THE GREAT DIVIDE

Correspondence

Evan Thornley & Jane-Frances Kelly

Housing is an enormously complex subject, frequently misunderstood by experts and the public alike. Alan Kohler’s insightful analysis navigates through the historical evolution and policy complexities, rightly diagnosing that our challenges have been decades in the making. He is astute in his observation that it’s difficult for governments to act, as housing policy change generally creates losers as well as winners (in any given year, the number of home owners with an interest in high house prices is vastly larger than those trying to get into the market).

But the view that if only governments could muster the political courage to alter some policy settings, this could all be fixed is, sadly, wrong. We wish it were that easy.

The role of government incentives and interest rates can be overstated in their effect on house prices. Over the last twenty years, house prices have grown on average by just over 7 per cent a year, a $7.1 trillion increase. Government policy, in the form of preferential tax treatment and incentives for property assets, is often asserted as the main reason for this growth. However, the Reserve Bank of Australia has published estimates that the capital gains tax exemption and negative gearing combined account for less than 2 per cent of the multi-trillion-dollar recent growth in house prices.

Meanwhile, media commentary typically focuses on the role of interest rates. But property prices increased substantially during the thirty years of rising interest rates after World War II, as well as in thirty years of falling rates after 1990 (and as rates have increased more recently). While both interest rates and tax policies are relevant, they don’t explain most of the growth we’ve seen in Australia over many decades.

So, what is the biggest driver of the growth of house prices over such a long period? We think the single largest thing that is underplayed is the importance of land value.

Land has a significant and outsized role in house prices because it’s not like other things we buy. We all need a place to live, so land is different from the kinds of goods where, if the price gets too high, people can opt out of using it (hence, if necessary, people stop eating out in order to continue to pay their mortgages, rather than the other way around). And, crucially, there’s only so much of it – as Mark Twain put it, “They’re not making it anymore.”

The supply is doubly fixed, given that each parcel of land occupies a unique location. It’s often observed that Australia has an abundance of land. But well-located land – near jobs, public transport, services and amenities – is limited. This, of course, is where most people want to live.

This is a bigger challenge in Australia than elsewhere. Australia has unusually high population growth – only one other country in the developed world has such consistently high growth. Also unusually, Australians are highly concentrated in a few large, low-density cities. Between them, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane house half the population, the majority living in low-density areas between the CBDs and fringe greenfield developments.

This combination of high population growth and an unusual urban settlement pattern makes well-located urban land much scarcer in Australia than elsewhere. And when a good is scarce, we can expect its value to increase. In our white paper What Drives Australian House Prices Over the Long Term, we have calculated that, driven by land value, residential property now constitutes almost half of Australia’s total national assets.

So while many point the finger at various government policies or inaction as the principal problem, we think the problems are fundamentally structural, rooted in the role of land values. As such, no simple change in government policy can solve them. Given how hard it is for governments to act in this area, that is probably just as well.

On a parenthetical note, it is essential to distinguish between land value and building value. While buildings typically depreciate over time (as wear and tear erode their value, and desirability decreases relative to newer buildings), land, especially well-located land, appreciates due to its limited and scarce nature. Houses and other detached dwellings typically have the major proportion of their value consisting of land value, while high-density apartments typically have a low proportion. This distinction contributes to the varied growth profiles of different property types, with detached dwellings exhibiting the strongest growth, and higher-density apartments typically experiencing the lowest.

What to do? We think the creation of an Australian Housing Fund industry is the real solution.

To have any chance of working at the scale required, solutions need to run with the economics of the Australian property market, rather than against them. The role of land value described above makes Australia a high capital-growth residential property market. It is also, therefore, a lower-yield market, unlike, for example, the US residential property market, which in the main is characterised by higher yields. This means that overseas solutions, such as Build to Rent, which rely on good yields for their returns to investors, run counter to the economics of the Australian property market and are likely not to be attractive enough to make a significant difference.

But a high-growth market also constitutes an opportunity. At the moment, there are only two ways to benefit from the high capital growth available in Australia: owner occupation, and direct property investment through being a landlord. At the same time, high house prices relative to incomes make deposits ever harder to save, locking too many people out of home ownership. They are then stuck in a poorly performing private rental system which works for neither renters nor landlords (the former get poor tenure security and a poor experience, while the latter get poor average returns along with management and maintenance headaches).

The capital growth available in Australia’s housing market – driven by our population growth and settlement structure – means that large amounts of private capital could be mobilised to help solve these problems. In Mobilising Private Capital for Housing Solutions, we argue that a Housing Fund industry could be put to work by using investors’ money to solve two enormous challenges: to help people into home ownership through shared equity; and to give renters security of tenure and a better experience.

Shared-equity models can ease Australia’s housing affordability crisis by allowing homebuyers to purchase property with lower savings for a deposit in exchange for giving some of their home’s equity or capital growth to a third party. Housing funds would provide the capital for shared-equity providers to co-invest with eligible homebuyers. Governments are now offering shared equity in most jurisdictions but we will need private capital to meet needs that are an order of magnitude bigger than governments can fund.

This is particularly relevant for first homebuyers or those who have difficulty saving for the large deposit needed to purchase a home, including those who do not have access to financial assistance from the Bank of Mum and Dad.

Home ownership, even with a mortgage, is the best form of housing security in Australia, with no risk of residency being terminated by a landlord, and numerous protections from banks and governments to help financially at-risk households avoid foreclosure. Home owners also experience a higher quality of experience than renters, facing few restrictions around alterations or renovations, and aren’t subject to inspections, lease contract renewals or disrespectful treatment by poor property managers.

For those who cannot or do not want to own, housing funds would also invest in owning and managing large portfolios of long-term rental properties – a model long established in mainland Europe. These would provide tenants with a security of tenure not currently available in the private rental market, along with a significantly better renting experience. Housing funds could further differentiate themselves by giving tenants guarantees relating to safety, autonomy, flexibility and dignity. Multi-year rental agreements, interior alterations, maintenance request guarantees, high minimum standards on heating and cooling, energy retrofitting and minimum energy-efficiency standards would all be in the interests of the providers as well as tenants. Governments should ensure that the industry is regulated so that only reputable providers are able to operate – lessons should be learnt from the United States, where there is both good and bad provision.

It should be noted that current land tax policy represents a significant barrier to the development of institutional ownership in Australia. Other than in the ACT, under current settings the more land that individuals and corporations own, the higher their land tax rates. Since providers of affordable housing, who rent at a discount to the market, are exempt from land tax, the only current pathway for institutional ownership is as affordable housing providers. This is good for the provision of below-market rentals but means that households in the private rental system would not be able to access the tenure security and improved experience that institutional ownership would make possible.

The almost $10-trillion residential housing market and the growing scale of our housing crises mean that governments alone will never be able to fix them. The capital growth in Australian housing alone is roughly equal in size to the entire federal budget. But there could be a scalable solution through mobilising private capital.

The federal government recently announced a major push to work with superannuation funds to engage with Australian housing, as they currently have very little exposure to Australian residential property despite their substantial size and the magnitude of the asset class. Indeed, when discussing private investment in Australia, most of the discussion, and certainly most policy emphasis, is focused on institutional investors – notably large superannuation funds.

A much larger source of capital lies with landlords, where two and a half million individual property investors between them have over $2 trillion invested in over a quarter of Australia’s residential property market (and, in contrast to superannuation funds, have already chosen the asset class). And, because much of this capital is generating poor returns alongside daily problems for both landlords and renters, it is a capital pool that is ripe for redeployment for better housing outcomes. Corporate, family office and high-net-worth individuals also have an important role to play, particularly in seeding demonstration funds.

Our inspiration for these funds is the creation, forty years ago, of Australia’s superannuation funds, which have revolutionised our post-work lives. The role of superannuation funds is to provide secure dignified retirement. Given the opportunity, housing funds could become the architects of secure dignified housing.

Evan Thornley & Jane-Frances Kelly

THE GREAT DIVIDE

Correspondence

Saul Eslake

Just over ten years ago, I gave a talk to a dinner organised by the Henry George League (a small but enthusiastic group dedicated to the ideas promulgated by Henry George, a nineteenth-century economist and journalist best remembered today for his advocacy of a “single tax” on the unimproved value of land), which three months later formed the basis for a submission I provided to a Senate committee enquiry into affordable housing. Both were titled “Australian Housing Policy: Fifty Years of Failure.” If I were to give the same talk again – or write a similar submission to yet another parliamentary inquiry – the only things I would change would be to update the numbers I quoted in it and change the title from “Fifty Years of Failure” to “Sixty Years of Failure.” Because that’s what the policies of governments of all political persuasions, at all three levels – federal, state or territory, and local – have been. An unmitigated failure.

Alan Kohler was kind enough to quote from that talk in his Quarterly Essay. Indeed, Kohler went much further back into history than I did – to the mid-1820s. After reading his essay, I could almost speak of Australian housing policy as entailing 200 years of failure – except for the three decades or so after World War II when, as Kohler documented, Australian housing policy did succeed in meeting its stated goals of increasing home ownership and providing an adequate stock of affordable rental housing for those unable to attain home ownership.

To my way of thinking, one of the valuable contributions which Kohler’s essay makes to the contemporary debate about Australia’s housing crisis is in drawing out the history which shows that governments can – if they make the “right” policy choices – ensure that people can afford to buy or rent a home, even when faced with more rapid growth in the population (and hence in the “underlying” demand for housing) than we have experienced over the past eighteen months.

That is what they did between the end of World War II and the mid-1960s, when Australia’s population grew at an average annual rate of 2.2 per cent per annum (compared with 1.6 per cent per annum over the past twenty years), and the population of Australia’s eight capital cities grew at an average annual rate of 3.4 per cent per annum (because, in addition to the postwar “baby boom” and the massive immigration program, Australians were also moving from rural areas to state capitals in large numbers). Yet despite that, the average price of housing remained unchanged, as a multiple of average earnings, at about 3.5 times: and the home ownership rate rose by 20 percentage points – from 52.5 per cent to 72.5 per cent – between the 1947 and 1966 censuses.

That was possible because governments of both political persuasions, at both the federal and state levels, as well as local governments, focused on expanding the supply of housing and, beyond the bipartisan support for a big immigration program, refrained from adding to the demand for housing. Yes, as Kohler points out, there were ideological differences between the two major parties as to whether public housing should be sold to prospective buyers. But there was a bipartisan commitment to ensuring that the supply of housing matched the demand for it.

As Kohler goes on to show, that commitment began to waver, beginning with the introduction of the first program of cash grants to would-be first home buyers by the Menzies government in 1964. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the home ownership rate peaked at the first census after that and has been declining ever since. At the federal and state levels, governments of both political persuasions have increasingly favoured policies which have the effect of inflating the demand for housing; while at the state and local level, governments have increasingly favoured policies which have the effect of adding to the cost or the difficulty (or both) of increasing the supply of housing.

In my view, history amply demonstrates that anything which allows Australians to pay more for housing than they otherwise would – be it cash grants to first-time buyers, stamp duty concessions for first-time buyers, preferential tax treatment for residential property investors, government guarantees for loans to people who have difficulty accumulating the required deposit, shared equity schemes, lower interest rates, or easier standards for determining loan eligibility – results in Australians paying more for housing, and hence higher housing prices, rather than in higher home ownership rates.

Yet, despite the accumulation of six decades’ worth of history amply demonstrating that point, governments of all political persuasions keep doing the same things – and, echoing Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity – expecting a different result.
Another of Kohler’s valuable contributions is to point out why. As he says, “housing is a cartel of the majority, with the banks and the developers helping them maintain high house prices with the political class actively supporting them. Everybody involved in this game – homeowners, banks, developers and state and federal politicians – wants house prices to rise for their own reasons.”

I’d put the same point slightly differently. Over the past thirty years, there have been, on average, about 112,000 first home buyers in any given year. Up until the moment they sign their purchase contracts and draw down their mortgages, they (presumably) want governments to do things that would restrain the rate of increase in property prices. But at any point in time, there are more than 6.2 million households – which probably means at least 10 million individuals (out of 17.7 million on the electoral roll) – who own (individually or with a spouse or partner) the dwelling in which they live – all of whom have a vested interest in governments doing things that boost the rate of increase in property prices.

One thing that successful politicians can do is to count votes. And they know that there are far more votes to be had from people who want property prices to keep going up than there are from people who want them to stop going up, or even to go down. And that, I’ve come to believe, is the real reason why what Kohler calls “Australia’s housing mess” will probably never be cleaned up by government policies: because a majority of voters don’t want it to be cleaned up. And politicians know that.

Saul Eslake

THE GREAT DIVIDE

Correspondence

Pete Wargent

Alan Kohler’s Quarterly Essay, The Great Divide, challenges the assumption that Australians actually want to fix housing affordability and supply, given that a quiet majority arguably hold a vested interest in the status quo. Assuming we genuinely want to bring about changes which promote both home ownership and housing affordability, I argue that this should be tackled in the form of a regional renaissance.

Australia’s biennial intergenerational reports regularly prosecute the case for swelling the resident population to 40 million and beyond through ongoing net immigration. We’re on a course which, if pursued, realistically means that affordable homes in landlocked Enmore or Erskineville simply won’t be achievable. Logically, a change of focus is therefore required. The COVID-19 pandemic unexpectedly presented a remarkable window for employees to demonstrate the ability to work productively and flexibly from home, or closer to home. We should embrace this opportunity to create a broader vision for dynamic regional living.

Of course, economists will justifiably argue that the major capital cities have certain unique benefits in terms of economies of scale, concentration of skills, frequency of interactions, and the potential for serendipitous events. This is all incontestably true. But instead of trying solely to work out how we can cram twenty million people into Sydney, Melbourne and south-east Queensland’s narrow coastal strip, perhaps we should create a grander and more enlightened vision for dynamic and thriving regional cities?

Let’s start with, say, Albury-Wodonga, Bathurst, Dubbo, Orange, Port Macquarie and Wagga Wagga in New South Wales, as well as Ballarat, Bendigo, Mildura and Shepparton in Victoria. In Queensland we have Bundaberg, Cairns, Gladstone, Mackay and Rockhampton, for example, and in Western Australia Albany, Bunbury, Busselton and Geraldton. Add in Tasmania’s Launceston, plus the already-popular peri-urban conurbations within a two-hour sweep of the larger capital cities, and here we have several dozen regional cities and centres which can be the thrust and heartbeat of a dynamic, productive and prosperous Aussie economy. Where people can have space, quality of life and affordable housing.

Australia has been accused in the past of being lucky and lazy, of running face-less and fattened oligopolies, of enjoying the fortune of vast mineral resources, while being a relatively favoured destination for global capital and wealth. The Mittelstand economies of Germany, Austria and Switzerland have variously demonstrated how we may be able to promote geographical diversity, driven forward by growth in nimble and adaptive small-to-medium enterprise (SME) businesses with a global niche, and a focus on technology and excellence. The edge in SME businesses over the big end of town can be in faster decision-making and elite customer service, offering a more human experience.

Life can be challenging for small businesses in a high-cost economy, with Mittelstand economies sometimes encouraging cooperatives or partnerships. SME businesses can excel by doing one thing really well, while working collaboratively with innovative technologies and AI to deliver innovation, entrepreneurship, outstanding training and apprenticeships, and quality customer experiences, with strong regional ties. Craft trades, machinery, electronics, chemicals, automotive parts and a raft of services industries can all fit the bill for growth.

More years ago than I would like to remember, I had some experience of living in Germany when I studied there in the Oberstufe. Germany has had its own housing market and other challenges in recent years, fuelled in part by shifting migration trends and in particular a dozen years of ultra-low interest rates, although house prices notched a record decline in 2023.

My best memories of Stuttgart – today a safe and flourishing city of 600,000 people with its vast sporting stadium, outstanding universities and growing start-up culture – might broadly fit the vision. You can live in the hills five or six kilometres from the heart of the city, with suburbs and villages populated by small business owners and workers in sectors ranging from engineering to personal services. Granted, home ownership rates are not high in Germany. Tenant-friendlier markets lead many to actively opt for long-term leases, enjoying an outstanding quality of life, while taking pride in business expertise and excellence. There could be something worthwhile to learn from this.

There may also prove to be some productivity challenges associated with more Aussies working from home (or perhaps closer to home, in serviced office hubs and not always in the central business districts). Many of the key market players in realty have a material stake in the large commercial office towers, but ultimately floor space will fill up over time, given the projections for population growth.

In Australia, our respective levels of government will need to invest in regional infrastructure – perhaps funded via land value capture – including in transport, educational facilities and healthcare. Why can’t we live in Townsville or Toowoomba instead of cramming into Brisbane’s northside mortgage belt? We’d need to see more appealing employment options and shopping hubs; high-speed internet and connectivity; great schools; road, rail and airports; healthcare excellence; leisure; and attractive housing choices. We need to create a vison, buzz and excitement, and a sense that “Hey, something is really happening here.”

Incentives such as tax breaks and special economic zones can bring all the usual political challenges associated with the picking of winners, but why can’t the Gold Coast be our regional technology hub, with Adelaide specialising in healthcare R&D, and, say, the Pilbara firing up as a leading renewable energy region? Australia is set to experience an array of booming industries ahead, including in green energy and energy security, niche manufacturing, food, healthcare R&D, construction techniques, mining, IT and other modern technologies besides.

Immigration and labour market settings are hotly contested, especially following the snap-back in arrivals as the international borders reopened, but there should clearly be a focus on upskilling the incumbent population, as well as importing more people. In professional services, it has for too long been the case that managers and directors are often imported rather than homegrown. More apprenticeships and vocational training would be a welcome reform, with higher education teaching our required skills and vocations, and not functioning so much as visa factories for international students.

Zoning reform in the capital cities has a key role to play in the housing conundrum; but equally rezoning doesn’t fix everything. I recall living close to Newstead, in inner Brisbane, around a decade ago as a vast swathe of apartment towers began to mushroom out of the ground. The large oversupply of Brisbane apartments was even called out in the Reserve Bank of Australia’s Financial Stability Review as a systemic risk for the economy. The idea that only half a dozen years down the track we would be debating the need for rezoning due to there not being enough development sites would have seemed absurd at the time.

What happened? Concerned consumers stopped buying new apartments, developers put up the shutters and sold off their surplus development sites, and as advertised rents declined the vacancies gradually filled up. Today we are back in a shortage, but by 2026 or 2027 that will quite likely have reverted to a supply overhang. No doubt there could be short-term uplift from rezoning, and overall it would be beneficial to housing supply over time. But over the long run supply and demand tends to revert towards equilibrium, so rezoning is one part of the housing solution, not the miracle cure.

A contemporary example to illustrate the point might be Hamilton Northshore in Brisbane, which can potentially absorb up to 25,000 people in 14,000 apartments, being a large, flat strip of land, effectively ready for development. Why has this supply not all built through the past cycle? Because the cycle was killed by oversupply, high vacancy rates, sliding prices and presales drying up.

There is little speculative building in Australia, and generally speaking new housing will only be built when it is profitable and viable to do so. House prices reflect both demand and supply, and the equilibrium price will occur at the level that matches current demand to available supply. In the short run, supply is increasingly relatively inelastic, given that we have more medium-density construction in the capital cities these days, and that it can take several years to bring new apartment projects to market.

Fixing the rental market is another challenge to be overcome. Tenants’ rights have improved, but the other side of that coin is that there is less protection for landlords than there once was. Many private landlords would doubtless like to offer longer-term leases, but since it’s sometimes difficult to evict even the most problematic of tenants, we are likely stuck with six- or twelve-month leases as things stand.

The burgeoning build to rent (BTR) sector can be a part of the housing solution for the capital cities, but it is also not the whole solution. The UK experience, centred in London, has been mixed. Total returns for the sector over the past half-decade have been modest rather than compelling, even including capital growth. If we take the risk-free rate to be the ten-year bond yield, this has been tracking at around 4 per cent. In Australia we have been assessing BTR portfolios on compressed cap rates of around only 4 to 5 per cent. Will the BTR sector deliver affordable rents? It’s doubtful, given the institutional imperative and the required returns.

Overall, there are numerous challenges ahead for Australian housing market dynamics, dwelling supply and affordability. But with a relative shift in focus from the metropolitan melee to a regional renaissance, they needn’t be insurmountable. We’ve seen a rush to the regions during the pandemic “race for space.” Next, we need to champion a regional powerhouse campaign. The time to plan and invest is now!

Pete Wargent

THE GREAT DIVIDE

Correspondence

Peter Tulip

Public discussion of housing policy suffers from undisciplined eclecticism. Too many commentators provide long, unstructured lists of multiple causes or conclude that the truth lies between competing explanations. This muddle reflects an inability or unwillingness to distinguish the important from the unimportant. Alan Kohler’s The Great Divide and the accompanying media coverage are examples.

Instead, let’s be clear. Housing costs are high and rising because growing demand interacts with unresponsive supply. This has been going on since at least the 1970s. Rising demand in turn reflects higher population, higher per-capita income and (since their peak in the 1980s) falling real mortgage rates. Taxes are not an important factor.

Unresponsive supply largely reflects zoning restrictions. If the housing market worked like other consumer goods markets, higher demand would have resulted in many more dwellings. Instead, restricted supply has resulted in soaring prices.

Alan Kohler gets much of this right. His analysis of the dimensions of the problem and how it is ripping the social fabric apart is readable and incisive. And his discussion of zoning restrictions is spot-on. As he notes, zoning is estimated to have raised the price of housing in our biggest cities by hundreds of thousands of dollars. Those estimates are in line with an enormous body of research. (Full disclosure: Kohler cites my research on zoning approvingly.)

Kohler covers a wide range of other issues. I confine my comments to my biggest concern: his overemphasis of tax concessions. He argues that the interaction of negative gearing with discounted capital gains taxes is a major reason housing is unaffordable.

There is no credible research supporting this claim. On the contrary, good researchers have estimated the effect of negative gearing and capital gains tax concessions on housing prices using different approaches and repeatedly found this effect to be tiny. John Daley and Danielle Wood compared the revenue cost of the concessional treatment of capital gains tax and negative gearing to the value of the housing stock – and on that basis estimated that the tax concessions may boost the level of housing prices by 1 to 2.2 per cent. Gene Tunny, using a similar methodology and assumptions as Daley and Wood, found larger impacts of up to 4 per cent on house prices on average. The most detailed study is by Yunho Cho, Shuyun May Li and Lawrence Uren. In a micro-founded model, they found that removing negative gearing would reduce house prices by 0.9 per cent and raise rents 2.5 per cent. Deloitte Access Economics estimated the ALP’s 2019 policy of restricting negative gearing to new housing and reducing the capital gains discount would reduce established dwelling prices by 4.6 per cent and new dwelling prices by 3.6 per cent. Effects of only eliminating negative gearing would be smaller.

In summary, negative gearing and the capital gains discount are estimated to boost house prices between 1 and 4 per cent, while having a smaller negative effect on rents. Most of these estimates represent a long-run “one-off” effect that would have been incorporated into housing prices decades ago.

It does not require technical research to see that the tax concessions are unimportant. Kohler points to the acceleration in prices after capital gains were discounted in 1999. However, the logic of that argument would imply that prices should have fallen by twice as much following the introduction of capital gains tax in 1985. Instead, prices rose. Taxes on investor housing were much lower in the early 1980s but prices were lower.

The evidence Kohler provides for a large effect of the tax concessions is a chart showing housing prices accelerated after 1999. That chart uses an arithmetic scale, which exaggerates the change. If instead one plots house prices on a log scale – as is standard for variables subject to exponential growth – an acceleration can be seen, but it is not dramatic and it begins before the tax change.

Empirical studies of housing prices, such as my 2019 paper with Trent Saunders or more recent work by Peter Abelson and Roselyne Joyeux, attribute the faster recent growth to lower real mortgage rates and higher immigration. They give no role to tax concessions.

The fundamental problem underlying the housing crisis is that voters oppose more housing in their neighbourhood because they don’t know – or don’t care – about the harm this opposition does. That needs to be explained to them. Kohler’s discussion of zoning restrictions and their effect on Australian society is very good in this respect. However, public education also requires paying attention to the research and not being distracted by unimportant side issues.

Peter Tulip

THE GREAT DIVIDE

Correspondence

Brendan Coates & Joey Moloney

Alan Kohler’s The Great Divide is a compelling account of Australia’s housing calamity and how it threatens to tear our society apart. Within living memory, Australia was a place where housing costs were manageable and people of all ages and incomes had a reasonable chance to own a home with good access to jobs. But the great Australian dream of home ownership is rapidly turning into a nightmare for many young Australians, while the growing divide between the housing “haves” and “have nots” risks returning Australia to the Jane Austen world of the late-eighteenth century.

Kohler correctly diagnoses the core driver of unaffordable housing: it’s too hard to build more homes in established suburbs where people want to live. But having done so, he veers regrettably off-course to propose solutions that have little chance of working, and which simply act to distract his readers from the main game of building more homes. Kohler misses the moment. The political mood is changing. There is a growing groundswell of support for more density, and a growing awareness of the costs of locking up vast tracts of our cities from development. With momentum building and much more still to do, Kohler’s misfire is particularly unfortunate.

Historically, Australia has not built enough housing to meet the needs of its growing population. Heading into the COVID-19 pandemic, Australia had just over 400 dwellings per 1000 people, which was among the least housing stock per person in the developed world. Australia had also experienced the second-greatest decline in housing stock relative to the adult population over the twenty years leading into COVID, and Australian cities are some of the least dense in the developed world.

The reason is simple. The frameworks and processes that dictate what gets built where are hugely biased against change. Older and wealthier residents of well-located suburbs – those who prefer their neighbourhoods to stay the same – get an outsized say. Prospective residents, who might live in new housing in desirable suburbs were it to be built, find themselves effectively unrepresented.

The result is “missing middles”: hectares of prime inner-city land, close to jobs and transport, rising barely taller than two stories. The flow-on effect is high prices and rents, a stagnating economy because fewer people can live close to jobs, and expensive and environmentally damaging sprawl into farmland and floodplains.

If the problem is not enough homes in established suburbs, surely any meaningful solution must involve building more homes in said suburbs? But Kohler is unduly pessimistic, arguing that more medium-density housing is “going to be difficult, if not impossible,” “won’t work,” and “will never actually happen.”

Kohler contends that addressing the supply problem directly is too hard, and instead searches for alternatives that have little prospect of succeeding. He does this because he judges that the obvious answer – building more housing in the inner- and middle-ring suburbs of Australia’s major cities where most Australians still want to live – is politically unworkable.

Kohler frames NIMBYism and heritage restrictions as “natural barriers” to greater density. But there’s no natural law that says we must let the aesthetic preferences of existing residents for Victorian terraces or Californian bungalows trump the needs of their fellow Australians to have somewhere to live. The restrictive zones in desirable suburbs are not unalterable commandments handed down like ancient laws. Building denser cities is a political decision, and Kohler misses that the political tide is starting to turn.

Until recently, supply-side reform was an obsession for a passionate few, but largely absent from broader political discourse. But in recent times, the political clout of renters has grown and the YIMBY movement has gained momentum. Sacred cows are slowly being slaughtered. The Minns government in New South Wales has plans to up-zone large amounts of well-located land, including overriding heritage controls where they conflict with more density. Victoria is aiming to build 800,000 homes over the next decade, with at least 70 per cent in established suburbs. The Albanese government has put $3.5 billion of federal money on the table, mirroring a Grattan Institute recommendation, to push the states to help build 1.2 million homes over the next five years. This isn’t just an Australian phenomenon. Similar shifts are taking place in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and New Zealand. Kohler has misread the political winds.

Key to this change is the fact that most residents of Sydney and Melbourne actually want more density if it means being able to live in a better-located suburb. Denser dwellings – townhouses, apartments, etc. – made up 44 per cent of Sydney’s housing in 2016, and 33 per cent of Melbourne’s. Yet a Grattan Institute survey showed that residents say they actually want those numbers to be 59 per cent in Sydney and 52 per cent in Melbourne.

The weight of evidence is becoming impossible to ignore. Take New Zealand: in 2016, Auckland – a city of 1.5 million – rezoned about three-quarters of its suburban area to allow more intensive land use. Researchers found that this led to a doubling of the city’s rate of housing construction. Unsurprisingly, rents in Auckland are lower now – relative to inflation – than they were in 2016, whereas rents across the rest of New Zealand have gone up by 10 to 15 per cent over the same period.

Denser cities don’t just offer cheaper housing. Done well, they also bring amenity, vibrancy and walkability; certainly, much more so than a satellite suburb fifty kilometres from the CBD. Several cities with similar populations but higher densities – such as Vancouver, Toronto and Vienna – outrank Sydney on quality-of-life measures.

But Kohler argues land-use planning reform is too hard, preferring an alternative approach: run faster trains to peri-urban and regional areas, massively increasing the commutable distance to our major cities. This would be unfair, costly and ineffective. Allowing more homes in desirable suburbs would enable more young Australians to live, work and add to the social fabric of these communities. Spending billions on trains from somewhere else tells them they’re only wanted there for their labour, and the preferences of those who got there first matter more.

Denser cities are more efficient cities. The NSW Productivity Commission found it costs up to $750,000 less in infrastructure per home in established suburbs than on the urban fringe. Denser cities are also better for the climate – a sprawling, car-dependent city pumps more CO2 into the atmosphere. And denser cities are better for the economy – allowing more employers to locate closer together increases knowledge spillovers and gives workers more options.

More fundamentally, fast trains simply would not solve the problem in the way Kohler contends they will. To be fast, trains need few stops, and few stops along low-density corridors means longer trips to the train station for commuters. Cutting fifteen minutes off a train ride from Geelong to Melbourne isn’t much help if it’s a forty-minute drive to the station, and a race against the clock to find a park before the train leaves. And at the other end, Kohler appears to believe most if not all workers need to get to the CBD. But Grattan research has found that only about 15 per cent of jobs are there, at least in Melbourne. So even after a trek to the station at one end, fast trains to the city still leave workers with more commuting to do at the other end.

The fast-trains solution would leave workers heavily exposed to one service that takes them a hundred kilometres from home. The denser-cities solution offers workers diversity and options. Some people will walk to work, some can ride their bike, others take the tram or train, and inevitably many will drive. But the key point is that when jobs are closer, it is easier for families to organise their lives – easier for one parent to pick up a sick toddler from daycare, or for the other to take a new job opportunity without upending family arrangements.

Australia’s housing affordability crisis is needlessly compounded by muddled housing policy discourse. The heart of the problem is much simpler than many let on: housing costs are too high because there are not enough houses. Kohler provides an incisive critique of the political obstacles towards remedy. The political tide is starting to turn, but there is much more still to do. Distracting Australians with the superficial solution of building trains instead of houses is an unfortunate wrong turn.

Brendan Coates & Joey Moloney

THE GREAT DIVIDE

Correspondence

Joseph Walker

For many years, I’ve been waiting for somebody to write the canonical treatment of Australia’s housing mess. Maybe a young Aussie Robert Caro would emerge and take a microscope to every corner of what is becoming our most urgent public policy problem. Such an account would no doubt amount to the literary equivalent of urban sprawl.

The Great Divide is neither canonical, such is the nature of word limits, nor is Alan Kohler, after a long and distinguished career in finance journalism, a millennial. But his Quarterly Essay is sober, necessary and broadly correct in its conclusions; and perhaps its message is best conveyed by a baby boomer like Kohler, whose vision is anchored in memories of a more functional past.

It is a fact of life that the cost of the structures we live in – or, more accurately, the land under them – keeps going up, even as the prices of the stuff we fill them with keep coming down. Over the past twenty-three years, house price-to-income ratios have doubled, from 3.5 to seven. According to the 2023 Demographia report, Sydney and Melbourne are the second and ninth least affordable cities on Earth.

Something that should be a national shame is, judging by the popularity of real estate TV and the size of crowds at weekend auctions, actually a national sport. As a friend quipped to me: America is number one in the world in healthcare costs, and it’s a disaster; Australia is (almost) number one in housing costs, and it’s celebrated.

So, what started the party? Or at least: what set off the most recent boom? The capital gains tax discount, Kohler answers. On my podcast in 2020, I discussed this possibility with Nobel Prize–winning economist Vernon Smith. As Smith explained, the story in the United States was similar; he identified the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997, Clinton’s act, which exempted from capital gains taxes the first $500,000 of any home sale, as the trigger for the US housing bubble.

Howard’s 50 per cent discount was even more investor-friendly. By sweetening the deal on the resale value of housing, the effect of the tax break in Australia, as in the US, was to shift perceptions of what could be achieved with property.

For all this, Kohler’s astute historical analysis bleeds into a dubious economic argument; he writes as if the CGT discount is one of the – if not the – most important drivers of prices at current margins – a separate and less substantiated claim (indeed, a claim incompatible with some of the other research he cites).

If the CGT discount lit the spark, what has been fuelling the blaze? Kohler gives a comprehensive if not complete accounting of the myriad factors that have been swelling demand or dampening supply (missing, for example, are foreign investors). Haunting his analysis of the demand side are Australia’s one-million-strong negatively geared property speculators.

Kohler does not, however, get sidetracked in circular debates about bubbles. This is just as well. Demand and supply are like the blades on a pair of scissors.

Prices are set not by one half or the other but by their interaction. A corollary of this basic economic insight is that even if demand-side changes have been the proximate cause of the price rises of recent decades, as they surely have, their impact can be absorbed by the supply side.

In principle, that is. In practice, Australia’s housing supply is chronically inelastic.

If Kohler’s essay has a flaw, it’s that he doesn’t prosecute his own argument vigorously enough. He outlines the obvious or first-order harms of high house prices, namely declining home ownership, a “lack of security” and, importantly, rising inequality. But beyond that, his treatment of the downside risks is cursory. Two pages are given to discussing the decline of pet ownership among renters – a sad trend, to be sure, but in that passage he spills as much ink on cats and dogs (552 words) as on three of the worst repercussions of housing unaffordability: crippled productivity, macroeconomic fragility and falling fertility (553 words). It’s worth underscoring these harms in turn (to say nothing of the many other ills of housing unaffordability, such as the misery of long commutes and the environmental damage wrought by urban sprawl).

First, high house prices in our major cities stunt national productivity. Cities are engines of entrepreneurship. They facilitate specialisation and the sharing of information (what economists call “knowledge spillover effects”). As Ed Glaeser puts it in Triumph of the City, “ideas cross corridors and streets more easily than continents and seas.” By pricing our fellow citizens out of our most productive places, we don’t just deprive them of better wages; we deny our country greater wealth.

Second, high house prices make us macroeconomically fragile. In particular, excessive household debt coupled with high house prices render the risk of a balance sheet recession – the nastiest form of recession – at least plausible.

Australia has the second-highest household debt-to-GDP ratio in the world. Most of that debt is tied up in residential mortgages. While much less of our mortgage debt is held by subprime borrowers than was the case in the United States, marginal propensities to consume out of housing wealth don’t approach 0 until closer to the top 10 per cent of the income distribution anyway, according to research by economists Amir Sufi and Atif Mian. That is, 90 per cent of income earners can still be expected to tighten their belts if prices collapsed. So, we’re not exempt from this risk, however robust our position may seem.

Third, expensive housing is preventing couples who want to have kids, or have more kids, from having them. Children usually need bedrooms, and every extra bedroom means a bigger mortgage.

At the individual level, this is frustrating. At the societal level, it’s disastrous. As Kohler notes, our fertility rate is already below replacement level. This seeds structural imbalances wherein fewer workers must support more retirees. It undercuts productivity: our best economic growth models imply that population growth drives technological progress (since more minds means more Einsteins). And it frays the thread connecting society to its future – a condition that, unlike the others, can’t be postponed by mass immigration.

High house prices are a plague not just in Australia but across the Anglosphere. Indeed, their consequences are both so perverse and so pervasive that housing advocate John Myers and economists Sam Bowman and Ben Southwood coined a term, “the housing theory of everything,” to explain how housing unaffordability undergirds so much of the deep dysfunction we observe in the West.

What can be done? The Great Divide is really an essay about three great divides, all of which have conspired to put solutions out of reach. The first is the titular divide, between those who own homes and those who do not. For most Australian homeowners, housing forms the greater portion of their wealth. Since losses loom larger than gains psychologically, this group resists policies that put their nest eggs at risk with a passionate intensity that can’t be matched by aspiring homeowners.

Proposals for reducing house prices that are not accompanied by compensation to these owner-occupiers for lost equity – however undeserved that equity may be – are unlikely to shake the “generational tyranny” of the boomers (or the resistance of younger people who have managed to buy into the homeownership club before prices rose).

The second divide is between local residents and would-be residents. Local zoning rules, such as they are, give cranky NIMBY residents effective veto rights over new construction in their neighbourhoods.

There is an imbalance. Locals have both the capacity and the incentive to block new development. They can coordinate easily because they’re both physically proximate and few in number. And their reasons for enforcing the status quo, ranging from risk aversion to heritage preservationism (sincere or otherwise), are powerfully motivating.

On the other hand, non-residents looking to rent or buy in a city area would hypothetically be YIMBYs, but how can they organise to express their preferences? They’re spread across a city, or outside of it, if they even think of themselves as potential residents of a particular area at all. Moreover, the housing affordability costs of any one development not getting built are thinly spread and provide inadequate impetus for these strangers to overcome their coordination problems. This entrenches a fallacy of composition that hobbles efforts to increase housing supply. Any one rejection of new construction by NIMBYs at the local level may be both comprehensible and negligible. But scaled up to the national level, all those local decisions sum up to a housing shortage.

The third divide is, as Kohler laments, between two political impulses. The housing problem has become an ideological Rorschach test, in which the left, with its focus on equality, blames demand-side greed, whereas the right, with its belief in markets, prefers supply-side explanations.

But there are signs that the third divide – and hence the second – can be bridged. There is growing recognition on the political left that zoning is inherently inegalitarian. In the United States, liberals such as Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson have begun pushing for a “supply-side progressivism,” wherein the left redirects some of its energies from the demand side of the ledger to the creation of goods and services; in Klein’s words, it’s the “stupidly simple” thesis that “to have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of the things that we need.” Above all, that includes housing.

This new “abundance agenda”, with its wide political promise, is instantiated Down Under in the bipartisan YIMBY groups that have recently sprouted in Canberra, Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne, and in their new alliance to form the Abundant Housing Network Australia.

There are pockets of hope, but a broad will is necessary to transform the housing situation. Can such consensus be found? I sense a deep pessimism on Kohler’s part. Given the seeming irreconcilability of the three divides, such pessimism is understandable!

But if we’re bound to fail anyway, why not permit ourselves to fantasise a little? How about land value taxes, like the Georgists have long argued? Kohler dismisses these out of hand, but taxing the gains – or rents – of agglomeration could be a highly efficient way to redistribute revenue to, for example, the regions – to say nothing of its ethical justification. Speaking of the regions, why not found new cities – or transform Darwin into an Australian Singapore – as Ken Henry suggested to me in 2023? Or if that’s too audacious, can we not turn to the age-old saviour: technology? Just as trains and cars opened up effective supply in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, perhaps Zoom and virtual reality will do the same in the twenty-first. With the rise of working from home, can we convert office space into residential? To address the problem of the “missing middles”, why not allow street-level votes for gentle density, as has been proposed by YIMBY groups in England and Ireland – a win-win solution that can dissolve the second great divide? Or how about establishing home equity insurance markets, as Bob Shiller has proposed, to placate the NIMBY “homevoters”?

For Kohler, no solution is tenable until we purge ourselves of the belief that “house prices always rise and that housing is the best way to build wealth.” Ideally, we would engineer a flatlining of prices for the next eighteen years, until incomes catch up. A hard landing is off the table – wise, given the balance sheet recession risk.

Kohler is right that we must dislodge property from its pedestal, though this raises the question of whether the desired soft landing would be self-defeating. If speculators, already bleeding rental losses, then no longer expect capital gains, why wouldn’t they just try to sell – threatening a mass exit that could crash prices?

There is also the question of political will. Any attempted normalisation of prices by policymakers needs to be orchestrated with an heroic gradualism that outlives election cycles and the political temptations of pumping home equity.

But these nagging questions give way to a deeper one. Howard’s throwaway comment on ABC Radio in 2003 (“I haven’t had anybody shake their fist at me and say: ‘Howard, I’m angry with you for letting the value of my house increase’”) hints at a strange connection between our fixation on property and our lackadaisical attitude to productivity.

In an age of rising income inequality and stagnating productivity growth, have debt and equity become a palliative in Australia, as Raghuram Rajan argues they have in the US since the 1970s?

Thus, if solving our housing crisis requires abandoning the idea that property is a vehicle for building wealth, perhaps it also means embracing the notion that creating valuable ideas or companies is the most noble thing a citizen can do.

This would require a complete inversion of our national outlook. Under the tyranny of tall poppy syndrome, it’s as if property is the most excusable way to get rich in Australia: if you found a start-up, you’re long on yourself; but if you invest in property, you’re just long on Australia.

But we may not have a choice. For if pouring ever-larger piles of credit into unproductive assets is a sure-fire way of doing less with more, innovation has always meant doing more with less.

Joseph Walker
 

LIFEBOAT

Response to Correspondence

Micheline Lee

Thank you to the correspondents, all experts on disability experience and/or policy, for their valuable comments on Lifeboat. The comments themselves are significant contributions and insights into the way forward for inclusion of disabled people and the role the NDIS should play in this. I would especially like to acknowledge the correspondence from Rhonda Galbally and the Minister for the NDIS, Bill Shorten, as they, alongside Bruce Bonyhady, were and continue to be instrumental in the development of the NDIS.

As the correspondents say, we are at a defining period for disability. The Disability Royal Commission Report and the preliminary findings of the NDIS review show that despite Australia’s policies and measures to recognise disability rights, Australia has not become more inclusive. Those who are in most need of assistance continue to live at risk of abuse. In fact, under the NDIS, group home segregated living has actually increased. Galbally was a Commissioner on the Disability Royal Commission. She found that it was segregation – being “out of sight and out of mind – that enabled abuse, violence towards and neglect of disabled people. Disabled people need to be part of the community, starting from early childhood. We need structural change so that all systems – health, housing, transport, education, employment, infrastructure – are accessible and inclusive.

The NDIS was to be an important part of that structural change. We are disabled by both our bodies and by the inaccessibility of society. We need individual supports and an accessible environment in order to participate. The NDIS was to provide the individual support to those with the most significant disabilities. It was recognised that this part, though vital, was just one part of the equation. Consequently, the NDIS was originally positioned within the broader context of tiers 1 and 2, or what is now being called “the ecosystem.” This was to ensure that those with less significant disabilities are supported by mainstream services, and that measures are taken to make society more accessible.

As the correspondents point out, after ten years of operation, however, the early promises of the NDIS have not been completely fulfilled. While the NDIS has benefited some, the scheme itself has been inaccessible and inequitable, particularly for some of the most disadvantaged, who need it most. And governments’ focus on the NDIS has resulted in a neglect of their duties to provide support within the community and to remove social barriers.

The NDIS is revolutionary, establishing a level of entitlement to individual supports that never existed before. However, the NDIS has not increased participation, and in some ways it has resulted in society becoming less inclusive. We need to examine why, without the fear that criticising the scheme will return us to the faulty old system that we don’t want repeated.

Several of the correspondents describe the problems associated with the NDIS’s reliance on a classic market system. As Robbi Williams says, “How could we think a market mindset would work for the NDIS? This demands not only the assumption that scheme participants are properly supported to make informed choices that miraculously shape a responsive impactful market, but also the assumption that social and economic participation can be accomplished by buying stuff. They aren’t, and it can’t.”

Robbi also points out how the NDIS has misunderstood what it means for disabled people to be included and participate in the community. The scheme counts participation by measuring time spent outside the home, which, he asserts, “is not a valid measure of social participation, and at best measures physical presence in the community – a guest appearance, a very different thing from being an active and valued community member.”

For Carly Findlay, the NDIS doesn’t reflect her lived experience of disability and of disabled people’s rejection of the medical model. “In the case of the NDIS,” she says, “disability equals inability.” She notes the administrative burden placed on the individual by the NDIS, and that “you need to prove how disabled you are: how much you cannot do.”

Member of Parliament Monique Ryan describes how the NDIS has become the “default” service and governments have defunded or removed supports in the community outside the scheme, resulting in disabled people having to be on the NDIS or get nothing. As a former paediatrician, she did as other specialists have reported doing in the absence of other available supports – she was “quicker to diagnose autism.”

We all agree that to correct course, an understanding of human rights is foundational. As Bill Shorten said, “there has never been a better time in our nation’s history than now to talk about the human rights of people with disability. In politics, to achieve real change, timing is everything.”

The challenge is how to translate the theory of human rights into the real-life steps that will lead to the actual exercise and enjoyment of those rights by disabled people. Sam Drummond observes that, “Perhaps the greatest strength and the greatest weakness of advocating for disability rights is that everyone says they support them . . . But when it comes to the crunch, will they willingly reach up to the top shelf to help us get an item? Will they support our right to lead as meaningful a life as theirs?”

Both Sam and Robbi acknowledge that, though essential, the mention of human rights can be obscure and a turn-off for many. Robbi suggests that a way through this is to “see a right as a code-phrase for a collection of values.” When enough people think the values are important enough, they are written down and encapsulated within the form of a right. We can rediscover the values that are implicit within a right, and by doing that, we have “a better chance of people finding a connection, be it intellectual, personal or emotional.” For example, education is valued because it brings knowledge, skill, empathy, personal development, finding your place in the world.

The difficulty people have is understanding how discrimination and disadvantage flow from society’s structures. Too many people still believe these are neutral, rather than built for a narrow conception of the autonomous, white, able-bodied, middle-class human. They think that equality is about treating people the same. People don’t really understand how these structures keep us shut out and how it is changing these structures and accommodating diversity that will bring inclusion.

Robbi’s suggestion of emphasising the value of education and employment is important. It shows the benefits of education to the whole community and I think everyone would agree to this. But it doesn’t explain that changing the narrow way education is delivered is foundational.

The No vote for the Indigenous Voice to Parliament was also a No vote for disabled people. Not just for First Nations disabled people, but for all disabled people who are disadvantaged by our narrow inaccessible structures. The struggle is in many ways shared. Waleed Aly comments that the best explanation he found for the No vote “comes from pollster Jim Reed, who concluded that Australians will vote to ‘award equal opportunities to individuals regardless of their attributes,’ but won’t vote for something that ‘treats individuals differently.’” Unlike the marriage postal vote (“equal love”), which was about treating people the same, the Voice to Parliament was about treating people differently. I agree with Waleed that in the end many Australians were unable to understand how different treatment was necessary to help achieve greater inclusion and equality.

The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) that came into force in 2008 was formed through active collaboration with people with disabilities from all over the world. This collaboration forged a treaty that has gone further than any other in emphasising government’s responsibility to recognise structural or institutional discrimination. Just having rights was getting us nowhere – governments needed to take action to change the structures that were preventing disabled people from realising equal enjoyment of human rights.

At the heart of the CRPD is a four- dimensional understanding of equality. This conception provides a process and sets out the prerequisites for ensuring a reform or structure is likely to fulfil the right to equality. These dimensions respond to the reality of the experience of disability and disadvantage. They are not simple to understand, so I tried in Lifeboat to illustrate how these work through the telling of my and others’ experiences of disability and the barriers to inclusion. In a nutshell, the dimensions say that you can’t have inclusion without the real opportunity to pursue one’s own valued choices. For that, you need to have a voice to have real negotiating power; you need real options to choose from (for example, it is not real choice if you opt for segregated education because there are no reasonable alternatives available); you need to be valued as equal and there must be recognition of your context and actual capacities; and finally, transformation of social structures to accommodate different needs is essential.

Our challenge is to find an accessible language to communicate this multi- dimensional approach. I see already from some of the correspondents’ comments that differences can arise when it seems that we are emphasising one dimension over the other. As the CRPD emphasises, these dimensions are interdependent and all need to be satisfied.

Individual funding and the use of private providers can be beneficial; problems arise, as we have seen, when people see choice as the freedom to participate in the market without ensuring that the supports and the structures are there to allow disabled people to exercise real choice. We can’t ignore the fact that people are seldom the autonomous individual born with the ability to contract and opportunities there for the taking.

The market needs to be shaped. It is government’s responsibility to ensure that if it is going to use the market to deliver disability supports, then the market needs to be reformed to provide access and opportunity for all, consistent with a realistic conception of the human subject. We need a government that can counter unfettered self-interest and develop and embed the public values that are missing from the NDIS market approach.

We have seen the NDIS turning into a medical or individual model of disability support because governments have neglected broader social inclusion. Shorten calls on all governments to “commit to greater investment and effort to create inclusion: schools, transport, early childhood, community activities, advocacy, building regulations, community mental health by all levels of governments and the private sector.”

As Robbi Williams says, “we must demand courageous, values-driven leadership from the governments of Australia. We must see in them visceral outrage.”

When I encouraged my friend Frida to join the NDIS to get the individual supports she needed, she cried out, “I need a man.” This doesn’t seem so far- fetched to me if every reform such as the NDIS is treated as part of an ecosystem, and if, as Bill Shorten says, “the parts of the ecosystem are being brought together.” After all, being recognised as equals, loving and being loved back is what it’s all about. If Ann Marie Smith had had one friend in the world, the abuse she suffered over three years that finally took her life would not have happened.

Micheline Lee

LIFEBOAT

Correspondence

Robbi Williams

Micheline Lee’s article is a valuable read for anyone new or old to the issue of disability in Australia. She charts key events leading to the advent of the NDIS, followed by a compelling narrative of the scheme’s issues, punctuated by stories painful to read. It should rightly leave the reader wondering: how have we blown this so badly?

A key problem with the NDIS is it was pitched as a panacea, a nation-sized handful of magic beans growing an empowered disability community living in an inclusive Australia. However, just as the NDIS idea sat in the context of the National Disability Strategy and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD), so the decisions and actions of the NDIA, the agency administering the scheme, needed to sit in the context of a broader government push to advance inclusion policy and practice. Alas, that has not been evident. Indeed, dialogue about the progress of the first version of the National Disability Strategy, along with its sparse and tardy reporting, was entirely overshadowed by public discourse about NDIS implementation, often with a focus on where accountability lies.

First, there was the business of resolving what each government should pay. The state and territory governments scrambled to find enough extra money to pay for their share of scheme costs, and a miserable consequence was the discontinuation of some government- funded programs and mechanisms important to the disability community. Worse, because there was not enough money down the back of the sofa, the government bilateral agreements included payments-in-kind. It wasn’t a watch or car keys that were pushed across the table along with cash; it was the occupants of state-run disability group homes, consigning them to even less choice than other NDIS participants. Astonishingly, funding agreements underpinning NDIS implementation included elements that preserved the types of service for which the NDIS was meant to be the antidote.

Second, there was the business of resolving which disability supports ought be scheme-funded and which ought to be covered by state and territory services in health, education, accommodation, transportation and the like. Ten years on, tensions remain at these interfaces, not least because of a default assumption that if disability is involved, it must be the responsibility of the NDIS. If you need support when admitted to hospital, the NDIS should pay. If you need support in education, the NDIS should pay. If you have accessibility needs on public transportation, the NDIS should pay. When all roads lead to the NDIS, it is little wonder this caused a stampede of diagnoses, most notably autism, so folk could be admitted into the scheme and access supports. Yet Australia’s obligations to the UNCRPD mean all governments of Australia should be making far greater progress on the accessibility and inclusion of their mainstream services. It is entirely possible the manner of the NDIS’s implementation has served to hinder the evolution of state and territory services towards inclusion.

This goes to a deeper issue about how our society responds to disability, where if we throw money at it – or at those who will deal with it for us – we have done our bit and can get on with our own lives. For as long as I can remember, not-for-profit disability organisations have engaged in fundraising activities to continue their work. Whether intended or not, such activities tend to portray the organisation as the hero and the disabled person as the patronised recipient. But such fundraising efforts maintain a longstanding narrative that the best way non-disabled people can contribute to the resolution of disability issues is by paying some money for someone else to take care of that business for them. On a grander scale, this is what has happened in the government’s funding architecture for the NDIS implementation. If you have a disability, you go to the NDIS because that’s where we’ve sent taxpayer money. And because of the volume of funds allocated to the NDIS, non-disabled Australians might conclude that the issue of disability is being taken of and nothing more needs to be done. But this very assumption sets up the NDIS for failure, because the NDIS needs the context of an effective disability strategy, and it is through the changed attitudes and behaviour of non-disabled Australians that we must measure the success of that strategy.

In the absence of context, the scheme’s implementation made such failure even more certain through a highly transactional approach to the business of funded disability supports, coupled with a delusional level of faith in the power of the market. How could we think a market mindset would work for the NDIS? This demands not only the assumption that scheme participants are properly supported to make informed choices that miraculously shape a responsive impactful market, but also the assumption that social and economic participation can be accomplished by buying stuff. They aren’t, and it can’t.

Markets are transactional, whereas the NDIS is meant to be transformational. Everything about the implementation of the NDIS has felt transactional, including the calamitous sequestering of the Local Area Coordinator (LAC) role to transact scheme business instead of its intended transformational purpose of connecting people to community resources and networks. The current NDIS market is shaped by what services providers choose to offer, at prices determined by the NDIA. The NDIS participant has minimal influence in this market, and instead has become a market commodity. This is nowhere more evident than in the housing part of the NDIS – Specialist Disability Accommodation (SDA) – where private investors combine with builders and disability support providers to build shared housing that vacuums up scheme participants with the right price tag on their forehead.

So what is it we are meant to be implementing? The scheme’s core values, as echoed in Micheline’s essay, include “choice and control” and “social and economic participation.” It follows, therefore, that the implementation ought to reflect these values. However, participant choice and control are largely absent from the current NDIS pathway, with participants having limited choice about what goes in their budgeted plan and how it might be used, and no choice of LAC. And the scheme has misunderstood the nature of social and economic participation, as revealed by the way it measures the success of this: counting the amount of time a scheme participant spends outside the home. This is not a valid measure of social participation, and at best measures physical presence in the community – a guest appearance, a very different thing from being an active and valued community member.

In addition to these core values, Lee points to the disability community’s unmet expectation that the scheme would be anchored in human rights, reflecting Australia’s commitment to the UNCRPD. I agree about the NDIS and the Australian Disability Strategy needing to be anchored in human rights, but ironically a narrative based on rights may not be the most effective way to win the day for an effective NDIS and an inclusive Australia. Part of the problem about the language of “rights” is that it is an intellectual discourse and can leave some people unmoved, especially those who have little or no personal experience of the issue to which the right relates. For example, there are plenty of men in Australia and elsewhere who remain disconnected from the importance of women’s rights, with the result that women continue to be oppressed, overlooked or assaulted. The same is true for First Nations people. Without personal experience and insight into the issues the right speaks to, a right can become synonymous with compliance, with perceived entitlement, maybe belligerence. I am not convinced there is even a common understanding among Australians about what a right is. Rights, though critically important, are not engaging, not a crowd-pleaser, and quite possibly a turn-off.

A way through this is to see a right as a code- phrase for a collection of values. These values are held to be sufficiently important by enough people to make it worth writing them down and saying everyone should have them. By exploring the values within a right, there is a better chance of people finding a connection, be it intellectual, personal or emotional. For example, there is a right to education because of the value of education. While we might readily accept the idea of a right to education and expect people to be able to access it, we do not seem to spend much time thinking about why the right is important, about the nature of its value. That value includes, for example, the value of knowledge and skill, the value of personal development, the value of lifelong learning, the value of developing empathy and networks, the value of community, and the value of education in helping you find your place in the world.

The problem with focusing on a right rather than the values that lie within is that a right can be met transactionally. For example, a jurisdiction can meet a person’s right to an education but it doesn’t necessarily follow that the education so offered will be effective. But, hey, we met our obligation, we provided an education: what more do these people want, for heaven’s sake? It is only by drawing out the values within a right and using those values as the explicit framework for our expectations that we can make real progress.

So what does this mean for the NDIS? It needs to move away from a transactional mindset to one that is values-driven and obsessively focused on investing in a true impact on authentic social and economic participation. That would be magnificent to see, but by itself it still won’t be enough to deliver an inclusive Australia. The bigger issue lies in the broader work of all our governments. We must see more courageous and determined leadership towards inclusion. There is plenty of research data illustrating how well-crafted inclusive education is far more effective than special education at equipping young disabled people for meaningful and fulfilling adult life. Inclusive education is manifestly better at delivering the values on which the right to education is based. Yet, counterintuitively, Australia continues to invest in special and segregated education for many disabled young Australians. This also happens in other key areas of life chances, such as employment, housing, health and transportation. We need from our government and community leaders a level of determination born not just of intellectual concern at the insufficient regard for rights but of visceral outrage at the continued exclusion of disabled people from the membership and rhythms of our neighbourhoods. Despite having heard many stories of violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation, the Disability Royal Commission’s recently released final report shows that commissioners were split in their view of the future of segregated mechanisms such as group housing, separate special employment and special education, and with timelines for change to segregation that in some cases, such as education, can be measured in decades. And the report by the NDIS Quality and Safeguarding Commission earlier this year on the many instances where quality and safety have clearly been absent in group homes did not appear at any point to contemplate whether the group home model itself was fundamentally flawed. Where is the visceral outrage? Where is the manifest urgency to change things now, to dismantle these fortresses of exclusion?

To have any real chance of tackling the range of issues in Micheline Lee’s essay, we must demand courageous, values-driven leadership from the governments of Australia. We must see in them visceral outrage. Let us look for this in their response to the royal commission report and to the NDIS Review report. Hold them accountable for authentic, urgent, values-driven decisions that advance inclusion now, not later.

And let each of us hold ourselves accountable for being part of the solution, not simply through donating to fundraisers or admiring the amount of taxpayer funds going to the NDIS, but by the character of our own actions, as neighbours, co-workers, employers, club members and fellow human beings.

Robbi Williams

LIFEBOAT

Correspondence

Rhonda Galbally 

Lifeboat is a comprehensive analysis and valuable critique of where we have got to with disability in Australia and where we might go. More than that, it is a beautifully written and very moving account of Lee’s life as a disabled woman. Lee’s status as a compelling writer was established with her wonderful novel The Healing Party and this essay applies her honed skill of drawing on her internal voice so that her inner ambiguities and struggles are revealed. This is a generously revealing approach – weaving together the personal and political – and Lee has done this with great skill in analysing the NDIS, warts and all.

Lee begins by outlining just a few of her struggles with Australia’s lack of accessibility and inclusion. She wants to be polite and generous to people’s well-intentioned efforts to be kind, but she reveals her inner rage at charitable attitudes, with its object the poor cripple and she on the receiving end.

On receiving a free bar of soap as a gift from a shop owner, she writes:

I felt conflicted and embarrassed but didn’t want to hurt his feelings.

I approached and gave him a smile . . .

“Aren’t we just inspirational!” . . .

“He was just being kind . . . he’s better than most people,” my sister added.

“But it made you feel like a child, right?”

While being treated as brave, inspirational, vulnerable and needing protection might not sound too awful, it has led to awful treatment. Disabled people are segregated “for their own protection.” Yet, as I found as a Disability Royal Commissioner, segregation enables violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation to abound unseen, invisible – out of sight and out of mind.

At the Disability Royal Commission we heard that the alternative is to make all systems in Australian society accessible and fully inclusive – starting with early childhood, so that disabled children can interact with non-disabled children in all aspects of schooling as one of the gang. It is familiarity that leads to acceptance that in turn enables attitudes to change. And Lee agrees that all systems – state, federal and local – need to fully include disabled people – health, housing, transport, education, employment, infrastructure.

Meanwhile, into our inaccessible, excluding Australia, the NDIS was launched, opening its doors in 2013 after an outstanding campaign called Every Australian Counts. There were huge hopes for the scheme, but it was never envisaged that it would have to take responsibility for the complete lack of universal access and inclusion. Its job was to enable people at an individual level to decide what they needed personally to participate fully in the social, cultural and economic life of Australia. The NDIS packages were only ever meant to be the personal bit of the equation. The external world also needed to be transformed so that disabled people could participate.

Nevertheless, the NDIS was a revolution, in that for the first time ever disabled people could decide what they needed and wanted and what personal support might assist them to get there. Lee describes valuing her independence and privacy, so she gets to choose how, when and where she gets support. She also tells of trying to persuade her friend Frida, who has a psychosocial disability, to take a package by describing how that could support her to get back to work.

Frida rejects the suggestion to go onto the NDIS. “I want a man,” she says. Would, could or should a package have assisted Frida to go to places where she might find a man, or at least have a chance to make more friends that might lead to relationships? Frida did not have problems with physical access, but most places where we might meet people – disabled and non-disabled together – are completely inaccessible physically and socially forbidding to many people with disabilities, thereby excluding them.

Lee describes terrible cases of people trying to work their way through far too complex processes; dealing with inconsistent, unfair and irrational decisions; and trying endlessly to find what they need in undeveloped, thin markets. Do I detect, though, a slight hint of harking back to the old days when the states provided disability services with block funding, or am I being oversensitive? I regard the pre-NDIS service sector with horror: it was a time when disabled people had no choice or control – absolutely no say over what, how, who, when and if they would receive services, and certainly no say over the design of the specialist, mostly segregated services. And these segregated services were just as riddled with violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation, but with the addition that hardly anyone received support in the first place.

While Lee focuses on the market for disability specialist services, there needs to be attention given to the completely undeveloped “market” for mainstream services and systems. This means, for example, that people need a disability support worker to drive them around because public transport is not accessible. Or an occupational therapist to help them negotiate a place in what should be an inclusive and welcoming setting, such as a junior sports group, or a speech therapist to coach them in subjects at school.

If I, as a disabled woman, decide that I’d rather learn computing or reading or numeracy or photography or art with non-disabled people, the venue is likely to be inaccessible and the teacher is also likely to be unwilling and unable to teach me if I am non-verbal, intellectually disabled, have high support needs or diverse behaviours.

When the mainstream is inaccessible, it is far easier to default to a segregated special school, sheltered workshop, day program and group house, where I live, learn, work and play with my own kind. This is, in effect, to be forced into a segregated life rather than for the outside world of community living, mainstream schools, open employment and recreation to accept and include and teach disabled children and adults. Is the NDIS inadvertently expanding segregation in areas such as group homes, day programs and sheltered employment? If so, this is a profound problem and certainly not a lifeboat for those living in those settings.

Alternatively, is the NDIS adhering sufficiently to the original design, to provide flexible personal budgets that encourage the non-disability specialist mainstream world to include disabled people?

Lee implies that expecting consumer demand to transform the mainstream world is unrealistic and I agree with her. Governments should be taking responsibility for making all systems accessible and inclusive, not just because it is a requirement of their commitment to the human rights of persons with disabilities but also because this would take financial pressure off the NDIS.

The NDIS was never expected or funded to deliver an accessible and inclusive world. But in the face of an inaccessible community, fighting to get a package is the only game in town and the packages must be large enough to compensate for lack of access and inclusion.

The reality for the sustainability of the NDIS is that we need disabled people to be able to lead lives out in the world. What is needed is the combination of NDIS support packages that assist people to join the wider community and governments at all levels, ensuring we have accessible and inclusive systems and settings that enable this. It is this combination which provides the lifeboat referred to by Lee in the title of her essay.

At the heart of Lee’s multilayered analysis of the NDIS, she grapples with the concept of individual/personal budgets. Personal self-directed budgets are a separate issue from market models or the consumer role. Lee herself is a self-managed participant and she outlines some of those choices that she makes – some of which work out and some don’t, but all are hers to make.

In being concerned that self-directed budgets with choice at their heart might lead to a neoliberal consumerist approach, Lee quotes Mark Considine, who seems to be suggesting that we might consider giving up choice for voice. This made my blood pressure go up very high. Voice without choice means no choice about when, how, who and what for our daily lives – no choice about whom you live with, who supports you, what you eat, when. No choice to be able to leave your segregated setting and live your life in the community. Voice would be meaningless without choice. I’m sure that can’t be what Considine would like to see, but I would guard the NDIS’s choice and control aspiration to my last gasp and promote self-direction and flexible budgets as empowering, enabling the transition to mainstream life. At the same time, I recognise that the mainstream has a long way to go to ensure inclusion of disabled people.

Lee’s essay is a call to arms to get the NDIS working much better. My hope, as a recent Disability Royal Commissioner, is that the NDIS, with its self-directed budgets enabling choice and control, will end up stimulating the demand by disabled people for an ordinary life in the mainstream. But this will only come to fruition if, as commissioners recommend, there is a commitment to the responsible phasing out of segregated models of housing, work and schooling. This would be properly spearheaded by governments at all levels agreeing to fully honour Australia’s commitment to the treaty we were one of the first countries to sign: the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

Rhonda Galbally

LIFEBOAT

Correspondence

Monique Ryan

One in six Australians live with disability. That’s 4.4 million people. To support them, ten years ago the Gillard Labor government established the National Disability Insurance Scheme. The NDIS has been life-changing for many Australians. For many, the supports it has provided have been essential to living an included life within our society – possibly for the first time – but the ten-year mark for this scheme coincides with a time of uncertainty and concern regarding increasing participant numbers and rapidly escalating cost. Micheline Lee’s Quarterly Essay Lifeboat is therefore perfectly timed, landing as it does at the same time as the report of the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability – all twelve volumes and 6788 pages of it – and the impending final report of the independent review commissioned by the NDIS minister, Bill Shorten, in October 2022.

The Australian Labor Party prides itself on Medicare, its universal healthcare scheme, established by the Whitlam government in 1975. The fundamental principles of Medibank/Medicare were equity, efficiency, simplicity and fairness in provision of a universal insurance scheme for healthcare provided under the shared auspices of the Commonwealth and the states and territories. The NDIS has never quite reached for or achieved those lofty ideals, but it has become a major part of our government’s social welfare system.

The NDIS was designed to give disabled individuals “reasonable and necessary” supports, over which they have choice and control as to how they want to live their life, and over who delivers the supports required to help them achieve this. Many current issues with the NDIS relate to its structure. It was established as an insurance scheme in the expectation that early investment in the capacity of those with significant disability would decrease the cost of their future care. The scheme was aimed primarily at Australians with permanent and significant deficits – so-called “Tier 3” individuals – who would be given personalised individual support packages. Similar packages would be provided to those with less severe disability where it was predicted that early intervention would significantly lessen their future support needs. Approximately 475,000 such cases were anticipated, and it was expected that community-based disability services – including education, health and vocational training – would support the remaining 3.8 million Australians with lesser disability (“Tier 2” individuals). Those in Tier 2 would continue to receive mainstream health, education and employment support via mainstream (generally state-based) services. The NDIS was never intended to cater for all Australians with a disability, or even for all of those with severe deficits: those over sixty-five were carved out, unless they entered the scheme before that age.

The reality of the NDIS as it stands now is very different. Almost from inception, the NDIS has become the back-up and default service for most children and adults with developmental disorders, delays and disabilities, as other disability supports and programs – particularly those funded by state and territory governments – have been defunded or removed. Vacation of the space previously filled by community-based block-funded services has left a void for those with milder developmental delay and physical deficits. Massive inequity has arisen; those on the scheme receive much more support than non-participants. The Melbourne Disability Service has reported that 90 per cent of people without NDIS funding are unable to access the supports they need. This renders current clients desperate to retain NDIS funding, and leaves others fighting to become eligible. Those with lower support needs have had to apply for NDIS funding when they might otherwise have accessed other programs, and paediatricians (like me) have been quicker to diagnose autism when that’s the quickest and easiest way to ensure that children can receive early intervention for their developmental delay. When all you have is a hammer, everything starts looking a lot like a nail. However, this has led to a situation where 11 per cent of Australian five- to seven-year-old boys and 5 per cent of five- to seven-year-old girls are NDIS participants. This is simply unsustainable. It demands change.

The NDIS was established as a classic market-based system; the thought was that participants would drive and shape the market – that with control over their own plans they would select the best providers, rewarding excellence with patronage and driving competition for their services. The Productivity Commission assumed that supply would be generated in response to increased demand for providers, but the reality is that there remain shortages of many allied health disciplines and other providers in the disability sector. Disability care is not akin to fast-food delivery; you can’t just call in a gig workforce of Uber drivers, although services such as Mabel have sprung up to attempt to fill the gap for lower-qualified workers able to provide less complex services. In many cases, the thin – and complex – market means that appropriately skilled providers often can’t be found or accessed. For instance, disturbingly, people with psychosocial disability in the Far West region of New South Wales use only 11 per cent of their plans. The market fails where participants need more specialised supports, which come at higher costs, and in areas where there are poor economies of scale. The federal and state governments have not monitored disability services to ensure that there’s back-up in regional or rural settings, that the services billed are actually provided, and that vulnerable participants are receiving not just services but also holistic care. There are no means by which people with disabilities can compare and rank service providers; and in any case their needs are individual and often complex. It can take a participant months to get to know and trust a carer; it’s not as simple as comparing a pair on a website and swiping right. Because of the shortages of providers, those in the market have been able to raise their prices to the maximum permitted by the scheme, to levels above those supported by other services – TAC, Veterans’ Affairs, Aged Care – so that individuals in those other schemes struggle to compete.

It’s not all clover for the providers. The policy and compliance framework can be challenging, screening processes for workers slow, and cashflow an issue when clients neglect to pay accounts or run out of funds. Not-for-profits caring for high-needs and complex participants have found it difficult to compete for staff and to provide their services competitively. Cost-shifting between the federal and state governments does not help. In August 2023, the Victorian government tried to cut funding for specialist visiting teachers working with disabled children in schools, backflipping only in the face of sustained outrage from parents, teachers and disability advocacy groups. During the pandemic, issues with NDIS-funded planners left hospitalised scheme participants ready for discharge waiting for an average of 118 days – ready to go home but waiting on funding packages and accommodation.

There are clearly significant inequities in how the NDIS is operating. NDIS participants are overwhelmingly young and male. Only 37 per cent of NDIS participants are women. This reflects the higher incidence of autism and related conditions in males, but it also reflects selection bias within the scheme; 49 per cent of people with disability aged under sixty- five years are female. Plan utilisation is higher for those in metropolitan than in regional and remote areas. Many participants describe inconsistencies in the size of support packages provided to people with the same disability or level of need. The quality of advocacy by planners and parents has mattered, disadvantaging those whose advocates argue less eloquently, those with less familiarity with bureaucracy, and those from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. Lower levels of plan utilisation among Indigenous people with disabilities reflect difficulties with providing evidence of disability and an absence of whole-of-life case management in the NDIS for those who are dealing not only with disability but also with other social challenges such as homelessness and poverty.

Cost has been a perennial concern. The NDIS is a demand-driven scheme with no limits on spending. As of June 2023, the scheme has more than 610,000 participants, with numbers projected to increase to over a million by 2032. Fraud is an issue, as with all government systems, but the extent and prevalence of system abuse is unclear. Attempts to rein spending in under the Morrison government led to cost- cutting, and a 400 per cent increase in disputes over packages. We all know that the disability dollar is not unlimited. The NDIS is expected to cost $50 billion annually by 2024/25 – more than the annual budget for Medicare, or even defence, nuclear submarines notwithstanding. That figure, however, fails to take into account the original assumption of the scheme: that it would generate revenue and productivity by facilitating employment and engagement of people with disabilities, and by freeing up carers to return to the workforce. While employment of disabled people has not increased significantly in the past ten years, there is good evidence that the multiplier effect of the NDIS is significant – that every dollar spent generates an economic contribution of $2.25. It’s a service, not an expense.

As a paediatric neurologist, I interacted with the NDIS through the annual completion of support letters, which very often had to be rewritten as I’d not used the right key words to trigger maximal package size. I had to undertake yearly redocumentation of the permanence of genetic conditions. I had to do my best to convince assessors that NDIS funding was just as justified for individuals with lifelong, progressive disorders as for those with conditions more likely to respond to intervention. I had to apologise to parents for documents emphasising their children’s deficits, in the hope of attracting more support, rather than highlighting their engagement with therapy and their capacity for achievement.

As a member of parliament, I hear often from NDIS participants and their carers about their frustration and anger with the system. From the mother of a brain-injured adult in Supported Independent Living, worried about the potential for his 24-hour nursing care to be revoked. From the sisters of a disabled adult concerned with the increasing cost of his residential placement. From the guardians of a thirteen-year-old with autism and fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, whose excellent Special Developmental School struggles to manage her behavioural outbursts and who can’t access inpatient psychiatric care where her medications can be safely adjusted. From consumers outraged that the NDIS is paying large amounts for behavioural therapy assessments of dubious value. From participants and parents unable to find affordable, accessible psychologists, psychiatrists, dieticians, speech pathologists or occupational therapists. Those engaged with the scheme were outraged by the comment of the previous CEO of the National Disability Insurance Agency, Martin Hoffman, that the NDIS “operates on the presumption that all people with disability have the capacity to make decisions and exercise choice and control.” That comment was made at a Royal Commission hearing into the death of Ann Marie Smith, a 54-year-old woman with cerebral palsy who died from septic shock, organ failure and malnutrition at the hands of an NDIS provider. It reflected a refusal to accept that the ability to exercise choice and control is often compromised in persons with a disability. Of course it is – how could it be otherwise? The NDIS’s remit must not only ensure support to help people exercise independence but also include a duty of care for those unable to do so.

As a member of the Australian Parliament’s Joint Standing Committee on the NDIS, I’ve had the honour of hearing from many providers and participants about their experience of the system. Some of those testimonials were really hard to hear; they were raw, confronting, sometimes heartbreaking. Our NDIS has the potential to be world- leading, but it has become adversarial. Participants are expected to justify why their static or progressive medical conditions are not improving. They’re forced to undergo annual assessments which engender uncertainty and anxiety, when there is often no good reason for such frequent reviews. They’ve had to take on review processes and the Administrative Appeals Tribunal without support or representation. We have forced disabled Australians – and their parents, partners and carers – to battle a system in which transparency and generosity have been sacrificed to red tape and mean-spirited bureaucracy.

So the question remains: how do we best support those needing help? We should, can and must do better than we have done to date with this life-changing scheme. Shorten sees the NDIS as “the only lifeboat in the ocean.” Bruce Bonyhady, the original chair of the National Disability Insurance Agency, has described it as an “oasis in the desert.” Rather than the individual supports provided by the NDIS, we have to offer a dual system, including both defined packages for those with more significant needs, and community-based programs for infants and young children with developmental delay, children with mild autism and neurodivergence, and adults with milder deficits for whom group therapy will not only result in better use of resources but might also promote inclusion. This model will be better aligned with the original NDIS design. It will also be more cost-effective. Politicians love a metaphor; I’ll offer an alternative. No man is an island, or an oasis, and no man should need a lifeboat. The NDIS should be a trampoline; a place for soft landings with strong external supports and limits, but also a launching pad for those able to take off. Around that trampoline should be the soft grass provided by support services which increase the range and nature of community and mainstream supports for people without severe disability, and which provide group therapy and services for all who are able to benefit from them. This model would need us to resile from the premise that all disabled people must self-manage their care, and that all should receive support individually. Some things are better done together – for efficiency, economy and enjoyment. The model would also mean that, as a society, we accept our responsibility to include and support all individuals, their variations and imperfections, and to create a context accepting of their varying capacities and needs.

Monique Ryan

Voice of Reason

Response to Correspondence 

Megan Davis 

Each of the erudite responses to my Quarterly Essay stands on its own as worthy and incisive commentary on the essay and on this historic moment that we are barrelling towards. I make only a few observations in response. Sana Nakata and Daniel Bray’s extraordinary contribution should be compulsory for all “undecideds.” It should be read by the multitudinous commentators prosecuting the idea that Australian democracy and liberalism require no adjustment and no reform, and cannot recognise “difference” in a way that won’t violate formal equality. If we set to one side that Australia is a nation that has enabled communities of different wealth to flourish because of a commitment to substantive equality, not formal equality, Bray and Nakata provide a sharp retort to those essentialists.

Their dialogue reminds me of the fascinating and sophisticated conversations that occurred in the First Nations Regional Dialogues. They were fierce and moving and messy and clever. Full of tears and anger and hope and covering the full spectrum of human emotion. For, you see, we were asked to talk to members of communities who are the end users of a billion-dollar industry that is so large and unaccountable that even the Productivity Commission can’t track it. And we rock up to talk about the constitution over three days?

When Aunty Pat Anderson went on ABC TV’s 7.30 to explain the dialogues, she spoke of the process as being just that – teary and angry – but the next day News.com.au had a headline: “People were angry: Uluru Statement architect weighs in on dialogues amid ‘reparations’, treaty controversy.” Mainstream media see the dialogue participants and advocates for Uluṟu as angry activists with angry motives. It is so clichéd. What we saw, as Bray and Nakata elegantly put it, was a “meeting place. A place where even agreement is noisy.”

It is where common interests have sharp, broken edges. Where the peace is fragile. Where understanding is often incomplete. It is where the past and the present and the future converge in moments that seem like they should break us apart, but don’t.

This is the parliament.

This is Australian democracy.

This will be the Voice.

I see Bray and Nakata’s concluding words as a neat metaphor for the Voice and for Australian democracy. Democracy should be the meeting place of all citizens.

But for so long it hasn’t been that for the First Peoples because, as they say, the marginalisation of First Peoples has been done “not by accident, but by design.”

Nakata and Bray traverse some of that history. But more importantly, they explain that democratic governance, like our constitution, is not intended to be static, to stand still. As Bray and Nakata say:

Those who argue that the safeguard of a democracy is its unchanging nature are wrong. Renewal is how nations inoculate themselves against new forms of division and conflict that emerge when the people and the power continue to diverge. This is exactly what constitutional reform to protect an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament works to achieve. The proposal for a Voice takes seriously the weaknesses of Australia’s democracy and proposes a constitutional remedy.

After all, the origins of the parliament come from the post–Norman conquest formation of assemblies to talk. Parler is the French word for “to speak”– from which the word parliament evolved. And this is what dialogue seeks to do. It seeks to speak “to” the parliament and “to” the executive. Our parliamentary system is adversarial and is built upon the mediation of two versions of the good life. But for First Nations people, our world, our lives, our needs fall outside that spectrum because we are distinct cultural groups. The Voice is utterly consistent with our legal and political traditions, as it aligns with the values that Bray and Nakata show are integral to contemporary democracy, and this includes the mechanisms of accountability citizens can exercise outside of elections and the deliberative capacity of political communication and the inclusion of affected people in policymaking and the empowerment of the historically marginalised. We are asking to be listened to. That’s all.

Bray and Nakata say, as we do, “From this vantage point, the Voice will enhance Australian democracy.”

Damien Freeman sets up a straw man. I don’t say that undecided non-Indigenous voters who have genuine questions about the Voice’s ability to address the plight of Aboriginal people don’t love Aboriginal people. I said Noel Pearson’s claim that we are “unloved” will be tested at this referendum.

Freeman also says that Aboriginal cynicism is not the only cynicism that needs to be addressed and that we need to make the case to non-Indigenous electors who feel cynical about a Voice.

My entire work post-Uluṟu has been to turn up, tirelessly, to a host of different forums across Australia and write in different media to try to reach those people and explain how the Voice is and was expressly conceived, and has been developed, as a form of recognition that will be more than symbolism, that will help improve the lives of people on the ground. Unlike Freeman, most communities don’t use the term “local communities” – that’s not how they describe themselves. It’s a bureaucratic term. It’s a term used by the United Nations which has seen the diminution of Indigenous rights. They don’t make a distinction between local communities and national voice. That’s an artificial distinction: their Voice is their Voice no matter where the meeting place. They view this mechanism as grassroots communities wanting a Voice directly to Canberra, where national decisions are made. And most dialogues wanted to elect spokespeople directly via ballot-box elections. The design phase that the Labor government has committed to that follows a successful referendum will allow communities to contribute to that design. The one point they all made was that there is no existing entity or framework that represents their voice.

Freeman worries about me convincing cynical voters who don’t know what the Voice will achieve. The Uluṟu Dialogues, which I co-chair with Pat Anderson, are on the ground every day doing the hard work of talking to cynical undecided and No voters, as well as to ATSI peoples and Yes voters. My team over six months in 2023 has been to Cooktown, Laura, Cairns, Mossman, Port Douglas, Kuranda, Ingham, Innisfail, Lightning Ridge, Walgett, Coonabarabran, Narrabri, Moree, Townsville, Palm Island, Eagleby, Broken Hill, Mudgee, Wellington, Gilgandra, Trangie, Narro-mine, Gulargambone, Nyngan, Warren, Lithgow, Wagga Wagga, Redfern, Nowra, Cairns, Mareeba, Tully, Brewarrina, Logan Central, Taree, Port Macquarie, Tamworth, Hervey Bay, Dubbo, Orange, Sydney, Newcastle and Logan City. We are soon moving to South Australia. We run small, face-to-face dialogues with Aussies and local Indigenous groups, some together, some separate. We have no “Yes” placards. We are there to educate, not proselytise.

What we are hearing is not cynicism about the Voice, or even opposition to the Voice, but voters with cynicism because the system does not work for them. They demonstrate little faith in Australia’s democracy or Australia’s politicians or Australian parliaments.

Freeman challenges me to persuade those voters, but neglects to consider an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation that’s being driven by his side of politics (though definitely not by Freeman). If Australians thought the same way as LNP conservatives, the conservative vote would not have plummeted to the low thirties in the 2022 election. It’s disappointing that they are now glee-fully and publicly saying they will use this referendum and the lives of vulnerable First Nations communities to position themselves for the next election. It explains why a Voice is needed. It explains why the Uluṟu Statement was issued to the Australian people. Politicians only have their eyes on the three-year term. And for a party that is struggling to fundraise, the LNP sees this referendum as a money-making opportunity for themselves. That brazen pursuit of power is what I’m hearing as we travel the country talking to ordinary Aussies. Their cynicism is fuelled by retail Australian politics. And the more they hear about the Uluṟu Statement as an invitation issued to them, not to politicians, the more likely they are to vote Yes.

Daniel James addresses this from the Indigenous side of things in his eloquent reply. I have thought about the same issues he has written about for years and years. The deep concern of some of our people is that we do distrust the system because it’s let us down so much. Even so, I do believe the 83 per cent statistic and the higher statistic from Reconciliation Australia that around 88 per cent of our mob support this. Because we are pragmatic people. We decided not to waste this opportunity. But we are all nervous. We are all anxious. The day after a referendum, if the result is No, all First Nations people will feel profoundly rejected by a system imposed on them, that they sought to join in an ever so modest way: Recognition Through a Voice. As Aunty Pat Anderson said on 7.30, “We are fringe dwellers,” “We are knocking on the door.” Will Australians open the door?

Which makes the Voice as a model and the Uluṟu invitation so remarkable: that after everything that has come before, we offer a modest constitutional option. The Voice is about listening. And constitutionally, it is about listening always. I found James’s essay profoundly moving. Our people are taking a leap of faith. And they’ve placed that faith not in politicians but in their fellow Australians.

Henry Reynolds asks whether it was the right decision not to use international principles and standards for the current Voice debate. He writes, “It is surely strange that they are so rarely referred to. It suggests the advocates for the Yes case decided it was better not to mention the UN, international law or global opinion. Whether that was a prudent decision remains to be seen.”

Reynolds need ask no more. If he reads the Referendum Council report, he can see that the process was influenced by international principles and standards. From UNDRIP to CERD, it was influenced by the standards applicable to Australia. It also references many of the international resolutions on truth-telling.

However, where the UN is mostly referred to in this campaign is in No forums and campaign material seeding disinformation and misinformation on Facebook. I’ve been asked a number of times at community forums whether the Voice means the UN takes over Australia. I believe this referendum demonstrates the problem that can occur in liberal democracies where civics is poorly understood, and in particular it highlights the failure to educate about modern history and Australia’s place in a global world. The UN conspiracies I am seeing and hearing align with the anti-WHO, anti-vaccine discourse that emerged in the COVID-19 pandemic.

Mark McKenna is the historian who influenced my thinking and my career turn to become an academic. His work on the 1999 referendum had a profound impact on how I thought about the republic referendum and Indigenous recognition. A failed Voice referendum will make it that much harder for a republic referendum. I do wonder, however, whether the legislative changes that needed to happen for the Voice referendum – such as fact-checking the pamphlets – will happen following this referendum.

Many Australians ask how the Voice will make a difference: read Antoinette Braybrook. There is no area that suffered more under nine years of conservative government than the field of family/domestic violence and violence against Indigenous women. When the Abbott government introduced the Indigenous Advancement Strategy and ripped $500 million out of community programs and policies, many of these were schemes, bodies and programs aimed at combating violence against Indigenous women. The conservatives pulled money for night patrols.

Braybrook talks about the silence and disbelief. We heard this a lot in the dialogues. The way the bureaucracy and executive in successive conservative governments ran Indigenous affairs was like some Florentine patronage scheme. If you’re in the “in crowd,” you’ll be fine. If not, you’re done until there’s a change of government – and even then it’s not guaranteed. The Australian National Audit Office reports provide a snapshot of the arbitrariness of executive decision-making. The picture is bleak for many. And the bureaucratic trend of co-design and sharing decision-making is so utterly ludicrous in a system where the power imbalance is acute for all but for a very few elite figures who, for various reasons, carve out their own boutique space.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women lead our communities. They do the heavy lifting. And our women are never silent. We are always talking up. The Voice is a mechanism that will allow many women and girls to flourish. One of the design principles that make up the detail is that the Voice must comprise equal numbers of men and women. This is critical. Constitutions do provide the material conditions for a dignified human life. It’s in plain sight that the constitution has benefited Australians. But it has not benefited all. This referendum is about the Australian people agreeing that there is dignity in having a seat at the table and this will mean empowering women structurally.

My essay straddles an interesting phase in the referendum. It was published when Yes was ahead in the polls. That is no longer the case. But curiously, there are huge numbers of undecideds – somewhere near 40 per cent. I don’t think anyone expected the misinformation and disinformation to dominate in the way it has. As The Guardian has reported, the No campaign even has funding and expertise from companies registered in Texas who are from the Christian far right and are experts in Trumpian misinformation and disinformation. The Yanks have arrived on our shore and they are interfering in the integrity of our democracy. This should be a bigger topic of conversation than it is. But will all these problems be cleaned up after the referendum?

I’ve led this work for seven years, maybe twelve if I start with Gillard’s expert panel. I did not think that just months before the referendum the headline in The Australian would be “Prime Minister defends the length of the Uluṟu Statement.” Ludicrous. While the political elites play political games, the issues that plague our community remain hidden from view. That’s the tactic. If we are distracted from our jobs, then fewer Australians hear about the exigency of the Voice and why it is a clever and fair way to address a structural injustice. The exclusion of First Nations is not by accident but by design in the Australian constitution. I’ll leave Bray and Nakata with the last word on this:

Structural injustice exists because that is how our political system is structured. We are getting exactly what the system was designed to deliver. A Voice to Parliament alone cannot specifically redress every injustice, but it will connect people to power in a way that currently does not happen. Democracy demands nothing less.

Megan Davis

Voice of Reason

Correspondence

Rachel Buchanan

Back in 2001, the literary journal Meanjin was preparing a special issue called “Poetics” and selected writers were invited to record their poems to a CD (ironically titled Enhancer) that would be sold with the journal, tucked into a plastic pocket at the back.

I was asked to go to a place in Coburg or Brunswick, somewhere miles away from where I lived in Melbourne’s west, and read “The Immigration Experience,” a two- part piece about what the title says.

When I got there, Lisa Bellear was at the mic. I had heard of Bellear from the “Koorie survival show” that used to be on 3CR, a community radio station in Melbourne. Lisa read two powerful short poems – “Reconciliation Spins My Head” and “Prepared to Die” – in a voice that was slow and dreamy, edged with menace.

Then Lisa hung around to watch me. I was nervous. As I reflected in an essay for Te Pouhere Kōrero, the journal of the Māori Historians Association, I had not imagined what a Koorie person would think of my work. I had written my piece with a white Australian audience in mind, I guess, and maybe a Pākehā one as well.

Afterwards, we had a chat. Lisa was a warm person with a beautiful smile. She commented on my outfit – a subtle combo of a bright-orange fake-fur maternity dress worn over striped bell-bottomed leggings – and noted that we had both made mention of cousins in our work. I felt her reference was rather more sophisticated than mine but whatever. Then Lisa got to the point.

“We don’t like it when you Māoris come over here and tell us how things should be for us,” she said. Lisa was looking away from me as she spoke. Her voice was light, almost joking, but I heard her message. Do not speak for me. Do not compare your people with mine. Be respectful. Listen. Don’t ever forget who you are and where you are.

Five years later, Lisa Bellear – poet, playwright, photographer, comedian – died in her sleep and the obituary published in The Age said 1000 people attended her funeral at the Victorian Aboriginal Advancement League headquarters in Thornbury.

This might sound weird, but I’ve learnt that it is a gift when someone important – say, Lisa Bellear – decides you are worth dressing down, and after reading Megan Davis’s brilliant essay, this encounter with Lisa came back to me.

In arguing for a constitutional Voice, Davis says Australians “could see an unconventional yet compelling invitation to address one of the most acute challenges for Indigenous Australia: getting the government to listen.”

The second section of Davis’s essay is called “The Torment of Our Powerlessness,” a title not easy to forget. “Parliaments do not listen because they do not have to,” Davis writes.

Bob Hawke promised a treaty (1988). Didn’t happen. Royal Commissions have come and gone – Deaths in Custody (1991) and Little Children Are Sacred (2007) – but still nothing changed. The Northern Territory set up a Treaty Commission (2019) but the work fizzled out. South Australia announced treaty negotiations (2016), then a new government canned them. Now they are back on. A change of government in Victoria could derail the work happening here too.

As Davis said in her 2021 Mabo Oration: “Treaties that are not premised on the country’s federal structure are not binding treaties.”

Pandered to, placated, patted on the back, fobbed off with “Acknowledgments of Country and an endless parade of posters and water bottles and wristbands” or Reconciliation Action Plans (yesterday’s news), Davis damns the ritualistic ways that federal, state and territory governments have signalled “connection and deep engagement” with First Nations communities while continuing to ignore what these communities are actually saying.

Attending a NAIDOC morning tea might make non- Aboriginal people living in Australia feel good, but it does nothing to reduce the numbers of First Nations children who are removed from their homes or the number of First Nations people who are in prison. (I mention child protection because Davis uses it as a case study to justify the need for a Voice to Parliament, and here in Victoria the Yoor-rook Justice Commission’s first inquiries have been on child protection and the criminal justice system.)

I understand some of the struggles here because I’ve seen similar ones at home. No matter what some people like to say, Aotearoa New Zealand is not a bicultural paradise where the immense harm of colonisation is being undone, one treaty settlement at a time. If that were so, why are so many of us here?

One in five Māori, about 170,000 people, live in Australia. In total, just under 560,000 New Zealand–born people live here, making us the fourth-largest immigrant community, behind people born in the United Kingdom, India and China.

Some of us refer to Australia as Te Ao Moemoea, which could mean the land of dreams or the land of the Dreaming, and even though we arrived as uninvited guests, this country has welcomed us. Australia has certainly been good to me. I have received an excellent tertiary education here, raised three kids with a top bloke (Italian- Anglo Australian), written four books, had good jobs and made good friends, but I also know my place.

Yes, I am an indigenous person in New Zealand, but, as Lisa Bellear reminded me all those years ago, here I am a migrant, a guest, a surface person wrapped in the blanket of my ancestry, a thin covering compared with the luxurious cloak First Nations people wear, the one created by 60,000 years of occupation, custo-dianship and care.

I am in awe of Professor Megan Davis, Aunty Pat Anderson AO and their many colleagues for the innovative and dogged work they did leading up to Uluṟu and what they’ve done since then. I am inspired by the fire and dignity of Professor Eleanor Bourke and the other Yoorook commissioners as they hold the state of Victoria to account in a series of extraordinary hearings (you can watch them online) and by the passion of many Elders who have chosen to give evidence so far.

Thank you for sharing your Country with me and my family. Thank you for your power, humility, generosity and intellectual, artistic, creative and legal excellence. I will vote Yes and I hope every other eligible Māori and Pākehā person living on your land does too.

Rachel Buchanan

Voice of Reason

Correspondence

Daniel James

Megan Davis avoids the obvious choice, as a child of the 1980s, to find meaning in John Farnham’s hit “You’re the Voice,” instead opting for “Age of Reason” – as someone with her impressive scholastic and legal background would, of course. But there is another Farnham song that could also describe the position we’re in when it comes to the Voice: “Two Strong Hearts” – “reaching out forever like a river to the sea.” The Uluṟu Statement from the Heart is another iteration of the offerings First Nations have made to the colonial state over the last two centuries – reaching out. Without the selfless advocacy of so many, Uluṟu would not have gained the traction it has. The country needed to change before it could be embraced.

The road to a referendum on a Voice has been long and arduous. In Voice of Reason, Davis flags the stations along that road. Initiatives and attitudes, some well- intentioned, some designed to destroy us. Despite the motives, good or bad, both have invariably failed to change the way of things for First Nations people under the shackles of the colonial experiment.

Colonialism engulfed us all. The survivors and fighters – from first contact to the earliest days of Federation and beyond – soon understood that the best way to resist and then change the new order was from within, no matter how painstaking or traumatic that was. Seeking an active role in the white democratic life of a country founded on the bodies of its original inhabitants was, and is, no easy task. To see it, as some critics do, as conformity is not only a gross insult to so many of our forebears, but also displays a rudimentary understanding of history and empathy. It also isn’t a cessation of sovereignty; that was never ceded. Our land was stolen and our free movement across what was ours was restricted to the point of forbiddance.

It stands to reason, then, that to loosen its grip, to change the way modern colonialism influences the lives of First Nations communities, it will be necessary to change the founding document of this country and tend to the machinations of its parliament on issues pertinent to us in real time.

How much time have we lost along the way? Davis reminds us that for much of the 1990s and the early twentieth century the notion of reconciliation was essentially privatised. The Howard government washed its hands of reconciliation in its truest sense, finding greater comfort in stoking the tedious history wars and promulgating a Python-esque view of the benefits of colonialism for First Nations people.

It fed into that government’s emphasis on “practical reconciliation,” a political inertia after Mabo and Wik which gave birth to the Reconciliation Action Plan – a dubious velvet-covered instrument that only reckons with activities designed to highlight progress through the number of boxes ticked. As Davis writes, “[the RAP] focuses on private action or corporate civic action, and not on truth and justice.” It’s perhaps why corporate Australia, including the not-for-profit sector, so fervently adopted RAPs – as an easy way to cleanse collective guilt by doing the bare minimum, without addressing truth and justice, without doing the heavy lifting of reconciliation. It reminds us that true reconciliation is looking forward and looking back, realising the tense of all things coexisting and shaping all of us in any given moment. The long view through mature eyes, just as our old people tried to instil in us.

The ultimate disconnect is not the rationale for a Voice, especially if one considers all that has come before. No, the real stumbling block for people considering whether to support it or not is whether they can muster enough faith in the political system and its operatives at a time when faith in public institutions and those who run them has never been more tenuous. Anyone who is even a part-time student of the blak struggle in all its guises knows that the advocates, the leaders, the voices from communities around Australia will throw themselves earnestly and honestly into the task of speaking truth to power.

What is far less certain is the will of political leaders of all persuasions to hear the truth and act upon it. All it takes is one John Howard or one of his political spawn to arrest the legitimacy of truth-telling. It’s why enshrinement of the Voice in the constitution and not merely through legislation is important.

In her concluding paragraph, Davis challenges us: “We Aboriginal people must suspend our belief that the system cannot change. We must suspend our belief that the nation cannot change.” I think it requires more than that – it’s going to take a leap of faith. Even once First Nations people avail themselves of all the arguments around the Voice, as many have, that final act of faith is hard to approach, let alone make. It’s why so many are still undecided in my community: their reasons are valid, their hesitancy understandable. I pondered this final step for a long time myself before taking it.

As I write this, the Melbourne Remand Centre, with a capacity of close to 600, currently houses 143 Aboriginal male prisoners. Almost every Victorian Aboriginal person with ongoing connections to this part of the colony would know, or know of, First Nations people in prison. You can’t help but understand why there is a resistance among many of us to dealing with the state, let alone entering into dialogue with it. Yet this is again what is on offer; one side has shown heart, demonstrated vulnerability through strength. Will the broader community reveal its own heart? Because that’s what it’s going to take if we’re to break the status quo.

Daniel James

Voice of Reason

Correspondence

Mark McKenna

Voice of Reason is one of the most detailed and persuasive cases for the Voice I’ve encountered to date. Megan Davis has explained why the Voice is needed from the ground up. The examples she explores, sometimes in granular detail, highlight the failure of past policies and the urgent need for a constitutionally enshrined Indigenous Voice to the Commonwealth Parliament.

Davis also brings out the creative and imaginative dimensions of the Voice – both in its conception and its constitutional function. She explains why the Voice is an Indigenous and Australian solution to the complex historical and political circumstances faced by Aboriginal people. She also documents the long, tortuous journey to the referendum – pointing out that since 2011, we have witnessed seven public processes and ten public reports on constitutional recognition. As she laments, “at each meeting, for each prime minister, we had to explain the process from scratch.”

Like the official “Case for Voting Yes,” published online by the Australian Electoral Commission, and her recent publication with her UNSW colleague Professor George Williams – Everything You Need to Know About the Voice – Davis’s essay is there for every Australian to read and understand. Just how many voters will take up these or other opportunities to cast an informed vote in the referendum is difficult to estimate. But for anyone seeking to persuade family, friends or their local communities to vote Yes – or, as Davis colourfully put it in a recent interview on Late Night Live to join the road to “Yes town” – Voice of Reason is essential reading. As it stands, the need for persuasive arguments and positive stories that illustrate the practical advantages of the Voice and constitutional change grows more pressing by the day.

On 26 June, the day Voice of Reason was published, Newspoll showed that support for the Voice had dropped below 50 per cent nationally, with only two states (New South Wales and Victoria) registering more Yes than No voters. By late July, only three months out from the referendum, the same poll showed a continuing downward trend across the nation: 41 per cent Yes; 48 per cent No; 11 per cent undecided; and not one state recording over 50 per cent support for the Yes case.

As Australia enters the most crucial period of the referendum campaign, the fear of failure is palpable. The bar to achieve success inches ever higher. Calls to abandon the referendum have come from historian Bain Attwood, journalists, and Coalition MPs who feign concern for the future of reconciliation even though they did little during nine years of Coalition government to legislate the Voice or put forward a viable alternative to the proposed constitutional amendment. They cry out for detail at the same time as they provide no detail themselves. They argue that the Voice is divisive as they do all in their power to sow confusion and discord. They speak of their attachment to the constitution and argue the Voice will divide Australia on the grounds of race, when they know full well that racism is embedded in the very constitution they claim to protect.

Like the Nationals, Dutton’s intention was always to scuttle the Voice. The only recognition he is willing to countenance is recognition on his own terms. Even more reason, then, not to abandon the referendum. After having achieved the momentous task of securing a referendum, turning back now would inevitably be seen as a de facto defeat, demoralise a generation of Indigenous leaders and hand an easy victory to the naysayers and scaremongers. In any case, Albanese has made it clear that he is not in office to mark time:

I’m not here to occupy the space. To change who is in the white car. I’m here to change the country. And there’s nowhere more important than changing the country than changing our nation’s constitution to recognise the fullness of our history. So I want this done for Indigenous Australians but I want it done for all Australians. We will feel better about ourselves if we get this done . . . Australia will be seen as a better nation as well by the rest of the world.

Albanese’s words echoed those of Gough Whitlam when he launched Labor’s election campaign at Blacktown Town Hall in December 1972: “All of us as Australians are diminished while the Aborigines are denied their rightful place in this nation.”

To a large extent, the referendum campaign has pivoted on ideas that reflect an aversion to all things “political.” In different ways – and there’s certainly no equivalence between Dutton’s anti-Canberra rhetoric and the Yes campaign’s desire to take the discussion away from the political arena into local communities – both sides seek to distance themselves from politics. Like Morrison before him, Dutton, who presumably wants to be prime minister and believes in the transformative capacity of parliament, regurgitates cheap anti-Canberra rhetoric at every opportunity. While Senator Jacinta Price, whose office, like that of every parliamentarian, would not function without access to the informed and hopefully fearless advice of public servants, does all she can to besmirch the Canberra “bureaucracy.” In any other workplace they would be sacked for damaging their employer’s reputation.

For the Yes campaign, there’s an obvious tightrope to walk: how to engage Labor and other members of parliament who have helped make the referendum a reality while repeatedly arguing that the referendum doesn’t belong to politicians but to the Australian people. Davis, for example, places her faith in the new politics that emerged in the last federal election, one in which the major parties struggled to secure a primary vote above 30 per cent, while Greens and progressively inclined independents won an ever- increasing proportion of seats in electorates that were previously Liberal strongholds. “The demographics have changed,” she argues, and “the politics have changed.” True. Yet she also seeks to distance the Yes campaign from politics, claiming, perhaps rightly, that the referendum needs to “engage Australians on a higher level than political cynicism. The heart and the head. People, not politicians.”

While the desire to “escape the political” seems to be the point on which all sides of politics agree, there is no escaping the fact that the referendum is an intensely political process. The very structure of a referendum, with its binary Yes and No alternatives, immediately implies that both cases have equal validity. No matter how misleading and vacuous the No- case arguments might be, they are validated merely by being seen as the alternative to the proposed constitutional amendment. Moreover, unlike the 1967 referendum, when there was no official No case, the 2023 referendum campaign is already captive to an adversarial political process. Like it or not, partisan politics has its paws all over the referendum.

Even the Voice itself, if the referendum succeeds, will be tasked with managing the same political reality, and will obviously need to be conscious of its own political optics in such an intensely competitive and antagonistic political system.

For Albanese and Labor, there’s a delicate task ahead. To what extent does the prime minister attempt to enter the fray? Is Albanese merely a facilitator of the debate? A leader who has done his bit by getting the referendum legislation through parliament and now hands it over to the Australian people? Or does he seek to lead? It’s already evident that the No campaign has a clear leader: Opposition Leader Peter Dutton, backed by Warren Mundine and Senator Jacinta Price. But who is the leader of the Yes campaign? While a long list of names come to mind – from Albanese and Linda Burney to Noel Pearson, Megan Davis, Rachel Perkins, Marcia Langton and Thomas Mayo – there is no clear answer. Given the nature of the Yes strategy, perhaps a community campaign requires a community of leaders, but in the cut and thrust of adversarial politics, the “courageous leader” Davis speaks of would seem essential.

More broadly, the issue is not whether the referendum campaign is “political,” but how its politics is conducted; how we, as voters, and politicians, as our representatives, engage in political discussion – whether inside or outside the parliament – and ensure that the spirit and character of the referendum debate improves the fabric of our democracy. After all, the Voice is an attempt to better inform the Commonwealth parliament on “matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples,” and to work with it constructively. There is little point in deriding politics and politicians when the Voice, or any future proposal for that matter, will rely on politicians for its efficacy.

To drive home the underlying urgency of the Voice, Davis draws perceptively on the history of invasion and dispossession to illustrate the marginal position in which Indigenous Australians find themselves today, especially in relation to the exercise of political power. Many of the progressive democratic reforms cherished by non- Indigenous Australians, often expressed through ideas such as the “fair go,” emerged under White Australia, at a time when Aboriginal people were rendered invisible and excluded from the glorious narrative of democratic advancement. Democracy and equality were ideas treasured by British Australians, but they were also exclusive because they applied only to whites. Equally, the land that became “the great Australian dream” was taken from Indigenous Australians without treaty, compensation or consent.

This raises one of the key challenges for the Yes campaign. The referendum implicitly asks the vast majority of Australians to recognise and understand a different historical experience to their own; to recognise that, for Indigenous Australians, the history of the last 235 years has been far removed from the stories of peaceful progress that have comforted white Australians for so long. In other words, the referendum asks Australians to do what Prime Minister Paul Keating suggested in his Redfern Park speech in 1992: to imagine that “we” had suffered the “murders . . . discrimination and exclusion.” “With some noble exceptions,” said Keating, “we failed to make the most basic human response . . . to ask how would I feel if this were done to me? As a consequence, we failed to see that what we were doing degraded all of us.”

When Peter Dutton stokes fear and anxiety by claiming that a constitutionally enshrined Voice will see the “greatest change” to our system of government since Federation, he both wildly exaggerates the risks and fails spectacularly to demonstrate empathy. What of the changes forced on First Nations peoples by invasion and dispossession? What of the changes wrought by over two centuries of government policies designed to eradicate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures and dictate every aspect of their peoples’ lives? What of their long struggle for their rights? And what of their exclusion from the constitution?

In grave tones, Dutton warns Australians about a constitutional amendment that will genuinely and positively include Indigenous people in our constitution for the first time since 1901. He stresses the virtues of the constitution’s stability and continuity. As he and others so often remind us, the constitution has “served Australia well.” But who has it served well? And for whom has it provided “stability and continuity”?

Because of their exclusion from the nation’s founding document, Indigenous Australians understand the Australian constitution far better than other Australians. They do not have the luxury of ignorance.

Over the past fifty years, the presence of Indigenous culture and history has become more visible in Australia’s public culture; from Welcome to Country ceremonies, to place names, art, dance, music and literature, and the opening ceremonies of football finals, school assemblies and, since 2008, the opening of federal parliament after each federal election. For many Australians and certainly for visitors from overseas, this is the most distinctive aspect of Australian culture.

How long can Australians remain content to draw on this rich Indigenous knowledge and heritage as mere symbolism? Surely we have to give more; surely we need to demonstrate that we have listened to and heard Indigenous Australians by agreeing to establish what the Uluṟu Statement asked for: “the establishment of a First Nations Voice enshrined in the Constitution,” which, as Davis argues, will constitute a “dialogue for time immemorial between the First Nations and the Australian people.” This is the “constitutional moment” of reckoning that the coming referendum has placed before us.

In its tone and gracious request, the Uluṟu Statement from the Heart calls to mind previous invitations from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to their fellow citizens.

Among the thousands who walked across Sydney Harbour Bridge in May 2000, there were undoubtedly many reasons for attending. But the overwhelming expression of support for reconciliation would lodge permanently in the nation’s memory. So too would the simple act of walking, which became one of the most powerful metaphors employed by Indigenous leaders when seeking support from their fellow Australians.

In October 1992, the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation explained that the process of reconciliation “involves all of us walking together to find a better path to the future of this nation.” In May 2017, the final words of the Uluṟu Statement from the Heart invited Australians “to walk with us in a movement of the Australian people for a better future.”

I can only admire the optimism and determination of Davis and so many other Indigenous leaders, who continue to hold out their invitation to Australians to “walk” with them. As Davis argues, over the next three months, the Yes campaign needs to “explain to Australians why the Voice is needed.”

The coming referendum is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make the Voice work to the betterment of Indigenous Australians and the entire nation.

Mark McKenna

The Wires that Bind 

Response to Correspondence 

Saul Griffith

When I was at MIT Graduate School my physics and maths modelling professor, Neil Gershenfeld, was very fond of saying, “We are violently agreeing.” He loved the details and it was his way of telegraphing that he was about to express a vociferous difference of opinion on some tiny detail. I too loved reading the detailed and thoughtful responses to my Quarterly Essay and find myself “violently agreeing” with most if not all of the respondents, and most but not all of their big ideas and tiny details.

Thankfully, everybody has urgency in their voices and nobody questions the climate physics. For an Australian climate debate, this is good news, a sign that we are all concerned about the lack of progress to date, and the daunting timeline of what lies ahead. David Pocock most concisely expressed this need for speed, including citing the IPCC’s AR6 Synthesis Report, which didn’t mince words – this is our last chance to avoid catastrophic levels of warming. Many people, and most politicians, remain ignorant of this terrible urgency. We remember the target of the IPCC’s 2018 report – to halve emissions by 2050 – and so governments nominally (though not in the detail of their commitments) aim their rhetoric and policies towards that target. But that target was only possible if you started in 2018, which of course we didn’t, and apart from a brief COVID-induced blip, we are emitting more than ever.

New science has also come in about the extent to which our own pollution has been masking global warming! The particulate emissions from things such as bunker fuels in ocean transport have been keeping the Earth artificially cooler than we thought. These two facts collide in my colleague Jonathan Koomey’s new book Solving Climate Change: A guide for learners and leaders. In summary: the uncertainty about remaining carbon budgets is now larger than the actual remaining carbon budget, or in other words, our pathway to 1.5ºC of warming now requires effectively zero emissions by 2040. We need more ambition and urgency, and after we inevitably move slowly for a few more years we will need even more ambition and urgency again. All of Biden’s impressive climate bills do not yet put the United States on this track, not even for 2050. This is the true opportunity for Australian global leadership on climate. We can afford to do it by 2040, and if we did, we’d make it more possible for everyone else.

It is for this reason that my primary hope in the essay was to reveal, as Ian McAuley understood, “the political economy of our energy transformation and … how households have been used in the weaponisation of arguments about renewable energy.” In many ways I wasn’t writing this for the respondents who replied here, but to engage Australians in demanding faster action on climate. Governments don’t want to go much further or more boldly than the electorate will let them, and this essay was a plea to the voters – not only can their government afford to do more, but Australia can’t afford not to. I still believe we need a massively popular climate movement that is constructive and about building the future – an environmentalist movement in stark contrast to the tradition of environmentalist movements that shut things down and close the gate. We will have to create that movement, and I think our best hope is in our households, where voters live, not in boardrooms debating ESG lukewarmly.

Most respondents commented on the public appeal of electrification. My friends in climate science have been rudely ignored and even vilified. Rewiring Australia started campaigning publicly in October 2021 and we have enjoyed a huge volume of positive coverage across the media, from The Saturday Paper to The Australian, from Nine News to the ABC’s 7.30. We are leading with a solution that everyone can understand and, in a few short years, almost everyone will be able to afford. We do not talk about abstract emissions targets or even more abstract and corruptible offsets and baselines. We talk about things everyone can have a view on: cars and stoves, solar panels and heaters, hot water and houses.

The most exciting outcome of our work is excitement itself. There is a welling up of new ideas, big bold plans and visions around the climate space such as I have not witnessed before. Communities are hosting meetings on how to increase political ambition and get their own communities to zero faster than governments are planning. The public is doing the work of governments – not everywhere, but important green shoots.

We should welcome big ideas, especially ones that are actionable today. We must go hugely fast, which should worry you, as it does Christine Milne. I find her commentary the most difficult and urgent to respond to. When we move fast we break things. The environment is already fragile from two centuries (if not two millennnia) of attack, and we should be very wary of the mistakes we could make in the next two decades. It is worth fretting over rushed permitting for nickel mines and lithium projects, and the details of where the solar and wind go. Christine (as with other respondents, notably Bjorn Sturmberg and Ian Lowe) urges reduction in demand for energy, sometimes known as efficiency.

My work has shown electrification is the principal efficiency. Electrification will likely reduce energy demand by more than 60 per cent, not only for households, but for whole nations. Electric machines and renewable generation do not squander huge amounts of energy as waste heat. Electrification is the biggest efficiency win. I’m prepared to gloss over the efficiency gains of more traditional demand reduction – using a smaller car, driving less, insulating your house, wearing a sweater – because climate solutions finally have momentum. It is now possible to fundamentally address the climate crisis without subsuming all electrical efficiency gains under a culture war over “lifestyle.” I think this should be our primary strategy, but I am painfully aware that this decision glosses over the fact we should double-glaze our windows, improve building standards, build more walkable communities and drive less gigantic vehicles.

It is also true that the climate crisis is not our only ecological and planetary crisis. (As my colleague Dan Cass says, “The limits to growth is ‘the most inconvenient truth.’”) The biodiversity crisis could overwhelm Earth-wide systems, but before then it could quickly escalate into an urgent international food security disaster. So in this response I will be more clear, and as laconic as I can be: Electrify Everything, upgrade it when it fails, build all new things well and make everything as reusable and recyclable as is practicable. While we rush to electrify, it would be great if we could change the story about what the great suburban Australian life looks like. No more cynical and pretentious developments on the city fringe with porticoed homes of dubious quality, with multiple living spaces and levels and single-glazed windows, no insulation, several gas appliances, hot, unshaded, north-facing aspects and garages big enough for four small trucks. It really does matter whether every household has one, 1.8 or three cars. It does matter whether those cars are small or large, even if they are 100 per cent electric.

These choices made poorly will more than double the amount of material we’ll need to pull from the Earth to create this future of clean machines. We absolutely should reconsider our development patterns, our architectural vernaculars, the way we have designed our schools and medical systems to embed things like extra travel and extra materials and energy into our lives. As nearly every respondent emphasised, this won’t be achieved without structural and systemic change.

Christine caught me out in my own little “theory of change.” Having seen no great adoption of bicycle lanes despite thirty years of agitation in this country, I’ve given up on the noble and the sacrificial and embraced the pragmatic – take the efficiency win of electrification and hope that as people see positive change in their communities they adopt a few other nice-to-haves, such as bicycle paths, because electric bicycles are now truly wonderful, sweat-free conveyances that flatten every hill and make every leg that of an eighteen-year-old.

Christine also puts in a very concise plea for a clean-up of our energy market bodies. The new government and new parliament have a new agenda. Their legislation was written for the age of coal and their boards were installed by a conservative government that wanted anything but clean energy progress and deep climate action. When Labor came to government it was forced to manage an energy crisis bequeathed to it by the previous government’s nine years of climate war and energy ineptitude. Perhaps, now that Prime Minister Albanese has had time to reflect, there should be a review of the energy regulators which, like the Reserve Bank of Australia, must be fit-for-purpose. This would prepare for a refresh of their legislation and their boards, a flushing of the regulatory immune system. The regulators seem confused about what it will take to hit the climate target set by the IPCC in Paris: not net-zero or even real zero by 2050 – we are too slow for that; but a pathway to limit cumulative emissions as close to a 1.5ºC pathway as we can get.

The current “green” plans for the National Electricity Market (NEM) are plans for climate overshoot. We still don’t model the NEM ambitiously enough to account for the sector coupling that happens when we electrify all the vehicles, most of the industries and all the housing and commercial building stock.

Ian McAuley rightly points out the “imagined benefits of privatisation” of the NEM. He enthuses that energy consumer–producer households will “be participants in community renewal” and would surely agree with Heidi Lee, who writes that electrification will also have a social function in rural and regional Australia, where “entire regions work together to decarbonise.”

Guilty of boostering, addicted to carrots, I have avoided the hard discussion of regulations with teeth. Perhaps my time in the Land of the Free softened me or made me frightened of things that might be conceived as infringing on personal liberty. The United States’ Inflation Reduction Act was full of carrots – an all-incentive approach to climate action. But we won’t get all the way with incentives, and many incentive-based systems are socially regressive. We must also regulate. Norway, another wealthy primary-producing country with a small population, shows us the way. They have mandated only zero-emission cars for sale by 2025. Eighty per cent of sales this year are electric. The road hasn’t been perfectly smooth but they have managed it and the certainty has enabled all players to implement the policy effectively. To be very clear, it is in the interest of the energy transition to have a phase-out date for all fossil-fuelled machines, and the sooner the better. Governments are scared of the headlines around mandates and bans, but that is what is actually needed, not eventually, but soon. That means a phase-out date for gas appliances and a phase-out date for petrol and diesel vehicles that don’t run on biofuels or a zero-emissions alternative. We should mandate more efficient and all-electric new construction, and even apply the same logic to major renovations. Science requires urgency and the “market” needs certainty, and the general public deserves honesty.

Rebecca Huntley rightly argues that a lot of people will need “proof of concept” of the cornucopia our all-electric protopia might provide. I can’t agree more violently. It is why I have been an advocate for “pilot” projects in real communities. These shouldn’t even be called pilots, but rather “proof at scale” demonstrations and social innovation incubators. Proof of the efficacy, proof of the savings, a shiny and happy community that is proof that the sky doesn’t fall in when we stop putting carbon in the sky.

I have been advocating for the rapid electrification of a suburb – cars and all – for about two years now. A place in Australia, a postcode, where the future has arrived already. A place people could visit to lose their fear of the future and embrace change. Alas, fear of resentment and classic Australian cringe means these pilots will likely get watered down to less ambitious technology-testing grounds. No politician wants to be resented because they picked a winning suburb and subsidised its EVs. I get that, but the picture was much bigger, to show how it is done somewhere, including re-optimising the regulatory environment. For a very small investment in one community, the country would get an enormous discount on the decarbonisation project writ large.

So we are still embarking on this journey together, a little piecemeal. And piecemeal is a recipe for discontent, as Rebecca also points out with her crisp phrase “suburbs full of … old tech, rising energy costs and resentment.” She is right, and this is my biggest fear – for lack of the courage to show how it all works and figure out the gnarly details, we could well fail in the new culture war of who can afford to save their children’s future and who can’t. Better to deny the science than tell your kids you didn’t have the money or unblemished credit history. The political party that figures out how to bring everyone along will have a long and vibrant popularity. It was good to see money for small businesses and social housing in the recent federal budget allocated explicitly to electrifying and efficiency. Baby steps are good. The historical moment requires leaps and bounds.

I was glad that Ian Lowe agrees that part of the climate solution is a leadership revolution which sees women taking the reins of power. Ian wants to quibble over whether an SUV that weighs twice as much causes four times as much damage or sixteen times as much damage to the road as a smaller vehicle of half the weight. I’ll quickly and violently agree with him if we can use that to turn our attention urgently to the need for incentives to prevent Australia adopting even larger truckzillas – whether electric or not. Making larger vehicles pay their way is critical if we are to curb the ever-increasing size of our cars and prevent ever more of the plunder of the Earth that Christine Milne appropriately regrets.

Robin Batterham cites the Net Zero Australia (NZA) study, which produced modelling demonstrating we will have to continue to rely on gas. This research was sponsored by APA, the $22-billion gas conglomerate whose pipes carry half the nation’s gas, and which owns most of the country’s pipelines plus a handful of generators. I would welcome the opportunity to sit down with the authors and gas industry sponsor of the study to compare assumptions and models. As Ian Lowe said, it is “right to draw attention to the dishonest claims being made by fossil-fuel interests.” One of the modellers for the NZA (America) study worked from my office for a year or so. I got to watch over her shoulder and see the inputs to their models and debate them with her. The model was flawed, and assumed one was designing the system for optimal size, not optimal cost, and hence the model didn’t contemplate an over-build or over-supply of renewables with eight to twelve hours of short-term storage, something that has since been shown to be a lower-cost way of getting to a 100 per cent reliable energy system, and one that requires no gas at all. I once downloaded a handful of climate models to see whether they were all just cutting and pasting their work – I’m suspicious of models because I know how easy it is to model bullshit in and bullshit out. Those climate models turned out to be good work; the Princeton NZA modelling work was good work too, but it wasn’t the last word. It would be lazy to accept the results without debate, especially in a different country and context and time with new information and new solutions. We will only get what we model and what we currently model is not ambitious enough, nor reflecting the latest and best ideas.

I also worry that Robin took the essay out of context, which was focused very much on the residential and suburban aspects of electrification, and I’d refer him to my books The Big Switch and Electrify to look at the full effects and sector coupling of the whole economy, and the likely physical and practical limits on things such as carbon capture and bio-fuels as part-solutions. These books emphasise more renewable electrification sooner for the climate targets we need.

It appears that Bjorn Sturmberg was most violently agreeing with me with his calls for rebuilding trust, collective values, reduced demand and empowering stakeholders. I couldn’t agree more violently – there was a long chapter on reducing demand in the most important sector of all: transportation. There were many references to collective values being absolutely central to success on climate and charts of all the stakeholders across the energy system mapped to machines and even governance. I was precisely trying to empower stakeholders with a map, and a call to collective arms. Perhaps I didn’t say enough about rebuilding trust, and I likely can’t say enough. We have gutted the public sector in the past few decades. In many cases I have to buy energy data and studies that my tax dollars paid for because we farmed the work out to private enterprise. The fact we privatised energy and not water is illustrative of the plunder of the public good for private gain.

Bjorn criticises me for a lack of big ideas. I’ll take that as feedback. He proposes to “provide households with a cost-free energy allowance to cover their essential needs, including refrigeration and cooking.” I think this is a great idea. I have been meeting regularly with Audrey Zibelman, the former head of the Australian Energy Market Operator, to workshop exactly this idea and whether in fact we shouldn’t just have a flat subscription fee for electricity, given there will be such an abundance once all the cars and batteries are connected. Unfortunately, I don’t see these big ideas debated publicly and within the critical regulatory bodies. I invite Bjorn to work with me to model these things and fight the regulatory battle. We have nothing to lose except our complex bills and unfair energy contracts!

While we are at it, Bjorn, here’s another big idea, and one that brings us back to Christine’s concern. Each Australian currently pumps about 15 tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere and generates multiple tons of things like fly-ash to service their fossil-fuelled lifestyle every year. All of that is mined at great cost to the Earth. Their all-electric lifestyle will need copper, nickel, iron, lithium, silicon and other things, but these are extremely recyclable. With population declines predicted globally at the end of this century, you can squint and imagine a future with practically no more mining at the end of this century because we are recycling all the things in our energy lives. Wind turbines become more wind turbines and solar cells become more solar cells. This vision can animate us about the possibility of dedication to Christine’s truly circular economy. It also emphasises that it probably isn’t a great idea to rush and sell all of Australia’s metal resources once, at commodity prices. Australian metals and ores are going to be electrifying every other country’s machines centuries into the future. Before we sell it once and then let Korea or Japan or Germany recycle it forever, let’s have a conversation about a recurring revenue business model of leasing our lithium and renting our copper with dollars perpetually flowing back into an Australian sovereign wealth fund owned by all and benefiting all rather than just a few mining magnates making a quick buck for themselves right now. If we adopt a more indigenous relationship with the land than a colonial one, where we are borrowing the land and its minerals from future generations, this transition could be the progressive opportunity of the century to share our collective natural wealth while also protecting it for those future generations.

How to do all this in the negligible time we have left? Simon Holmes à Court says we have to walk and chew gum and change everything from ballet box to switchboard at the same time – and he’s right. Or as he puts it, “we need to focus on systemic change, work to build movements in our communities, elect the right people and pass the right laws.” I couldn’t agree more violently.

Saul Griffith

The Wires that Bind 

Correspondence 

Robin Batterham

We are besieged by messages about how to reduce emissions, appropriately focusing on eliminating our use of fossil fuels. The stridency of the “kill coal and gas now” theme is almost omnipresent, yet the notion that this would result in chaos is rarely mentioned. When the damage that would be done if we get our decommissioning of existing assets too far out of phase with our commissioning of new assets is mentioned, it is seen as the bleating of vested interests. There is then relief in reading Saul Griffith’s essay, as it acknowledges the challenge and plots a path that has a splendid ring of feasibility: of delivering net-zero emissions by around 2040. (Saul is careful not to name an actual target date, but his suggestion for your household plan for full electrification stretches to 2040.)

Saul’s message is very simple and is directed to us as individuals and communities: electrify everything as and when you can. At the same time, install solar PV on rooftops, on community facilities, on top of car parks, indeed wherever you can. By his calculations this will take us to where we need to be and also be affordable.

So far, so good and no arguments. Electrification is the key driver of decarbonisation, as we can see in the Net Zero Australia (NZA) study, the results of which have just been published. But NZA also talks about gas being needed to firm up our renewable energy grid. Can both positions be right?

The NZA study is a partnership between the universities of Melbourne, Queensland and Princeton and the management consultancy Nous Group. It uses the modelling method developed by Princeton University and Evolved Energy Research for its 2020 Net-Zero America study, adapted to the boundaries of the Australian debate. NZA is rigorous and granular, evidence-driven, technology-neutral and non-political in its approach. It is the only study that has considered the totality of Australia’s emissions, including those of the land sector and those associated with our exports.

In the NZA study, we considered full electrification as recommended by Saul Griffith as one scenario, and a further scenario where electrification was less rapid yet net-zero emissions was still achieved by 2050.

We can summarise the NZA results in three parts, where the words in italics represent quite different positions to those in Saul’s essay:

1 To achieve an energy transformation:

• Grow renewables as our main domestic and export energy source.

• Install a large fleet of batteries and pumped hydro and gas-fired power capacity.

• Greatly increase electrification and energy efficiency.

• Develop a large carbon-capture utilisation and storage industry.

• Greatly expand our utility networks.

• Commit $7–9 trillion of capital investment to 2060. This excludes capital spending on the demand side: for example, vehicles and appliances; and land and agricultural sector investment.

2 To transform exports:

• Transition to clean energy and minerals.

• Locate export industries in the north, possibly also in the south.

3 And to invest in people, land and biodiversity:

• Add 700,000 workers.

• Move the land sector towards net zero.

• Address major land-use changes.

So why have we ended up, after a very rigorous study, with some significant differences to the seemingly sensible recommendations of the Quarterly Essay? There are two answers: first, we have not forced any one favourite solution (such as renewables or nuclear) to be the main way of achieving net zero. We have forced the emission trajectory to come down to zero and then, at five-year intervals, have let a modelling package pick the cheapest supply options to meet the energy demand. This is done down to a local level and takes into consideration all manner of restrictions, be they land ownership, limitations on infrastructure on farmland, and a string of others such as biodiversity considerations, no-go areas (airports, military areas) as well as areas we want to preserve, such as inland waterways. This is a level of detail far beyond anything yet attempted for this country.

More significantly, we have considered transforming exports. Our exports of coal and LNG produce twice the emissions in the export countries as in our domestic economy. We have assumed, as others have done, that the remarkable abundance of sunlight and wind in this country will allow us to export energy, or to use this abundance to transform our existing industries such that we don’t export iron ore or bauxite/alumina – rather, we will export green iron and green alumina.

On our points of difference, I would point out that, using cost projections from the CSIRO and AEMO, our calculations show that you cannot firm up the grid just with batteries and pumped hydro. You do need gas. This will be a surprise to some but we are talking decarbonised gas fed to turbines that sit around for 90+ per cent of the time doing nothing and then, on the occasions when renewables can’t meet the load and we run out of pumped hydro and battery storage, kick in to keep the lights on. As well, we are talking about a bigger grid than that envisaged by Saul Griffith. We are going for net zero at home and net zero with exports.

We could cross swords on the matter of the hard-to-abate sectors, which Saul correctly lists as aviation, some aspects of freight transport, industry (for example, cement and chemicals) and agriculture. Saul’s essay relies on the assumption that “the technology is on its way” to look after this sector. Our approach has been more pragmatic. On our modelling and on the work of many others, we have to build a lot, starting now. That we need three times the grid we currently have by 2030 is taken by most modellers (including AEMO) as a given. We just don’t have time to wait around for new technologies, so we have used everything that is currently available. For carbon capture and storage, globally 42 Mt of CO2 was injected in 2022, mainly for enhanced oil recovery. This is the hallmark of a developed technology, even though in Australia the rates achieved at Gorgon are nearer 2 Mt in 2022 for a project touted originally at a much higher level. We have considered that injection rates would be limited and have come out with a figure that even in the most optimistic renewables scenario, around 90 Mt per year, would be needed, because the land sector is, in our opinion, not able to supply these sorts of figures as offsets.

The NZA results and this correspondence are not a contrary view to the essay. Indeed, we would suggest that Saul Griffith is not going far enough. If Australia makes the right choices, it could grasp a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and not only decarbonise the domestic economy but the export economy as well. It is too early to place bets on just one pathway. We need to keep a wide range of options in play, although the dominant shift to electrification cannot be avoided.

Robin Batterham

The Wires that Bind 

Correspondence

Bjorn Sturmberg

While the pivotal role of electrification in decarbonisation has been understood for decades, it has rarely been described as vividly or enthusiastically as by Saul Griffith in The Wires That Bind. Griffith recognises that electrification is a story, at its heart, not about decarbonisation but about cleaning the air in our kitchens and streets, improving the liveability of our homes and communities, and “keeping wealth in our households and communities” – and nation. In short, electrification is a story about a better future.

While attuned to this human story of electrification, Griffith is, at heart, an engineer so it’s no surprise that The Wires That Bind is packed full of figures. Emissions are carved up, the grid is mapped and fossil-fuel machines are counted. This achieves Griffith’s goal of “clarity about the job in front of us” and complements his persuasive case for electrifying everything. The question that remains is: how can the transition best be accelerated and steered towards just and enduring outcomes?

Part of the answer is the substitution of fossil-fuel machines with electric machines and subsidies to expedite this, as advocated by Griffith and Rewiring Australia. But these substitutions are insufficient (and oddly conservative, given Griffith’s reputation for out-there ideas). What’s more, while straight substitution has fuelled the fastest transitions in history, it has invariably led to new, sometimes worse, problems. The example given of cars replacing horses (which was also motivated by a pollution problem – that originating from horses’ backsides) is a salient example: cars went on to drive global warming, respiratory diseases, obesity, road accidents, social isolation and the mass consumption of resources and real estate. As Griffith points out, the substitution of our fossil-fuel cars with electric Hummers could exacerbate more of these harms.

So how else can the transition be effected? Our research suggests four interrelated approaches: (re)building trust, focusing on collective values over individual responsibility, reducing demand, and empowering a broader set of stakeholders.

First and foremost, we need to move beyond our myopic focus on markets and machines to instead focus on trust – not technology or taxes. For, as Chilli Heeler explained it to her daughters Bluey and Bingo, “if there’s no trust, none of this [the world] is possible … No libraries, no roads, no power lines.”

Markets don’t foster trust. Market mechanisms, such as evening peak pricing, have not changed when families eat – nor should they. Their greatest success has been to send pensioners to bed at 4 p.m. to shiver under blankets instead of running their heaters. The Wires That Bind plots how twenty-five years of energy-sector privatisation in Australia has fuelled hyper-inflation of prices. What’s harder to plot and harder yet to undo is the consequent hyperdeflation of trust in the sector.

To give just one example of a non-market initiative that would earn back trust, governments (or the energy sector) could provide households with a cost-free energy allowance to cover their essential needs, including refrigeration and cooking. An elegant model could link this consumption with government-owned renewables generation.

Technology, likewise, neither creates trust nor replaces it. The rise of cryptocurrency scams and collapses is a timely reminder that we need to trust the humans on the other end of algorithms. For the energy sector, this should temper visions of trustless, blockchain-facilitated peer-to-peer trading and the Home Energy Management Systems that Griffith presumes will become ubiquitous. Research, such as the Digital Energy Futures project, keeps finding broad rejection of smart technologies and tariff-based incentives: people prefer hands-on control and to shift their demand by shifting routines.

The second approach, which also works towards building trust, switches the focus from individual responsibility (as a market participant or climate citizen) to collective values. As Griffith puts it, “the challenges of climate change need a politics of the collective more than a politics of the individual.” One way to put this into practice would be to conceive of the grid as a “common good.” This points us to lessons from managing other common resources, such as water. Drought-time water reductions, for instance, are not achieved through financial contracts or automated tap-closing devices but through social contracts of solidarity. Temporary electricity demand reductions, which are invaluable during periods of low renewables generation or peak demand, could be pursued through similar means.

Rooftop solar systems could be monitored in the way rural fire brigades monitor their community’s water tanks and dams. These solar systems today have greater combined power capacity than the biggest generator in the country – they are truly, as Griffith notes, critical national infrastructure. But there are no processes in place for monitoring their performance or managing their maintenance. This critical gap would be best filled by local or state governments, network companies or a not-for-profit, not by individuals – we don’t, after all, make individuals responsible for maintaining roads or the NBN.

The commons framing also highlights the risk of “free riding,” which can arise when turbulent transitions throw costs and benefits into the air. As an example, households that install solar and/or disconnect from gas are reducing their contribution to the upkeep of the electricity and gas networks without altering the total cost of maintaining these networks. This increases the burden on remaining customers, who are increasingly those facing barriers to make such upgrades. In contrast to Griffith’s description, increased use of the electricity network will likewise leave the total maintenance costs unchanged, but it may alter their distribution. The huge opportunity for saving is to decommission the gas network completely.

The first step in tackling distributional questions is to define who’s in and who’s out of the community/commons. I strongly believe in the principle of considering communities with the greatest diversity and number of constituents. Only within broad communities can inequities be redressed. This principle runs counter to the popular trend of localism, which Griffith’s suburb-and postcode-based initiatives play into, and instead emphasises the role of network companies and governments, which represent large and diverse swathes of the country. An outstanding example of this is the “postage stamp” model of paying for electricity, under which all the customers of a network pay the same price, despite the cost of serving rural customers at the end of long lines being many times greater than the cost of serving urban customers.

After personally spending years bringing solar to the roofs of apartments and rentals, I now believe the most equitable and effective approach gives these customers access to cheap and green grid electricity. Similarly, I believe there are efficiency, environmental and equity advantages to grid-scale storage, such as hydropower stations and batteries at wind farms, rather than Griffith’s vision of 5 million household batteries. Grid-scale storage lets diverse customer behaviour average itself out, before responding to residual imbalances of supply and demand. This efficiency reduces the quantity of batteries required, and the shared nature of grid assets avoids inequity risks. Additionally, the need for dedicated short-term storage assets will be greatly diminished in 100 per cent renewable grids because of the abundance of long-term storage assets that have been built to cover multi-day stretches with low renewables generation.

The third approach to the energy transition is greater investment in the “demand side,” which, despite representing the raison d’être of the energy system, has been overshadowed by supply-side initiatives. The Wires That Bind overlooks the foundational role of non-electrical ways of fulfilling human needs. Insulation, ventilation and thermal mass can create more comfortable buildings at lower carbon, material and financial costs than the latest, greatest air-conditioner. Reconfiguring urban layouts and infrastructure to place work and services within a fifteen-minute commute via active and public transport will create happier, healthy and more socially connected communities than merely swapping drivetrains. Perhaps the slogan can be elongated to “eliminate, then electrify everything”?

The defining challenge of demand-side actions is that they take place where people live and work. This raises the complexity and stakes of implementation and maintenance. Australia’s unrivalled roll-out of rooftop solar provides two salient lessons in this regard. The first is that leaving implementation to the market invites what Griffiths politely describes as a “perpetual stream of ‘buy solar now!’ advertising,” as well as some companies pursuing more predatory sales techniques and a race to the bottom on cost and quality of components and services – what industry insiders call “crap solar.”

The second lesson is that social expectations and technical standards should be defined in preparation for ubiquitous uptake. This would mitigate the confusions and frustrations that have followed repeated modifications to solar system functionalities. As electric vehicle sales accelerate, our research on vehicle-to-grid technology has demonstrated how this technology, and the flexibility offered by vehicle charging in general, will be an illusion unless there is a behavioural shift from filling cars as rarely as possible to plugging electric vehicles in whenever parked.

The fourth approach is to empower a much broader set of stakeholders “within the framework of existing institutions.” One aspect of this is action by nimble communities, for which The Wires That Bind makes an impassioned case. But while there are exciting developments in this space, I believe a just transition ultimately requires our larger institutions to earn back our trust and then to lead.

For energy-sector institutions the issues are remit and ideology. The bodies making and enforcing the rules currently see their fundamental objective as market efficiency and their sole tool as market competition. Regulation is therefore framed around containment (“ring fencing”) – restricting network companies to reacting to customer actions – rather than proactive enablement. Griffith is right that the “regulatory environment is as important as the physical one” – I was taught this by incurring $120,000 of legal work to enable the first installation of a solar and storage system (costing $80,000) in an Australian apartment. “Regulatory sandboxes” are a laudable innovation but changes to regulatory governance must go deeper.

Two institutions whose role in electrification – as champions or blockers – is often overlooked are rental property managers and tradespeople. Property managers are the under-appreciated glue that holds together Australia’s three million rental arrangements. With training, resourcing and culture change, they could play a potent role in planning and managing electrification upgrades (at least upon failure of existing appliances) and having these features understood and valued by property buyers and renters. Similarly, tradespeople are the boots-on-the-ground authority on whether or not (in their opinion) it is feasible to electrify, disconnect from gas, insulate and otherwise retrofit properties.

The electrification and decarbonisation transitions are lively, uncertain processes with abundant path-dependencies. We will never know precisely how to best navigate them, but the four approaches discussed here – prioritising trust over technology and taxes, governing for the common good, eliminating demand as well as electrifying it, and empowering more stakeholders – provide some direction. Taken together, they remind us that it is not the wires that bind people together, but rather the bonds of community that are materialised in the grid’s wires.

Bjorn Sturmberg

The Wires that Bind 

Correspondence 

Christine Milne

I love the idea of electrifying everything and turning off the blue flames of fossil fuels in factories, power stations and households as rapidly as possible – for all the reasons Saul Griffith sets out. His commitment to addressing global heating, his enthusiasm for stopping burning things, his stories of community commitment and his powerful arguments underpinned by careful calculation are compelling and inspiring. Reducing greenhouse gases, better air quality, improved health, better energy security, cheaper energy, a more sustainable built environment from replacing 101 million machines with new, more efficient, better and more climate-friendly machines – what’s not to like?

But I would have liked Saul to address the question of whether we can afford it, if the shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy destroys ecosystems? Can the Earth afford the transition to renewables if it is embedded in the linear business-as-usual, take-make-dispose model of unlimited consumerism and economic growth? There cannot be infinite growth on a finite planet. Without that recognition as the foundation, electrifying everything will boost economic growth and consumerism (with a green salve) while continuing to destroy biodiversity, extract resources and dump waste, in largely hidden practices.

How effective is the electric transformation if there are three Teslas and a heavy electric truck in the renovated garage? If we do not “internalise the externalities” of the resource extraction needed to produce these vehicles, or the new transmission infrastructure to convey that electricity, it will be a recipe for community conflict. Already, mines such as that proposed by Venture Minerals in the Tarkine forest are justified on the basis that boron is “an important and versatile element in the modern world, used in everything from computer screens to fertilisers to creating powerful magnets for wind turbines and EVs (electric vehicles).”

Gangs on the streets of Brisbane and Sydney are stealing catalytic converters from the exhaust systems of our petrol fleet to recover precious minerals such as platinum, while governments don’t bother to recycle cars or whitegoods to recover metals and rare minerals and instead send them for waste disposal and approve new mines. The failure to manage waste from the technological revolution is evident in the mountains of e-waste that pile up or are exported. What will happen to 20 million cars and gas burners over a decade?

Saul has started charting a critical path. As we walk it, we must keep in mind that climate and biodiversity are two sides of the same coin. We cannot destroy one in the name of the other. Electrification has to occur within ecosystem limits, not by “offsetting” or ignoring or trashing these limits.

But this is possible. At the end of his essay, Saul argues that “we can show the world later this century what a circular economy really looks like.”

In a linear economy, to quote an online reference, “raw materials are retrieved and made into products that are used until they are discarded as waste. This economic system relies on selling as many products as possible,” even when there is a focus on “eco-efficiency,” or minimising the ecological impact to get the same output.

By contrast, a circular economy focuses on reducing, reusing and recycling. “Resource use is minimised (reduce). Reuse of products and parts is maximized (reuse). And last but not least, raw materials are reused (recycled) to a high standard. This can be done by using goods with more people, such as shared cars. Products can also be converted into services, such as [the way] Spotify sells listening licences instead of CDs. In this system, value is created by focusing on value preservation … This means that not only the ecological impact is minimized, but that the ecological, economic and social impact is even positive.”

We can advocate energy efficiency and, as Saul outlines, pull government levers to constrain demand, meet supply, change consumer attitudes and prompt innovation within existing development footprints. Sulphur batteries, for example, don’t need scarce resources such as cobalt. Fuel efficiency standards, building standards, EV targets, sunset dates for fossil-fuel machines or weight-based road charges, separate bike lanes and removal of electric-bike power limits, community-based feed-in tariffs – all these should be part of a government plan to complement individual and community plans. But we need to acknowledge that ultimately we must pull those levers in a circular economy which is not divorced from local biodiversity and waste streams. How much better to have a distributed rooftop solar generator than to destroy a forest or unique ecosystem? How much better to protect a forest and recover metals and minerals from obsolete machines rather than dig a new mine?

Reducing demand for metals and minerals and land for new generation, along with establishing facilities to recover and recycle resources – this is what must be installed as the Electrify Everything transformation gets underway. Once the energy transformation is embedded in the linear economy and runs parallel to the fossil-fuel economy, it will be almost impossible to retrofit. The country will have lost the jobs and social and environmental benefits of cradle-to-grave resource recovery, better urban design opportunities from electrification of the transport fleet, and it will have torn itself apart. Communities are already becoming polarised and conflict-ridden over congested cities, overcrowded parking areas, resource extraction, mines, land alienation, transmission and biodiversity impacts consequent upon the existing transition – let alone before we become a renewable energy “Superpower” supplying energy to meet overseas demands as well as our own. Yet we have a great opportunity to embed circular principles now, and we must do so to maintain ecosystems, community cohesion and the social licence for renewable energy.

To be a truly transforming force, Electrify Everything has to be more than a politically safe, siloed, clean-energy initiative; it must repudiate the discourse of delay that has overtaken Australian politics. We have shifted from a “fossil-fuel only” economy to a “let’s have it both ways” economy. Let’s maintain fossil fuels and delay the transition for as long as we can, but at the same time, in parallel, create new businesses and exports from a clean economy sector and facilitate them both with “offsets.” It is a deliberate and successful “divide and rule” strategy to smother dissent from the climate activist community. It is an economic growth strategy based on exporting fossil fuels and building clean energy infrastructure as if the two were completely compatible. It is a “something for everyone” climate and energy strategy.

Many who argue for the transition to renewables deliberately avoid hard-edged condemnation of the delay discourse to maintain political access. Embracing technological optimism and a “carrots, not sticks” approach sits as happily with Woodside as it does with climate investor groups. The “just pass it” mentality that drove the 43 per cent emissions reduction target and the Safeguard Mechanism is the politics of delay.

Saul notes the way government and regulatory bodies such as the AEMO have, in recent years, maintained the status quo and delayed the transformation from fossil fuels to renewable energy. But he doesn’t take the next step and call for the complete clean-out of these bodies. I do. We are entering a period of chaos, greenwashing and bad decisions because the regulatory authorities are not up to the challenge and are committed to business as usual.

Christine Milne

The Wires that Bind 

Correspondence 

Simon Holmes à Court

Some say the energy transition – decarbonising our energy: that is, what we must do to hold on to a liveable climate – is the biggest transformation since the industrial revolution. This greatly overstates the task, and makes it sound much scarier than it really is.

Saul Griffith has a knack for simplifying what others tend to complicate: decarbonising Australia is largely a matter of us replacing 101 million machines that rely on fire with ones that don’t. As Saul says, we need to “carry out the fire.” Thanks, Prometheus, electricity will take it from here!

As we replace fire with electrons, it is of course critical that we use “green” electrons … or rather, electricity produced by non-polluting sources. And here Australia is doing pretty well. Twelve years ago, just 9 per cent of our electricity came from renewable sources – mainly hydro, with a smattering of wind, solar and bioenergy. Renewables sit at 36 per cent today, with solar in front, wind close behind and hydro and bioenergy unchanged. In the scenario the Australian Energy Market Operator currently deems most likely, renewables provide 90 per cent of the energy in a significantly larger grid just twelve years from now, and 98 per cent a decade later.

That future is not “in the bag,” but the engineering, economic and political momentums are all pulling decisively in that direction. There’s a lot of policy work, investment and construction to ensure we get there at the lowest cost, but energy experts almost unanimously agree that this decarbonisation of our supply side is inevitable.

Saul has done a great service by shining a light on the energy demand side – the vast majority of the 101 million “fire” machines belong to punters, in their homes and driveways.

The punters are going to replace pretty much all their machines over the next decade or two as the machines age. What’s critical is that the old “fire” machines are replaced by machines of decarbonisation – air conditioners instead of gas space heaters, heat pumps instead of gas water heaters, induction instead of gas stoves and cars powered by batteries instead of petrol.

If it is done right, most people won’t notice the decarbonisation of our energy system. Our rooms will be illuminated, our showers will continue to be steaming hot and our houses will be no less comfortable whether it’s searing hot or freezing cold outside. Few will stop to consider that the power now comes mostly from wind and solar rather than from burning coal and gas and dumping carbon dioxide and other pollutants into the air – using the atmosphere as a giant open sewer, as Al Gore likes to put it.

In this inevitable future, those who drive will enjoy better cars – cleaner, quieter and zippier – but their wheels will no longer be driven by a couple of hundred small explosions of petroleum a second under the bonnet.

As Saul rightly points out, households will save thousands from their budgets by making the switch.

The elephant in the room is that many of these “fire-less” machines currently cost more to buy than the ones we’ve been buying for decades. Even though the lifetime costs are lower, or soon will be, what matters to most households is the cost today.

Unfortunately, if your gas hot water system dies today, chances are your plumber will replace it with another gas burner, locking in another two decades of emissions. Anyone replacing an internal combustion engine car today is more than likely to purchase another petrol burner, again locking in another two decades of emissions. In both cases, you’ll also be locking in two decades of higher energy costs.

Thankfully, we can draw on our own experience to solve this problem. In 2002, just 253 households in Australia installed solar panels. Costs were very high. For some of these early adopters, it would have been an economic decision – for example, a remote household that otherwise would have relied on diesel generation for all its power. It’s likely that other households were enthusiasts who just wanted to play with a new technology, but neither scenario could be considered the mainstream.

Early on, the subsidies were massive: up to $8000 per kilowatt. Nowadays, the subsidies are much smaller, less than $400 per kilowatt and falling. Thanks to the falling cost of solar and a strong value proposition, almost 290,000 households installed solar last year and now more than one-third of Australian homes have an array on the roof. Solar is now truly mainstream – most of these households didn’t install solar to save emissions; their motivation was to save money. Australians love technology and will flock to it if it’s readily available and they can justify the investment.

We now need to ensure that the machines of decarbonisation are also readily available and make financial sense to the mainstream household. This is not a call for subsidies, but for smarter, friction-free financing. Take $10,000 off the cost of a new electric vehicle at the point of purchase, and recoup the program cost through annual registration fees. Discount heat-pump hot water systems at the point of purchase, but recoup the costs of the discount through (lower) energy bills. In both cases consumers will be better off, and society will be closer to meeting its decarbonisation goals.

I’m reminded of Emma Marris’s important New York Times piece “How to Stop Freaking Out and Tackle Climate Change,” in which she implored us to stop thinking of personal sacrifice as a solution to climate change – that won’t achieve much, if anything. Rather, we need to focus on systemic change, work to build movements in our communities, elect the right people and pass the right laws. When doing the right thing – the thing that needs to be done – is the easiest thing, even the totally disengaged will do their bit to decarbonise Australia.

Australians are ready to do more for decarbonisation. We just need to ensure our representatives deliver the systems to make it easy for us all to do the right thing. It’s not a dichotomy between household and government action, but rather a collaboration between the two – a new, transformative social contract.

Simon Holmes à Court

LONE WOLF

Correspondence

Rachel Nolan

In Lone Wolf, Katharine Murphy offers an explanation for a fascinating yet little-remarked feature of recent Australian politics: the physical and apparently temperamental transformation of the prime minister before our very eyes. Out is the “insurgent,” “bomb-throwing” Albo, a character so compelling that Lech Blaine argued it was the model Scott Morrison plagiarised to invent ScoMo. In is a quiet, thoughtful character who, in round glasses and felt hat, looks for all the world like John Curtin during the war.

Murphy’s explanation is that far from being “Queer Eye’d” in pursuit of ambition, Albanese is an outsider who’s moved in, bringing a considered and collaborative approach to leadership in disrupted times.

Albanese’s goals, Murphy writes, are to make Labor the natural party of government and to deliver meaningful change. His fascinations in order of preference are “power, politics, parliament, policy and process.”

Murphy’s analysis is satisfying. The bigger question is: can he succeed?

After the devastation of the 2019 election, Labor adopted a more modest program, promising an expansion of public services through cheaper childcare, greater access to Medicare and more investment in the NDIS, as well as some harder-to-deliver programs, such as a 43 per cent emissions reduction target, greater investment and efficacy in Australia’s defence posture and an end to relentless, often partisan attacks on public services and the welfare state. With progressive politics having spent a generation in retreat and trust in politics at historic lows, even this agenda may be hard to get up.

Labor’s approach is a unique political experiment. In abandoning the model of an “all politics, all the time” front man dominating the debate, Albanese differs not just from Scott Morrison, but from every post-war Labor prime minister except Julia Gillard.

In ditching pizzazz for policy and process, the government is choosing two of its leader’s lesser preoccupations. It’s a radically conventional approach at a time when the weakening and politicisation of the public service has become commonplace and democratic institutions are threatened globally by nationalists and a raging hard right.

Less than a year in, the Albanese government has begun to define its approach. There is a proper cabinet process, complete with functioning committees. Ministerial staffer roles were publicly advertised and there are six new public service heads. First among them, Glyn Davis – an exceptional public servant and thinker who has led both the Queensland premier’s department and the University of Melbourne – has replaced Morrison’s former chief of staff Phil Gaetjens as head of the prime minister’s department.

Legislation for an integrity commission has been introduced and an expensive decision made to abolish rather than “square up” the irredeemable Administrative Appeals Tribunal.

While these are sound high-profile decisions, the success of the government’s approach will depend on the far less sexy work of improving capability and integrity at the heart of the Australian public service (APS). In the past twelve months, a series of public inquiries at both state and Commonwealth levels has revealed deep flaws in public service integrity. Queensland’s Coaldrake review, the Barilaro inquiry in New South Wales and a string of Commonwealth audits, royal commissions and reviews have heard shameful evidence of senior public servants taking it upon themselves to suppress bad news because they have sensed, or been told directly by out-of-line political staffers, that uncomfortable advice will not be smiled upon.

This dynamic – in which public servants become avatars of their political masters, and politicians lack access to frank and fearless advice – is risky for everyone. Timid public servants leave themselves open to carrying the can for what should be political decisions, but there’s also the risk that governments, lacking the rigour of good policy advice, get it wrong.

Political decision-making is an art form; a magic concoction of ideology, evidence, power dynamics and a nuanced understanding of public opinion. It’s best undertaken by politicians who, unlike public servants, are masters of the discipline.

Fixing this will take serious reform and time. So far, the new government’s approach relies largely on the recommendations of the Thodey report, a review into the APS commissioned by Malcolm Turnbull in 2018 and largely shelved by Scott Morrison. The review began with a concerning starting point, identifying that just 30 per cent of Australians trusted public services, that the public sector spent 12 per cent more than the private sector in running old digital platforms and that the APS was excessively atomised across agencies.

While Morrison rejected any suggestion that the APS would take a leadership role in policy development, the new government – under public service minister Katy Gallagher – has set about an extensive overhaul of the APS, with ongoing capability reviews, better organisational and industrial coordination, the pursuit of diversity including First Nations employment, the development of an in-house consulting model and a commitment to measure and report on public service efficiency and trust.

The government has appointed Gordon de Brouwer, a former secretary of the environment department, on a two-year contract to lead the reform. In a significant move, it has also begun publishing communiqués from meetings of the departmental Secretaries Board.

The reforms are sound and represent normalisation rather than a step change. There’s no trendy, new democracy–style launch into citizen’s juries, no regionalisation of service delivery – as Kevin Rudd pioneered and Barnaby Joyce ham-fistedly applied – and no money for wholesale investment in digital service delivery as has occurred in New South Wales.

But getting to the sweet spot of the relationship between the public service and the executive will take some doing and, if successful, will test the integrity of the government in a system now so used to ministers just getting their way with a disregard for process or policy.

Far from being an exercise in giving the APS what it wants, the reforms will need to reflect an understanding that an elected government does have a mandate but that the APS can and should know deeply what it’s talking about. With the trickiest conversations inevitably happening behind closed doors, we will have to wait for the entrails of the first conflicts to be revealed either in key departures or gripping Senate Estimates hearings.

In the last Oxford University survey, Australia’s public service was rated the fifth-best in the world, which might come as a surprise to anyone who’s watched the recent Commonwealth inquiries or tried to deal with Centrelink. The service might be fine by international standards, but there is an ocean of improvement to be made in culture, diversity (including an ability to imagine life beyond Canberra), digital capability, integrity and excellence.

There is no higher calling than public service – for our political and bureaucratic actors alike. We will know all of this is getting somewhere when Australian universities, many of which have abandoned teaching public administration, return to the field and produce graduates who rush not to intern with the World Bank in Washington, but in Treasury, the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet and the climate change department. These are the places where the real action is happening.

Achieving such a change may at times be uncomfortable for a prime minister and cabinet already nearly one year into a three-year term, but if the goal is to make the Labor project sustainable, then the best-quality advice will immeasurably benefit the cause. Australia has long provided a leading example to the world in our democratic institutions. Compulsory voting provides ballast to our democracy; our health, education and welfare systems are world-leading, and we famously took a lead role in the establishment of the United Nations.

If Australia can succeed in de-politicising and strengthening its public service at this critical moment in history, it will again be an exemplar for the English-speaking world to follow. If it doesn’t, it’s hard to say where we go. There is no plan B on the horizon.

Rachel Nolan

LONE WOLF

Correspondence

Carol Johnson

Professor James Walter has described Katharine Murphy as “one of our most astute political observers” when it comes to analysing the personas and performances of our political leaders. Lone Wolf draws a masterly portrait of the attributes that facilitated Anthony Albanese becoming prime minister and that may assist in his managing of the “new politics” as major-party support declines. In the process, Murphy provides an insightful analysis not just of a developing political persona but of a changing political landscape. Murphy characterises the “clean and green” new politics as eschewing “major-party custom and practice,” being “bottom-up rather than top-down,” idealistic and aspirational while championing dialogue, positivity, integrity and transparency over division. She suggests that Albanese will draw on the lessons he learnt during the Gillard period to manage relations with key independents who represent the new politics. Doing so will facilitate their ongoing challenge to the Liberal Party, even though he doesn’t need the independents’ support in the House of Representatives. (Albanese has required the support of independent senator David Pocock in the Senate.) However, there are some issues raised by Murphy’s analysis that are worth considering further. Labor’s task is complicated by the fact that it is having to negotiate the new politics at the same time as it negotiates some very old political issues. Traditional social cleavages and antagonisms remain and will complicate Labor’s strategies, despite Albanese’s claims that he will bring Australians together.

For example, Murphy cites Albanese’s proud assertion that Labor represents “the interests of the vast majority of Australians,” including being able to “work with business and unions.” Yet Labor still needs to address the traditional social democratic issue of how to reduce inequality under capitalism, while managing the relationship between business and labour in the process. As I explain in my book Social Democracy and the Crisis of Equality, economic inequality has increased in recent years, partly due to neoliberal policies that have contributed to wage stagnation and a decline in real wages. The pandemic has exacerbated economic inequality even further. Albanese has often evoked former Labor PM Bob Hawke’s consensus politics to suggest that an Albanese government will bring both business and unions together to improve workers’ standards of living. However, Hawke’s rapprochement was based on an Accord process that facilitated business reducing its wages bill, while workers were supposedly compensated by an increased “social wage” expenditure on health, welfare and education. By contrast, the Albanese government aims to increase real wages in the longer term, rather than restrain – or even cut – them, as Hawke and Keating did.

The Albanese government’s task will be made even harder by major inflationary pressures and an uncertain international economy. Furthermore, Labor’s ability to increase compensatory government expenditure, including welfare spending, is constrained by the need to manage a large deficit. That deficit will be further affected by revenue losses due to the planned stage three tax cuts. Given these dilemmas, we have already seen the government delay the full implementation of wage rises for aged-care workers, despite Labor having made a strong case for such wage rises. The government has succeeded in passing industrial relations legislation through parliament that it hopes will facilitate wage rises. However, it has done so in the face of considerable business opposition and only after making concessions to David Pocock. Pocock had been particularly concerned about the implications for small business (as indeed had some teal independents in the House of Representatives). There are also doubts that the measures included, such as multi-employer bargaining, will be sufficient to ensure adequate wage rises in the current economic climate, especially given business resistance.

Many of the new politics independents have a small “l” liberal background that is sympathetic to business, so Labor may encounter ongoing challenges in managing parliamentary relations with them. Outside of parliament, business opposition can result in well-funded campaigns against Labor and a resulting perception that Labor governments are poor economic managers. Voters employed in the private sector can be particularly worried about the prospect of reduced private-sector investment and job losses. Business campaigns against Labor governments have contributed to the electoral defeats of the Chifley, Whitlam, Keating and Rudd governments. Murphy cites Albanese’s concern that Labor’s poor relationship with business during the 2019 election campaign had contributed to Bill Shorten’s defeat.

Climate change policy is another area where relationships with at least some sections of business are still problematic for Labor. Murphy states that Labor’s Minister for Climate Change, Chris Bowen, has been “attracted to the idea of framing climate action as the unfinished element of the economic reforms Labor had pursued since the early 1980s.” Yet this is not a new framing; it is one that Penny Wong used when she was climate change minister in Kevin Rudd’s first government. Unfortunately, Wong was only successful in convincing some sections of business that Labor’s climate change reforms were necessary, with the Rudd government facing considerable opposition from the large polluters.

Labor has managed to pass its reduced emissions target through parliament with support from the Greens and independents. However, we wait to see how successful the party will be in introducing further measures, including its attempts to tweak the existing safeguard mechanism to reduce emissions by big polluters. Fortunately for Albanese, much of Labor’s safeguard mechanism policy can be implemented via regulation, thereby bypassing parliament and the need for either Greens or Coalition support in the Senate. However, a key aspect – namely the stockpiling and trading of carbon credits by overachieving firms to under-achieving ones – would need to be passed by legislation. It is a measure designed to placate those businesses that will not sufficiently reduce their carbon pollution, while rewarding those that will overachieve. As with proposed carbon trading during the Rudd era, Labor is facing difficulty obtaining Greens support, given that the Greens see Labor’s cautious measures as facilitating big emitters. Meanwhile, the Coalition is resorting to old political strategies, with its Opposition energy and climate spokesman, Ted O’Brien, denouncing Labor’s climate change measures as a “carbon tax.”

Climate change is not the only field where Labor faces old arguments and culture-war issues. Murphy also cites Albanese’s statement that Labor respects “First Nations people” as part of his argument that Labor represents “the interests of the vast majority of Australians.” Yet that “embrace” of broader forms of equality also comes with longstanding political divisions. Not only have the Nationals opposed the Voice, but Peter Dutton has repeatedly raised questions regarding the form the Voice will take. Meanwhile, radical critics, such as Senator Lidia Thorpe, have questioned the Voice from the left, raising concerns about how effective it will be and its implications for black sovereignty.

As with climate change and the republic, Labor must solve the dilemma that addressing the conservative issues raised by the Liberals risks alienating more progressive supporters. Murphy rightly notes Albanese’s emotional intelligence, but it might not be a match for a culture war–style fear campaign from the right coupled with feelings of disappointment and negativity from the left. After all, Rudd’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme failed to get through parliament when the Greens joined the Liberals to vote against it. The republic referendum failed when the votes of conservative opponents to a republic were bolstered by the “no” votes of progressives who supported a republic but not the specific model proposed. Peter Dutton may lack the dexterous footwork of an Albanese, who likes to keep his opponents “dancing,” but Dutton is not without room to manoeuvre. As Murphy reminds us, the new politics can also take an anti-progressive form. Trump is an example of new politics – “a classic disruptor.” Dutton has well-established cultural warrior credentials on which to draw, which owe as much to John Howard as to the former American president.

Clearly, Albanese will be hoping that Peter Dutton proves to be out of step with the new politics rather than an alternative manifestation of it. Albanese will try to utilise the new politics’ emphasis on “dialogue over combat” to pursue a successful parliamentary agenda. He’ll be hoping that the new independents’ preference for making some progress rather than none, along with the Greens’ apparent greater willingness to compromise, continue to gel with social democracy’s traditional pursuit of incremental reform. Nonetheless, as Murphy acknowledges, the Greens will continue to target Labor seats and future teal-style independents may do so too. Negotiating old battles while managing the new politics will not be easy. So far Labor has enjoyed significant legislative success. However, “swimming between the flags,” as Murphy argues Labor has successfully done, may yet prove to be a far more difficult exercise in government than it was in Opposition.

Carol Johnson

LONE WOLF

Correspondence

Frank Bongiorno

In the week I’m writing this response to Katharine Murphy’s admirable Quarterly Essay on the new politics, we’ve had two pointed reminders of the old. Scott Morrison appeared before the Robodebt royal commission, ducking and weaving as in days of yore, but with one major difference from those media conferences we came to abhor and avoid. In this forum, he was unable simply to avoid a question, patronise the questioner and then move on to another of his endless stream of deceptions.

Australians also heard from a woman, Sandra Bevan, who was a victim of this odious and unlawful system. A real battler – as distinct from the kind invented by John Howard to harvest votes – she was bullied, humiliated and cheated by a system designed to punish the poor and win the favour of voters and media hostile to welfare recipients. All in the land of the fair go.

In the same week, the attorney-general, Mark Dreyfus KC, announced that the government would be abolishing the Administrative Appeals Tribunal. As currently constituted, this body represents – as Dreyfus put it – a “disgraceful exhibition of cronyism.” With its eighty-five former Liberal politicians, staffers, candidates and mates, it has become a high-end welfare system for Liberal Party people looking for their next “opportunity.”

While the AAT is an especially notable example of the Coalition’s way of running the country for the benefit of the well-connected – egregious not least because of its potential impact on the lives of so many Australians – it is just one among many of the country’s institutions debauched during nine years of Coalition government. The old politics also saw the same kinds of people stuffed on to the boards of cultural institutions, even as several of those same institutions were so deprived of funding that some of them are now – quite literally – falling apart.

Is there a new politics? Murphy believes so, and I think she is right. For Murphy, it is about the decline of the two-party system and its ways. Unlike those parties’ tendency towards what political scientists call the “electoral-professional model” – parties dominated by politicians and paid officials and with a thin rank-and-file base – the new politics is “bottom-up,” arising from local communities. While it has a strong streak of pragmatism, it is also idealistic, and it elevates cooperation and conversation over the combat of partisan politics. It stresses integrity and transparency, in contrast with the old politics’ pleasure in a backroom deal in a smoke-filled room or around a lazy Susan in a Sussex Street Chinese restaurant. It has in common with right-wing populisms an insurgent, disruptive quality, but it is supportive rather than corrosive of democratic norms and rational policy.

During the 2022 election, the teal “community independents” were the most “in your face” expression of the new politics, which is particularly attractive to younger people, the better educated, the professional and women. For decades, the major parties have seen the key to their future not among those they have – often pejoratively – treated as metropolitan elites, remote from the values and experiences of “real people” out in the suburbs and country towns. Western Sydney was seen as the testing ground for politics: as in Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York,” if you could make it there, you could make it anywhere. Labor’s most explicit experiment in this kind of politics occurred under Mark Latham, who expressed disdain for the “insiders” of the inner city and championed a politics of the suburbs. That ended poorly, and the 2007 Rudd election indicated that Labor’s only real hope of electoral success lay in what Murphy calls a “big tent” approach that forms and then seeks to hold together an alliance of often diverse people and interests. But that ended badly too.

In the years since, Labor has never quite known which way to jump. There were champions of a politics that emphasised the need to connect with blue-collar workers with “traditional” and even “conservative” values. Some proponents of this view took inspiration from Blue Labour in the United Kingdom. Labor’s defeat at the 2019 election – which some attributed to its loss of connection with traditional supporters in regional, Queensland and “coal” seats – boosted the idea that Labor needed to secure its blue-collar base, but proponents had little to say about how this approach might affect its standing with other kinds of voters. Its most vocal champion was Latham’s old mate Joel Fitzgibbon. Murphy’s account is revealing on how the party managed his internal criticism and eventually landed on a climate policy under Chris Bowen as minister that – in an evocative image from her essay – managed to swim between the flags.

There is a case that considering both Labor’s climate policy and its commitments to childcare, it is unfair to characterise the party’s approach at the 2022 election as small target. It was adventurous in its chasing of voters who wanted action on climate change, government integrity and equity for women, but who lived in electorates rarely inclined to throwing Liberals out of office. Jim Chalmers is quoted in the essay as suggesting it was a bigger program than Hawke’s in 1983 and Rudd’s in 2007. This is debatable, but it might not be wrong. What is less in doubt is that in 2022, metropolitan voters delivered a very clear message to any political parties or candidates inclined to ridicule or condemn their lifestyles, values or interests.

That brings us to Albanese. We have a good biography from Karen Middleton of a few years back, and Albanese has said plenty about his personal story on the public record. Nevertheless, I learnt more here. The overriding impression I had taken from his successful campaign was that he wished to be seen as a collaborative leader. The late political psychologist Graham Little would probably have seen in Albanese’s style “group leadership,” which he also attributed to Bob Hawke: “neighbourliness, translating the experience of life in smaller groups, like the family, into the nation as a whole.” But Murphy suggests that Albanese has another side: a lone wolf quality that works as a tension with the more collegial approach. Albanese’s stress on orderly government, his emphasis on process, his search for consensus, his ambition – also nurtured by Hawke – to turn Labor into the natural party of government: these suggest not only an identification with the Hawke era but a rejection – politely implicit, but still real enough – of the leadership style of Kevin Rudd. It is, of course, also a rejection of Morrison’s outrageous breaches of Westminster conventions and practices that have a history stretching back centuries, such as his secret assumption of five ministries on top of the prime ministership.

Albanese seems to understand something that eluded Rudd. Rudd wanted to make his government the story each day, to win each 24-hour news cycle. That was great while the government’s popularity lasted, not so great when things soured. Albanese realises that a sideshow featuring your opponents has its uses: we have an almost daily reminder of how bad the last government was, and therefore – until Peter Dutton and his colleagues make a more explicit break with their immediate past – what an alternative to an Albanese Labor government might yet look like.

Albanese also seems to have judged the present mood of electors well. They don’t want partisan politics in their faces each and every day. They are over charismatic leadership. They are over silly stunts of the kind Morrison made his trademark. There is a dawning realisation that serious times and serious issues – the China relationship, climate change and energy policy, a fast-rising cost of living and unaffordable housing, a lack of integrity in government – call for a serious politics. The teal independents also benefited enormously from this impulse among many voters. The new government is well regarded because it has been practical and has restored a sense of order and civility to a politics that had been veering dangerously towards the right-wing populist model contemptuous of parliament, process and even policy.

One other Labor leader of Albanese’s lifetime also seems to sit there as part of his make-up and project. That is Gough Whitlam. Albanese might once have been of the Hard Left – the kind of politics that was hardly enamoured of Whitlamite social democracy – but in his life story he is very much a product of the Whitlam era. As the son of a mother on a disability pension, living in public housing, he was the beneficiary of public support, as inadequate as that could sometimes be (and the stories Murphy tells of the experiences of his mother, Maryanne, in the health system are especially moving). He received a free university education, courtesy of Whitlam. He was mentored and employed by Whitlam government minister Tom Uren. Albanese’s talk of a move towards universalism in childcare is as Whitlamite in its feel as his insistence that the Uluru Statement from the Heart and the Voice are definitive of his government’s commitments, values and image, here and abroad.

Yet, as Murphy indicates, Albanese’s government, like Whitlam’s, finds itself in office at a time when the global economic situation is unconducive to the realisation of Labor ambition. The local fiscal situation will also pose challenges, not least while Labor remains committed to seeing through the stage three income tax cuts.

Still, like Whitlam, Albanese is not willing to die wondering, as Penny Wong told Murphy. We are in for an interesting ride.

Frank Bongiorno

LONE WOLF

Correspondence

Michael Cooney

Politics is both funnier and more serious than people expect, and so is Lone Wolf. Maybe no one in 2022 quite “campaigned in poetry,” but Katharine Murphy saw the election in haiku. Think of her rendering of the unsettling prospect for any Labor handler of an unscripted lakeside conversation between the leader and a self-funded retiree.

Or her anxious interior dialogue later that day, moments before a photo shoot at Anthony Albanese’s home.

Twenty pages in, I texted a friend to say this was the most unexpectedly funny thing I’d found since reading Growing Up African in Australia in lockdown two years ago.

And it’s also the most serious. Here, unlike in a lot of journalism – even journalism containing revelatory reporting – there are precise and subtle details to savour. When we read of election night, “As the night wore on, it was clear … ‘I don’t hold a hose, mate’ was past tense,” we have to think, yes, nicely done. He really didn’t, did he. Later, “Albanese adores the dog … like a child” carries a lovely ambiguity which can’t be an accident. And as for, “I say belief, not faith, because Albanese believes in what he can see,” I don’t think St Paul could have put it better.

The prime minister is also a funny man, as well as a serious one. I like that this comes through in Murphy’s consideration of his character and the politics he is leading us through.

Albanese’s good humour is something all his friends of forty years’ standing reflect on when they speak about him. I’ve certainly seen it in the twenty years (goodness me) that I’ve worked with and – briefly – for him. People ask you what are they like, these Labor leaders. It is sometimes interesting which people ask about which leaders. The first thing I have always said about Albanese is that of all the Labor leaders I’ve worked for or with, and that’s all of them since 1996, he’s the one I’d be happiest to find sitting next to me on a flight to Perth.

I said that once, when giving the vote of thanks after he gave the Harvester Oration in late 2020, and one person laughed: the leader of the Labor Party, Anthony Albanese. I really hope that doesn’t change.

But some things definitely changed about Anthony Albanese while he was Opposition leader. “The old dog for the hard road had to learn some new tricks,” we read. A hundred per cent. Murphy points out that the Opposition leader had never run for national office or in a national campaign before 2022 and hadn’t had the benefit of two years on the road due to lockdowns and border closures; what’s more, he seemingly didn’t see that he might not be match-fit when the time came. Until he did.

Murphy recalls a certain Albanese “ebullience” after the Eden-Monaro by-election in July 2020, and reports this brought a “constant assessment,” or an “intervention,” or something – whatever it was, it apparently took a conversation with the colleagues to bring things back to earth. That’s changing; if there was any ebullience around in the second half of 2022, then it didn’t take the colleagues to rein it in. Events kept this PM’s feet pretty firmly on the ground.

I reckon Albo’s “art of indeterminate age” – on the balcony at the Enmore Theatre and all that – might be another change coming. They all turn silver. When he runs for re-election, the PM will look at least sixty-two.

What else might change in coming years? He doesn’t hate talking about himself, Anthony Albanese. The contrast between his happy warrior self-talk on his weight loss and Michelle Rowland’s horror at the thought someone had been talking about her advice to him is very cute. The PM says “I” a fair bit when he’s quoted in this essay. To be fair, he’s being asked about himself. And Albanese’s life circumstances – political, as much as personal – do mean he hasn’t often been one to rely on a surrogate. Someone else to tell that funny story about his fridge never being empty of staples, or his credit card balance always being zero, or to introduce him by saying at least he never changed his footy team, rather than it being left to him to make the humblebrag himself. I wonder if that will change, whether the surrogates will find their voice, and how he’ll help them find the space. I think it will, not least because we can already see the voices found and the spaces created by his colleagues in the governing project, and Murphy rightly zeroes in on this.

What we have in Canberra right now is a prime minister who is leading a real government-by-portfolio, as much as any in modern times. I think that tells us a lot about what comes next. If you’re trying to answer the question, “How will this PM approach the big stuff: the Voice referendum, decision-making on the real economy, China?” then it seems to me the first thing you’ve got to do is rethink the question. You can’t answer that question without also thinking about Linda Burney, about Jim Chalmers, about Penny Wong. That’s a good thing.

Colleagues quoted on two key decisions of the Albanese Opposition – childcare and climate – rightly emphasise the big interventions the leader made, but it’s equally clear these interventions weren’t fundamentally about design. They were about purpose, political purpose as well as policy purpose. And they worked.

One other change. I watched at home with my eighteen-year-old son the first 7.30 interview Albanese gave after the 2019 election. The caucus had met that day and in the room Albo’s candidacy had been unopposed. So there he is on television, saying, “Well, as the leader of the Labor Party” as his intro to every second answer, and junior turns to me and says, “Your man certainly does like being the ‘leader of the Labor Party’, doesn’t he?” Penny Wong noticed this too, unsurprisingly. Her summary of the most important decision Anthony Albanese made between 2019 and 2022? “He decided to win, and he wanted to win the prime ministership, not the leadership of the Labor Party.”

I just think that is so true.

The PM is not a new Albo; he’s a bloke growing into a new job. But yes, in Katharine Murphy’s essay we see an experienced politician changing – even more remarkable, we see a man aged over fifty growing – and the change that comes through most clearly is collegiality. The wolf runs with a pack.

What about a new politics? The Labor Party’s national secretary and campaign director, Paul Erickson (another funny and serious character, whose post-election address to the National Press Club is worth printing out and popping inside this QE for future reference), is clearly sceptical. The election was won in the regions and the suburbs; one-off factors held down Labor’s primary vote during the campaign.

Erickson also makes the very sound point that if we really must see in politics the exhausting trope that Labor infrequently wins from Opposition, the only general lesson of that is you can’t draw any general lesson from that, because those wins are wildly discrete events, literally decades apart. He might have noted two other pertinent caveats to the “Labor winning from Opposition” trope. First, that’s federal Labor. In state elections, the Labor Party has won from Opposition five times in the past nine years. Second, it really just means that “the Menzies government was long.” Even in federal politics, Labor’s last three governments went two terms, five terms and two terms. The federal Coalition’s last three governments went three terms, four terms and three terms. Come on, guys.

Nevertheless, a big change did happen in 2022, when a key group of geographically concentrated Liberal voters switched, taking a heap of seats off the Coalition, making the path to majority for the LNP very hard, and hugely disrupting some entrenched habits and institutions in politics and the parliament.

To the extent that this emerges as sustained change, it may just be change back to a very old politics; when Murphy refers to “centre-right progressives,” doesn’t she just mean “liberals”? Hello, 1909. And hell yes, if liberalism and conservatism really are never, ever getting back together, that’s great and amazing. In her biography of Alfred Deakin, the last liberal prime minister outside a conservative party, the historian Judith Brett observed:

Let’s see if that’s still a problem this time.

If it’s not, and the liberals don’t fuse into the conservative institutions again, does that mean a new politics? I dunno. What I do know is that the people who say it would mean there’s a new politics also say the new politics is about three things, and one of them is integrity.

Which is where I come back to the question behind Lone Wolf. Not “What is Albo like?” but “How will Labor govern?” How will the prime minister lead? One more Murphy haiku:

So can I. When the PM speaks about long-term governments, a lot of people hear lessons from 2007 to 2013, especially from 2010. Important lessons about process and progress – “big things done slowly and little things done quickly,” in Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ words. And very very obviously, yes, lessons about unity – the PM’s overflow of emotion at the Lodge after the election when thanking colleagues for their teamwork as they had rallied in the campaign; tears of relief, Murphy thinks.

But I think more should be made of the likelihood that the PM has also learnt a lesson about trust. Yes, the ghost of 2010 says to work methodically, yes dear God obviously, it says don’t eat your own, but I think the PM might hear it saying something else: you rarely build a long-term government by breaking election promises on tax.

And by the way, all that discussion of the NSW Left was really interesting. Meredith Burgmann’s insights are particularly striking and I’d forgotten Andrew Leigh wrote that amazing paper. (Of course he did.) When the prime minister addressed the NSW Labor State Conference in the Sydney Town Hall last year, the first prime minister from New South Wales to do so this century, there was a little moment in the middle where he stopped, looked up and called out, “Delegate Albanese, Admin Committee!”

Very, very Albo (he may even have said “Albuh-neez”): funny, sentimental and something we probably won’t hear at the conference this year. Things keep changing for the PM. That’s the plan.

Michael Cooney

UNCIVIL WARS

Correspondence

Waleed Aly & Scott Stephens

Never read the online comments. So goes the advice issued to almost every writer published on a news website. Generally speaking, it’s wise. You’ll just be infuriated by the ad hominem, the misrepresentations, the people who simply read the headline and post comments that show they never bothered to read any further. But when a portion of our Quarterly Essay was extracted on The Sydney Morning Herald’s website, one such comment, usefully – if predictably – presaged what was to come:

Implicit here is an allegation that we’ve selectively highlighted examples of right-wing contempt, and that the one exception to this – that of the Stop Adani convoy – was tagged with a dig at the Nationals anyway. That whatever else we were doing, we were revealing our left-wing sympathies. That sort of response, which rummages through the essay, tallies, grades and categorises the examples, and then assigns the overall argument a political persuasion, became relatively commonplace upon its release. So, by the time the correspondence of John Quiggin and Carla Wilshire lodged with us – albeit making a countervailing charge of “right-wing advocacy,” in Quiggin’s phrase – we were on familiar ground.

And here we were thinking we’d written an essay! Turns out that instead we might have issued a Rorschach test. We’ll return to Quiggin and Wilshire, but what’s so striking about the highly varied correspondence published here is that it nonetheless falls into a few broad categories that accurately reflect the orientations of the respondents. One group, the philosophers and democratic theorists, take the essay on its terms, consider the implications of contempt for democracy, and then challenge or extend certain of the essay’s concepts. Another group, coming from those with more of a culture-war posture, conscript this essay into precisely those wars – rendering it an artefact whose primary value is in whether or not it sides with the right side of those wars. Similarly, but slightly distinctly, stands Nyadol Nyuon’s contribution: that of an activist for whom the primary meaning of the essay is what it means for the liberation of the oppressed.

Somewhat apart, though, is Brigid Delaney’s vignette, which for all its brevity makes a keen observation. She distils the civic importance of “real” communities in which people are more than their opinions, appear to us more fully in their humanity, and where interdependence demands a kind of supra-political cohesion. These are exactly the things that online conversation doesn’t habitually offer. But Delaney’s story of a shunned Arkansas pastor offers a prescient warning. It might be that the habits of online engagement have now poisoned our real-world communities, too. Delaney describes this beautifully as a sign of a society “rife with inflammation and division.”

That describes a society with a certain condition. And that is fundamentally what our essay is about. A condition. A widely present state of being, an atmosphere – or, in the metaphor the essay adopts, the air. That air, we argue, is thick with a contempt that suffocates democratic culture. And most of our interlocutors – especially those interested in democratic theory – agree. Where they take issue is in how we might best respond, or precisely what the limits might be.

These aren’t easy questions. Karen Jones says something uncontroversial by our reckoning when she says white supremacy is “asked and answered.” But we can’t follow her to her conclusion that we can use “asked and answered” as a test to determine when contempt can safely follow, for precisely the reasons she ends up indicating: the matter of what is “asked and answered” is becoming increasingly the site of politics itself. She gives the conflicts over transgender politics as an example – and it is a good one – but we can observe that political contests are increasingly being framed in that way: contentious issues are presented as resolved, such that all that remains is for others to “educate themselves” or “take the red pill.” “Asked and answered” is not a sober description of something, but a move made to foreclose often fledgling debates.

Bo Seo offers us a sharp, quietly thrilling response, suggesting that perhaps we have the problem backwards, and that maybe democratic debate would improve if we gave people the skills to argue better. We’re certainly all for imparting those skills, but we have our doubts precisely because of the conditions in which that would be taking place. If we’re right that contempt increasingly characterises our common life, then we are dealing with more than a problem of the mind. We’re dealing with a problem of the heart. We’re up against the fact that our modes of communication incite us to contempt, and that we enjoy hedonic sensations when we indulge in it. Can you get a similar dopamine rush from learning to argue well? Seo might be the expert there, and we’d love to hear from him that you can. But if not, we suspect the starting point would be appreciating that we have a contempt problem in the first place, and considering whether we might actually want to argue better.

Or, as Robert Talisse reminds us, we might want to find places where we do things other than argue. Talisse surgically identifies certain conundrums of democracy – among them that it encourages us to build coalitions with other true believers, whose fidelity is best proven by not being fair to their political opponents. On this basis he suggests that our call for attentiveness might commit the mistake of the Addams–Dewey principle: that the solution to any democratic dysfunction is more democracy. But if more democracy means more political engagement and therefore more coalition-building, more democratic activity might in fact increase our mutual contempt, making democratic life worse. And we’re inclined to agree. We’d only clarify that ours is not an Addams–Dewey argument. It is one that says democracy is predicated on a kind of civic bond, a mutual recognition of each other as democratic equals and as partners in a shared project with a common future. But we do not say those means are best achieved by making everything at all times a matter of democratic deliberation and contestation. Talisse is right to identify a gap in our essay: there could be a whole other section on the importance of apolitical space as a precondition for healthy political life. There is certainly an argument worth exploring that it is in apolitical life that we become sufficiently real to one another such that we may then be attentive. Delaney, too, gestures in that direction. And if that’s correct, it follows that where everything becomes politics, politics must fail.

But the fact that we are discussing a condition means that our essay is not about – and cannot be about – a rogues’ gallery of bad actors, because to focus simply on a group of malefactors would be to describe something less than a condition. Clearly this irritates Quiggin, Wilshire, and to a certain extent Nyuon, who want the focus to be very much on certain bad agents – especially the Republican Party in the United States. Hereabouts, the 6 January insurrection is frequently raised, and we stand criticised for not mentioning it in our essay.

We do, actually, on page 55, albeit in passing. True, it doesn’t play a major role in our analysis, but that’s because ours is not an essay about the specific and particular problems of American politics. It draws heavily on American examples for reasons explained at the outset, but only to the extent that we suspect Australians will see analogues in their own experience. Australia simply has no analogue of 6 January. But we do have analogues of a high-stakes discourse on Roe v Wade or any number of culture wars about “bigotry” and “wokery” that we have imported from American social media feeds. Some lengthy consideration of 6 January would have been a mighty digression in a way these other examples are not.

This family of responses therefore put us in something of a bind. Taken together, they charge that the essay’s main thrust is to urge the reader that both sides of politics are as bad as each other, and that cancel culture – as the major example of contempt – is a chief threat to democracy, as bad or worse than the 6 January insurrection. Put simply, our bind is this: how far do we go in responding to these charges when they simply don’t engage with our essay on its own terms? They are either misrepresentations, misunderstandings or principled refusals to take our argument on face value, preferring instead to uncover its “real” meaning or agenda.

It is true that we draw on examples across the political spectrum. How could it be otherwise in describing a condition? But the question of which side is worse is an irrelevant and uninteresting one when you’re diagnosing an emerging, corrosive, increasingly standard mode of discourse. To demand that an essay like this one make such a declaration – and to accuse it of smuggling in right-wing apologia under the cover of faux centrism if it doesn’t – is to force it into a pre-existing political disposition in which the apportionment of blame along some political axis must always be the ultimate destination.

Quiggin, Wilshire and Nyuon provide more to engage us when they seem to deny that contempt is a problem tout court. For Wilshire, contempt is simply an “individual emotion”; what we should be focusing on is polarisation, and polarisation is the result of inequality. That last point requires further demonstration at a time when Sweden, one of the most equal and high-taxing societies in the world, has a far-right government in its governing coalition, as Denmark previously did for a decade. But the point for our purposes is that this line of argument reflects both a misunderstanding of contempt and of the way the weakening of the bonds of mutuality in the decades following World War II created the political conditions in which many people in the United States, Britain and Australia could fail to be affected by immiseration of their fellow citizens. As Rousseau anticipated, and political philosophers such as John Rawls and Pierre Rosanvallon have argued at great length, contempt precipitates and enables pervasive inequality. (To read the full argument, see Scott Stephens, “Two Towers: How We Learned to Live with Inequality,” Meanjin, Spring 2017.)

Hereabouts, Nyuon’s extraordinary intervention deserves its own, separate and sustained consideration. It is hard not to be impressed by its force and seriousness, and at critical points it can only command our assent. But it is also hard to know how to respond to the imputation of views we do not hold and arguments we did not make. Much like Wilshire, Nyuon says that our essay leaves the impression “that cancel culture and political correctness pose a symmetrical threat, or an even greater threat, to American democracy than Republican attacks on voting rights.” Nowhere do we suggest or imply any such thing. To deny a group of people a vote, and therefore a voice, in the constitution of the life of a nation is an egregious act which both humiliates that group by denying them equal status as citizens and undermines any claim to democratic legitimacy. And given the importance we assign throughout the essay to voice and consent, to mutual recognition and the transformative power of civic associations, it is incredible to hold that we would be unconcerned with partisan redistricting, racial disenfranchisement and the ongoing legal assaults on sections 2 and 5 of the Voting Rights Act (1965), not to mention the return of voter intimidation and outright political violence. These are vitally important issues, and we are heartened that so many American lawyers and activists, philosophers and politicians are waging a valiant struggle against such blatantly anti-democratic tactics.

But were we to devote significant space in the essay to “Republican attacks on voting rights,” Australian readers would have good reason to wonder about its relevance to them. These are the peculiar afflictions of a nation teetering on the brink of becoming a post-democracy, and the product of its particular history of racism and injustice, to say nothing of its fraught relationship to the very idea of political equality and its distinctive (and debased) conception of individual freedom. While Australia certainly has its own share of electoral problems, voter suppression, gerrymandering and an overblown sense of states’ rights are not among them. Moreover, we assiduously avoided the attribution of blame to one side of the political divide or the other – Republican or Democrat – not because we hold them equally culpable, nor because we wish to draw some moral equivalence between their conduct, much less take part in a nauseating game of “whataboutism.” Politicians and political parties are, at best, a sideshow in our essay; they are epiphenomenal, not really causal. Instead, from the very first sentence we sought to address our fellow citizens, participants all in a shared political project – each one entrusted with the care and cultivation of our common life – and invite them to reflect on the degree to which we have contributed to a prevailing condition of mutual distrust and disdain (“above our wills,” as Emerson once put it). Nyuon no doubt would prefer that we focused more of our attention on voter disenfranchisement or white backlash. Fine, but that’s a different essay. And, in fairness, we didn’t devote much space to “cancel culture” either, and none at all to “political correctness.” “Cancel culture” in the essay functions as little more than a ready-to-hand, well-known illustration of the logic of one of the more conspicuous forms of contempt that we adduce – moral contempt – and it would have been strange indeed if we failed to mention it in an essay that sets out to examine the fraying of public deliberation and debate. But we did not linger with it for long. Not for nothing, the instance of “cancel culture” to which we devote the closest attention is the right-wing media’s censure of Yassmin Abdel-Magied. That seems to have gone unremarked.

More troubling, by far, is Nyuon’s claim that the form of moral reasoning we employ in the essay against the prevalence of contempt “echoes the historical justifications used to restrain and even reverse progress, especially as demanded by the historically marginalised (the contemned).” In effect, she charges us with peddling what Martin Luther King Jr called “the tranquilizing drug of gradualism” – his way of characterising the pseudo-prudential efforts on the part of effete northern moderates in the 1960s to impede the progress of voting rights legislation for fear that such legislation would prove too disruptive to an untenable status quo. But King insisted that this kind of political stability is unjust, because its cost was too high and had to be borne by too few: it entailed nothing less than consigning black women and men to a state of moral suffocation, condemning them to inexpressiveness by denying them access to the democratic medium in which their voices could be heard and their consent given.

But for King, there were two insidious threats to the cause of racial equality. One was the bromide of “gradualism,” which promised that the desired change would come, eventually, and even then only at a rate white Americans could stand. The other was what King called a “new militancy,” which viewed white Americans as “the enemy,” as an existential threat to their wellbeing, and therefore portrayed their struggle for justice as a zero-sum contest. King believed that both temptations had to be avoided at every turn if the nation was to be made whole – if American democracy was to become a moral reality. And so, from the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 until his assassination in 1968, King would condemn with commensurate urgency the reversion to violence and contempt on the part of black militants as the self-defeating pursuit of purportedly just ends through patently unjust means, and the self-serving callousness of the “great majority of Americans” who are “uneasy with injustice but unwilling yet to pay a significant price to eradicate it.” Both, he urged, must be renounced in order to cultivate the proper moral emotions between citizens such that they could come to see themselves as constituting one people who share one another’s future and bear one another’s fate – a “beloved community.” As Tommie Shelby puts it, King insisted that we “should not be content with interracial detente; we should strive for interracial civic friendship.”

However much Martin Luther King is revered now, his message of “interracial civic friendship” and his call for the renunciation of racial contempt proved to be fabulously unpopular, as Nyuon observes. In a 1968 Gallup poll, King ranked fifth on the list of “least trusted” public figures; he was “disapproved of” by more than 75 per cent of white Americans, and more than 60 per cent of black Americans. By contrast, according to the same poll, the brazenly segregationist governor of Alabama, George Wallace, who was running for president as a third-party candidate, came in eighth on the list of the “most trusted” Americans. Contempt, clearly, can be popular. But the point isn’t popularity. There are doubtless many effective means of achieving restitution for the crimes of the past, ways of seizing power and forcing the hand of “History.” What King insisted is that democracy imposes certain inherent constraints on what means might be employed if the goal truly is justice as equality and mutual recognition – because (as we cite in the essay) “the end is pre-existent in the means, and ultimately destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends.”

You can argue for a different politics if you like, in which just ends license unrestricted means. But at that point, you are not arguing for a democratic politics. And you immediately raise questions that never really receive an answer. For instance: precisely which means of activism are you prepared to endorse? At what point would you deem certain means illegitimate even in the face of injustice, and on what basis would you proscribe them, especially if “what is being protested” is “the problem” rather than “the manner of protest”? And precisely what conditions describe the end point at which we can say means matter as much as ends? Our democracy is a long way from a world of legalised slavery, segregation and the denial of the vote. Can a politics of means resume then? Or must some absolute equality exist first?

We may not have written the essay that Nyuon wanted, but does that really warrant lumping us in with the opponents of racial justice? Is there really any suggestion in our essay that we are trying to pump the brakes of progress lest “the contemned” demand too much too quickly and hurt too many feelings along the way? Is it really our position that those who are demanding radical change need to “play nice” so as to ensure they can be safely ignored? Or is it simply that fidelity to a democratic vision of the preciousness of persons and the demands of justice places certain moral requirements on speech and conduct to which citizens must aspire if they want to sustain a life in common? By characterising our position as she did, Nyuon unfortunately engages in precisely the form of argument about which we warn throughout the essay, whereby those with whom one disagrees are caricatured, tossed into the same basket as some truly bad actors, pronounced guilty by association, and dismissed altogether.

This applies equally to her crass dismissal of Immanuel Kant, reducing the contribution of his moral philosophy to some notorious remarks in the notes to his 1781–82 lectures on anthropology in which he proposed a kind of hierarchy of races and offered a principled defence of colonialism. While these views were omitted from the subsequent publication of his lectures, they were reiterated, to varying degrees, in lectures and papers and in a number of letters written during the 1780s and early 1790s. There is no defending or excusing them. But what Nyuon fails to mention is that Kant would himself go on to repudiate these very views in the late 1790s: he condemned the colonial seizure of lands and labour, upheld the importance of contracts and informed consent with the indigenous occupants of non-European territories, argued that the interests and wellbeing of indigenous populations imposed a normative constraint on the designs and conduct of Europeans, and denounced the utter inhumanity of chattel slavery in Toward Perpetual Peace (1795) and in The Metaphysics of Morals (1797) – which, incidentally, also contains his most fully developed reflections on the non-reduction of human beings to means to another’s end, and on the vice of holding other human beings in contempt. And it is precisely this refusal of contempt that, in a very real way, made his repudiation of colonialism possible.

We did not use Kant in the essay as a source of authority, much less a trump card, but as someone who bears persuasive witness to a vision of human community founded on the preciousness and equality of persons, in which each is called to consider the interests of others and to adopt the kind of dispositions and quotidian habits that would permit their life together to grow in depth and mutual understanding. It is a vision that can lay claim to no authority apart from the terms of its own appeal – which is to say, the invitation it holds out to see the world, and those within it, in a different, more gracious light. Like philosophy, democracy has no claim to authority apart of the consent of citizens and is assured by nothing other than their daily willingness to go on together. This is, of course, an invitation that may be rejected: there are those who will refuse the moral constraints inherent to a democratic vision of life, and eschew the very notion of pursuing a future in which their enemies have a place. No wonder, as Stanley Cavell puts it, philosophy and democracy seem both to vacillate perpetually between hope and despair.

Is there any better way of characterising the moral vision of James Baldwin than as one which occupies the space between hope and despair? Nyuon rightly observes the importance of Baldwin’s witness in our essay, but her contention seems to be that we illegitimately appropriate him, turning him into a shill for our own purposes – our very own Booker T. Washington (or Herschel Walker) in the service of a kind of counter-revolution to the cause of racial justice. There’s no point engaging in a contest of duelling Baldwin quotes, for his writing, like his life, “refuses summation,” as Toni Morrison put it in her eulogy at his funeral. Even in his own time, Baldwin was a highly controversial figure, more even than King, because he fit neatly nowhere. He could be claimed by no one, and easily enlisted in no cause. He was black and bisexual, but refused the mythologies of black nationalism and the cultural reification of what he termed “queer identity”; a Baptist preacher’s son, and a child evangelist himself, who abandoned Christianity; a son of Harlem who lived much of his life in France and Istanbul; a close friend and ally of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, and yet a loving critic of both; neither a secular saint nor an activist, but a writer who made his name with an incendiary critique of the most revered black novelist of the first half of the twentieth century; a public intellectual whose public standing collapsed in 1968, in part because of Eldridge Cleaver’s mercilessly homophobic attacks. Cleaver charged Baldwin, among other things, with relinquishing his black manhood on account of his sexuality, and wrote that Baldwin was trying to become “a white man in a black body.” For Cleaver, a Black Panther leader, Baldwin’s refusal of contempt was simply appeasement, an attempt to ingratiate himself with whites. And when the violence which engulfed 110 American cities after King’s assassination was taken to demand either total justification or absolute condemnation, Baldwin refused to do either. But this is precisely why Baldwin demands attention in a time like ours: the way his life and writing straddled what would seem to be incommensurable positions bears vital witness to his determination to escape America’s suffocating cycle of racial contempt and counter-contempt.

That cycle invites us to recall an aspect of Baldwin’s thought to which our interlocutors paid insufficient attention. That to succumb to contempt is to license it per se, and thereby to consent to the other’s contempt for one’s self. Nyuon asks if “the moral responsibility for resisting contempt … is only imposed on the contemned”? We’d suggest our answer was unequivocal: no, it is imposed on all. That is precisely the moral basis on which the contemned can protest their contemning. But as Baldwin understood, something fundamental changes when contempt becomes the coin of the realm. It then circulates in all directions, including – perhaps especially – among those seeking equality. So, members of the Nation of Islam ended up being the ones who assassinated Malcolm X. Baldwin’s own treatment at the hands of Cleaver is another illustration. Or, to choose a contemporary, local example, allegations of an Indigenous senator leaving an Indigenous elder traumatised by a tirade of abuse after a meeting at Parliament House. Even the dynamics of cancel culture illustrate this. Progressives can’t cancel Donald Trump or his supporters. They thrive on that. The ones who truly fear being cancelled are most often fellow travellers. Twitter pile-ons frequently take that form: feminists castigating other feminists for being the wrong kind of feminist; progressive stoushes on transgender issues; Muslim activists tearing apart senior, even revered, Muslim scholars. And of course, as we quoted Jonathan Haidt noting, Republicans attacking their colleagues as “cuckservatives.”

If our reading of Baldwin is “overstretched,” as she claims, then Nyuon’s reading is indefensibly narrow. Take the example of Baldwin’s use of the term “innocence.” Anyone who has read Baldwin knows that “white innocence” in his writing does not suggest guiltlessness, much less a kind of spurious moral purity. Rather, it denotes something closer to self-delusion, a wilful ignorance as to white Americans’ complicity in the immiseration of their fellow human beings. The moral force of Baldwin’s use of the term “innocence” is thus analogous to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s description of the self-satisfied lives of the inhabitants of the “civilized” northern states prior to the Civil War: they may be far removed from the barbarity of the plantation, and yet the delicacies on which they dine each evening and the comforts with which they adorn themselves each day are the products of a regime of systemic degradation. It is their “graceful distance” from that suffering which permits them to live in a kind of effete oblivion to the “dreadful debt” they owe to the slaves who picked the cotton and boiled the sugarcane. As Emerson puts it, unforgettably, “The sugar they raised was excellent: nobody tasted blood in it.” Like Emerson’s neighbours, Baldwin’s fellow citizens liked to believe themselves untouched by the taint of injustice. And yet this will-not-to-know had consigned them, Baldwin thought, to a state of perpetual adolescence; it had retarded their moral growth and bound them to an infantilising self-image from which they must be freed.

As Baldwin writes in No Name in the Street, “the fraudulent and expedient nature of the American innocence … has always been able to persuade itself that it does not know what it knows too well.” But even here, the term “innocence” is inflected with a mixture of bewilderment and pity, not condescension, certainly not contempt. The contempt with which white Americans have viewed their black brothers and sisters has so distorted their vision that they cannot even see themselves clearly. That, for Baldwin, is what contempt does: it leads to the moral deformation of the eyes. Which is why, after he writes, “Whoever debases others is debasing himself,” he explains immediately: “That is not a mystical statement but a most realistic one, which is proved by the eyes of any Alabama sheriff – and I would not like to see Negroes ever arrive at so wretched a condition.” The only thing that can free the “white man” from the self-imposed anguish of his “innocence,” the only thing that can release him “from the tyranny of his mirror,” Baldwin writes, is to “be seen as he is … by those who are not white.” He goes on:

For Baldwin, love is the contrary of contempt. It creates the conditions in which the parties can realise a life, and a just future, together. Whereas the contempt he heard in the words of Elijah Muhammad – as Baldwin dined with him at the headquarters of the Nation of Islam movement on Chicago’s South Side – represented to him “the absolute death of the communication which might help to liberate both Negroes and whites.” Nyuon is right that there is nothing “romantic” or sentimental about Baldwin’s notion of love, but it is nonetheless passionate, and not simply political.

Which delivers us, finally, to Martin Krygier’s strong suggestion that we would have been better off, and our readers better served, had we simply adopted the language of civility rather than that of “love” or “attentiveness.” In a sense, he is unarguably correct. Civility is the horizontal expression of our shared commitment to political equality – it is how we show that we regard one another as equals. As such, civility is the name for the particular type of moral restraint that must be reciprocally exercised by members of a democratic community if their deliberations and disagreements over the state of their common life are to remain non-coercive. To put it bluntly: without civility, there is no consent. And so, for Stanley Cavell, civility “is not a particular moral demand, but the condition of democratic morality.” This is not to reduce civility to courtesy, much less politeness. Rather, it suggests a way of speaking which ensures that our speech is answerable to others. In his important book Sustaining Democracy, Robert Talisse puts it this way:

Our thinking on civility and democratic equality has been richly informed by Talisse, Teresa Bejan and Danielle Allen, among others, and we’ve discussed their work (occasionally with them) on numerous episodes of The Minefield. But in the essay, we steered clear of the language of “civility” for reasons made clear by Carla Wilshire’s correspondence: because civility has already become so widely associated with politeness, and so widely – though we say wrongly – attacked as a structure of oppression in itself. We hoped that by transposing the language of our essay into a different and perhaps unexpected key – contempt, attentiveness, love, reciprocal devotion, marriage – it might give our sense of the problem and of the solution (much of which resonates with the sentiments expressed by Philip Selznick) a wider hearing.

Perhaps Krygier is right, and this will prove to have been a failed and ultimately fanciful endeavour. Maybe contempt is simply too much the air we breathe, and democracies such as the United States, Britain and Australia have already passed the point of no return. But if there remains some hope, we believe it begins with a recommitment to the task of attentiveness, which is why we are prepared to linger with the analogy between democracy and marriage. “Reciprocal devotion” perhaps misleadingly conjures the image of citizens looking lovingly in one another’s eyes, as if such strong emotions could be cultivated, much less realised, in a diverse political community “whom chance or choice have brought together” (to quote Michael Oakeshott). This is not what we argued. Rather, the devotedness is to the condition of political communality itself, as an expression of the desire that it should persist – and that it should persist with our opponents as an indispensable part. Writing in the early nineteenth century, the philosopher Georg Hegel was convinced that marriages pass from “contingency” (two random people bound together by nothing more than a kind of contract) to “necessity” (an enduring ethical bond) only when each person comes to see themselves through the other’s eyes as a person worthy of love. Is it really too much to suggest that the commitment to see one another as equals, and therefore as equal participants in a shared political project which depends on cooperation, compromise, frankness, remorse, forgiveness, reciprocity and mutual education, requires a devotion for which the only word is love?

Waleed Aly & Scott Stephens

UNCIVIL WARS

Correspondence

Karen Jones

Emotions infuse our interactions with one another and shape our social and political worlds. The affective climate we inhabit changes our perception of the practical options that we face and of the people with whom we communicate. Many commentators claim that there has been a change in this climate and not for the better: fear, distrust, disdain and anger are on the rise, and they are driving out cooperation, trust, respect and civility. We inhabit an increasingly polarised and toxic social and political landscape. By bringing contempt into focus, Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens have taken us a step further towards understanding this present climate and, with that, a step further towards remedying it. Whereas many place current problems at anger’s doorstep, Aly and Stephens diagnose contempt as the chief culprit. I will argue that, though they are not wrong to lay blame on a rush to hold those we disagree with in contempt, the philosophers they draw on misunderstand the nature of contempt. This misunderstanding leads us to find symmetry between the contempt which we might appropriately feel towards views that are beyond the pale, such as white supremacy, and the “reverse” contempt that those charged with being contemptable might direct back at us. Contempt is dangerous – even, I will argue, more dangerous than Aly and Stephens claim – but it is seldom best understood as a symmetrical problem.

Contempt has few supporters, but two philosophers, Michelle Mason and Macalester Bell, have recently taken up the job of defending it. Their analyses are similar. Both point to the totalising nature of contempt: it ascribes “badbeing” to the one held in contempt. It is not simply that the contemptible have done bad things or displayed morally problematic character traits – traits they should be ashamed of but which they might yet work to remedy. Contempt is a move to global shaming: the person’s whole character, their very identity, is found wanting. The contemptible are beyond redemption. Contempt, on this analysis, passes a form of harsh moral judgment on the one held in contempt and in so doing positions the contemptuous as morally superior to their target. Contempt seeks expression in words or deeds and so is communicative. Aly and Stephens accept this analysis but reject Mason’s and Bell’s limited defence of the emotion, on the grounds that the evidential requirements they place on justified contempt are simply not able to be met in the public domain, given the commodification of outrage in our current environment.

I don’t think this is the right analysis of contempt. This becomes clear when we consider contempt towards institutions. When Scott Morrison secretly assumed several ministerial portfolios, he demonstrated contempt towards the Westminster parliamentary system, towards his cabinet colleagues, and towards the Australian public. Yet he did not pass harsh moral judgment on the institution of Westminster parliament, his colleagues or the public. He did not ascribe “badbeing” to anyone. (It barely makes sense to say we can ascribe badbeing to institutions, though we can find them corrupt.) Morison demonstrated an unwillingness to be held answerable to that system, his colleagues or the public. This suggests that the core of contempt lies in the thought, “I am not answerable to you.” One reason we might take this position is if we hold others to be so morally bankrupt that they are outside our moral community and can therefore be pre-emptively dismissed, ignored or shunned. But it is not the only reason. We can also consider ourselves not to be answerable because of our own superiority (patronising contempt, as defined by Aly and Stephens). Neither seems easy to justify, raising the question of whether it is ever reasonable to take ourselves not to be answerable to an institution, a view, a person or a group of people. Isn’t the practice of giving reasons for what we do and being responsive to the demands of others to justify our actions both at the heart of moral life and central to any well-functioning democracy? If contempt is a refusal of answerability, how could it ever be justified?

I think it can be. I think white supremacy and white supremacists are contemptible. In response to the violent protests in Charlottesville in 2017, Trump was just wrong to say, “you also had people that were very fine people on both sides.” In our public discourse we do not have to give space to, engage with or debate white supremacy; we are done with answerability towards such views and towards such people, because they’ve “asked” and been “answered.” Asked and answered again and again over at least the last 200 years. Answerability has been discharged.

There’s dangerous territory here. What happens when one group thinks “asked and answered” and places a position and its advocates outside the sphere of answerability and open to dismissal, while another group thinks “not answered, still trying to ask, and being unfairly and contemptuously closed down”? Perhaps this characterises where the Australian community is currently at with the issue of trans inclusion. Trans activists have taken on the burden of sharing their lived experience, and of myth-busting “mad or bad” stereotypes and so might justly feel “asked and answered,” yet they continue to be met with “not answered.” How do we decide when the burden of answerability has been discharged and contempt becomes warranted?

There’s further reason to be cautious in our contempt. Emotions have their own kind of logic. It’s not the logic of argument, but a narrative logic in which some feelings invite or repel others, which in turn invite or repel yet others, which in turn … and so on through feedback loops that can quickly turn toxic. Aly and Stephens criticise online shaming, in which someone is called out for their bad behaviour and faces the threat of being “cancelled.” It is a practice of contempt, they claim. Because I have a different analysis of contempt, I don’t take these practices to be expressive of contempt – yet. But there is an affective alchemy whereby they fast turn into not just contempt, but runaway contempt. If I try to shame you, I am presupposing that we share some moral standard to which we are both accountable. I charge you with failing to meet that moral standard and so showing some deficiency in your character. It is time you pulled your socks up and tried to become a better person. Sometimes this works. But more often it doesn’t. Shame is a strongly negatively valenced emotion and we are strongly motivated to avoid it. Shaming is more likely to attract anger than reform. However, anger only partly meets the sting of would-be shaming. Contempt does a much better job, because it dismisses the charge at its root: I am not answerable to you, and so I am not answerable to your shaming move. I dismiss it and you, so there! You dismiss me? Well, then, I dismiss you! (Developmentally, one of the places we learn what to feel, when to feel it and towards whom is the playground, so it should come as no surprise that even as adults emotions can be vulnerable to the logic of this space. It takes maturity and some measure of practical wisdom to regulate them not to be so.) We start with an attempt to shame that presupposes shared values, or at the least the possibility of shared values; a few moves later we have pushed one another outside the realm of answerability and descended into mutual contempt.

The narrative logic of emotions is not doomed to be toxic. We can start with a different response and set in train a positive feedback loop. Aly and Stephens point to the example of James Baldwin, whom they believe has been erroneously cited on the side of contempt, but whose work is better read as a refusal of contempt, even towards those who hold you in contempt. On whom falls the burden of breaking cycles of contempt? It is easy to place that burden on those in socially subordinated positions, asking of them a near super-human moral forbearance of not returning contempt with contempt. Alternatively, we might say the burden falls on us all, as the problem comes from all sides. Or we could instead decide that the burden falls asymmetrically – this is not to say that “upward” contempt is better or more readily justified than “downward” contempt, but that it is time for the burden of forbearance to change hands.

Karen Jones

UNCIVIL WARS

Correspondence

Martin Krygier

I welcome and applaud Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens’ trenchant critique of the growth of contempt as a standard accompaniment (and source) of hostilities among citizens “in public settings.” They argue elegantly and rightly that, as a reflex response to those with whom we differ, contempt pollutes “the quality of the air we breathe together,” and corrodes democracy, civil society and indeed most other conditions that might sustain successful and flourishing lives in common.

Of course, as so many contemnors happily learn, a posture of reflexive contempt for those with whom one disagrees has its charms. It allows the alluring pleasures of self-righteous and censorious judgment, demands neither excuse nor apology, does wonders for one’s confidence, and allows one to avoid the difficult business of mounting or coping with evidence and argument. But these are shabby delights, typically unearned by those who enjoy them and undeserved by those who suffer from them.

But what’s the alternative? The essay’s title is “uncivil wars,” but clearly Aly and Stephens are not after civil wars, a phrase in which the adjective has another “other.” A civil war is, of course, not a war that is civil, but a war among citizens. The opposite of uncivil wars is civil peace, not a common phrase but an attractive condition for which we have a more familiar term: civil society.

Often, when civil society is spoken of today, the adjective has little work to do. The noun carries the whole load. It’s a way of turning attention to society rather than, say, the state or government or even the economy. Alternatively, and today typically, civil society is degraded simply to identify a particular sub-category of organisations within society at large: NGOs, or “not-for-profits.” This might be what led to the lament by the Hungarian former anti-communist dissident Ferenc Miszlivetz that “what we dreamed of was civil society. What we got were NGOs.” One senses he hoped for more.

What did they dream of? Perhaps a society in which routine relations among citizens are not dominated by the state and are actually, and typically, expected to be routinely civil, rather than hostile, warlike, full of mutual contempt and/or worse. For a special charm of societies in which civility is widespread, as I argued in my essay “The Quality of Civility,” is that:

Civility in this sense is cooler than love – if all you can say of lovers is that they behave civilly to each other, you know the relationship is on the rocks. In its place, however, civility is precious, for it is cooler and calmer than hatred as well. It doesn’t just happen though, but is a true and relatively rare achievement. As we know from many parts of the world, it doesn’t have to be like that. In so many places, today and always, society is not composed of routinely civil exchanges and interchanges among citizens but of wary and hostile manoeuvres, full of tension, fear, hatred and, often, contempt.

Many of the societies with which Aly and Stephens are concerned, with all their myriad faults, blemishes and real sins – including our own – have attained a high level of civility (at least among large numbers of their citizens) for considerable periods of time. That depended on a host of enabling conditions, which are often in short supply and, as we are seeing in the United States and many countries, can dry up or be deliberately destroyed. Manufacture and distribution of wholesale contempt, as Aly and Stephens show, threaten this precious condition and achievement.

I doubt that they would disagree with any of this. However, they never mention civil society, and they seem to have something altogether different and more demanding in mind as the ideal antidote to contempt, which we should strive to emulate, if not completely realise. The model is marriage. Thus their first example of contempt arises in the context of a marriage gone wrong. There, a wife who believes her husband is prepared to use her as sexual traffic for a job (for that is what it amounts to) finds him contemptible (as, were the charge justified, would I). And their last chapter, entitled “Democracy as Marriage,” makes clear that the ideal to emulate as a counter to contempt is a marriage gone right: “a particular type of relationship in which two persons, who are bound together by nothing more substantial than a reciprocal devotion, discover through their life together the ‘ethical conditions’ that allow their union to persist.”

I’m fond of democracy, I like many of my neighbours, some of them are friends and some of them I love. I’m also fond of marriage. But to hope for much like “a reciprocal devotion” among citizens of vast, multitudinous, various, differentiated society – who, unlike many spouses, have no opportunity to choose (or to leave) their associates – seems to aim a little high. It is what philosophers used to call a category mistake.

Just as modernity was taking shape, Adam Smith wonderfully characterised the predicament of the citizen of modern, large, populous, complex, differentiated societies: “In civilised societies, he [sic] stands at all times in need of the co-operation and assistance of great multitudes, while his whole life is scarce sufficient to gain the friendship of a few persons.” If he or she is lucky, one of those persons might be a spouse and their relationship “nothing more substantial than a reciprocal devotion.” But that’s a rather fragile foundation on which to build a society among multitudes, the bulk of whose social relationships must necessarily be unchosen and thin, unlike those of spouses, whose connections, for better or worse, richer or poorer, are thick.

To be helpful, an ideal for social interaction must take seriously the circumstances of politics and society, as they are and as they are likely to be. Sustaining conditions of civility does that; seeking society-wide simulations of reciprocal devotion does not. There are two routes to this conclusion, one born of relative but realistic optimism, the other of bleak pessimism, about the human condition. Both need to be taken seriously.

On the one hand, whereas civility is often regarded as a cold and pallid virtue, the optimistic civilian stresses how much it can offer to social interaction that is rich and positive. This view is nowhere expressed with more insight and nuance than in a chapter (on civility and piety) of The Moral Commonwealth, the magnum opus of the great American sociologist Philip Selznick.

Selznick was that very rare type of thinker, a Hobbesian idealist. Unlike most people, who tend to emphasise either conditions of survival (Hobbes) or hopes for flourishing (ideals), he insisted that we should strive to realise both: recognise real constraints, but refuse to ignore ideal potential, which he tried very hard to find. But conditions precede possibilities: without survival, flourishing is not an option. On the one hand, he writes, civility is “not a morality of engagement … It is cool, not hot, detached, not involved” and it is a necessary condition for secure interactions among those who will never love each other. It is true, as Selznick was at pains to stress, that more might be possible. Indeed, where circumstances are favourable, the qualities of civility might be enriched, for:

In these passages, Selznick comes closer than elsewhere to countenancing the ideals that Aly and Stephens espouse, though they are ideals for enriched public, not intimate, engagement. And that is never where he starts. For while he always hoped for more, he realised that often circumstances don’t give you much choice. You might aim for high ceilings, but you must start with solid foundations. It is harder the other way round.

Our world is full of dark possibilities, repeatedly realised. Even then, indeed especially then, where love is nowhere to be found and we confront just how perilous the circumstances of society and politics can be, norms and practices of cool civility among associates and strangers are precious.

This darker, more uniformly Hobbesian theme has recently been taken up by the Oxford political theorist Teresa Bejan in her book Mere Civility. Writing of the seventeenth-century debates over the novel idea of toleration, she introduces us – well, she introduced me – to one Roger Williams, a now somewhat obscure but then significant English Puritan evangelist and religious fanatic, who founded and became governor of the colony of Rhode Island in America. He advocated the practice of “meer [sic] civility” as the “vinculum societatis” (social bond) that, as Bejan puts it, “might hold in the face of protracted fundamental disagreement and discord” that followed the Protestant Reformation. On this view, “the virtue of civility in a tolerant society rested on the way in which the rules of respectful behaviour could be maintained no matter what one thought about others, their culture or their fundamental and sacred beliefs.” The blunt message was, “[w]hile we are stuck in the same boat with people we hate, we better make the most of it.”

Williams has been taken up recently by those few political theorists who have heard of him, prominent among them Martha Nussbaum, as an inspiring prophet of civility as a product and source of mutual respect, if not love. However, on Bejan’s persuasive reinterpretation he was nothing of the kind. It was lack of respect for beliefs other than his own that drove him and that he sought to deal with. This Puritan zealot appeared to dislike, to the point of disgust, the views of anyone who did not share his beliefs, and in Rhode Island, as well as in England, there were a lot of them. He expected he would not be alone in that sentiment. So rather than decree the impossible, that we should respect the views of those with whom we disagreed over the most fundamental things, he made available in Rhode Island, and enforced, an extraordinary and unprecedented freedom of religious belief, speech and observance.

Bejan argues that Williams had recognised a truth for which there is more than enough evidence and good reason to believe: that many of the harshest problems of social life, perhaps inexorable problems, come simply from the difficulties people have in living peacefully with others whose views, or whose religion, or whose nationality, or whose ethnicity, colour, gender … they do not share. Of course, we can be directed to like and respect them, but often that doesn’t work. What to do? Williams’ answer was not to try to wish fundamental disagreements away, but to acknowledge they were here to stay and we had to have ways of dealing peaceably with them. His answer, translated by Bejan to the modern world, might seem dispiriting from a marriage guidance counsellor, yet apt for a social analyst. He faced then, and we face now, the problem that very often:

In such circumstances, exhortations to treat others as we should a loved partner, instead,

Bejan is here talking us down from expectations that “mutual respect,” still less John Locke’s “love and charity in the diversity of contrary opinions,” can be relied on to serve as lubricants for harmonious and civil social relations. Doubtless, they are good things to have, but one wouldn’t bet on them. One might nevertheless hope that Selznick’s realistic optimism will be vindicated in some societies at some times, but we know that bleaker options are more likely in much of the world. One wonders, in either circumstance, what the odds are for sustaining modern societies on “nothing more substantial than a reciprocal devotion.”

Martin Krygier

UNCIVIL WARS

Correspondence

John Quiggin

Uncivil Wars arrived in my email at the same time as two other pieces of news. The first related to the removal of a mural painted by a Melbourne artist, showing a Russian and a Ukrainian soldier embracing. It was not well received by Ukrainians, who have suffered months of murder, rape and other crimes at the hands of Russian soldiers, and would have suffered more, were it not for the fierce resistance put up by Ukraine’s own forces. While this particular mural was (let us hope) an expression of a sincere wish for peace, it echoed the message of Russian propagandists (notably including Fox News contributors such as Tucker Carlson) seeking to portray the two sides as morally equivalent.

Contempt for Putin and his murderous supporters is entirely justified. But a natural reading of the Stephens and Aly discussion of US politics is that such contempt should stop at the water’s edge, exempting people like Carlson because of “the bond that must exist between democratic citizens.” Certainly, that’s the implication of their view that Hillary Clinton’s description of millions of Trump supporters as racists was outrageous contempt, even though there is ample evidence that it was accurate.

More directly relevant to the essay was President Biden’s speech on 1 September warning that US democracy was under threat from MAGA extremists. Republicans responded to the speech with attack lines that might have been drawn directly from the Stephens and Aly essay. Biden, Republicans said, was slandering tens of millions of Americans as “fascists.” In Australia, a string of pieces in the Murdoch press echoed this view.

But what led Biden to make such statements? It is hard to think of an American politician more steeped in the old-fashioned ways of consensus, learned from decades in the Senate. His election campaign was premised, in large measure, on his ability to work “across the aisle” with Republicans. And even in his doom-laden speech, Biden was careful to claim that such Republicans still exist.

Has Biden suddenly fallen, as the analysis of Stephens and Aly would seem to imply, into a politics of grievance and contempt? Or was he, perhaps, responding to a series of events they don’t even mention (with the exception of a passing reference to the quite literal call to “hang Mike Pence”)? Somehow, the repeated attempts by Republicans to overthrow US democracy, of which the most dramatic was the 6 January insurrection, seem to have escaped their notice.

The desperate attempts at moral equivalence in this essay can be seen not only on big points like this, but also in more trivial pieces of bias. Stephens and Aly quote, with approval, a report in Vox on the social psychology of threats. This reflects the fact that Vox is a serious publication, offering careful analysis from a broadly progressive, but not propagandistic, perspective. Yet when they want to denounce “tabloid” partisan media, Stephens and Aly list “Fox, Vox, Sky, Vice, BuzzFeed and the Daily Mail,” carefully balancing right-wing propaganda outlets with titles that might be seen as leftish.

At a time when democracy is under threat around the world, the last thing we need is right-wing advocacy packaged as “both sides do it” centrism. But that is precisely what Stephens and Aly have offered us.

John Quiggin

UNCIVIL WARS

Correspondence

Nyadol Nyuon

A majority of US Republican nominees running for the House, Senate and key state offices this year are election deniers. Most are expected to win. This will place some in positions where they can refuse to enforce election results. The threat is not theoretical. This year the Democratic secretary of state for New Mexico had to get a court order to enforce the election result of a primary.

And it gets worse. Republican lawmakers are proposing and enacting laws to restrict voting. The Washington Post reports that these voter restriction laws would “strain every available method of voting for tens of millions of Americans, potentially amounting to the most sweeping contraction of ballot access in the United States since the end of Reconstruction.” And this is only what is happening on the political front.

On the cultural front, conservatives in the United States, sometimes backed by wealthy individuals and groups, are banning from schools books focused on race, LGBTQ+ issues or marginalised communities. Some of the books banned include biographies of Rosa Parks, Dr Martin Luther King Jr and Ruby Bridges. Ruby Bridges was the six-year-old first grader who walked through an angry mob to desegregate a school during the civil rights movement. For her protection, she was escorted by four federal marshals. The white crowd, mostly adults, were there to protest her presence. They screamed insults and racial slurs at the six-year-old. A woman held up a miniature coffin with a black doll in it. Today, some believe teaching this history is “woke,” in the pejorative sense of the word.

Yet Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens’ essay leaves the impression that cancel culture and political correctness pose a symmetrical threat, or an even greater threat, to American democracy than Republican attacks on voting rights. Others have arrived at the same conclusion about the essay. Ryan Cropp, an historian, writes in Inside Story that although the authors have no sympathy with the right wing of American politics, they advance a narrative that suggests “the fascist inclinations and genuine illiberalism of the new American right has its mirror on the left, in the form of cancel culture and political correctness.”

That claim is obviously ridiculous to many, including Francis Fukuyama. Fukuyama plainly states in his book Liberalism and Its Discontents that the “threats to liberalism are not symmetrical. The one coming from the right is more immediate and political; the one on the left is primarily cultural and therefore slower acting.”

Turning to substantive matters, I think the essay also echoes the historical justifications used to restrain and even reverse progress, especially as demanded by the historically marginalised (the contemned). This is apparent in the authors’ use of language such as the “hard labour of patient appeal” or the value of maintaining hope “in the moral possibilities of persuasion.” Importantly, this language is exclusively directed at the contemned. It defines what the authors deem to be the morally permissible response the contemned should have for their contemnor. There is no equivalent analysis of the contemnor’s moral responsibility or whether they share any moral accountability. What is clearly argued is that responding to contempt with contempt is morally wrong. By framing the issue in this manner, the authors impose an order that treats the reaction to an issue as the issue.

To set the scene, the authors indicate there is something amiss about our time. They say we may live in the first period of history where every demographic feels “existentially slighted all the time.” This has created a cycle of mutual condemnation, which leads us to treat each other with contempt. The authors argue that “democracy cannot survive contempt.” All these statements are debatable.

Arguably, democracy was “born” with contempt that was visceral and violent. Women, enslaved black people and Native Americans were not equal human beings or citizens. And these groups’ fights for equality always generated tensions as disruptive as in our time. The southern slave states felt “existentially slighted” enough to go to war over their right to own other humans. During the civil rights movement, white people felt “violated and victimised” by black people’s demands for equality. You cannot look at the photographs or footage of violent attacks on peaceful protesters – or of the group screaming at six-year-old Ruby Bridges – without sensing that these are people who felt threatened in some fundamental manner. Dr Martin Luther King Jr, concerned by the backlash, warned that America “may now be in … an era of change as far-reaching in its consequences as the American Revolution.” Conceivably then, the existence of anger, or contempt, has accompanied the democratic experiment and isn’t distinctive to our times.

An understanding that democracy was “born” with contempt shapes and redirects our attention to what should be considered a critical threat to democracy. According to Jan-Werner Müller, a political philosopher from Princeton, what really threatens democracy isn’t disagreement, since the true function of democracy is allowing for “disagreement in perpetuity.” The real threat to democracy is an attack on the means or the infrastructure established for dealing with disagreements. For Müller, Crop writes, “you cannot expel or disenfranchise citizens, or attempt to limit their participation in the political process. This is democracy’s ‘hard border’: cross it, and you pose a threat to democracy itself.” That would be what the Republicans are currently doing or attempting to do, as discussed. The authors are silent on this point.

This silence might be explained by their preference for Alexis de Tocqueville’s “soaring vision” of a thick democracy over a thin democracy. To the authors, thin democracy “connotes very little indeed: regular free and fair elections, the rule of law, tolerance of opposition political parties, and a set of rules that determine how publicly binding decisions get made.” It is difficult, however, to see how one can achieve a version of thick democracy without first protecting thin democracy. Without thin democracy, you return to a system of institutional contempt. In any case, it has never been the lack of a “soaring vision” that is the problem. After all, the “magnanimous vision” – “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” – was stated by men who, in the words of David Livingstone Smith, “participated in the brutal and degrading institution of slavery.”

Nevertheless, accepting the argument that democracy cannot survive contempt, let’s examine the nature of the contempt deemed to be the problem. The authors state that “contempt has been almost universally condemned as the kind of moral emotion from which nothing good can come.” Immanuel Kant’s moral theory of contempt provides the reasons for the universal objection. According to the authors, Kant is against contempt because “humans have an inalienable dignity simply by virtue of being humans.” As such, contempt – judging “something to be worthless” – denies human beings the respect owed to them as human beings. Kant admits someone might have inward contempt, but performing that contempt outwardly is an “offence.” At this stage we get the first distinguishing characteristic of contempt: it is performative. The authors distil two more: it is judgmental and comparative. We therefore get two overall statements about contempt. It is universally condemned and, distilled, it has three characteristics. Next, Aly and Stephens present three types of contempt: patronising contempt, visceral contempt and moral contempt. The authors concede these types are “not mutually exclusive” and each can “easily bleed into and inflect the others.”

Considering the statement that contempt is universally condemned, that it has three characteristics, and that there are three types of contempt (which are not mutually exclusive) raises some absurd scenarios. Michelle Mason, who advances the view that contempt can be morally required in certain circumstances, probes these scenarios. She asks: if remorse were to be expressed by perpetrators of the Holocaust, ought the victims and survivors forgive such perpetrators? “Should they feel morally pressured to stifle their contempt?” These are, of course, difficult questions, but Uncivil Wars is meant to be addressing difficult moral issues.

Importantly, I think Mason’s questioning might expose an assumption in Kant’s moral theory of contempt. While Kant formulated these egalitarian principles, he himself endorsed racism and sexism. He considered black people to be unable to govern themselves, and thus they “serve only as slaves.” The point isn’t the racism or the sexism. It is whether Kant’s theory of contempt was “tested” against those he considered less than human – in the way Mason’s probing challenges us to do. It is likely Kant’s theory was intended to manage relations between individuals who mutually recognise each other’s humanity. This seems logical. In this situation, contempt – if allowed to fester – would threaten that mutuality and undermine the foundation of their shared life. To the contrary, where such mutual recognition doesn’t exist, it is manifestly absurd to argue that enslaved people have a moral obligation or duty not to hold their enslavers in contempt because they are human beings with inalienable dignity and shouldn’t be treated as worthless, while that is precisely how the enslaved are treated.

Whatever absurdities might arise, the authors appear to imply that upward contempt will always remain morally objectionable. To develop this argument, they supplement the Kantian view of contempt with their construction of a “Baldwinian” approach. This is meant to address two things. First, to embed their argument that responding to contempt with contempt isn’t morally justified and should be resisted. This means that even if grave injustices exist (as they did during the civil rights movement), upward contempt is still morally objectionable. Second, the Baldwinian approach is regarded as appropriate for our time. The authors posit that in our current political environment, “in which everyone claims to be victimised, ‘upwardness’ becomes far from straightforward.” To draw out this complexity, the authors provide the example of working-class white people who consider discrimination against them to be just as bad or even worse than that experienced by racial minorities (such as African Americans). The Baldwinian approach is advanced as providing the morally acceptable response to these challenges. In my view, however, the authors overstretch Baldwin’s work.

The authors cast Baldwin’s body of work as a “monument to the refusal of contempt.” In addition to extracting from Baldwin’s novel Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, the authors focus on the letter in his book The Fire Next Time. They draw attention to Baldwin telling his nephew that he must not only accept white people, but also accept them with love because “these innocent people” are “still trapped in a history which they do not understand.” The authors claim this language captures Baldwin’s “moral claims for racial justice” and that it is “far removed from a disposition of contempt.” The authors imply Baldwin’s understanding is shared by the “greatest advocates for racial justice.” These include W.E.B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King Jr. For emphasis, the authors contrast Baldwin’s perception of the Black Power movement. They argue that for Baldwin the problem wasn’t that “Black Power is immoral on account of its militancy.” Instead, “Baldwin regarded the Black Power movement as a kind of tragic figure.”

It is questionable whether Baldwin’s use of phrases such as “innocent people,” “accept them with love” or “war between brothers” means what the authors claim. Baldwin considered innocence, especially this particular kind of white innocence, to be a crime. Earlier in the letter quoted by the authors, Baldwin wrote: “it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.” He did not speak of innocence in the manner that we would look at a child’s mistake as rendering them guiltless. This kind of white innocence is complicit, through ignorance, wilful blindness or tacit justification of the destruction of black lives. Indeed, before naming that innocence a crime, Baldwin wrote in the same letter: “I know, which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it.” As such, what the authors derive from this term seems to be the exact opposite of its intended meaning. In fact, it is arguable that the white working class who believe they are suffering discrimination equal to or greater than black people today, are suffering from this kind of white innocence.

Further, Baldwin’s concept of love was directly opposed to the romanticised version. In Down at the Cross, he wrote: “I use the word ‘love’ … not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.” It is easy to discern how that concept of love connects with the concept of innocence: they both call for maturity. Part of that maturity is the ability to face the truth and the suffering that may bring. For Baldwin, “people who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are.” It is also debatable whether Baldwin’s reference to “brother” has the implied meaning advanced by the authors. This was not necessarily a spiritual or political brotherhood; it was literal. He often referred to the rape of enslaved women and how that had led to African Americans who were “visibly and legally” descendants of enslavers. To Baldwin, black and white Americans were “blood” brothers who could do nothing to change that.

Overall, it is even harder to reconcile the authors’ construction of the Baldwinian approach with the purpose of his work. Baldwin dismissed the “sloppy and fatuous nature of American good will.” He claimed it could never be relied on to deal with hard problems – only with those changes born of political necessity, and by necessity he meant “concession made in order to stay on top.” On the other hand, Baldwin saw no real improvements without “radical and far-reaching changes in the American political and social structure.” As did King. Those who study his philosophical theory argue King’s “political hopes” were informed by the conviction that societies have to “grow and change, in radical and perhaps revolutionary ways,” to achieve justice.

This call for “radical and far-reaching changes” seems to go against much of what the essay advocates, and directly contradicts the authors’ characterisation of the Baldwinian approach as being about “steadfastness and patience.” Baldwin’s approach couldn’t be more different. In 1971, speaking of his two-year-old nephew, Baldwin said his frame of reference was that his nephew was not going to live the life he had lived even if it “demands blowing up the Empire State Building or whatever it demands.” He is known to have asked white America how much more time it needed for its progress when it had already cost his father and him time. He reproached William Faulkner for similar reasons, stating the time Faulkner asked for “does not exist.” For Baldwin there was no time in the future; the time was “always now.”

Arguably, King also rejected calls for patience. In his memoir Stride Toward Freedom, King mentions a speech in which he told the congregation that they had come “to be saved from that patience that makes us patient with anything less than freedom and justice.” Famously, King reproved the well-intentioned white moderate who was more devoted to “order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.” He said he had “almost reached the regrettable conclusion” that these well-intentioned moderates were a greater stumbling block to black people’s stride to freedom than the Ku Klux Klan. With these counterarguments laid out, it is difficult to reconcile the authors’ construction of Baldwin’s, and by extension King’s, position with their own.

And this is not their only error. The authors also misunderstand Baldwin’s critique of what they call the “Black Power movement.” Perhaps they meant the Black Panther movement. Black power is a concept that has militarist and non-militarist expressions. It can simply mean pride in blackness or culture. In the cultural sense, it is a way of shoring up a feeling of self-worth against the many racial stereotypes black people often confront. Black Power can, indeed, have militaristic and supremacist expressions. The Black Panther movement certainly embraced a militaristic approach, but not always a supremacist approach. It was formed originally as the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. And the self-defence was meant to be against police brutality. Where Baldwin and King criticised Black Power was when it spilled over to Black Supremacy. Baldwin thought that tragic. And it is tragic. Any supremacy leads to hierarchies of dehumanisation. In any case, and possibly because of these complexities, Baldwin not only “[felt] an undeniable tenderness towards” members of the Black Power movement, as conceded by the authors – he understood them and even conceded “intellectual grounds” to them. For example, in his letter to Angela Davis (quoted in part in Uncivil Wars), he acknowledged the “enormous revolution in black consciousness” occurring in the younger generation. Baldwin even appealed to Davis not to “appear to be your father’s daughter in the same way that I am my father’s son.” Baldwin recognised that he, like his father, was constrained by what was expected of their generation and what was often sold as the model of a good black leader. He stated, with a force that is confronting, that his father “was just a n*gger – a n*gger laborer preacher, and so was I.” It is remarkable how much intellectual ground Baldwin concedes to the younger generation and to this “revolution in black consciousness.” Such intellectual humility is hard to come by in our era, where younger generations are often castigated as woke snowflakes who are unable to keep their calm or a job.

Above all, however, whatever his disagreement with the Black Power movement, Baldwin never made their reaction, contemptuous or otherwise, the cause of the American racial problem. He simply did not commit the error this Quarterly Essay makes by focusing not on the source of contempt, but on the victim’s reaction to contempt. Baldwin in fact called out the apparent hypocrisy when he noted that “violence and heroism have been made synonymous except when it comes to blacks.” He argued the only way to deal with those who embrace militant acts, like Malcom X, isn’t to point to triumphs and progress made so far, but to concede that they are right and ask why this is so. Therefore, Baldwin had a radically different approach to the one proposed by Aly and Stephens. And he was right never to lose sight of the source of contempt. And here lies the greatest challenge to the authors’ arguments.

Of all the “greatest advocates for racial justice” that are named in the essay, none had a fate that was drastically different from the fate of the “tragic” Black Power movement. Du Bois, a civil rights pioneer and intellectual, renounced his American citizenship and died in Ghana. Baldwin was worried “nothing has changed in the depths” and that America might be in “worse trouble than before.” He spent significant time in France and died there. King was assassinated.

It is telling that King, despite a lifetime commitment to non-violence, suffered a similar fate to Black Panthers members who – as Baldwin sorrowfully lamented – were killed “like rats.” So, despite the authors implying that the Black Power movement’s failure was determined by its contemptuous approach, it can equally be explained by its members being killed, sometimes in their beds.

Of course, Aly and Stephens’ explanation remains consistent with their claim that responding to contempt with contempt is not wise because it might attract worse outcomes. This, however, creates a circular argument. Why did the people who arrested or killed members of the Black Power movement not respond with “brotherly love” or non-contempt? After all, as Baldwin pointed out, “there is no reason that black men should be expected to be more patient, more forbearing, more farseeing than white.” Is the moral responsibility for resisting contempt one that is only imposed on the contemned? And if it is only imposed on the contemned, mainly because any other reaction might result in a worse kind of contempt for the contemned, what is the point of moralising if there is only one moral possibility? And what are the practical consequences of a moral duty upheld by a threat? Isn’t that analogous to the claim that a slave contract was legitimate because, as summarised by Fukuyama, “a weak individual faced [with] a choice between a life of slavery or death at the hands of a stronger person … could voluntarily choose to be a slave”? Whatever the response to these questions, Dr King’s violent assassination diminishes any claim that the manner of protest, and not what is being protested, is the problem.

Whatever the authors might believe to be the “record of lasting change” of non-contemptuous actions, Dr King’s own view of that record isn’t that glorious. Neither was the public’s at the time. Dr King died with a disapproval rating of nearly 75 per cent – a figure that is noted by James C. Cobb as “shocking in its own day and still striking even in today’s highly polarized political climate.” He became beloved after his death. Reading King’s own assessment of his life’s work, and what was happening to it in his lifetime, is heart-breaking. In his essay “Impasse in Race Relation,” Dr King spoke of white backlash and the undoing of civil rights progress. These were some of his last statements on racism, poverty and war before he was killed:

According to Lawrence Glickman, writing in The Atlantic, white backlash has been a defining pattern of American history. For Glickman, the elements of white backlash to the civil rights movement were its smouldering resentment, its belief that the movement was proceeding “too fast,” its demands for emotional and psychological sympathy, and its displacement of African Americans’ struggles with its own claims of grievance. Glickman notes this backlash often deployed “imagined coercion where it did not exist” and “embraced a lexicon and posture of victimization.” It was reported at the time, for example, that “white panic” was driven by fears of “favoritism” and “special privileges” for African Americans and fears that “the Negros want to take over the country.” It doesn’t take much to see how these fears and anxieties parallel many of the complaints of Trump supporters and the white working class that the authors write about in their essay. What is even more striking is how early in American history the charge of “favouritism” arose in response to calls for equality. Less than twenty years after the abolition of slavery, the United States Supreme Court nullified the Civil Rights Act of 1875 on the grounds that it was time for former enslaved people to cease “to be the special favorite of the laws.”

Aly and Stephens present the matter of poor and working-class whites as something that complicates the picture, yet the picture is less complicated than it is historically consistent. Besides, the argument proceeds as if there are no poor or working-class non-whites. There are. Yet these groups don’t appear to be making the same political choices or rushing into the Trump coalition. Even warning that focusing on aggregated advantages accrued by white people (like over-representation of white men in politics) should be avoided because it obscures the experiences of working-class whites, it is not long before we hit another inconsistency. It is there in the bodies that don’t seem to be registered in the warning about “body-counts.”

The authors challenge those who see a “democratic case for contempt” to show “its track record of lasting change.” They argue that the alternative, such as when contempt underwrites decisive political action, “always involves body-counts.” But there are still body-counts. The body-count has not stopped for some. Sexist contempt kills at least one Australian woman a week through domestic violence. Racist contempt killed George Floyd as he begged to breathe the air we are told is collectively ours. Placing the moral responsibility for resisting contempt on those who are contemned, on the basis that this might avoid deadly contempt against them, isn’t necessarily going to prevent their deaths. We might simply fail to notice those deaths; that is, fail to include them in body-counts because they are not the kind of death that matters, or they are the kind of death we lament but tactically accept as an unavoidable price of patiently waiting for the “moral possibilities of persuasion” to return better outcomes. But since the authors remind us we should not aggregate the advantages accrued by white people to obscure the experiences of working-class whites, perhaps then we should not aggregate the progress made so far to obscure the price that continues to be paid. This reality might be tolerable if the authors’ moral arguments improve the outcome. I do not think they do.

The real problem isn’t necessarily the nature of contemned reaction – whether contemptuous, or Baldwinian love, or King’s non-violence – it is progress itself. In short, in the case of race, white people see equality as a zero-sum game. Research confirms that “white Americans perceive increases in racial equality as threatening their dominant position in American society.” This view, as noted in the section on white backlash, isn’t new. It is a pattern. In the context of gender, a modern version of this zero-sum view is reflected in Scott Morrison’s comment that: “We want to see women rise. But we don’t want to see women rise only on the basis of others doing worse.” This zero-sum frame means that what appears or feels contemptuous might be the very progress of the person – no matter how they do it. This means the contemned need not display any of the distilled characteristics of contempt for a negative reaction to occur. I do not know how we resolve that, but perhaps, like Baldwin, we can better witness to our times.

Baldwin considered himself foremost a witness. We read him today and get a clear picture of what was the sin, who were the sinners, what price was paid, and how we might possibly liberate ourselves, or indeed perish. The task of a witness is to record things as they saw them. What, then, does Uncivil Wars stand as a witness to? Is it an accurate assessment of our time? What, as a matter of style and approach, does it “insist on”? How does it focus “our attention” on some things while “narrowing our attention on others”? Could we really say that cancel culture and political correctness create as symmetrical a threat to democracy as the concerted efforts by Republicans to restrict voting rights in a way that recalls America at the time of Reconstruction?

Wherever our future lies, whether in the grace of equality or in the doom of body-counts, it is not for the contemned to be blamed. Those to be blamed are the ones who insist on that type of innocence Baldwin called criminal. They seek to hold others in perpetual contempt, and human dignity refuses to be divisible. There is little that is theoretically appealing about obtaining one dignity partially or gradually through the “hard labour of patient appeal.” That this has been practically the case is a kind of moral failure which has had deadly consequences. The chance for change lies in challenging that moral failure, not in elevating it as the appropriate form of relating to one another. Even if the contemned have to reconcile themselves with a harsh reality in order to survive, it is never morally wrong not to lose sight of the whole claim to dignity and to insist that it become reality. That it is reality unjustly withheld.

Nyadol Nyuon

SLEEPWALK TO WAR

Correspondence

Dennis Altman

Generals, it is said, tend to fight the last war. There are echoes of this in the growing anxieties about Australia’s security, with references to the dangers of appeasement and Japanese aggression in World War II. Fear of a potential Chinese base in Solomon Islands draws on memories of the battle for Guadalcanal in 1943, when US forces began driving back the Japanese advance.

The American alliance has been the bedrock of Australian security planning since World War II, leading us into wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, and to ever-deepening integration into US military planning. It is the central and most significant insight in Hugh’s essay that this alliance may pose considerable dangers to Australian security, increasing rather than diminishing the possibility of major conflict in what politicians now like to call the Indo-Pacific.

The new federal government is trying to balance commitment to the United States with greater attention to both the Pacific and Southeast Asia, although Albanese’s attendance at the recent NATO summit suggests it shares the dominant paradigm of a global contest between democracies and autocracies. There is some truth to this, but it also ignores the realities of strongly held nationalist grievances. There is a parallel to the way in which the United States and Australia misunderstood the importance of nationalism in Vietnam, seeing the North Vietnamese communists as, to quote Robert Menzies, “part of a thrust by Communist China between the Indian and Pacific Oceans.”

Anxieties about a new Cold War have been heightened by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which echoes centuries-old disputes over territory that at various times has been part of Lithuania, Austria-Hungary and Russia. The conflict is more than simply a vanity project of Vladimir Putin: there is a deep connection between Russia and much of what is now Ukraine, symbolised for many Russians by the city of Odessa, essentially founded by Catherine the Great and immortalised in Eisenstein’s images of the city steps in his film Battleship Potemkin.

To acknowledge history is not to excuse current outrages, but it is necessary to understand why many Russians support the invasion. In the same way, the Chinese claim to Taiwan is based on centuries of Chinese control and bitter memories of the civil wars of last century, when the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek fled to the island. Until 1972 both the United States and Australia recognised his government as that of China, so we can hardly be surprised if the Chinese government believes it has a legitimate claim to the island.

Media commentators in Australia seem surprised that major Third World countries, such as India, Brazil and South Africa, have not joined in condemnation of Russia. The majority of countries in the world – and in our region – have a realistic appraisal of China’s rise and are seeking to find ways of balancing one great power against another. They might well provide a better guide for Australian policy-makers than the hawks of Washington.

It is certainly possible that China may try to take back Taiwan by force, but this does not mean that it is likely to attempt military conquests beyond what it regards as its legitimate territory. Rather, it will behave as other great powers have in using a range of military, economic and political pressures to suit its national interests. The complaint that China is breaking the “rules-based international order” would be more persuasive had the United States not so frequently disregarded these rules.

Hugh has long argued that Australia needs to become more self-sufficient in defence planning, which makes his scepticism about the AUKUS agreement all the more telling. I would only add that the images of Scott Morrison flanked by Joe Biden and Boris Johnson reinforced the perception of many in our region that Australia still longs for a world ruled by white imperial powers, a dangerous delusion for a country situated in the Indo-Pacific region. Penny Wong is clearly aware of these perceptions, as she made clear in stressing that Australians are “more than just supporting players in a grand drama of global geopolitics” at a G20 meeting of foreign ministers.

The disquiet within the region about Australia’s plans for nuclear submarines, expressed most clearly by Malaysia, suggests that there is a cost beyond the astronomical amount required to build, purchase and operate the ships. Labor’s rush to endorse the project was understandable in the lead-up to an election. Now that it holds power, one hopes it will ponder Hugh’s warnings about the problems of the arrangement.

Many years ago, then trade minister Neal Blewett remarked that Australia needs to be particularly agile diplomatically as we belong to no obvious bloc. It is difficult to imagine us as a member of ASEAN, and rhetoric about “the Pacific family” disguises that we are essentially a neo-colonial power, albeit largely benevolent. For a small fraction of our military expenditure, Australia could increase its diplomatic presence, which Lowy Institute research has shown lags behind that of most comparable countries.

As Hugh points out, Morrison’s claim that our alliance with the United States and the United Kingdom is a “forever partnership” ignores the harsh reality that countries will act according to their perception of national interest at any given moment. With the possibility of a return to power by Trump, or by a Republican in the Trump mould, our reliance on the United States becomes more dangerous. (In my first draft I typed “Untied States,” which is increasingly appropriate.) In pointing to the flaws of the AUKUS agreement, Hugh is echoing comments in September 2021 by Paul Keating, who diagnosed “a monster level of incompetence.”

Hugh’s essay is a powerful antidote to the excessive dependence on the United States, which is increasing even as that country becomes internally more divided and isolationist. While politicians rail against Chinese influence in our universities, the University of Sydney hosts a large US Studies Centre that increasingly positions itself as a booster of the American alliance. Many years ago, when I sat on its advisory committee, I suggested that a key research question was to evaluate the benefits of the alliance; that question went unanswered.

A world dominated by China is not an attractive proposition, one that is worth working to prevent. But to do this requires skilful diplomacy and an acceptance that neither we nor the United States can prevent its rise as the predominant military and economic power in East Asia. As Hugh points out, there are “profound moral imperatives” as we balance values and principles against the imperative to avoid war. “Peace,” he reminds us, “is a value too.”

It is possible that Russia’s slow advance in Ukraine, following the ignominious withdrawal of the United States from Afghanistan, suggests that military interventions of this sort are relics of a dying world. In a recent article in The New York Review of Books Sophie Pinkham writes that Russia’s attack “begins to look like the convulsion of a dying state,” asserting that massive climate change is eroding Russia’s internal stability.

Pinkham’s essay reminds us that we need a more fundamental re-evaluation of Australia’s security interests than Hugh’s essay suggests. His argument rests on an assumption that China’s rise presents the greatest challenge to Australia’s security. Yet over the past few years the realities of climate change and new epidemic diseases have been far greater assaults on national security than Chinese trade embargoes and cyber interference.

If scientific forecasts are correct, the AUKUS submarines will be delivered into a very different world to the current one, a world in which fire, flood, pestilence, food shortages and massive refugee flows will present real and present dangers. It is easier to envision enormous social, economic and political upheavals in our part of the world as consequences of non-military disasters than it is to imagine a Chinese military attack on Australia.

The scale of such upheavals will require us to work with the Chinese government, however repugnant its domestic repressions. Were the Republicans to control US politics after 2024, this would produce the greatest strain on our alliance since the Whitlam government, so well described in James Curran’s Unholy Fury. If the Albanese government is serious about making climate change a crucial element of its approach to domestic and foreign policy, how would it respond to a United States that refused to accept the Paris Agreement? We already know that climate change is a central concern for Pacific island nations. Faced with a choice between China and Trump’s America, should we be surprised were they to favour Beijing?

Dennis Altman

SLEEPWALK TO WAR

Correspondence

Rory Medcalf

Strategic analysis can be a weird game. With incomplete information, in a haze of uncertainty, you are expected to reach durable conclusions about the interplay of power, people and events, their impact on national interests, and options for sound policy.

There are several ways to play. The most frustrating is the endless hedge of discussion and description, without an actual attempt to guide strategy: matters could go this way, or that; we lack a full dataset (and always will, since this is about the future, not just history); so better to be hesitant than wrong. Leaders shun such stuff. Foreign Minister Penny Wong openly laments commentary that merely “admires the problem.”

Rarer is the effort to strike a fine balance of evidence, plausible judgments and practical implications for decision-makers. Proffer conclusions, by all means, but temper with analytic humility. Concede the limits of your information and method, recognise what you may have got wrong in the past, be prepared to change your mind and avoid the temptation to score points. It should be about the community of experts helping government get the best estimate. That’s how good assessment works in the intelligence world. It’s a pity that public discourse too often responds to other and somewhat perverse incentives: the reward is less for being useful than for product differentiation.

I’ve admired my ANU colleague Professor Hugh White for decades: his singular intellectual style, public profile (such that many mistakenly assume he speaks for Australia), unorthodox career, generous mentorship of next-generation thinkers, sharp good humour, even his zeal. He is a past master of the strategic analysis game. But he insists on playing it just one narrow way – his own, derived from his training in philosophy and winner-takes-all Oxford debating. And, sadly, his new Quarterly Essay maintains the cage.

True to the essay’s title, Sleepwalk to War, Hugh’s is a mesmerising approach. It’s a kind of syllogistic hypnosis, using superbly readable prose to generate camouflage that looks like free and open debate. That sounds uncharitable. But my frustration comes from forever hoping for more: waiting through several essays and books now for Professor White to engage on terms wider than those he rigidly sets (always the same) at the outset of each foray. That, of course, would make for a very different intellectual expedition, one where the end – China wins, America loses, Australia needs to change drastically before it’s too late, and anyway it’s probably too late – is not preordained. In this ritualised tragedy, the author’s argument always triumphs. But the denouement feels less like the outcome of an exhaustive and evidence-rich contest of ideas and more like the imagined acme of Chinese strategy: winning without fighting.

Despite the obligatory early reference to a pat economic projection (that China will overtake America as world’s largest economy), and various admissions that we need to consider China’s power-play in wider contexts, the essay is really a self-contained drama with few protagonists, dimensions and moving parts. It’s primarily about conventional and nuclear military confrontation between China and the United States in East Asia, principally over the status of Taiwan, the risks and projected outcome of war, and the decisions this forces on Australia. This is interspersed with a lot of virtuous throat-clearing about Canberra’s alleged missteps in China policy over many years, a critique of the AUKUS technology-sharing agreement and a selective tour of global and regional security dynamics, but all to reinforce the headline argument: that, if we are to live with a powerful China, we must turn our statecraft towards urging America to back off. This means – and Hugh cannot be accused of lacking clarity here – “abandoning Taiwan to Beijing.” This line is so thunderous, it may paradoxically lull readers into thinking they’re wide awake and alert to all realities, rather than dazed by a false dichotomy.

Hugh aims to provoke, and he does. Other correspondents will no doubt elaborate on the awful implications of such anticipatory capitulation – surrendering a self-ruled, Australia-sized community at the heart of Asia to a fate worse than Hong Kong’s, demolishing the most successful democratic endeavour in the history of Chinese civilisation and the most robust young democracy in the Indo-Pacific. Hugh’s rejoinder is that, while this may not be pleasant, it beats nuclear war. This computes in the parameters of his self-structured debate, but it ignores all plausible futures short of unlimited war. If you accept that, in the years ahead, Beijing is more likely to launch campaigns of extreme pressure than do-or-die invasion (and that any planned invasion would be preceded by a rising tempo of threats and coercion), then we need to hear also about how to counter and deter China in that vast grey zone. Hugh’s commitment to peace is admirable, and his point that America is underinvesting in front-line conventional forces is well made, but this does not mean Beijing is poised to risk doing battle with them. A counsel of despair can also be an invitation to aggression – and overlook that the loss of Taiwan could prove the beginning, not the end, of a perilous struggle for security in Asia, not least in the view from Tokyo.

China doesn’t want war, as Hugh acknowledges, and would much prefer a bloodless victory. For Australia, America, Japan and a range of other prospective partners, sensible policy advice therefore would be to understand Beijing’s coercive playbook and explore every avenue of preparedness and deterrence. Well before it contemplates total war, China is likely to consider economic sanctions, maritime blockades, political interference, cyberattacks, sabotage of critical infrastructure, disinformation, intimidating military exercises, incursions and seizure of outlying islands. All of these steps are feasible; some are already being tried. They exist in a space of contingency, where matters could go either way: they could be discouraged, even deterred, by a combination of military, economic, cyber, intelligence and diplomatic measures. Or they could bring risks of escalation and damage to the global economy and its technology supply chains, in which Taiwan plays an integral part. But this spectrum of potential Chinese action also widens the range of prospective countermeasures by the many nations wanting to preserve the status quo. These could involve increasing support to Taiwan as an advanced economy and a durable democracy located close to vital international sea lanes, without necessarily crossing thresholds to state recognition.

Even an imminent or limited Taiwan conflict would have dire economic consequences for Australia and globally (as our iron-ore miners privately know, and many corporations worldwide are beginning to wargame). One of the many lessons from Ukraine is the danger of economic reliance providing asymmetric leverage to an authoritarian aggressor. A fruitful avenue for new policy thinking is not only how to wean oneself off such dangerous dependence, but how to begin turning the tables. If Beijing’s Taiwan threats jeopardise the international economic order on which China’s internal stability depends, then it makes sense to begin mapping the collective geoeconomic leverage of democratic states and signalling how this could be brought to bear. This is a conversation that has begun in America, Japan and, crucially, even in Europe (including Germany) – whose investment, technology and markets China needs more than the other way around. If a Taiwan conflict is going to destroy business as usual – and it surely would – then what’s to lose from warning about that up-front and weaponising that fact as a form of deterrence? This geoeconomic dimension may seem peripheral to Hugh’s thesis, and may matter less if the shooting starts, but to ignore it entirely is to miss an opportunity for policy advice more realistic and nuanced than simply “abandon Taiwan.”

And geoeconomics is hardly the only vital piece of context missing or out of place in the unsettling dream world of Sleepwalk. Nations are not billiard balls, responding identically and predictably to the laws of physics: if they were, then Ukraine would have surrendered by day three; Japan, Vietnam, the Philippines and India would long ago have conceded their contested boundaries to China; and Canberra would have meekly accepted the fourteen points accompanying Beijing’s economic coercion. Internal dynamics, leadership, risk calculations, events, national identity and public mood all matter. So it is disappointing how little attention the essay pays to what goes on inside China – though surely everything else follows from this.

There’s understandable reference to the troubled state of American politics, and a dismissal of the Taiwanese people’s will to fight, yet almost nothing about the internal challenges and attitudes of Chinese society, other than the uncritical assertion that primacy or regional leadership is “as dear to China’s people as it is to their leaders” – implying that they are universally ready for total war in this cause. This does a disservice to the complexity of what China’s people and the Communist Party must face. Development and stability are still compelling national priorities. Yet these must now be achieved with a slowing economy, a rapidly ageing society without a safety net, growing mistrust of China across much of the world, pollution and resource pressures, rolling debt crises, constant suppression of diverse springs of dissent, patterns of political and professional disengagement among youth, and a still-deferred reckoning with the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Extreme nationalism spilling into military aggression may be an insecure Xi’s circuit-breaker for such internal trouble – or may make China’s predicament worse. We simply don’t know, though we do know the enormous lengths to which the Communist Party’s propaganda machine goes to insist that China owns the future. Yet we are asked to believe that the Chinese people are more than ready to leap over decades of restraint from almost any use of external armed force to risk everything – including generations of economic wellbeing – on a sudden willingness to wage nuclear war, and therefore strategically it’s game over.

There’s likewise a frustrating selectivity in the essay with evidence when it comes to the crucial questions of Australian and American objectives. We are told Washington is incapable of making Asia policy in any terms other than seeking primacy, even though it is acknowledged that some leading strategic thinkers on both sides of US politics are starting to explore more realistic alternatives. And we are told Australia’s entire policy-making elite has timidly put the nation’s fate in American hands – even though so many of the decisions that have upset China in recent years (such as the Quad and the bolstering of domestic security) can be read credibly as efforts to diversify our partnerships and do more for our own protection. It’s baffling how wilfully the essay jumbles the timeline of Australia–China relations (during, before and after the reality check of the Turnbull years). It’s easy to disprove the claim that Australian policy was essentially about impressing and following America. Indeed, Australia was the pioneer on many of the issues Hugh refers to; China knows this, and has said as much, which helps explain its bullying. The first round of the Sam Dastyari affair, which signalled the start of Australian pushback against Chinese Communist Party interference, occurred months before the election of Trump – who initially had no wish to pressure allies on China in any case.

The essay is also curiously uneven in the way it treats regional and global settings, as if these are painted opera scenery to be moved around as fits the unfolding plot. On the one hand, we are told China wants primacy in East Asia but is content to leave its hands off the Indian Ocean (and by extension South Asia and Africa), and will fail – thanks to Indian, Russian and European “multipolarity” – if it foolishly makes a play for Eurasia. And since it can’t dominate Eurasia, it won’t really threaten America by controlling the resources of this global heartland. Yet the argument somehow dismisses the whole question of whether multipolarity will, in time, work against China’s interests in the Indo-Pacific, where within a few decades the combined economic, population and military weight of India, Japan, Australia and Indonesia could, without America, be larger than China’s. Hugh claims that China and India can avoid a clash of interests because China will leave the Indian Ocean as a sphere of interest for India. This requires erasure of the inconvenient fact of Xi’s signature external policy, the Belt and Road Initiative, which involves dominance of ports, undersea cables and other economic infrastructure across the two oceans, Eurasia and beyond. None of this means that India will line up militarily against China in a war over Taiwan – one of Hugh’s favourite straw men is to claim that some of us imagine India alone will save the day.

But it does mean that China courts a widening horizon of risk and is provoking balancing coalitions across Indo-Pacific and global landscapes it cannot dominate. All this widens the aperture for more creative and expansive Australian policy – including multilateral engagement with Southeast Asia, support for Pacific and Indian Ocean island countries grounded in more than our own security fears, and, yes, judicious dialogue with China based on coexistence, mutual interest and an attempt at mutual respect. On that vision, perhaps Hugh and I can agree – though there’s no need to prematurely surrender Taiwan to get there.

Rory Medcalf

SLEEPWALK TO WAR

Correspondence

Sam Roggeveen

From the publication of his 2010 Quarterly Essay, Power Shift, to the release of his latest, Sleepwalk to War, Hugh White’s body of work on the consequences of China’s rise has generated a mountain of commentary and criticism. Yet remarkably, none of it has laid a glove on his most important claim: that America’s overall security is not threatened by China’s ascent to leadership in East Asia.

If White is correct on this point, it suggests that every statement made by every US administration about the importance of Asia to American security and economic wellbeing, every reassurance to friends and allies in the region that America can only be secure if Asia is secure, is built on sand.

To my knowledge, no one in the Australian security commentariat, or among national security leaders in our two major parties, has directly taken on this crucial idea. White’s critics often complain that he has been repeating himself for over a decade. Yet that leaves them no excuse. They should have rebutted him by now.

I don’t think we can conclude that silence implies assent. Rather, silence is a form of avoidance because White’s conclusion is just too uncomfortable. Australia is betting its future security on the proposition that Asia is critical to the United States, and that therefore the United States will be prepared to secure a favourable order in Asia, even if it means fighting China. White overturns this assumption. He argues that America’s security interests in Asia are not vital, and certainly not important enough to risk a catastrophic war with China.

That’s a radical enough conclusion, with consequences for Australia that ought to be exercising the minds of our decision-makers. Unfortunately, this government is seemingly no more ready than the last to entertain any limits to what it insists on calling the “unbreakable alliance,” as if such a thing ever existed in history. Yet in Sleepwalk to War, White goes further still, when he describes what comes after American leadership in Asia. He says, “it is hard to see what could stop China dominating East Asia and the Western Pacific. No other country in the region has either the power or the disposition to resist it.”

This is where White leaves room for debate. His use of the term “dominance” is not quite consistent throughout the essay. At some points “dominance” seems highly coercive. For instance, White says that to really threaten America, China would have to dominate Eurasia first: “Only then would it command a material resource base big enough to overwhelm American conventional defences and – just conceivably – overmatch and neutralise its nuclear forces. And only then would it be free of rivals closer to home, which would allow it to focus its power on America.”

So “domination” here refers to a great power’s ability to agglomerate the resources of the states which it dominates, and then direct this combined force at a rival. It also implies that the dominant power can impose its foreign policy goals on subordinate states. This would be something akin to the Soviet Union’s position vis-à-vis the smaller Warsaw Pact countries.

But White also says: “India will dominate South Asia and the Indian Ocean, and China will dominate East Asia and the Western Pacific. Each of them will be strong enough to deter the other from seriously interfering in its sphere of influence.”

Here we might interpret White as saying that to dominate a region is to exercise a sphere of influence over it. But a “sphere of influence” is commonly defined as being looser and less intrusive than “dominance.” As White points out, Australia has traditionally exercised a sphere of influence in the Pacific, as does the United States in Latin America. Where a major power boasts a sphere of influence, it can exercise authority due to its economic and military weight. It can also exclude other great powers from exerting influence within the sphere. Yet as traditionally defined, a sphere of influence does not allow the leading power to appropriate the military, diplomatic and economic resources of the countries under their tutelage to further their own foreign policy ambitions.

Is Chinese “dominance” of East Asia likely by the first, stronger, definition? It is not the present reality, even for North Korea, China’s only formal ally. Perhaps weaker Southeast Asian states such as Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar will fall under China’s direct control (though if they ever do, they will become a drain on Chinese power rather than add to it). China is not likely to impose direct Soviet-like control over bigger Southeast Asian countries, and for powers such as Japan, South Korea, Indonesia and Australia it is out of the question unless China physically conquers them first.

I would argue that even the latter, weaker, definition of “dominance” does not fully describe Asia’s likely future under Chinese leadership. True, we can already see the makings of a Chinese sphere of influence in its relations with smaller Southeast Asian neighbours. Others may slip further into China’s orbit and away from the United States; the Philippines and Thailand look particularly vulnerable.

But beyond that, the task will be challenging for China because maintaining a sphere of influence over maritime Asia requires enormous resources – primarily a huge navy, preferably with a handful of well-located foreign bases to support it. Of course, China has a big navy, and nobody can stop it from getting much bigger still. But as White himself has argued forcefully on other occasions, in the maritime realm, the advantage rests with the side trying to prevent an adversary from imposing dominance.

This is especially true over long distances, which make it difficult to project sustained naval power. Smaller countries can concentrate their lesser defence resources near their coast, with the result that even much bigger navies can have their power blunted just enough that the smaller state never needs to submit to the great power’s authority.

Distance is not the only constraint. Even at a slight geographical remove, smaller powers have options because of the inherent limitations of navies. For instance, White says, “Taiwan cannot realistically expect to defend itself from China.” But I would argue it is still too early for such a stark conclusion. Even under the imbalance of forces that exists today, Taiwan has some hope of repelling a Chinese invasion because, in the missile age, military operations involving large surface fleets are incredibly risky, even over short distances. Taiwan is able to impose high costs on China by targeting the ships it needs to mount an invasion. If Taiwan spent more than its current 2 per cent of GDP on defence and sharpened its focus on the so-called “porcupine strategy” (small, agile forces rather than ships, tanks and fast jets), it could set Beijing’s ambitions back by years.

Still, let’s assume Taiwan is eventually retaken by China. White says this will be a disaster for America’s regional alliance structure, which “will crumble” as a result. Again, this seems too stark. It is equally plausible that Japan, South Korea and Australia will breathe a quiet sigh of relief that the United States has conserved its military resources rather than expended them defending Taiwan. Besides, what’s the alternative for America’s allies? They would need to declare that it is no longer reliable, politely kick US troops out of their countries and then build up their own military forces, including with nuclear weapons. That’s much harder than maintaining the status quo.

To return to where we began, none of this is to disagree with White’s claim that American resolve in East Asia is eroding and unlikely to recover. The United States faces a highly motivated and well-resourced China, and America’s own security interests in the region are not vital enough to justify taking on such a big rival.

But White paints American resolve as a quickly diminishing resource. In fact, he says it could be exhausted at a stroke if Taiwan falls. My response is that for each setback, there is a fallback. China’s assertion of hegemony over the South China Sea was a setback, yet American resolve and the US alliance system did not crumble. Nor are they likely to crumble if Taiwan falls.

To be clear, I’m not saying that the United States will transition from a dominant power to a balancing power in East Asia. White argues convincingly that it wouldn’t gain much from such an arrangement. If it is self-aware enough to recognise that its vital interests are not threatened by China, then settling for a lesser security role in East Asia is no more attractive than having no role at all. Rather, I would argue that residual American resolve can delay Chinese dominance indefinitely. Japan, South Korea and Australia have strong political and bureaucratic incentives to hold on to their alliances, and America’s other partners in the region also want it to stay. On the US side, there is simply no political or bureaucratic constituency for withdrawal from East Asia. Even after a viscerally anti-alliance president came to office in 2016, America’s military footprint in Asia did not change.

White would presumably reply that simply maintaining alliance arrangements is not in itself a demonstration of American resolve. To show that it really is committed to competing with China, the United States must massively up its military game in East Asia. He is right. America has been standing pat in East Asia since the end of the Cold War, and although no US administration will ever admit it, this is a de facto decision to go into relative decline. Allies and adversaries recognise this for what it is – an erosion of American resolve.

But America’s military presence in Asia, particularly its marines and navy in Japan (55,000 military personnel plus a permanently stationed aircraft carrier), will remain a potent force. Even if this force is outmatched by China in future, it will act as a “trip-wire” whose destruction could prompt the United States to use nuclear weapons in retaliation. As White reminds us, nuclear weapons cast a dark shadow over the US–China contest. While the chance of nuclear use is small, that slight possibility is tremendously significant because the consequences will be so cataclysmic. This low-risk/high-consequence dynamic works against a dramatic transition away from US power because although China may well believe American resolve is eroding, it cannot afford to make risky bets on that belief – the consequences of being wrong are too high. Hence even a lukewarm US commitment to its Asian allies can constrain China.

There is one more extenuating factor. If, as now seems likely, China’s economy grows more slowly than previously forecast, we might never see clear daylight between the United States and China in terms of their national power. Recent Lowy Institute research suggests they will remain roughly equal for the indefinite future, which makes China’s task of presenting itself as overwhelmingly the leading power in East Asia that much harder.

Again, this will not affect the ultimate transition away from US leadership in East Asia, but it will extend America’s horizon. And when the curtain finally falls on the age of American leadership in East Asia, the region stands a good chance of being able to prevent a new era of Chinese dominance.

Sam Roggeveen

SLEEPWALK TO WAR

Correspondence

Michael J. Green

Hugh White’s essay Sleepwalk to War starts with a compelling observation about China. “Not since we faced Imperial Japan in the 1940s,” he states, “have things been so bad between us and a major Asian power. And this is potentially worse.” This jarring but accurate statement is the right starting point for a serious discussion about Australian strategy and managing relations with China and the alliance with the United States. But the essay unfortunately goes on to provide the wrong diagnosis of the problem and then essentially concludes that the best treatment for Australia is pre-emptive strategic euthanasia.

Sleepwalk to War reads like an Australian iteration of the hyper-realism of self-professed American “restrainers” such as John Mearsheimer or Stephen Walt. The balance of power that upsets these authors most is not in the Indo-Pacific, but in Canberra and Washington. Their greatest ire is reserved not for China or Russia, but for their own foreign policy establishments’ “alliance back-slapping” and “cringe-makingly sentimental” statements.

It is always fun to critique the bureaucrats, of course, but the attacks would be more convincing if the underlying analysis of the power dynamics in the international system was actually right. The geopolitical competition in the Indo-Pacific is not the simple bipolar contest between China and America that Hugh posits; nor is the world moving towards respective spheres of influence with China at the centre of Asia, as he predicts. The only country in the region that would like this to be so is China, which is why Beijing promotes its own version of Hugh’s argument through repetition of Graham Allison’s “Thucydides Trap” thesis and offer of a “new model of great power relations,” in which the United States would avoid conflict by conceding to Chinese demands in a bipolar condominium that excludes the interests of Australia, Japan and other US allies and partners.

But this is not Athens and Sparta. The regional distribution of power is not bipolar. Instead, the Indo-Pacific region is defined increasingly by a multipolarity in which almost all of the other regional powers greatly prefer the existing US-led rules-based order to Chinese hegemony. To the extent Hugh pays attention to the other players in the system, it is to dismiss them as doomed or feckless. He ignores Japan’s growing defence capabilities, jointness with the United States and infrastructure financing (which rivals China’s Belt and Road and is much better received); South Korea’s recent election of a government much more aligned with US regional strategy; and Europe’s harder line on China. He casts India as largely irrelevant because New Delhi is refusing to become a real ally like Australia, when the US strategy was always premised on India not being an ally but a counterweight to China in a multipolar Asia – a reasonable long-term bet considering India’s demographic advantage over China.

The diplomacy involved in a multipolar Asia is not always straightforward, to be sure: Southeast Asia and the Pacific will always be porous; India will never be fully aligned; and the architecture of multipolarity will remain fluid and messy and fall short of a convenient collective security arrangement like NATO. But for a realist supposedly preoccupied with the distribution of power, it is a major oversight for Hugh to ignore the growing pushback against China in Tokyo, New Delhi and increasingly Seoul and Brussels. And it would be strategic malpractice for any Australian or US government not to harness this resistance to maintain a favourable balance of power going forward.

Hugh’s assertions about the economic power dynamics in China and the United States are also lopsided. Readers should by now be sceptical of the linear projections of Chinese economic dominance that underpin Hugh’s geopolitical arguments. As former US Treasury secretary Larry Summers predicted – even before Beijing’s self-defeating COVID lockdown, squelching of the private sector and real estate downturn – Chinese growth is reverting to the historical international norm. The United States averaged growth rates of 2.9 per cent from 1979 to 2021 and is projected by most economists to continue that performance in future. China averaged 9.5 per cent from 1979 into the second decade of this century, but now hopes for a 5.5 per cent growth rate that few private economists think is actually achievable (many predict stagflation this year). Even if China surpasses the United States in nominal GDP in the next decade, the next largest economies will still be the United States, India and Japan – collectively larger than China’s GDP and none prepared to cede regional economic leadership to Beijing. This is not to argue that the China challenge will solve itself because of China’s internal contradictions – its economy and military are huge and the strategic challenge for the rest of us is as real and as perilous as Hugh asserts in the opening of his essay. History suggests an economically stressed China could be even more dangerous for the world. But either way, it is important not to hyperventilate about China’s inexorable economic dominance over Asia. That is not how Chinese business leaders privately describe their own projections or why they increasingly seek permanent resident status in Singapore.

In addition to miscasting the material distribution of power, Hugh’s essay also misreads American willpower and intentions. His critique of the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations’ lurching and uneven efforts to find the right balance of cooperation and competition with China is not entirely unfair. As I described in my own history of US strategy in Asia, By More Than Providence (which Hugh kindly cites), the American way of grand strategy is always a messy “meta-process,” as one would expect in a system of government designed to reinforce checks and balances. Australia too was uncertain of what the transition from Hu Jintao’s China to Xi Jinping’s China meant in the years from John Howard to Scott Morrison. Hugh is also right to argue (as I and other American scholars such as Hal Brands and Zack Cooper have) that Washington has left big gaps in its emerging China strategy, including the fundamental question of what “victory” in a strategic competition with China looks like.

But while Hugh gets the faults in the American policy-making process right, he completely misinterprets the historic definition of US strategic interests. George F. Kennan would not have argued that Chinese domination of the Eurasian continent would be acceptable because it is far from the American homeland, as Hugh implies. In fact, Kennan asserted that there are two geographic “strongpoints” that would always remain essential to American security: Western Europe and Japan (and, by extension, the waters of the western Pacific beyond Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines that make up the first island chain). There is still broad consensus in the US strategic community and in Congress that Chinese control of maritime Asia is fundamentally unacceptable – a tradition that did not begin or end with Kennan. China’s strategy is clearly premised on domination of the first and second island chains, of course, which puts the US alliance system and Beijing’s vision of its security on a collision course. Hugh is right about what is at stake in that sense. But he is wrong to assert that historical American definitions of geopolitical interests in Asia point to a viable accommodation of Chinese dominance of the region. Several opinion polls (Pew, Chicago Council on Global Affairs, CSIS) indicate that the American public gets this and is more willing than ever to defend allies in the Indo-Pacific should it become necessary.

By extension, Hugh draws all the wrong conclusions about the geopolitical significance of Taiwan to US interests. The United States would not be able to brush off a Chinese takeover of Taiwan with skilful reassurance of Japan, as Hugh argues. The reality is that successful Chinese coercion of Taiwan would sever the first island chain, isolate Australia, put Taiwanese semiconductor firm TSMC and the “Ruhr Valley” of advanced semiconductor fabrication under Beijing’s control, and force states across the region to choose neutralism or possibly nuclear weapons to survive in the new environment.

But neither does Beijing have clear options to take Taiwan, as Hugh asserts. It would not be “easy for China to control the seas off Taiwan” for an invasion. While a Taiwan fight would be dangerous for surface combatants on all sides, the US Navy maintains a significant edge in undersea warfare that would make amphibious operations highly perilous for the PLA. Ukraine’s success against the Russian Navy in the Black Sea illustrates how much Taiwan could further complicate Chinese military planning with the introduction of more anti-ship missiles: a capability now at the top of Taipei’s shopping list. In short, it has become harder for the United States to execute its traditional plans for the defence of Taiwan, but Beijing hardly has an easy path of its own to victory. The unprecedented unity of US global alliances in response to Putin’s attack on Ukraine will further complicate Chinese assumptions about the use of force against Taiwan: Europe may not be neutral in Asian crises after all, as Beijing clearly assumed for years. That does not mean NATO sends warships, but there are now clearer geopolitical and economic costs to aggression. The bottom line is that deterrence and peace in the Taiwan Strait are still achievable, while pre-emptive surrender of Taiwan is neither necessary nor a reliable path to lasting peace.

The most surprising aspect of Hugh’s essay to me as an American is the curiously apathetic definition of Australia’s core values and interests. There may be an appetite in some corners for critiquing bureaucrats in Canberra or Washington, but would there really be political support in Australia for accepting the implications of Chinese hegemonic dominance of the Indo-Pacific? Is that the “China choice” Australians would make? Would they be prepared to curtail their free speech, as Beijing is already demanding, or to accept the odious apparatus of China’s high-tech surveillance state or PLA military bases in their immediate region? It is difficult to see any democratic society signing up for such a future – particularly when predictions of Chinese dominance and American retreat are built on such flimsy analytical scaffolding.

One thing Hugh gets absolutely right is how much influence Australia has in Washington. As he notes, the strategic community on Asia policy in DC is pretty small (I should know, I was part of it) and also very impressionable (see earlier parenthetical comment). If there are good ideas from trusted partners like Australia, they go right to the top. That is particularly true today, when the Congress and the Biden administration put such heavy emphasis on alliances and when Americans (especially younger Americans) are more positively disposed towards allies in polling than ever. But Hugh is wrong when he asserts that Australian officials just use that influence to cheer for whatever America wants. That was never my experience in my time in the Pentagon, the White House, or in think-tanks in DC. Australian officials may close ranks with the United States in public, but they don’t cheerlead in private. More often, they join forces with Japan or Britain to push the US system towards smarter policies. Sometimes they fail, but more often they succeed. AUKUS, the White House Indo-Pacific Strategy with its emphasis on engaging Southeast Asia, and the renewed US commitment to the Pacific Islands are just three recent examples of direct Australian influence on US strategy. I suspect that if the Australian embassy followed Hugh’s advice and went to President Biden to say, “You can’t win, best to turn the place over to China before it’s too late,” the meeting would not go well and Australian strategic influence in Washington and by extension the region would start to plummet. But since no Australian government on the horizon is likely to do that, I do not lose much sleep over that scenario.

What Australia should do with its influence is continue shaping American strategy towards China, not trying to break it. Hugh notes that the Biden administration has yet to define what victory looks like in the competition with China. Fair point. Australia should push the Biden administration to think over the horizon to a regional order that rests on a more sustainable equilibrium with Beijing. That starts with shoring up a favourable balance of power, enhancing deterrence, blunting dangerous Chinese initiatives and investing in the resilience of smaller states in the region. But if the goal is to find acceptable terms for less dangerous and more productive relations with China down the road, then the United States should be more focused on economic statecraft that can provide leverage over China’s treatment of investors and trading partners, rather than just looking at ways to decouple. In that regard, the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework is still a very thin reed compared with the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and Australia and other allies are right to push Washington to do more to shape regional economic rules. Along the same lines, the Biden administration would do well to reintroduce the kind of strategic dialogue with Beijing that Bob Zoellick in the Bush administration and Hillary Clinton in the Obama administration sustained with key players like State Counselor Dai Bingguo. Xi’s opaque and authoritarian leadership style makes this harder but it is no less important. In some ways Washington is still in the John Foster Dulles stage of competition and will sooner or later have to get to the JFK stage, when tough-minded but serious dialogue channels were established with Moscow – and this time preferably not after a Cuban missile crisis. (The administration has tried to establish transparency and guardrails around high-risk areas, such as nuclear weapons, but these talks have been aimed at making geopolitical competition less dangerous rather than finding a sustainable strategic equilibrium.) So yes, there are shortcomings in the US strategic approach where quiet prodding by close allies can help – as it often has in the past.

A balanced assessment of power and purpose in the Indo-Pacific would highlight for Australian policy-makers when to invest in jointness and interoperability with the United States, when to support American resolve, when to partner with Japan or others, and when to hedge. It would also highlight where pushback and risk are necessary with China, and where reassurance and even cooperation might be possible. There is no binary “China choice.” Instead, there are dozens if not hundreds of smaller choices that strategists and policy-makers must make to protect Australian interests – just as there are in the United States. Fortunately, a balanced assessment of the strategic dynamics of the Indo-Pacific will lead us to the same conclusions in almost every case – and with a growing number of like-minded allies and partners along the way.

So kudos to Hugh for shaking things up as always. There is urgency, as he notes. There are also many big and hard decisions ahead. But the basic consensus behind current Australian and American grand strategy is founded on a more nuanced and realistic assessment of the international system and the relative balance of power than offered in the polemical pages of Sleepwalk to War.

Michael J. Green

SLEEPWALK TO WAR

Correspondence

Malcolm Turnbull

For many years Hugh White has argued that Australia should not assume the continued presence of superior American power in our region, but rather accommodate ourselves to the reality that China will become the hegemon in this hemisphere as the United States is in its own.

Whether you agree with White or not, these regular doses of realpolitik are invigorating but in this latest Quarterly Essay, White has strayed into sweeping generalisations and, frankly, “alternative facts” to embellish his argument. I was disappointed that a scholar of his standing would do so.

White’s description of Australian foreign policy is simply wrong – in his view we have been passive clients of the United States, always looking to our great and powerful friend in Washington to solve all our China problems. Thus he suggests decisions taken by my government to enact laws on foreign interference and the 5G network were inspired by the Trump administration. He adds that by 2017, “Turnbull had repositioned Australia as the most stridently anti-Chinese country in the region, and indeed globally.” He then goes on to say that in August 2018, I “tried to back-pedal with a major ‘reset’ speech at the University of New South Wales.”

Nowhere in this description does White consider whether the extent of foreign (mostly Chinese) espionage and other influence in Australia warranted new legislation, any more than he considers whether the ban on Huawei and ZTE from the 5G network was justified on security grounds. The reader is left to assume that White believes it would have been more prudent for Australia not to bother about these security threats.

The truth is that both the foreign interference legislation and 5G decisions were carefully considered, calibrated responses to real threats. Great care was taken, especially with the 5G decision, not to arouse unnecessary resentment, and our announcement was deliberately very low-key. We went to great lengths, without success, to find a way to mitigate the risks so that we would not have to ban Huawei. The decisions were taken by the Australian government in Australia’s national interest and were not dictated or encouraged by any other government, including that of the United States. Indeed, as I have described in my memoir, A Bigger Picture, we were ahead of the United States in our assessment of the risks posed by the very different architecture of 5G wireless technologies.

As for the “back-pedal” – the background to that was quite the reverse of White’s description. The foreign interference and influence legislation was introduced at the end of 2017. The Labor Opposition had not agreed to support its passage through the Senate and there was considerable pressure from China to encourage the government to drop it and for Labor not to support it.

Once Labor had agreed to support the legislation and it was passed, we needed to create an opportunity for China to elegantly discontinue its pressure campaign. So I gave a speech at the UNSW in August 2018 which did not take a backward step on any matter of policy, but was warm in its tone and context, pointing to the considerable achievements from Sino–Australian cooperation in science and research. This was designed as an opportunity for China to reset and was not a “back-pedal” in any respect.

While China’s strategy of becoming the dominant power in our hemisphere is unchanging, its tactics are thoroughly flexible and when one line of pressure or coercion fails to achieve its objective, China will switch to another approach but generally needs the appearance of a catalyst to provide the exit ramp. The recent change of government is a good example of this.

Where White is on firmer ground is in his criticism of the gratuitously belligerent bluster about China from Scott Morrison and, especially, Peter Dutton. The absurdity of some of Dutton’s comments about Taiwan was underlined for me in November 2021 at the Halifax Security Conference, when one American four-star after another wryly observed, “Your defence minister is more forward-leaning on Taiwan than our president.”

And White is correct in saying that this belligerent rhetoric was designed to pander to a political and media constituency in Australia, undermining Australian security and prosperity in return for some favourable headlines in the Murdoch media.

White makes the mistake of swallowing whole the rhetoric around AUKUS. He describes it as “a major shift in our strategic positioning.” It suited all of the signatories to AUKUS to exaggerate its importance. For Morrison and Dutton it created the appearance of doing something on national security, for Boris Johnson it was evidence that after Brexit “global Britain” was back, and for Joe Biden it was a counterpoint to the debacle in Kabul.

Shorn of the bravado, apart from the submarines AUKUS does not add up to much more than a continuation of the already intimate collaboration between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States on security matters, especially signals intelligence. It does not create an obligation in any of the parties to defend the others and is not, as White asserts, “a complete identification of our interests with Washington in dealing with China.”

Chinese propaganda has been ready to condemn AUKUS as (yet another) attempt to contain China, but in truth its net effect is more of an own goal. So far AUKUS has:

• done little more than evolve the already close cooperation between the US, UK and Australia;

• seriously undermined the trust France had reposed in both Australia and, more consequentially, the United States;

• humiliated France’s “Atlanticists,” who support closer ties with the United States, and vindicated those, on the extreme left and right, who contend the “Anglo-Saxons” are utterly untrustworthy;

• ensured Australia’s new submarine capabilities will be delayed for at least an additional decade – into the 2040s;

• set back the prospects of closer cooperation between Australia, the United States and France in the Pacific; and, if that wasn’t enough,

• created a precedent of transferring weapons-grade uranium to non-nuclear weapons states for the purpose of “naval nuclear propulsion,” which is not prohibited under the Non-Proliferation Treaty. This has not only caused considerable concern among our ASEAN neighbours, but will also be used by Iran and other would-be nuclear-weapon states as a precedent to allow them to continue enrichment to weapons-grade levels. (There is a wealth of literature on this issue now: see James Acton’s “Why the AUKUS Submarine Deal Is Bad for Nonproliferation – And What to Do About It” and multiple speeches, interviews and papers by University of Texas professor Alan Kuperman, including his May 2022 article for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.)

Plenty there to celebrate in Beijing, and a reminder that just because you label something #standinguptoChina doesn’t mean you aren’t shooting yourself in the foot. Equally, just because Beijing is loudly protesting about AUKUS does not mean that it isn’t delighted with the chaotic outcome.

However, when it comes to the history of the acquisition of submarines, White is at his most unreliable. It is true that Tony Abbott was intent on buying submarines from Japan, although he did not share the full extent of his commitments to Japan with all his ministers, let alone the Australian public. However, it was Abbott in February 2015, following the “empty chair” spill, who announced there would be a competitive evaluation process to determine which country we would partner with to build the “future submarine.” The countries invited to tender were Japan, France and Germany.

I became prime minister in September 2015 and by April 2016 the unequivocal recommendation from our defence department and expert advisory panel was that we should proceed with the proposal from France’s Naval Group (then known as DCNS). This was based on the design of its latest nuclear attack submarine, the Barracuda, now known as the Suffren class. White says, “Their bid was extremely expensive – perhaps double the price of the competitors.” That is untrue. The costs of all three proposals were comparable. More importantly, the French proposal was head and shoulders above the others and the only one which offered a regionally superior submarine.

France also offered the prospect of transitioning to nuclear propulsion over time, but with low-enriched uranium reactors that do not present the proliferation risks that the weapons-grade uranium used by the US and UK navies does.

White goes on to assert that what really drove the AUKUS submarine move was “the growing awareness that the French project was a debacle, and the ever-increasing desire to align ever closer with Washington.”

I cannot speak for Morrison and Dutton’s motivations, but it is utterly false to describe the French project (more accurately described as an Australian–French–American collaboration) as a debacle. In fact, as was stated by defence department secretary Greg Moriarty in Senate Estimates, the program was not over-budget and, as revealed in defence department correspondence released under FOI requests, it was progressing well and the proposal from Naval Group for the next phase of work was regarded as “affordable and acceptable.” Moriarty assured Rear Admiral Greg Sammut, the CEO of the program, that this good news would be passed on to the French and Australian ministers when they met on 30 August – just two weeks before the Australian government terminated the contract.

White is scathing about the decision by Morrison to acquire nuclear-powered submarines from either the United States or the United Kingdom. I described my own reservations at length in a speech to the National Press Club in September 2021.

As Australia has no nuclear industry, let alone any ability to maintain or sustain a naval nuclear propulsion system, the submarines could not be safely operated other than under the supervision of the US Navy. This means an abandonment of Australian sovereignty.

The singular reason my government, and its predecessors, did not seek to procure nuclear-powered submarines was because it recognised that in the absence of a domestic nuclear industry, we would not be able to exercise sovereign control of such submarines. That was precisely the explanation I gave President Trump when he asked me why we were not acquiring US (as opposed to French) submarines.

The likely candidate is a US Virginia-class submarine, which is more than twice the size and with more than twice the ship’s company of the Attack-class (or Collins-class) submarines. It is very questionable whether Australia could afford these submarines, let alone recruit and retain the much larger crews required.

Naval nuclear propulsion does offer greater speed and endurance under water, but the vessels are not as stealthy while submerged as a modern diesel/electric boat. The ideal configuration for our navy would be diesel/electric boats for the shallower waters closer to Australia (such as in the archipelagic regions to our north and east) and nuclear-powered boats for longer transits in the Indian and Pacific oceans.

The upshot of proceeding with the acquisition of Virginia-class submarines from the United States will be that we will not be able to deploy our most expensive and lethal military capability without the active involvement of the United States.

So AUKUS as an agreement, absent the submarines, is not of great strategic significance. The engagement of “global Britain” in the Pacific, whatever that means, may well not survive the prime ministership of Boris Johnson. If you want a European, nuclear-weapons state that is a permanent UN Security Council member to partner with in the Pacific, it would make more sense to pick the one that is actually in the Pacific, not the one that withdrew its substantive military forces “east of Suez” more than fifty years ago. And it certainly made no sense at all to choose Britain as a new partner in the Indo-Pacific if the price of doing so was shattering the relationship with France.

At this stage, it may well be too late to restart the Attack-class program. While all the intellectual property has been retained, the workforce has been dispersed and would take many months to reassemble. Morrison has likely scuttled that option. The proposition that we could buy an “off-the-shelf” submarine from somebody else overlooks the fact that there is no such thing.

The best option at this stage is to acquire nuclear-powered submarines from France. Its production of six Suffren-class boats for the French Navy will be complete by 2030 and it would be feasible for that production line to continue to build six or eight boats for Australia, with one becoming available every two years. The submarines would be a more manageable size and cost. Their reactors would use low-enriched uranium – enriched to about 6 per cent, around the same level used in a civil nuclear reactor to generate electricity but far below the 90 per cent level needed to make a weapon. This would reduce the proliferation issues, and the Lockheed Martin combat management system could be readily integrated – much of that design work had been done for the Attack-class. In time, the front half of the boat could be built in Australia, with the back half containing the nuclear propulsion system built in France. This would give us nuclear-powered submarines from the early 2030s – a full decade before the Virginia-class.

From a strategic point of view, this would cement a partnership with France, a substantial power in the Indo-Pacific, with nearly two million citizens and extensive territories across both oceans. This strategic partnership, and the trust established between myself and President Macron, was seen as the foundation of France’s Indo-Pacific Strategy, launched in Sydney at Garden Island on 2 May 2018 – an “Indo-Pacific axis,” in his words. It would not diminish our alliance with the United States – the submarines would be interoperable with the US Navy. The only barrier to this course of action would be politics in Washington and Canberra.

White is very critical of the “small target” strategy of the Labor Opposition in the lead-up to the May 2022 election. On the AUKUS issue he makes a fair point. Morrison gave Labor only twenty-four hours’ notice of the deal – despite having undertaken to the White House that the Opposition would be fully briefed and supportive. Labor, recognising the risk of a wedge and being framed by Morrison and his friends in the media as “anti-American” or “Manchurian candidates,” chose to go with the flow – sign up to the deal but without any time to receive, let alone consider, a fully detailed briefing. It wasn’t edifying, but I can understand the political calculation behind it.

The small target may well have helped Albanese and Labor win the election but it does create a challenge for the new government, which must first and foremost set out all the facts surrounding the submarine issue, including the way in which the decision was taken to terminate the Attack-class program, the options that remain available, their cost and timing. It must tell the truth about the consequences of operating submarines with weapons grade uranium–fuelled reactors and explain whether the US Navy will allow those submarines to be operated without any US involvement or supervision.

One of the leading figures in the US administration intimately involved in the AUKUS negotiations has been reported in Europe as having justified the deal as “getting the Australians off the fence. We have them locked in now for the next forty years.” Now, knowing the individual involved, I can, just, imagine him saying that in an ebullient way. But of course, Australia was never “on the fence” in the sense of being about to move away from the ANZUS alliance to a non-aligned status which was more accommodating to China. But it is significant that this report is widely believed in Europe, and that the AUKUS submarine deal is seen as an abandonment of Australian sovereignty.

It is noteworthy to recall that in President Macron’s speech at Garden Island on 2 May 2018 he spoke of how Australia, through its partnership with France, was developing a wider range of allies, pursuing a policy of sovereign autonomy and not simply relying on the United States. He was quite right; that was precisely my thinking, and my government’s strategy.

That is why I often talked about our seeing our region as not simply a series of spokes leading into the imperial capitals of Washington and Beijing, but rather as a mesh where we found our security, as Keating used to say, not from Asia but in Asia, by building closer ties with our neighbours, whether it be Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, India or, indeed, France with its vast Indo-Pacific territories.

Hugh White’s bleak realism is as usefully challenging as it is dangerously mistaken, although his warning about not putting all our strategic eggs in one basket is a fair one. However, he is just wrong in saying that Australian foreign policy has been monotonously obedient to, and enthralled by, Washington.

During my own time, I displeased President Obama by not falling into line with his wishes on the treatment of pharmaceuticals in the Trans-Pacific Partnership. With President Trump, of course, we went toe to toe on a refugee deal, as we did on steel tariffs. In both cases our officials would have been happier if I had taken a path of less resistance. Similarly we did not agree to our navy conducting freedom-of-navigation operations within 12 nautical miles of claimed Chinese “islands” in the South China Sea. And perhaps most significantly, when Trump pulled out of the TPP and everyone thought the deal was dead, we persuaded other countries, especially Japan, to stick with the deal and as a result it was revived and concluded without the United States.

Similarly, White complains that Australia has neglected the Pacific and says we must do more than simply tell our Pacific islands neighbours not to deal with China. Well, leaving aside Morrison’s shameful diplomatic failure in Solomon Islands over the past few years, our diplomacy in the Pacific has been very active. In my own time we persuaded Solomon Islands not to do a deal with Huawei for an international cable network, not by lecturing them on the evils of communism but by building a cable network ourselves and funding it almost entirely out of our aid budget. We did similar things in PNG and Fiji.

White urges Australia to “stop telling our Southeast Asian neighbours that US primacy is the only path to regional order and start listening to them about how they see China’s and India’s rises and how they are dealing with them.”

In numerous discussions with ASEAN leaders I have never spoken to them in those terms and always sought and listened to their views. Many of my predecessors have done so as well, as have most of our foreign ministers. During my time we stepped up our engagement with ASEAN with new agreements with Singapore, Indonesia and particularly important security assistance in the Philippines. In my experience most ASEAN leaders welcomed a continued American security presence in the region, recognised that China would seek to exert more influence as it became stronger, and saw the United States as a vital counterweight. Hugh White’s prediction that America will depart this region and leave it to China would fill almost every nation in ASEAN with dread.

For my own part, I believe the United States will remain engaged in this region for many years to come. The United States is as much a Pacific nation as Australia; it can never responsibly or rationally cede this hemisphere to an unchallenged hegemony of China.

White recommends that Taiwan be abandoned by the United States to Xi Jinping, and that Australia should have nothing whatsoever to do with helping America defend it. But on that basis Ukraine would have been swallowed by Russia, which would now be moving on the Baltic states and on its way to restore the Soviet empire. And if Taiwan were to be overcome, how does that buy peace in our region? One nation after another would acquire nuclear weapons to make itself unassailable. If the risks of nuclear conflict are high today, the withdrawal of the United States in the manner White contemplates would send them sky-high.

The truth is we are living in a time when the pace and scale of change are without precedent. We have to expect, as Margaret Thatcher said, the unexpected. And that means that Australia must have a thoroughly independent foreign policy. The more independent it is, the more influence we have around the world, in our region and indeed in Washington and Beijing. As an ASEAN foreign minister once said to me “If we see you as a rubber stamp for Washington, why would we waste time talking to you? Easier just to talk to head office.”

As far as the defence of Australia is concerned, we must be able to defend ourselves and that means that all of our defence capabilities must be sovereign Australian ones, able to be maintained, sustained and deployed by Australia without the approval or supervision of any other nation.

Of course we look to our allies to support us in times of need, as we will support them, but we cannot look out across the decades to come and assume those allies will always be there.

Malcolm Turnbull

NOT WAVING, DROWNING

Correspondence

Sebastian Rosenberg

Sarah Krasnostein’s powerful essay Not Waving, Drowning demonstrates the moribund state of Australia’s mental healthcare “system.” But to call our mental health system broken suggests that it was once whole. This couldn’t be further from the truth. There has never been a genuine set of alternative mental health services in the community. Our current situation is akin to trying to put together pieces from different jigsaw puzzles.

Krasnostein first describes the terrible everyday experiences of individuals attempting to find help. The essay’s three key case studies highlight the gaps and failures to which families and communities have unfortunately become accustomed. People struggle to find help, face delays in getting the right diagnosis or treatment and become very sick, isolated and at real risk of harm to self or others.

There is dissonance here. A rich country, Australia is regularly lauded as having one of the world’s best health systems. And yet the stories of poor care, missing care or abuse in mental health are well known. They were documented in a report I was involved with back in 2005, entitled Not for Service. Prepared jointly by the Australian Human Rights Commission and (the organisation now known as) Mental Health Australia, the report’s title denotes how the Victorian state mental health system categorised a troublesome patient seeking care – that person was classified as being “not for service.”

Typically called consumers, people using mental health services have told their stories of continuing abuse and powerlessness to repeated parliamentary committees, statutory inquiries and royal commissions. There would surely be few areas of government activity more subject to formal inquiry than mental health. All this inquiring generates a blizzard of actions, recommendations and strategies – a plandemic. Yet mental health’s share of the total health budget in Australia was 7.25 per cent in 1992–93, when the National Mental Health Strategy began, and in 2019–20 (the latest year available) it had hardly changed at 7.57 per cent.

If this were any other body part, there would be uproar about the abject failure of the health system. Perhaps this reflects the ongoing impact of stigma described in the essay.

But I think there’s more to it. If you ask people with a mental illness, any type of mental illness, what they are most concerned about, they will typically prioritise secure housing, the capacity to earn a living and the social connections which make life worth living. Australia collects almost no specific data on the quality of life of people with a mental illness or whether the care they received helped them go home, find or keep a job, or improved their relationships. We are spending $11 billion each year on direct mental health services, but we know almost nothing about the merit of this spending. Is anybody getting better?

Without this information, as pointed out recently by the Productivity Commission, we are outcome-blind. We are vulnerable to a view that somehow people with a mental illness are not worth spending time or money on. This is stigma.

A scan of a map of Sydney Harbour will reveal that the body of water adjacent to the old Gladesville asylum is named Bedlam Bay – a legacy of colonial laws preventing the mentally ill from travelling the King’s highways. Incoming patients were instead transported by boats, disembarking at Bedlam Point.

Krasnostein writes that Australia’s mental health system is broken and in need of fundamental reform. She quotes one of the people with a mental illness as saying, “You can’t heal in the environment that made you sick.” Some consumers certainly report feeling that the services or hospitals they visit are toxic environments rather than places of healing. But all those reports and inquiries document not only the voice of consumers, but also the well-intentioned health professionals describing “iatrogenic harm” – the inadvertent harm caused by treatment. Health professionals themselves recognise they cannot deliver quality mental healthcare in existing settings.

When the old mental asylums in Australia closed, two replacement institutions emerged: the psychiatric wards of our public hospitals and jails. Of the $6.6 billion spent by the states and territories, around 80 per cent would be directed towards hospital-based mental healthcare – inpatient and outpatient. Australia has never really funded mental healthcare outside of hospitals, in people’s homes or in the community. While people with mental illness are now permitted to use the King’s roads, those roads all lead to our choked emergency departments. And a 2019 report by St Vincent’s found that 40 per cent of all Australian prisoners have a mental illness.

I suggest that Australia’s mental health system is not broken. It has never been built.

The federal government funds Medicare, which is primarily designed to provide GP and psychology services to people with anxiety and depression. The states deal with rarer mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, through public hospital care. Two different funders for two different client groups. So what happens to the person with schizophrenia when they are well? How is their physical health managed? What about a person with severe anxiety? Where should they go for help if their condition improves or deteriorates?

The result of this fragmentation is that if you have a mental illness that is too difficult or complicated for your local GP or psychologist, Australians have almost no choice but to go to the accident and emergency department of their local public hospital to seek assistance. Key opportunities to provide care in other settings are missed, leaving only the most expensive and often traumatic option of going to hospital. Other illnesses focus on early intervention – addressing the cancerous lump before it grows larger. In mental health, if your lump isn’t large enough you get sent home until it grows. And that’s if you get seen at all – not assured by any means, as Krasnostein reports in the essay.

A person with more complex mental health needs will often require a team. Take, for example, a young person with an eating disorder. Their care is likely to benefit from a team including a GP, a nurse, a psychologist, a psychiatrist, a dietician, a peer worker and other allied health workers (for example, to keep the person connected to their education or employment).

But mental healthcare in Australia is based on people going to see health professionals who work solo, typically charging considerable out-of-pocket costs, rarely coordinated to work in teams. Recent Medicare funding enabling this young person to see the same practitioner forty times may not be enough to address their complex problems. Only one in three Medicare mental health patients were new in 2019–20. Most are repeat customers, forced to continue to seek help because they did not get the right help the first time.

Technology can help provide care, monitor the impact of that care on a person’s wellbeing and help coordinate the team (through shared records, etc.), but investments here are negligible.

One of the most famous mental health services in the world is in Trieste, Italy. There, psychiatrists led a revolution against acute, locked, hospital care in favour of a new model of multidisciplinary health and social care in the community. Australia’s psychiatrists and other health professionals seem too content with the status quo – with hospital-based care or the certainty of Medicare fee-for-service payments – to contemplate any such revolution here. In Trieste they say, “Da vicino, nessuno e normale” – up close, nobody is normal. And you get a sense of this as you walk the streets there. With some subsidised arrangements for employment, a person with a mental illness might be driving your bus, making your (excellent) coffee or cooking your lunch. Their mental health needs can be met on the high street near where they live, or even in their own home. It is an irony that Australia pioneered the concept of hospital in the home with mental health decades ago. Home visits are rare now (even pre-Covid). People get phoned, not visited.

The government can play a lead role in enhancing the social democratic reflexes of Australian society, as Krasnostein puts it. This is because effective mental healthcare should not focus on the health system. It should focus on employment and housing. Given that 75 per cent of all mental illnesses manifest before the age of twenty-five, it should focus on education. Change at this level is way beyond tinkering. It needs much more than a few new beds here, another hotline there or some new, comfy beanbags for the local Headspace.

Central to this more fundamental reform is to finally recognise psycho-social care as a vibrant and respected partner to clinical care. Psycho-social services have never accounted for more than about 8 per cent of all mental health spending, but they provide vital counselling services, accommodation support, self-help, support for families, carers and peers, as well as assistance with employment, education and recreation. These services barely exist, leaving mental healthcare stuck as just a medical problem.

Addressing this imbalance, as well as ensuring access to quality clinical care, would give people a fair chance to live well in the community. And this was the point of deinstitutionalisation. Not just to swap one institution for another.

The 2022 federal budget, announced as Krasnostein’s essay appeared, smeared some new funding across myriad, often time-limited programs and services. Links to state spending, even the significant new spending in Victoria arising from its royal commission, are unclear or missing. New funding cannot be wasted by perpetuating fragmentation. We must stop pouring more oil into this leaky engine.

Thirty years on from Australia’s first national mental health strategy, Krasnostein’s essay demonstrates the scale and urgency of the fundamental reform still required.

Sebastian Rosenberg

NOT WAVING, DROWNING

Correspondence

Joo-Inn Chew

Sarah Krasnostein listens to one of the young women she introduces in Not Waving, Drowning, 21-year-old Eliza, “on two levels … with the interest of the 42-year-old author of this essay, watching how Eliza embodies decades of evidence that the negative outcomes associated with BPD [borderline personality disorder] might be mediated … with favourable environmental influences,” and also “with the admiration of the distressed eighteen-year-old” part of herself, who had suffered relational trauma but “hadn’t attained the insights Eliza has and was convinced … that she never would.”

Krasnostein’s essay is potent and radical for a multitude of reasons – her poetic and erudite blending of storytelling and analysis, and her synthesising of history, psychiatry, criminology and psychoanalysis to grapple with this country’s fragile colonial past, which has stigmatised the vulnerable, dispossessed and marginalised. Most powerful to me was her decision to situate herself in the narrative, to have “chosen my fear of that stigma over silence in the face of it.” In doing so, she removes another brick in the illusory and damaging wall we have built to render as “Other” those who experience mental illness and psychological distress. She speaks, and shares the voices of others, to show that “We” are “They,” and “They” are “Us” – in the future or the past, in ourselves or our loved ones – and that mental anguish, grief, trauma and psychiatric illness are intimate parts of what it is to be human. There is no shame in this. Normalising our own vulnerabilities fosters insight and empathy, the prerequisites for the cultural and systemic changes which are so direly needed.

Such a “radical choice” is not easy. I am a GP with a long history of working in mental health, including with refugees and asylum seekers, the LGBTIQ+ community and in the prison system. I recognise the weary frustration of the front-line clinicians Krasnostein interviewed, who band-aid daily the deep distress of their patients in a system and society which is failing them. Like so many of us, I have my own complex history, which shapes how I work with people who are traumatised, and then pathologised and othered on top of that. I know what it is like to reach a place where my psychological pain transforms into compassion and healing for myself and others, where it makes me more, not less.

There is something familiar about this territory, this radical choice. I came out as a lesbian decades ago. I know the danger and freedom of no longer hiding, of stepping into the world on my own terms. I see now that coming out as having “a mental health history” is just as hard, especially as a clinician, as coming out as queer was in the 1980s and 1990s – scary and risky, yet full of transformative power. Something done in my own way and time, but which also connects me to those who have made (or will make) their own radical choices. Over time, all these choices expand our collective view of who “We” are.

When I worked in a regional Victorian hospital as an intern, I admitted a young woman brought in by ambulance with fresh lacerations up and down her arms. I went through the steps as gently as I could, aware of her terror and despair. As I checked her pulse between the bloodied cuts, I felt an echo inside me. My arms ached in sympathy because under my work sleeves were long pale scars from my own self-harm a few years before. I said nothing about them, but gave her my best compassionate care. Back in the 1990s, BPD elicited hostility from many doctors and nurses. It was not unusual for people who had self-harmed to be left waiting until last in emergency, and to be called “attention-seeking,” “manipulative” and “incurable”; there were even stories of people having their cuts sutured without anaesthetic to “teach them a lesson.” I have never been diagnosed with BPD, but I knew how it felt to be in a vortex of pain, to try to cut an escape route through my own flesh. I tried to keep my scars hidden, especially early in my career, but if a colleague noticed I would tell a brief version of the truth – that I had been depressed as a teenager – and watch their triple-take at my category transgression. I was supposed to be a Normal – in fact, a Super Normal, a Dr God-Robot, invulnerable and always on the right side of the stethoscope.

Decades have passed since that time on the wards, and there are few of my cohort who remain untouched by grief, trauma or despair, few who do not have scars on our skin or in our hearts. Suffering is universal; so too is hope and the possibility of healing. In my work I have sat with people trapped in the long shadow of childhood abuse. I have looked after people who are fleeing torture and persecution, only to be detained and denied protection by our government. I have known patients for longer than I have known my own children, and then lost them to suicide. I have carried the stories of so many people struggling with anxiety and depression and psychosis, with trauma and shame and stigma, as carefully as I carry my own. Behind each wound, each addiction, each diagnosis is a person and a story, and beyond that a web of cultural and economic power which shapes everything, from the start people get in life, to how they express distress and whether they seek help, to how they are treated by front-line services and social institutions. Not everyone knows what it is like to feel safe and free in Australia. Every one of us can take stock of where we are in the web, how we use the power we have and how we recognise the common humanity of people around us. We can normalise our own vulnerabilities and use our power well. I thank Sarah Krasnostein for an essay which invites us to do just that.

Joo-Inn Chew

NOT WAVING, DROWNING

Correspondence

James Dunk

As a historian, I was pleased to find that Sarah Krasnostein’s Quarterly Essay about vulnerability in Australia is, as she writes, “always about history.” It moves deftly through the short history of European colonisation here – from the anxieties and afflictions of the penal colony to their long shadows, falling everywhere around us. She argues that the psychological processes of convict transportation and colonisation survived the penal colony in masculinist cultures that stigmatise mental illness and deter the ill from seeking help, leading to egregious outcomes, including the alarmingly high suicide rate that has been a consistent feature of Australian history.

In the essay’s sustained reflection on the 2019 Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System, there is refreshing historical depth, placing the Commission not only in the “shadow of the penal colony,” but in the more recent history of proliferating public inquiries. These are only the latest in an endless string of inquiries, which is a striking and exhausting facet of the modern history of mental health and mental illness. Exhausting not only in hours spent asking, answering and transcribing questions, but emotionally or spiritually exhausting. Commissioner after commissioner expresses horror and disgust at bedding or bathing practices, at the lack of therapeutics, at the class or capability of keepers, at the state of rations or visitation policies or at the personality flaws of superintendents: at everything, in short, and at who could possibly have authorised or funded or built or managed such a wretched institution. For those of us who have spent time working with that history, we come sooner or later to wonder at the amnesia and self-righteousness of the commissioner, and of the dialectic. Why should anyone have ever expected anything to be otherwise?

Because things are forgotten, writes Krasnostein. Because it has been helpful to forget. She brings depth psychology to bear here. She writes of our shadow selves, and of splitting selves, tracking the difficult line between individual psychopathology and social malaise. Asylums and hospitals become vehicles for our projected anxieties, sites for carving out and keeping out the most difficult parts of ourselves by doing slow violence to some of the most vulnerable members of our society. For a time, these institutions were palaces that exhibited, on the outside, the mastery of enlightenment rationality and mastery over the mind. They robustly secured by walls and laws those minds that strayed from the enlightened ideal. The emergence of effective psycho-pharmaceuticals in the post-war years offered relief from the costs of maintaining such elaborate structures, which, through endless inquiries, also became focal, vocal points for discontent with the whole entangled mess of what mental illness does to humans, and what humans do to other humans. Many of those purpose-built palaces are now crumbling or being repurposed, and the social barriers they buttressed have become more nebulous, with selves and populations harder to demarcate. And yet the inquiries continue, because people are still suffering, and their suffering is still and always alarming. The inquiries are compulsive acts, writes Krasnostein, where past trauma is recklessly and endlessly acted out instead of recalled, experienced and healed. These are social defence mechanisms gone to stale, barren seed.

The other kind of history here is personal history, the lived experience that elicits such inquiries. A genuine development in that steady stream of scrutiny is that commissioners have slowly learned to listen properly to the cared-for – consumers, clients, patients, survivors of psychiatric services – as well as the experts charged with their care. And their experience is, often, breathtakingly crushing. Max Weber described the onslaught of an industrial bureaucracy that aimed to strip away traditional impulses and motivators (like emotion) from the rational work of government. Bureaucracy may be, as he suggested, an iron cage in which we are slowly imprisoning ourselves, but Not Waving, Drowning shows the more violent parts of the system, in three studies of lives torn apart by the state or, at least, while the state sat back and watched. A friend who works in health policy told me that if the mental health system was funded properly, Australia would be broke in a fortnight. But these costs must always be borne, and they are. They are borne by those like the woman Krasnostein calls Rebecca, who spent eighteen months in a carceral forensic mental health facility because the court could not make a ruling. The court could not make a ruling, even though the “offence” had been minor, because there was nowhere it could rule her to be placed. This is not metaphorical. There was literally no place for her to live safe from further, compounding trauma. Krasnostein remains with her story through the long months in which many people met to solve a problem of which they were aware, including one where eighteen stakeholders (itself a major development or minor miracle) could not find a way to care for Rebecca because she fell between their agencies and systems. Everyone there was responsible for her, writes Krasnostein, and therefore no one was. For all its failings, the penal colony was governed from the centre, a colonial governor accepting moral and legal responsibility for those who were mentally ill on behalf of the Crown and deploying a rudimentary bureaucratic apparatus to solve problems and, often, to care for those who suffered. Those who assume the past is a dark or darker place are often surprised to find in my book Bedlam at Botany Bay a close and interpersonal colony, where compassion and care emerged within a wider program of discipline and terror and dispossession.

After two hundred years of bullish bureaucracy, the iron cage is straining awfully, and beginning perhaps to buckle under the weight of its dissociative fictions. The inquirers themselves – the archetypal commissioners – may finally be beginning to remember, and not repeat only. The conclusions of the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System showed the commissioners were aware of the long, long history of policy and moral failure, and aware too that a dataset and list of recommendations could do little to alter it. Daunting amounts of money and time were needed: billions of dollars and a decade or more to be spent on systems change, according to a theory in which real improvements are produced by changed relations between things. Krasnostein is at pains to show that those systems relations are in fact human relations, just as the gaps they aim to fill are embodied – are agonisingly realised – in the experience of the most vulnerable among us. More remarkable still, the Victorian government accepted the recommendations in full, rather than dodging and dissimulating, and has begun to implement them. It is, however, important that the reformers are not, as the minister has said, building a new system from scratch. They necessarily build in the ashes of the former system; they must build lucidly from history and memory, looking to those with lived experience of the old system to be architects of the new one.

James Dunk

NOT WAVING, DROWNING

Correspondence

Janet McCalman

Now that I have retired and have my pension, I can confess that I have been there too and done that. In 1976 I was locked up in the closed ward at Royal Park Psychiatric Hospital and emerged from a horror movie of delirium to find myself in strange clothing, in a strange place with a lot of iron bedsteads, with a couple of old women trying to get into my bed.

I had been stripped of all personal possessions, including my watch. But as I came to, it was still a recognisably human place, and my fellow inmates, many unable to speak, became less frightening once we were in the vast day room. Some were just crying. One old woman was visited by a man – perhaps her husband, perhaps her brother – while she babbled incoherently. He seemed utterly devoted.

The food was appalling, not that I had much appetite, and I learnt later that the budget per day per patient was 70 cents.

Then came the clinical assessment before twenty or so staff in a semicircle. I remember one particularly kindly and sympathetic face. They decided that I had recovered my wits, so I was sent to the open ward to rest for a few days.

There, it was quiet, and the only other patient was a young woman who was struggling with her identity and had admitted herself for a few days’ breathing space. She could also discharge herself when she liked.

If I were suffering a similar psychotic episode today in one of our leading hospitals, I would be in a room of my own that is all white and has fluorescent lights on 24-7 so that I can be observed by video and prevented from self-harm.

When the Quakers and rational reformers got their hands on the prison system in Britain and its penal colonies, they railed against the lash and promoted reform of the soul above punishment of the body. This meant isolation, silence and surveillance.

In the solitary cells, prisoners convicted of secondary offences heard no sounds: all eating implements, buckets for wastes and water, and even the warders’ feet were wrapped in cloth. You can see this at the panopticon at Port Arthur, where on the Sabbath prisoners attended church in a vertical coffin that cut them off from each other and directed their gaze at the preacher.

The reformers’ “silent treatment” drove prisoners insane and shortened their lives, whereas flogging had not. Prisoners in the Millbank Penitentiary in London, the most modern in the land, begged to be transported to Van Diemen’s Land and, if blessed to be chosen, collapsed on boarding in hysterics.

*

It is arguable that the biggest social policy failure of the post-war era has been the closing of the public psychiatric hospitals and the outsourcing of long-term care to families or the community. Certainly, we have looked away from a lot of deaths by suicide, by homicide and at police hands. But the narrative is that these hospitals were ugly, brutal places, best forgotten. And a critical architect of that narrative was the same Erving Goffman who wrote so brilliantly about stigma.

John C. Burnham, a distinguished historian of US psychiatry, commented that the closing of the asylums represented a perversion of liberalism. He recalled that there had been only one small study of the afterlife of those expelled into “freedom.” This revealed that after five years, half of them were dead and the rest were being supported by people as poor as themselves.

But the rot had set in earlier in the United States, as the new liberalism in social policy that privileged the right to choose over the right to care had degraded the work of the asylums, which had once been committed to training people for work and independence but were now teaching them how to shop – the citizen as consumer, not worker.

Old Royal Park, many will remember from a trip along the freeway, had a small farm attached. The new “lunatic asylums” of the second half of the nineteenth century, lacking any psychotropic medications, had only physical restraint and occupational therapy, and high on that list was farm work and gardening, in the outdoors, with animals to tend and befriend. Animals and fresh air still work wonders and there is some effort to introduce animals into aged-care facilities.

A psychiatric nurse turned historian was looking at the Cambridge County Asylum in England, opened in 1858 and closed, like Royal Park, in the 1990s. When she examined the case records, she was hugely impressed by the quality of care in the nineteenth century. The wardsmen and women were locals from a long-depressed rural community who were suddenly offered good jobs, nice uniforms, dignity and security. She remarked that they did better at suicide watch, in a difficult building to police, than we do today.

And when Australia closed its asylums, with them went the therapeutic residential communities, the workshops and day centres, and of course the gardens and animals.

Like Sarah, I too read the pleas for mitigation in Supreme Court trials for grave crimes of violence. And I read the reports of the Coroner’s Court of the preventable deaths in and out of care, of the suicides and of the overdoses. Nearly every perpetrator has a hideous childhood story of fragile parents struggling themselves with substance abuse, educational failure, inability to trust, wildly fluctuating moods and serious mental illness.

This knowledge helps me as an historian, for the convicts sent to Van Diemen’s Land between 1803 and 1850 were similarly distinctive in that they were far more likely than their social peers to have lost one or both parents, exposing them as children to a life unprotected by a safe, functioning household. And those parents who were still living were often fragile breadwinners – alcoholic, unstable, unreliable.

Even worse for your life outcome, despite all the privations of transportation and penal servitude, was being born in a place that was especially dangerous for your mother – a place where the only work outside domestic service was in a public house or a brothel. That is, in a seaport like Liverpool, full of transients, prostitution and violence, where women and children were said to be “living in drunken savagery” in alleys and under bridges around the docks. Far better for life expectancy, marriage and children was to be born in rural Ireland and survive the Great Famine of the 1840s.

This will come as no surprise to those who work with criminal offenders, especially the young. And what has failed them is the household that is meant to protect and nurture them. And more often than not, that household has failed because the household a generation before, and a generation before that, has similarly failed. It is very hard to learn to trust, to give love and to be a good parent if you have no model.

But fragile households in turn are failed by a society that may pretend to care, but which will not invest emotionally and financially in sufficient help, in secure work, in affordable housing, education and training. Uncaring societies inflict structural violence on their most vulnerable members, and structural violence breaks minds and shortens lives.

The moral core of most societies draws on ethics about care for others. Churches and mosques and temples are obliged to care as a spiritual duty. But mostly they are ill-resourced. In 1601 England instituted the first secular welfare state, paid for by a tax (the poor rate), where the Old Poor Law acted as a “civic household” to the destitute, the friendless, the illegitimate, the sick and the homeless. And it worked until the mid-eighteenth century, when it was overwhelmed by demographic and economic change.

The welfare state, as it was reinvented in the mid-twentieth century, is intended to enable those without strong families to survive. It is an expression of a “duty of care” that is fundamental to all the world’s great religions. Its remit, in Lord Beveridge’s words, was to abolish “five giant evils: want, disease, ignorance, squalor, and idleness.”

After the social-democratic high point post-war, this duty of care has been eroded: why should we subsidise the lazy and the stupid, the sick and the poor because of their bad habits? We need to grow wealth so that it will trickle down. And anyway, we are trampling on the right to choose your own destiny, even if you are unwell and without means and a home.

And so, when Jeff Kennett closed Royal Park in 1994, we didn’t dump its residents to live in tents along the streets. We decanted them to the public housing towers, which today are our vertical, underserviced, lonely single wards for invalid pensioners, the majority with mental illness.

It’s no longer as traumatic as it was in 1974, where distressed people wandered the streets of North Melbourne screaming for their pills, but too many still experience distress that in turn distresses their neighbours. And they are lonely, their daily lives consumed by their illness, as they will tell you in their first breath.

Those towers today are also incubators of mental illness in their newer, refugee population: suicide by jumping from a window, homicide while deranged, domestic violence and depression.

There was meant to be a proper support system for these outsourced patients in the 1990s, but there was never enough investment, the pay was too low, carers burnt out and people were left to medicate themselves.

Susan Reverby wrote a brilliant history of nursing in America called Ordered to Care, arguing that the dilemma of American nursing is that they are ordered to care in a society that refuses to value caring. And that’s the rub.

By the time this letter is published we will know the result of the election. Anthony Albanese has committed to a “care-led recovery.” This is our largest growing sector of the workforce and if we want proper aged care, childcare and mental healthcare, we need to value the carers. Few of the journalists and pundits seem to take this seriously: it lacks “vision” and is too small a target; surely it’s unaffordable. They really don’t get it.

Like global warming, the science is in on the effects of toxic stress in utero and early life. We know what to do for children and struggling parents to break the chain of intergenerational trauma and illness. It requires holding families together, not breaking them except in extremis, and intensive work building language skills, emotional resilience and personal capacity. It needs love and play, laughter and fun. It needs affordable housing and social infrastructure. And to do that we need well-paid, properly supported and trained carers of all kinds.

And it even makes economic sense. The think-tank Per Capita finds that the impact on GDP of the NDIS – the one the Morrison government considered too expensive – has an economic multiplier effect (conservatively estimated) of around 2.25. Currently it employs 270,000 people in over twenty occupations: that’s a lot of jobs. In the great pandemic lockdown year of 2020–21, the NDIS made an economic contribution of around $52.4 billion to the nation. Improved mental and aged healthcare investments contribute likewise.

Even better, there would be less suffering and more happiness. There is no excuse any longer: our mutual care system from cradle to grave is the best investment we can make in our future as a society.

Janet McCalman

NOT WAVING, DROWNING

Correspondence

Jennifer Doggett

For those (like me) who work within the health sector, mental health is a puzzle.

It’s an area where there is a surprising level of agreement among stakeholders. Politicians (from both sides of politics), clinicians and consumers all seem united in their concern about the rates of both mental illness and sub-clinical mood disorders in Australian society. It’s also an issue which has been a high personal priority for individual health ministers (including the recent federal Minister for Health, Greg Hunt), who have allocated significant policy, political and financial resources to improve our mental health outcomes.

In any other area of health, these factors would have resulted in substantial progress. But in mental health, they appear to have delivered only marginal gains.

Also puzzling is that, unlike the other public health challenges we face (such as obesity, smoking and Covid-19), the causes of our seemingly intractable mental health problems are murky.

From the outside, there is no clear reason why Australians are experiencing so much mental distress. Australia outperforms the OECD average in income, jobs, education, health, environmental quality, social connections, civic engagement and life satisfaction. Even accounting for the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, Australians have never lived longer, with greater health and more material wealth than they do today.

Yet rates of depression and anxiety are at record levels, seemingly even higher than those of many other countries with materially worse living standards and conditions – Indonesia, Nigeria and Mexico, for example (although, due to data quality issues, it can be difficult to make accurate comparisons across countries).

Suicide is the leading cause of death among Australians aged fifteen to twenty-four, with rates among young Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people double that of non-Indigenous young people. Domestic violence (which often results from and in turn causes or exacerbates mental health problems) is a national emergency: on average, one woman a week is murdered by her current or former partner.

Everyone agrees that these are serious and urgent problems. But disagreements arise as to their cause and therefore possible solutions. People on the left cite social determinants such as rising inequality, poverty and racism as the main drivers of mental health problems. Those on the other end of the political spectrum point to the shift in social institutions such as marriage and family or our changing views about gender. Others suggest environmental issues and the existential threat posed by climate change. It seems that mental illness is a mirror which reflects back to the viewer their existing concerns, anxieties and ideologies. In this way it reinforces the ideologies and worldviews which divide us, making it difficult to work together to develop a common response.

Sarah Krasnostein’s thoughtful and wide-ranging essay sheds some useful light on this problem and suggests where our previous approaches to mental health may have gone wrong. By stepping outside the conventional, individualistic and health-centred approach to mental illness, she draws connections between our traumatic past as a nation and our current struggles with mental illness today. She highlights the importance, at both an individual and a social level, of naming and responding to trauma, and describes how this can contribute to our understanding of mental illness.

Obviously, mental health policies, programs and services can be important in addressing mental health needs, and Krasnostein is certainly not suggesting otherwise. But her essay also makes clear how anaemic these responses are when they are seen outside of a broader context: the traumas of our past, the fault-lines of race, class, gender and sexuality, and our collective anxieties about existential threats of climate change, the Covid-19 pandemic and global conflicts.

As we grapple with the findings of the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System, Krasnostein demonstrates why this issue is too important to be left to the policy-makers, clinicians, bureaucrats and politicians.

It illustrates how desperately we need the knowledge and wisdom of those not generally included in the mental health debate: the historians, the storytellers, the educators, the grandmothers and elders. It reminds us how much we can learn from the resilience of Indigenous, migrant and refugee communities about the strength of shared stories and the healing power of relationships.

Most significantly of all, Krasnostein highlights the importance of listening to the voices and experiences of people living with trauma and mental illness – people like Eliza, Daylia, Rebecca and Codey, whose stories Krasnostein respectfully and sensitively shares. Along with her deep insights and thoughtful analysis, their stories provide a powerful and valuable reminder of the human and social cost of our failure to address the impact of mental illness on the Australian community.

Jennifer Doggett

THE RECKONING

Response to Correspondence

Jess Hill

Before I respond to the correspondence, I’d like to apologise to ABC journalist Louise Milligan for an error I made in the essay. Milligan did not, as I wrote, contact the late Kate Thornton’s lawyer, Michael Bradley, after being tipped off by Kate’s friend Nick Ryan. She was given that information by another (confidential) source. Nick Ryan had nothing to do with Milligan discovering that Christian Porter was the subject of these allegations.

The mood at the National Press Club on 9 February was tense and electric and anxious and generous. Journalist, advocates, politicians and – at every table – women who had survived sexual violence. Reckless hugging. Old comrades reunited.

We were gathered and waiting for an address from two young women, Brittany Higgins and Grace Tame, who had fixed the nation’s attention on sexual violence, and the government’s failure to respond to it. Battle-hardened feminists were nervous for the two women in the green room upstairs giving their speeches one last read. Would Australia – a country run mostly by mates and blokes – really let these two young women define this cultural moment? Or would their words end up being twisted and misrepresented? Would this be the moment two victim-survivors set the agenda for this election year – and the years ahead – or would it set in train a silencing backlash?

Since I finished writing Quarterly Essay 84, something has shifted again. After a year of public reckoning over sexual violence – which the Morrison government presumed to be a temporary flashpoint best handled with spin and patience – the heat has not abated. In fact, the cultural power of victim-survivors has only grown. In January, when Tame had the audacity to show the prime minister how she felt about him – stony-faced and side-eyed at the Lodge, fulfilling her last duties as Australian of the Year – hers was the face that launched a thousand columns. It wasn’t “civil,” it wasn’t “nice,” she was doing what women had been warned against for millennia, she was a feminist hero – within hours, she went from a public figure to an icon, photoshopped onto five-dollar notes as Australia’s larrikin queen.

This is a new kind of power – and an unprecedented change, I believe, in the way Western societies have traditionally regarded victim-survivors of sexual violence. If I was to get carried away (if I had a column to write, let’s say), I might look at this cultural transformation and see in it a historic paradigmatic shift – one that is seeing some victim-survivors imbued for the first time with power, wisdom and expertise. I can’t name a time in the history of Western civilisation in which this has been the case; for millennia, victim-survivors have been pitied (at best), blamed, shamed, pathologised and ostracised. Even in Greek mythology, rape survivors are expected to accept their lot. It’s in Indigenous stories that we find historical examples of this “new” paradigm: “The Tale of the Raped Maiden,” for example, in which a twenty-year-old Ojibwe woman is, in the wake of being abducted and raped by a warring tribe, welcomed back by her own people as a wise and powerful woman who becomes both a medicine woman and a warrior.

There’s nothing wrong with trying to take a bird’s-eye view of this cultural moment, to place it in a historical context and assess what it may portend. But it’s easy to get carried away and disconnect our analysis from the real lives of the people we’re writing about. The more important point to make – and perhaps what is central to her appeal – is that Tame herself is not the property of a single movement, she is not angling to be an icon and she is not ideological. As she tweeted in response to the Australian of the Year furore, “What I did wasn’t an act of martyrdom in the gender culture war. It’s true that many women are sick of being told to smile, often by men, for the benefit of men. But it’s not just women who are conditioned to smile and conform to the visibly rotting status quo. It’s all of us.”

When Tame stood behind the lectern at the National Press Club in February, she said a lot, and with such presence and conviction that it was almost impossible to look away. What I jotted down, while I still had the presence of mind to take notes, were not the lines that ended up dominating headlines later that day. They were lines in her speech that spoke directly to a marginalised cohort of people watching at home; lines that may offer us a chance to find common ground, and to stop sexual violence being described reductively as a “women’s issue.” She was standing there not as a victim of sexual assault, “which is a distinctly gendered issue,” but as a target of child sexual abuse.

“I am not just an advocate for women,” she said. “I am an advocate for all survivors of child sexual abuse, many of whom are male.” The need to preserve the distinction between sexual assault (which predominantly affects women) and child sexual abuse (which disproportionately affects girls, but also affects a significant percentage of boys) was crucial, she continued. “We cannot forget our boys, and we cannot forget our men, not only as welcome, equal participants in this ongoing conversation, and without ignoring many negative patriarchal customs, we cannot forget our boys and men who are fellow survivors of abuse.”

Tame was throwing down the gauntlet to the women’s movement: Can we broaden this conversation to include the boys and men who have been subjected to sexual violence and abuse? Domestic abuse, sexual violence and child sexual abuse differ in important ways, but, as Tame said, they are all about abuse of power. “Men are not the enemy,” she said. “Abuse of power is the enemy.” Men make up the overwhelming majority of perpetrators, especially of sexual violence, but this resistance to advocating for survivor boys and men must be overcome. The target of the feminist movement made more precise: abusers of power, upholders of patriarchy.

Since Rosie Batty was made Australian of the Year in 2015, we’ve spent years as a nation interrogating the nature of abuse and violence, and have dramatically recalibrated our attitudes to, and beliefs about, victim-survivors. In this conversation, however – still – the perpetrators are largely invisible, and often misunderstood. This issue remains, as Kieran Pender writes in his correspondence, “perhaps the most difficult piece in this jigsaw puzzle [of solutions].” What do we do with the hundreds of thousands – if not millions – of men who harass, abuse, coerce and control? When will people truly internalise the reality that the men who do the most damage aren’t just those who commit the obvious dastardly acts – the Harvey Weinsteins and Dyson Heydons – but “our fathers, brothers, friends . . . The typical perpetrator is not a bogeyman. It is you, or me.” That is a paradigm shift which is yet to take root in this country. That’s understandable: the idea that the men we love and treasure could be behaving in ways we find repugnant is deeply unsettling. But if we don’t grapple with this – while taking care not to demonise men in general – we will continue to misdiagnose both the problem and the solutions.

In his thought-provoking response, Pender also highlights the need to reconceive what constitutes the greater harm when it comes to sexual harassment. We are, as a society, preoccupied with blockbuster incidents, and find it much harder to comprehend the extreme harm done through objectification and degradation. “What of the grey areas – the sexual joke in the elevator, the possibly suggestive text from a boss to their staff member, the colleague leaning in for an unreciprocated kiss at after-work drinks? In these contexts, right and wrong are not always so clearly distinguished – subtle cues, power dynamics and subjective interpretation can be everything . . . If the #MeToo movement is to succeed, in Australia and elsewhere, it must address these everyday experiences of sexual harassment.” My own experience of sexual harassment, which I detailed in the essay, was not a headline-making incident – it was a blunt kind of sexual objectification. And yet, more than fifteen years later, writing about it brought back such powerful feelings of worthlessness that I was left sobbing at my desk.

I won’t speak for women of previous generations, but I can say that I believe my response was heavily influenced by the fact that I didn’t grow up with any sense that my gender would affect – let alone define – the way I would be treated in the workplace. In fact, although I was disturbed as a teenager by the way women were talked down to in fashion magazines, it took me another decade to realise that this was symptomatic of the broader system of gender inequality. So when, in my early twenties, I was sexually objectified by my boss (several decades my senior), it shattered the innate sense I had of being entitled to equal treatment. It initiated me into a world I had no idea existed.

Since The Reckoning was published, three young former associates sexually harassed by former High Court judge Dyson Heydon finally received their settlement, reported to be a six-figure sum, from the Morrison government. Asked by Laura Tingle on 7.30 if she had anything she’d like to tell Heydon, one of those associates, Alex Eggerking, summed up with cold fury and precision the life-altering harm of being coerced and sexually objectified by one of the country’s most senior judges. “Dyson, you ruined my career. You destroyed my love for the law . . . You made me feel viscerally unsafe on my third day of working for you. You made me feel worthless. You treated me like I was an object that you could use when you wanted to with impunity.” She went on: “What I also want to say is that you didn’t get away with it. Strong, courageous, vulnerable, bloody determined women stood up and said, ‘That’s enough. This is what happened to me and you won’t get away with it.’” The fury and indignation of women like Eggerking (and so many others whose names we have learnt since 2017), who were raised to expect equality, is the lifeblood of #MeToo and this powerful era of modern feminism.

Apparently, however, Janet Albrechtsen doesn’t share their indignation. Having said that, it’s unclear whether Albrechtsen read the whole essay. She is a culture warrior, first and foremost, which tends to preclude close engagement on issues within the battlelines. When she says “not all women are powerless patsies in the workplace,” it’s unclear to whom she is referring. Are the women who were involuntarily conscripted into #MeToo in Australia, simply through making a complaint, “powerless patsies”? Are women who don’t complain, by extension, powerful and independent? Should women just cop it and not make a fuss? Does Albrechtsen consider sexual harassment an unavoidable (albeit unfortunate) feature of working life for women? The mind boggles.

For this essay, I wrote 40,000 words in seven weeks (with the invaluable assistance of David Hollier and Kristine Ziwica), and I readily concede that I could not do justice to every aspect of the #MeToo movement. But nowhere on my list of subjects to include did I have the “messy, wondrous complexities of men and women and their sexual relationships.” My subject was #MeToo, which is concerned with sexual violence. I took it as given that readers know the difference between complex relationships and patterns of sexual harassment, coercion, assault and rape. Of course, the lines are not always precise, but my essay is concerned with behaviour that falls well outside the spectrum of “wondrous” and crosses over into “traumatising” and “illegal.” If Albrechtsen is suggesting that more analysis is needed of the grey areas regarding consent, I would direct her to chapter two, in which the Aziz Ansari case illustrates just that. In fact, clarifying these boundaries makes “wondrous” relationships more likely, not less.

Albrechtsen also suggests that the essay “would have benefited from more curiosity, perhaps even bravery, to explore how the #MeToo movement has ensnared – and been co-opted by – many people for purposes beyond abuse and male power.” I’m curious: which cases would exemplify this? Who has co-opted the movement? Albrechtsen is not explicit – or should I say, she does not appear curious enough herself here to give examples. In my work on gendered violence, I err towards challenging the status quo – for example, the accepted wisdom that gender inequality is at the root of domestic abuse (and is therefore an effective way to address it). I have never shied away from tipping a sacred cow on its head and examining its parts. But aside from analysing this as a hypothetical, I genuinely do not know what Albrechtsen would have me analyse – what credible example of #MeToo being co-opted or abused I would single out as a reflection of a broader dynamic. I don’t see how, on the evidence, #MeToo has led to a pattern of men being ensnared by false allegations.

It would be nice if Albrechtsen at some point acknowledged Australia’s endemic and, by international standards, very high rates of serious abuse of power in the forms of sexual harassment, assault and rape in workplaces and elsewhere. In fact, in Australia’s legal profession – to which Albrechtsen claims membership – harassment and abuse are so common they have long been accepted as part of the culture, a rite of passage for many. I wonder if Albrechtsen considers sexual harassment an inevitable, even normal, part of career advancement for women.

I am grateful for the cool-headed analysis of my journalistic peers, particularly Gina Rushton, Hannah Ryan and Amber Schultz. Rushton and Ryan are right to carve up my optimistic conclusion into quantifiable chunks: Exactly how can we tell if we are winning this war? Can we see actual change in how allegations are received? Whether sexual harassment has diminished? Aside from relaying anecdotal evidence, it’s impossible to answer these questions with any confidence. Journalist and survivor advocate Nina Funnell has cautioned against overblown optimism, particularly that which centred on the Women’s March in 2021. Momentum that is not bedded down in real reform can easily be lost, and to paraphrase the great Harvard psychiatrist Judith Herman, “trauma wants to be forgotten.” Perhaps rather than try to assess change through the shorter lens of the immediate past, it’s more helpful to zoom out, to see how similarly powerful movements have brought about historic change – the kind of change we now take for granted. Here, I defer to the correspondence of feminist and author Sara Dowse, who has had a front-row seat to many of the changes that preceded #MeToo, to give us a sense of what is possible.

Yet, of all the seismic changes we have seen since Dowse was a young woman, what we have not seen elevated in this movement is the equal inclusion of Indigenous women and women of colour. This was made painfully clear in the wake of the government’s hastily organised apology to those who had experienced sexual harassment, assault or bullying while working in federal parliament – an occasion to which the government did not deem it necessary to invite any of the women it was apologising to. Instead, a small number of survivors and advocates was hastily invited at the last minute, thanks to the intervention of independent MP Zali Steggall. There were several there, such as Chanel Contos, who had not worked in the parliament, and yet still, however, nobody thought to invite women of colour such as Dhanya Mani, a former NSW Liberal political staffer who went public with her allegations of sexual assault by a colleague, or Tessa Sullivan, who was the first political staffer to have their allegations made public after #MeToo, as readers of the essay will recall. Mani’s objections to this ongoing erasure were read out in parliament by Queensland Greens MP Larissa Waters:

“Even now in 2022, after the lessons of #MeToo, politicians and the mainstream media almost solely centre the stories of cisgender, able-bodied and conventionally attractive white women at the expense of all other voices. But this cultural moment of reckoning in Australian politics and feminism is built on the sacrifice, advocacy and unpaid labour of women of colour like me. Like Tessa. We came first.”

Nareen Young highlights this inexcusable disparity in her correspondence, citing a comment that speaks to the necessity of this change: “As a feminist of both Aboriginal and culturally diverse descent, I agree with Tracy Westerman’s succinct tweet of 27 January 2022 that ‘I want to see #MeToo champion Aboriginal victims, particularly given its Black origins & the invisibility of Aboriginal victims.’”

We need to shift the dial on this, and quickly, lest we embed just another archetype of the “ideal victim.”

We are living through one of those peak times, when, as Dowse writes, the “justice of the cause” has become “so bleedingly obvious” – but perhaps for the first time not just to women, but also to a growing number of men. There is something quite astonishing about the appeal of Brittany Higgins and Grace Tame to a growing number of men who are impressed by their chutzpah and do not feel excluded by their rhetoric. It is clear who attracts their ire: those who abuse power. As Higgins made so devastatingly clear in her address to the National Press Club: “I did not want his sympathy as a father; I wanted him to use his power as prime minister.” These are appeals not to empathy and compassion, but to a clarity of ethics and leadership. This is a message that is resonating with a growing cohort of men, who can see a shared vision in their words. So how can supportive men become part of the change they want to see in the world?

This is addressed somewhat in Malcolm Knox’s genuine and heartfelt response. I hand the mic over here to my partner, psychotherapist David Hollier, who co-wrote the essay’s chapter on men:

“Malcom Knox’s response plumbs the exact position of this essay on men’s response to the demands of #MeToo: listen, understand, stay engaged, work together. As a psychotherapist, I have worked with many men grappling with problems rooted in their experiences of being male; I can attest that Knox is not alone in feeling that ‘silence and submission’ is the smartest response to #MeToo. Faced with social media that so readily distort and weaponise even well-intentioned, considered contributions, too many men fall into the passivity that Knox rightly identifies as collusion. Every man must ask himself how it is that women need a movement to demand, to plead with us not to harass, assault and rape them. Start by facing the absurd notion that this is, still, apparently, an unrealistic request.

“As one of three men who along with sixty-odd women participated in UNSW’s inaugural gender studies class in 1995, I’ve long since thought feminism has as much, and in the long run more, to offer men than women; but for men to shed the skin of patriarchal, power-over masculinity requires a far more threatening metamorphosis, one that requires trust, the courage to let one’s guard down long enough to connect on terms of shared power. I have found that simply discussing this with men draws a threat response from many, a reaction that is more deeply embedded, more primal, more rapidly aroused, than anything in our cognition – men’s mistrust of men. Most feel a loss of control and fear before they can reach the relief of discovering they can let their guard down and still be okay. Just writing these words, I brace for the onslaught of reactive defensiveness, the excuses that invariably follow the offer of connection. Here is where men must encourage and support each other, shed the defences.

“As a therapist, I challenge men in the safety of a confidential closed room, men who have chosen to ask questions about their masculinity and the damaging effects it has on their lives – their families and friends. From this private space, I thank Knox and the many other men who have risked men’s – and some women’s – opprobrium when they have dared to publicly challenge the old-world masculinity and privilege so stubbornly abiding in Australia. May such voices proliferate.”

Finally, although the apology – snuck in the day before the address by Tame and Higgins to the National Press Club – was another impeccably designed PR disaster, I’m interested in what it says about the loose ends Morrison perceives as a threat to his re-election – it’s not enough just to play the buffoon to the blokes and the patient women who love them. The “issues” that women have with men’s violence may not decide the election, but they are clearly enough of a worry to see the government now give priority to the response – both to the internal Jenkins report and, theatrically, with the apology. Being faced with a slew of mostly female independents in marginal seats must also have sharpened the Coalition’s attention. It seems women may be sufficiently disgusted by this government to change their vote. How many women? We’ll have the answer by the time the next Quarterly Essay is published.

Jess Hill

THE RECKONING

Correspondence

Sara Dowse

Two pages into the introduction of Jess Hill’s Quarterly Essay is a sentence that jumped off the page at me: “But then things get dark.” She was referring to what happened after Prime Minister Scott Morrison revealed in a highly emotional statement to the press gallery that, despite his dissembling and shelving of the issue for weeks, he had come to learn what it’s been like for women, throughout Australia and in the very building where he was standing.

First, a few remarks about Morrison’s statement. It came after months of mounting anger as the #MeToo wave had crashed with full force into Parliament House – the centre, as is often said, of Australian democracy. On the Ides of March, women all over the country had spilled into the streets in a March 4 Justice and in Canberra they rallied on the Parliament House lawn. Putting it mildly, parliamentary workplace behaviour had been found wanting. A woman had been allegedly raped in the defence minister’s office, only a few feet from Morrison’s own. A male staffer had been photographed by his mates while jerking off onto a female MP’s desk. The attorney-general had outed himself as the accused in a historical case of alleged rape. Morrison seemed to have finally grasped that a deep-seated misogyny runs through our nation, finding its most horrific expression in what can only be called a scourge of sexual violence.

#MeToo has reminded us that misogyny – or sexism, as we termed it in the 1970s – operates systemically. At the milder end of the spectrum are the putdowns, the mansplaining, the crude remarks. Then come the unwanted sexual advances that can morph into outright harassment. But then things get dark – the endgame being sexual assault and all too often murder.

In the corporate world at least, strides have been made to lessen the incidence of sexual harassment in the workplace, which is illegal under the 1984 Sex Discrimination Act. In this respect, as Hill proceeds to skilfully outline, parliament is an egregious outlier, a world unto its own. For all Morrison’s histrionics at the press conference – about how the women in his life constitute its centre, and that because of them he was going to do something – the prime minister reverted to form. To the suggestion from a News Corp reporter that he might have lost control of his staff, the PM lashed back with an insinuation about an incident alleged to have occurred in a Sky News toilet. As Hill explains, there was no such incident. It is this “mask-dropping”, coded retort that Hill alludes to with her But then things get dark.

I’m not here to repeat what Hill explains about this gaffe and what it reveals about Morrison. For me, her simple five-word sentence has far greater resonance. It encapsulates the dismayingly cyclical nature of what one prescient writer in the ’70s called “the longest revolution.” Feminism’s progress – and it is progress – has been glacially slow. Now and then it gathers swift momentum, until it lands like a meteorite on the body politic. Such was the force of the suffragist movement. Then it was left to simmer, buried under the post-war patriarchal resurgence of the 1950s, until it burst out again. And each time it bursts out, as it did again in the 1970s, the women caught up in it experience a thrillingly cathartic exhilaration, as the justice of the cause becomes so bleedingly obvious.

And then things get dark.

I’m talking about backlash. It’s not surprising that Hill ends her magnificent essay by confronting it. “A century from now, women will be holding signs,” she affirms, “just as they did at the March 4 Justice – that say ‘I can’t believe we’re still protesting this shit.’” She even suggests that, as successful as it has been in effecting cultural change through exposing and rooting out misogyny in the entertainment and legal worlds, #MeToo appears to have triggered its own backlash. Writing this on the brink of a federal election, after all that’s been shown to be morally threadbare in Morrison’s idea of governance, I find this cause for concern. From what we know about him now, he will not be pitching for votes from feminists or our supporters, but from those in whom our own special brand of Australian misogyny has been left to fester and ominously sprout.

Yet there’s another way of looking at it. In the 1970s, when feminism’s second wave reached us here in Australia, we women found enough homegrown grievances to make the movement our own. Where to begin? Jobs advertised along gender lines. “Public” bars closed to women. Unequal pay inscribed in industry awards and cemented in a basic minimum wage. Childcare was scarce and substandard. There was a luxury tax on contraceptives; abortion was illegal and highly dangerous. There were no women bus drivers, let alone pilots. We scarcely made an appearance in the law faculties, not to mention the High Court. Not a single woman occupied a seat in the House of Representatives. You never heard or saw a woman reading the news or providing commentary. With staggeringly few exceptions, all positions of authority were reserved for males, for underpinning it all was the pervasive, peculiarly Australian patriarchal culture that effectively consigned half the adult population to second-class citizenship. It’s hard even for women (like me) who were alive back then to grasp how we were treated, and unimaginable to my daughters and granddaughters. But for all that, it could be said we were lucky, because feminism’s resurgence coincided with the 1972 election of a federal government prepared to put energy and resources into improving the situation. And it was a shift in the hitherto conservative women’s vote that put them there.

In the three tumultuous years that Whitlam was allowed to govern, the changes to Australian society were both remarkable and long-lasting. That doesn’t mean that no one resisted them or that reform came easily. But if the momentum slowed after the 1975 Dismissal, it picked up again after 1983, when Labor was returned. It was only with the Coalition’s election under Howard in 1996 that women took a slide, and things became steadily darker. Women in politics were more visible than they had been, a female MP was no longer an oddity, there were women in the ministry, a few made it into cabinet. But Howard’s brand of conservatism was marked by a nostalgic yearning for the 1950s, and key measures of his government, such as the family tax benefit part B and Costello’s baby bonus, were imbued with it. This was the “post-feminist” era. Women were induced to become “homemakers” again, and what feminism remained was narrowly interpreted as “leaning in,” or middle-class career advancement, or abstruse academic theory. The cost of childcare rocketed; the effective marginal tax rate on married women lowered the female participation rate, leaving many older women today with insufficient superannuation to fund their retirements. Correspondingly, cuts to women’s refuges and associated services left women unacceptably vulnerable.

Yet throughout this, the “post-feminist” claptrap and Howard’s social conservatism, one crucial change from those earlier, heady reformist years survived. Enough of what we second-wave feminists had achieved had rubbed off on younger women – even those who shunned the designation. Greater education opportunity had a part in it. For all Howard’s efforts, women had wider aspirations for themselves and were bound to be enraged when thwarted, meeting up with glass ceilings, sexual harassment and violence. Here was a classic case of approach-suppression – the kind that makes for revolutions.

It’s possible that, after the decades of backlash, the hideous treatment dished out to our one female prime minister and worse to countless other women, and the whittling away of essential government services, women will prove crucial in voting out a government that has shown itself particularly impervious to our concerns. Could it be time – once again?

Maybe it should come as no surprise that at the time of writing eight out of the eleven independents seeking to win previously safe Coalition seats in the coming election happen to be women. I live in Warringah, where we are bracing ourselves for what the Liberals will unleash in attempting to wrest the seat back. They were as dirty as hell in 2019 trying to stop Zali Steggall from getting elected. We’re not complacent, we know the tricks the Liberals are capable of. But the signs are that Steggall will be re-elected. She’s proved an intelligent, hardworking and responsive member, and the issues she’s fought for, in the 2019 campaign and subsequently in parliament, are of increasing urgency in the electorate. Climate change is one, integrity another. Feminism is another. At one event I attended back in 2019, the moderator, Layne Beachley, asked what had prompted Steggall to run. Steggall didn’t hesitate with an answer. It was seeing how the Liberals treated Julie Bishop in the spill that elected Morrison, she said, dropping Bishop off early in the ballot in favour of a man – any man. And needless to say, Steggall is no fan of Morrison.

The election this year is expected to be the most important in a generation – on the order of 1972’s – though even if history does repeat itself, the script is never quite the same. The overriding issue in the 1970s was our involvement in Vietnam, and Labor had promised to withdraw our troops. (Imagine how it would be wedged on something comparable today.) For women, the “mandate” included opening the case for equal pay and funding for preschools (though not for childcare). The Women’s Electoral Lobby’s questionnaire was significant in raising awareness of what were called “women’s issues” and exposing how ignorant of them some of the candidates were, most notably the sitting prime minister, Billy McMahon.

We’ve yet to see if the #MeToo groundswell will translate into enough votes for the female independents to gain the balance of power in the forty-seventh parliament, or if the women’s vote per se will be the deciding factor in a Labor victory, as it was in 1972. Certainly the incompetence, “soft” corruption and generally vacuous management of Morrison and his ministers provide reason enough for their losing women’s votes.

Hill rightly ends her essay on a note of cautious optimism. “We are winning the war,” she writes. Yet she also warns that the success of #MeToo, this latest iteration in feminism’s “longest revolution,” has set off its own backlash, one resulting in a deepening electoral gender divide, at the centre of which could be climate change – already deemed by some to be a “feminine” issue. And if Omicron peters out by election day, Morrison’s infuriating stunts playing to his toxic male “base” could just possibly save him. That said, I wouldn’t put my money on it. Things have got far too dark.

Sara Dowse

THE RECKONING

Correspondence

Janet Albrechtsen

The Reckoning is, on many levels, a terrific analysis of the #MeToo movement in this country and elsewhere. Jess Hill lays down an excellent timeline of how #MeToo started with waves of rage and retribution in October 2017, radiating from a hashtag to where it landed in Australia at the clumsy feet of Scott Morrison by the end of 2021. In between, Hill covers the disaster of the early days of #MeToo in Australia when Tracey Spicer made “impossible promises” of a “triage service” to help women. Hill also offers sensible analysis of the need to focus on the long game of embedding cultural change to protect all women from abuse, rather than just the Whack-a-Mole wins against high-profile men.

What’s missing from Hill’s essay is a greater understanding of why many have been frustrated by and disappointed with the exploitation of the #MeToo movement. For example, Hill regards the sceptical reaction of Germaine Greer and other older feminists to #MeToo as a “surprising twist.”

Why surprising? Not every claim under the #MeToo banner deserved, or deserves, to be taken seriously. Not all women are powerless patsies in the workplace.

Hill’s essay would have been more compelling if the messy, wondrous complexities of men and women and their sexual relationships got a run. Instead, it repeats the #MeToo pattern of treating us as simpletons, unable to agree to cultural change unless women are seen as powerless victims and masculinity as inherently bad, a road that takes our boys to confusion, misogyny and abuse.

Many women hold power in the workplace. Some abuse it. Women can manipulate men sexually and emotionally. Women can choose to have sexual relationships with powerful bosses without a scintilla of regret. Some will do it deliberately to climb the career ladder. In some cases, it’s the thundering power of love between two people who happen to work in the same place. Sometimes the love is uneven, and when there is no marriage proposal, all hell breaks loose into claims of abuse. Who holds the power in that scenario?

Hill’s Quarterly Essay would have benefited from more curiosity, perhaps even bravery, to explore how the #MeToo movement has ensnared – and been co-opted by – many people for purposes beyond abuse and male power.

Take the front-page headline in London’s Daily Mail about Meghan Markle on 7 January 2022: “‘Bullying’ is word used to harm career women, says Meghan’s lawyer.” Maybe sometimes. The word does get thrown around a lot when women fall out with colleagues. But not always. Women can be terrible bullies, as data from the latest report into the federal parliament’s culture shows.

If we are serious about cultural change, honesty is the best policy. That means recognising the good, the bad and the ugly in men and women.

Janet Albrechtsen

This response was first published in The Australian on 7 January 2022.

THE RECKONING

Correspondence

Amber Schultz

“Turning incuriosity into performance art”: this is the line that stood out to me from Jess Hill’s The Reckoning. Hill was referring to how, when Scott Morrison received an unsigned police statement alleging that, as a teenager, his right-hand man, Christian Porter, had raped a young girl named Kate, he hadn’t even bothered to look at it. (Porter denies the allegation.)

The phrase perfectly encapsulates why the #MeToo movement was so powerful. Every woman knows a woman who has experienced sexual violence, but few men claim to know perpetrators. Why? Sheer incuriosity and utter disbelief that their friend, their mate, their bro could commit something so vile.

Or perhaps, when it came to Morrison’s ministry and those on the other side of the political spectrum, it was something darker: if one could fall, so too could others. The Big Swinging Dicks club had to be protected at all costs.

When I first saw Alyssa Milano’s #MeToo tweet trending, I was highly sceptical. Surely everyone knew harassment was rife? Society’s tolerance for it was incredibly high. But women sharing examples and tales of abuse struck a chord. Yes, the prevalence of harassment was well known among women – but not, as I had assumed, among men. Or maybe I assumed men knew but didn’t care, which, again as Hill notes, wasn’t true.

As more and more stories were shared, memories – frustrating and frequent examples of harassment and abuse, which we had either pushed to the dark recesses of our brains or convinced ourselves we’d somehow caused – emerged and were reframed as what they really were.

Each shared individual experience was a small piece of the puzzle that, when joined together, helped us see the all-encompassing and pervasive culture of power, sexism and discrimination.

Such documentation is the heart of the #MeToo movement, as founder Tarana Burke intended it. Not necessarily finger-pointing – though, as Hill observes, this has added fire to the movement – but documenting abuse and harassment, however big and however small.

But once the puzzle was laid bare, not everyone wanted to look at it – especially those in parliament. So, when Brittany Higgins woke up half-naked on a couch in Parliament House, the room was deep-cleaned and the incident swept under the rug. When thousands of women and allies rallied outside parliament demanding action on sexual violence, they were ignored and told to be grateful they hadn’t been shot. When the rape allegation against Porter emerged, he was an “innocent man” in Morrison’s eyes.

See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.

I truly believe Morrison thought all the issues that came to light across 2020 might just ebb away, like many of his other public gaffes. But Australia had reached a tipping point. The silence simply made us louder, angrier and more driven. The Morrison government faced a dilemma: by the time Morrison began to address women’s anger, he had already lost control of the narrative.

The progression in how Morrison talks about sexual violence has been morbidly fascinating to watch. If it weren’t so rage-inducing, it would be comic – how frequently he got things wrong, squirmed as he tried to respond to difficult questions with spin to make himself look good, and made remarks he thought were clever but that showed a fundamental misunderstanding of the issue.

His rhetoric has improved: no longer does he evoke fatherhood or sympathy for “Jenny and the girls,” refusing to acknowledge women as autonomous beings outside of their relationship to men. Now he tells women he gets it, he understands: sexual violence is bad.

But Morrison missed the starting gun – something palpably painful for him. He always tries to stay ahead of the narrative. When Morrison fields journalists’ questions, he is in control. He’ll avoid hosting press conferences when prickly issues emerge, telling journalists there’ll be “another time” for answering their questions. There never is.

This is why, when sex discrimination commissioner Kate Jenkins’ Set the Standard report dropped, Morrison hosted a press conference fifteen minutes after it was published and two hours before Jenkins hosted her own conference. He took the opportunity to pat himself on the back, stressing how much he had learnt from his one-hour training on gendered violence. He didn’t specify what had been so revelatory.

When former NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian resigned, he quickly primed her for a federal seat, proudly announcing she had “a lot more to contribute” to politics. He was trying to use her as a political pawn, shoehorning her into a position she didn’t want. When he faced criticism, he played the victim.

“People can’t have it both ways,” he said. “They can’t say, why aren’t you getting more women into parliament, and when I try and get women into parliament, and when it doesn’t happen, they attack me.”

Or like when former Liberal MP Julia Banks decided she would step down, unable to tolerate Morrison and his “menacing controlling wallpaper” presence. She agreed to not speak to the media for twenty-four hours, thinking she was being collegial – only to find out Morrison’s office had started to background journalists about her, painting her as everything from a “weak petal” to a “bully.”

But when it comes to the #MeToo movement, Morrison has lost control of the narrative. He tries to stay ahead of it, appointing himself as the keynote speaker of the Women’s Safety Summit and dragging the Minister for Women, Linda Reynolds – who rarely speaks for more than a few minutes – to every press conference relating to gender.

But his attempts are too little, too late.

This is why Hill’s essay is so powerful. It lays down the narrative, without spin but with deep analysis, adding perspective to two years of anger and inaction.

It displays the entire puzzle in a clear light for all to see.

Amber Schultz

TOP BLOKES

Response to Correspondence

Lech Blaine

In September, I felt the country beginning to splinter as Clive Palmer’s anti-lockdown propaganda kicked into overdrive. I know lots of people in regional Queensland with zero history of vaccine hesitancy who were becoming gripped by conspiracy theories. If they felt so ferociously about lockdowns, what would the mood be like in Western Sydney and Melbourne, as a high baseline of distrust in government combined with a genuine sense of economic threat?

The answer came during the so-called tradie protests. Riot police were girt by high-vis construction workers who wanted to hit Dictator Dan where it hurt: by losing work, and potentially infecting each other with Covid.

Outside the CFMEU offices, the angry mob bombarded John Setka with accusations of betrayal. On the West Gate Bridge, the protestors sang “The Horses” by Daryl Braithwaite. That’s the way it’s gonna be, little daaarlin’! The next day, fake tradies and makeshift nationalists converged on the war memorial to shotgun pre-mixed liquor, snort Class A drugs, and chant “Advance Australia Fair”.

Reports surfaced that the workers had been infiltrated by neo-Nazis. Counter-reports maintained that true-blue CFMEU members were mostly responsible. Either way, it was a grimly familiar spectacle in Australian history: larrikins suffering from an inarticulate nihilism groped around for the charade of mateship and patriotism to justify their self-destructiveness.

The protestors evoked the textbook larrikins described by David Hunt in his characteristically witty correspondence to Top Blokes:

Hunt takes issue with the historical fidelity of the larrikin in my essay, and I don’t blame him. As a historian, I’m not fit to shine David’s shoes. I’m more interested in the myth of larrikinism that Australian politics has inherited than the literal inner-city larrikins of the 1800s.

My point wasn’t that Paterson and Lawson were bona fide larrikins, but that they played a pivotal role in disseminating the myths we still cling to. Likewise, nobody would sanctify Scott Morrison as a bona fide larrikin, partly because he has zero sense of humour. But his ScoMo persona is heavily influenced by the myths of larrikinism. Larrikins such as my brother John immediately see and hear a fellow traveller. Morrison conveys to a certain cohort of voters that he will fight against the political correctness Sky News believes is killing our national hero.

Not long after the tradie riots, John Elliott died. Figures from the right and left united to describe him as a “larrikin,” a euphemism often wheeled out on the death of disgraced businessmen. In the 1980s, Elliott belonged to a coterie of right-wing white-collar mavericks that included John Singleton and Alan Bond. They loved sport and beer, and made politically incorrect faux pas about women. This made them seem like mates, rather than vulture capitalists.

Increasingly, I’ve noticed the figure of the larrikin highlighted by culture warriors on the right as a defence against political correctness. This reactionary larrikin bears little resemblance to Hunt’s textbook larrikin, or the egalitarian larrikins – of both genders – celebrated by Alison Pennington. The myth-makers link a series of contradictory figures whose common feature is that they hearken back to an idealised – and less socially progressive – time in Australia’s history. It also happens to be a time when the transgressions of men went unchallenged.

In hindsight, I could have done a better job of clarifying these competing larrikins at the outset, although I reckon Shannon Burns is probably right: the business of determining exactly who is and isn’t a “real” larrikin might be a fool’s errand. Flicking somewhat flippantly between historical scenes was meant to convey the mess of Australian national identity, and the way we frequently use the same descriptions and categories for people who are spiritually and politically opposed. I definitely should have provided a more succinct definition of what it means to be a larrikin, then and now, especially in a positive sense.

Burns does a stellar job of pinpointing charismatic aspects of a larrikin:

I wish I’d written this. Burns could be describing my father. Dad was a Grade Eight drop-out who once upon a time worked at an abattoir while belonging to a gang of bodgies in hardscrabble Ipswich. After a serious workplace injury, he moved through various jobs, including professional gambling, dalmatian breeding and driving taxis, always hustling for money. He maintained a deep mischievous streak after becoming a publican. But there was always a warmth to his piss-takes, and he was consistently the target of his own scorn. The open advertisement of personal imperfections invited others to loosen up.

In her correspondence, former state Labor MP Rachel Nolan fleshes out the rich tradition of labourism in my father’s hometown of Ipswich:

This atmosphere provided the sincerely egalitarian side of my father’s larrikinism. The son of a trade unionist, he was a foster parent for almost thirty years. He also must’ve been one of the only publicans in the country who waged personal war against WorkChoices, because he believed that the government should protect the penalty rates of his employees and customers. And – along with former Ipswich Jets coach Tommy Raudonikis – he had a profound influence on the nefarious tendencies of his nephew Allan Langer, who would become widely beloved as Queensland’s number one public larrikin.

Growing up, I worshipped larrikin athletes such as Langer and Shane Warne for the same reason my father preferred Doug Walters to Don Bradman. It wasn’t just their athletic prowess that enchanted. They sounded like me, a bogan with a thick Australian drawl. There were increasingly few areas of public life where I saw my identity represented unironically, or where I could look without feeling in some way substandard by comparison.

I was delighted to receive Pennington’s erudite attention to gaps in my essay, and her personal identification with some of my experiences:

My brother John and I aren’t biologically related, but we are cut from the same cloth. His shame caused him to identify with John Howard, who appealed to people sick of feeling like they weren’t enough. As a teenager in country Queensland, my shame caused me to identify with urban elites, although I had much more in common with John on most matters except politics.

I’ve long since made peace with my bogan roots. Still, one of my missions as an essayist is to capture the perspective of self-identifying outsiders like John. Not because I agree with everything that he believes, but because John’s beliefs are extremely popular. He isn’t really an outsider. There are more of him than me. Bri Lee writes about the geographic distance between Australia’s media class and the cohort of unseen voters now known as Scott Morrison’s Quiet Australians, highlighted by the 2019 election:

The great irony – which I perhaps didn’t explore for fear of being self-absorbed – is that by pursuing a career in writing and journalism, I’m at great risk of squandering my father’s class advancements. Indeed, my brother John earns significantly more money than me, and nobody would accuse him of being an elite. I ain’t complaining, because I knew what I was getting into.

But Vivian Gerrand does have a point in her correspondence:

I’ve been incredibly lucky since publishing Top Blokes to generate positive feedback and vehement disagreement, frequently within the same breath. Some have asked why I care if Morrison is a fraud. The best politicians are bullshit artists, and all human beings are inauthentic to some extent. It is impossible to be the same person all the time, and social media has allowed human beings to be several different people at once. As Elizabeth Flux notes:

My memoir, Car Crash, analysed the several different identities I oscillated between as a teenager. The epiphany wasn’t picking just one but becoming comfortable with my contradictions. So why do I care so much about ScoMo’s? Principally, I think his reinvention is interesting on a human level. It also explains something fundamental about our national identity and the changing voting bases of the major parties. Tom Lee somewhat interprets the bee in my bonnet:

I wouldn’t have such an issue with Morrison’s careerist reinvention as a suburban rugby league fan if he didn’t frequently seek to force Australians to conform to a narrow version of Australian identity, or to exclude people who don’t from political debates. Anyone who disagrees with the government from the left, especially on climate change, is likely to be labelled as an inner-city elite. But there are no more powerful “inner-city elites” than the ones Morrison used to rub shoulders with at rugby union games or Liberal Party fundraisers. And if you seek to police public debate with stringent identity markers, you should expect your own carefully focus-grouped identity to be scrutinised.

At the same time, I didn’t want the essay simply to be a critique of Scott Morrison and Coalition voters. It takes two to tango. The reason so many Australians find ScoMo’s unpretentiousness appealing is because they generally feel contempt emanating from members of the media and political classes, especially progressives. Morrison embraces them unconditionally.

It remains to be seen whether a Johnny-come-lately love of beer and rugby league can save Morrison from the wrath of battlers in 2022. The prime minister has lost support among female voters, probably owing to his mishandling of the Brittany Higgins affair. This explained his puzzling appearance at the height of the Higgins cover-up to chug a beer in the dressing sheds of the Parramatta Eels, a rugby league team that he doesn’t even support. Morrison wants to compensate for the loss of women by attracting blokes anxious about woke feminists.

The Coalition’s game plan for the 2022 election will be similar to the last one. Morrison needs his incompetence to be eclipsed by infighting between voters who should be economic allies. At the eleventh hour, the main person responsible for the fear and loathing will present himself as a down-to-earth bloke who can unify the nation, deliver economic stability and defend larrikins from political correctness. And there is still every chance that this will work. Although I do think that “Albo” is much savvier than many pundits give him credit for, and not just because he’s a South Sydney Rabbitohs fan.

Lech Blaine

TOP BLOKES

Correspondence

Tom Lee

Lech Blaine’s essay is a welcome provocation to think in more nuanced ways about the complexity of Australian culture and character. Archetypes abound in the essay: the eponymous larrikin, in particular, though the bogan, aristocrat (I suppose we have them in Australia, bizarro versions like Kerry Packer), silvertail, fibro, tradie, miner, squatter, snob, cosmopolitan and parochial all get a look-in.

Blaine’s greater instinct, however, is for paradox and complication, rather than settled, generic images of the nation and its constituents. As Bruce, one of his dad’s best mates from Ipswich, says at one point: “I wish politicians would stop talking so much about tradies and miners … Some of us blokes are on a coupla hundred grand. We’re doing just fine. When was the last time you heard any politicians kick up a stink about the single mum cleaning the shitters at a nursing home? Or the bloke delivering Uber Eats on a bicycle for $5 a pop. That’s the real working class, mate.” Can you imagine the iconic, oversized thermal backpacks used by food delivery workers as the new high-vis? Matt Canavan, Bill Shorten or ScoMo donning one for a photo op on a street corner while shaking hands and getting to know the folk who wear them daily? Seems unlikely.

Cultural and financial conditions can change a lot over the generations, but off-the-shelf categories persist, shaping the stories told about the past, the analysis of the present and aspirations for the future. The metonyms “blue-” or “white-collar” capture a fragment of the worlds to which they refer in name; the more recent “laptop class” and “lentil belt” do the same. But how effective are these proxies at capturing what’s important about what people do and want in Australia?

Blaine’s essay shows how important political, sporting and business figures in Australia, largely men, mould themselves and in turn mould the categories that are used to define Australian aspirations and antagonisms. The end result: an unholy motley of chameleons, charlatans and spruikers, always slipping through and warping archetypes.

This raises an open question, which Blaine addresses impressionistically, without being dogmatic: what ingredients do we want to make up the important figures of the future? The journey away from deprivation to relative prosperity is for many Australian families the story of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But now, so-called upward mobility is looking increasingly challenging for younger Australians who don’t come from home-owning families. Much change has taken place even within one generation.

This is the case for Blaine and many of his interlocutors, including Terri Butler, the member for Griffith, and Joel Thompson, a retired rugby league player of Indigenous descent and founder of The Mindset Project. Both Butler and Thompson have direct and compelling ways of describing class distinctions relevant to their upbringing. Butler describes the lives of her cousins in North Queensland as ranging from “just tough” to “really fucking tough.” Thompson observes that growing up he didn’t know anybody who owned their own home, making him a tad different in material circumstances from Morrison, who in 2018, according to Blaine, described himself as starting out “very, very small” on entering the property market, when in truth, “small” meant owning two houses in Bronte.

That Morrison might be perceived by the public to share common ground with the likes of Butler and Thompson on the basis of culture, largely via rugby league and a cultivated lack of pretension, could matter more in the end than whether or not he shares a common origin. The relationship between the authenticity of origins, a relatively recently acquired yet nonetheless genuine symbolic solidarity with the working class, and a strategic misleading of the public – this is the very tricky-to-map and ultimately unresolved mess that Blaine traces.

I’ve got to dig deep to connect with anything like “tough” or “really fucking tough.” Yet like many Australians, I’m a bastard form with mixed trimmings, able to select which parts of my history to brandish, a luxury in itself. I came from Protestantism (Dad) and Catholicism (Mum), private school (Dad) and public school (Mum), the upper-middle class (Dad) and the lower-middle-to-middle class (Mum). Far from the most heady of contrasts, but enough to create some tensions.

I prized the rugby league heritage on Mum’s side in my teens while attending a rich, all-boys boarding school in Sydney, taking perverse delight in being on the outer. But it was hardly the outer: State of Origin was the only weeknight of the year that we didn’t have to do enforced prep after dinner. Everyone loved it.

The performance of a particularly rugged version of masculinity was the norm at the school: speaking in the harsh, monosyllabic drawl most likely learnt from farm workers, wearing shearers’ singlets, smoking rollies, cutting the toes and backs off our joggers to make a sort of thong (nicknamed “Shane and Waynes”). The greatest aspiration of many was to own a B&S-ready ute with all the roo-shooting, circle-working trimmings. Stupidity was certainly the currency, rather than sensitivity or intellect. A peculiar mix of cowboy and bogan commanded, on balance, more respect than the yachtsman, the preppy, the skater or, certainly, the hipster. Everyone tended to gravitate towards larrikin types who were a bit rough around the edges. There were niches for most, although it was certainly not the happiest time for all.

I felt immense relief when I spent my gap year working at an equally elite boarding school in the United Kingdom, a co-ed school where art, music, drama and a greater level of emotional sensitivity were the norm among students. It seemed like heaven. Though perhaps I was seeing everything through the romance of my own newfound freedom and the novelty of travel.

As for ScoMo, Blaine makes a lot of the love of rugby league he seems to have developed relatively late in life (as late as 2012) and brandished as part of his political self-image. There is something cringe-worthy about the idea that Morrison is just supporting the Sharks because he knows it will play well with a section of the electorate. But perhaps we should entertain the idea that he has come to love league, like his God, and while it might be politically convenient for him to do so, he’s going to games in the same way he’s going to church – a good Christian, buying the hat and the scarf.

Morrison’s greater crime might be that he is at best naive to the extent of his own hardship. This is Blaine’s broader point concerning authenticity: if you’ve always done alright for money, just admit it or try to have some perspective. If you’ve decided to be a Sharks fan because you want people to like you, fair play, but be straight about it. Perhaps this is terrible advice from a political perspective, but I like the sound of it.

Climate change looms in Blaine’s essay as a complex and divisive issue concerning class and perceived cosmopolitan elitism in Australia – a government-killer, since Abbott at least. It reminded me of a story I heard from my dad …

Dad is driving along one of the gravel roads at home and encounters a local lad, let’s call him Morgan, chopping wood by the side of the road. Morgan is an old primary school friend of mine, from Cumnock town, not the landed elite, who has returned to the district as an adult. Morgan certainly had an upbringing that was challenging compared to my own. I lost touch with him when I went away to boarding school, as I did with many of my local friends.

Dad, who’s become something of a local climate-change advocate, warns Morgan that he is breaking the law, that fallen branches are valuable habitat and provide soil nutrients. Morgan obediently packs up his kit and probably goes to get his wood somewhere else on the side of the road.

Whenever I remind Dad of this story, it presents him with a moral difficulty. A robust family argument tends to ensue. Dad and my brother chop firewood on our land and it’s legal to do so; sometimes people ask if they can come onto the property and do the same, and permission tends to be granted. But if lots more people started asking, Dad would certainly start saying no. Our family has access and rights to a massive portion of the countryside and all the work and leisure that affords, largely because of the time my ancestors arrived in the country, as well as other rolls of the dice and, no doubt, a fair amount of sacrifice, skulduggery and nous on their part – it would be churlish of me to imagine they were without ingenuity.

But how must this feel for Morgan, less well-off, prevented from chopping the wood he needs over winter in the name of biodiversity? I know Dad feels this as a profound moral quandary. Not so Mum, who isn’t from the landed gentry despite now owning the land. She doesn’t feel the class guilt that Dad does, and even though Mum’s arguably less of an advocate for biodiversity (despite doing plenty of practical work), she appears less conflicted laying down the law, hypothetically, to Morgan chopping wood by the side of the road.

This story is a parable because it so neatly illustrates the relationship between key progressive issues of the day, including climate change and class. Is it fair that those with existing privileges accrue more capital, both social and financial, when politics demands a shift in the trajectory of industry and the economy? How can we ensure people like Morgan have equitable access to a comfortable life without having long-lasting detrimental effects on the environment? Is it fair that some are forced to commit crimes against the environment in full view, while others can do the same things, at scale, inconspicuously and often to their financial advantage? And alternatively, should class guilt impact moral authority?

No answers from me here, merely a story to help frame the problem. This is also the value of Blaine’s similarly personal but far more expansive essay. I wouldn’t be surprised if it becomes a touchstone in the current political climate.

Tom Lee

TOP BLOKES

Correspondence

Shannon Burns

After reading Lech Blaine’s excellent and illuminating essay, I found myself thinking about notions of authenticity, impersonation and larrikinism as they apply to the so-called working class. Of course, some working-class people embody every cliché about working-class life, and there are others who are barely recognisable as working class to those who haven’t been exposed to its diverse manifestations. As with any group, some of its members are easy to read because their personas have been predigested, while some are almost unreadable because they represent a departure from the norm and others actively reject the obvious costumes and mannerisms because contrarianism is a common impulse. Working-class people put on many uniforms and speak in many tongues.

Blaine documents the political appropriation of well-worn working-class traits or tropes and the way they are employed in the pursuit of power, and he accuses Scott Morrison of a particularly cynical and artless variety of this common act of plagiarism. “Scott Morrison’s ScoMo persona was a focus-grouped act of identity theft,” Blaine argues, but I’m inclined to counter that identity is always performative and that mimicry is not theft. Blaine’s point is that Morrison is not authentic; part of his political strategy is to conceal his true face because his true face is not electable. He adds: “The closest that Morrison came to battling – or being a larrikin, for that matter – was getting cast as the Artful Dodger in Oliver!” It’s a killer line, but I’m not sure that it’s a killer blow. Here is a prime minister who releases images of himself making (or pretending to make) curries while listening (or pretending to listen) to a playlist entitled “Desi Hits.” His theatrical impersonations, the willingness to transparently perform a role, seems more significant than the particular material he works with. That Morrison played such a lively and seductive part in a school musical suggests that overt theatricality is one of his organic traits, that when Morrison puts on a mask he is being his authentic self.

“Bogan Bingo” features actors who perform the role of a lower-class bingo caller. I’ve been to at least three performances in the past decade, all of them in the inner suburbs of Adelaide. The bingo callers pretend to be promiscuous and stupid, most of their dialogue is sexually suggestive and the action centres on the grotesque, revelling in transgression. The audience is expected to dress down as bogans and participate in various activities. This typically produces a few smoking-while-pregnant teenagers, a lot of flannel shirts and ragged jeans, ugg boots, beanies, football apparel, Iron Maiden T-shirts, mullets, references to lower-class suburbs, V8s and fast food. I’ve attended versions of this performance at sports clubs and schools, and in each case the audience has been primarily white-collar middle class.

It is uncomfortable to see the broad outlines of people you grew up with transformed into figures of fun – family members who did smoke as pregnant teenagers (like my mother and stepsister), who wore those clothes and exhibited that kind of rough and rowdy behaviour (like my younger self), people who retrospectively seem to have lived their whole lives in what others perceive as amusing costumes. That they are so easy to mimic, that the outward signs of a social group’s singularity can be catalogued and repurposed with so little effort and that strangers who do not share their backgrounds or experiences can wield those signs however they like – all this is a little hard to stomach. But it is a fact worth digesting.

Part of the discomfort has to do with our relationship to the surface of things. It feels as though the people I knew and loved are being worn at Bogan Bingo, that the spectacle is a ghoulish possession of real bodies. But of course, they aren’t part of the performance at all; their inner lives and personal histories are not attached to the cheap reproduction of those superficial traits, just as a soul is not attached to the image of a person in a photograph. It is hard to get beyond the image, to accept that imitation is not extractive and to acknowledge that the original is not diminished by insensitive reproduction just because it feels that way. But I am inclined to make the effort instead of giving in to the illusion. Nothing real is being “stolen” in these performances, and this kind of impersonation is not identity theft.

A complicating factor with Bogan Bingo is that its caricatures of lower-class and uneducated people are explicitly associated with liberation and fun. You dress down to behave in impolite and transgressive ways, to be openly unpalatable and superficial, to dance, shout and run amok and thereby taste a kind of freedom that is not usually available to you. There is an implied envy at work, a repressed desire to be a different kind of person, to strip away those middle-class masks and restraints, and become something more “real.” This is not to say that those who enjoy Bogan Bingo are free of ugly beliefs or motives. Contempt for the poor and uneducated is one of the last great pleasures for inner-city progressives and conservatives alike, and I half-appreciate the openness of it all. Because this kind of “appropriation” is not yet subject to serious scrutiny or censure, we are still permitted to have fun with it, if only for now. It allows us to see how people behave before one of their tendencies becomes morally indefensible – before they learn a new set of manners and develop ways of concealing or repressing yet another impulse.

I was born into the underclass, migrated into the working class as a teenager and then settled into the middle class (via university and marriage) when I was close to thirty. I don’t regard myself as an underclass or working-class writer or critic because, for me, the material conditions that people endure in the present and the social worlds they inhabit are the best guide to their class status. This belief probably says more about my origins than about the world I live in now, a world in which the “working class” is the subject of writerly analysis and political discourse instead of daily experience. “Identity” in this particular context – a context that produces things such as Quarterly Essays and the reactions they provoke – is primarily a symbolic affair, and I wonder if Blaine’s strong reaction against Morrison’s theatrics is a simple extension of the well-educated, middle-class sensitivity to symbols. Or to put it differently: is our hostility to Morrison’s blatant imitations a sign that we don’t know how to bring a lasting focus to bear on material concerns?

To my eye, Scott Morrison poses as a middle-class suburban dad. Such men drink beer, watch sport and cook food while wearing aprons. Many change personas effortlessly. One moment they are standing near the barbeque with other men talking about sport or films or women while punctuating every sentence with “fucking”; the next they are sitting down with their wives and daughters, making dad jokes while using soft gestures and polite language. The same men go to work and deploy similarly branching personas in different contexts, just as their wives present one face to their mother or siblings and other faces to their friends, neighbours, employers or employees. This morphing of character is not uncommon. In fact, it is a sign of basic social competence.

You might even say that changeability and the confident willingness to perform disparate roles is an “authentic” trait of the suburban middle class, so the question of exactly who is being impersonated when Morrison dons the supposed garments of working-class life – rugby league and beer – is tricky to determine. If middle-class people have been performing in exactly this way for decades, and if the adaptability that comes with performative prowess is one of the many sources of their confidence and success, isn’t Morrison really impersonating, and thereby flattering, the middle class?

I suspect that Morrison’s costumes appeal to the broader suburban middle-class more than anyone. A more interesting question, perhaps, is who does it repel? The answer, I think, is that a solid portion of intellectuals, writers and artsy types – people such as me – are viscerally repulsed by images of Morrison drinking beer at league games, almost as much as they are repelled by his hulking male blokeyness. Morrison doesn’t bother to flatter us with imitation, perhaps because he would lose more votes than he gained. “ScoMo the typical bloke” is a steady reminder of our political irrelevance.

Blaine argues that larrikinism has its origin in forms of performance and impersonation – that Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson were partly masking their own effeminacy or high status when they developed the anti-authoritarian larrikin figure. This is as contestable as any biographical analysis, but if we go along with it and accept that larrikinism is partly founded on deception or masking and that the “authenticity” we associate with a robust larrikin persona is an effect rather than a reality, then the business of determining exactly who is and isn’t a “real” larrikin is a fool’s errand.

I grew up in such safe Labor seats that voting seemed almost redundant. Even so, federal Labor victories were registered with a collective sigh of relief, and federal Labor losses had a profoundly depressing effect. The adults in my life liked Bob Hawke because he was a “character” – his larrikinism won their affection – but they also saw that he was a bullshit artist. Hawke was not one of them, and they never thought he was, yet his persona suggested that he would not regard them with contempt either, and he was prepared to tell a story and put on a show that included them in his audience. Keating left them cold.

I think that Blaine undervalues one of the most powerful qualities of the larrikin. Anti-authoritarianism and hardnosed tenacity are not the whole story. The larrikin catches your eye because his dynamism and outsized personality makes him unpredictable. He knows how to have fun and invites you along for the ride. A larrikin is playful when she is serious and serious when she is playful. He winks at you while earnestly declaring that he is a wholly honest man on serious business. The larrikin is a “character” who is capable of seducing and persuading without seeming desperate or superior. These are fundamental skills that politicians need to possess if they want to be elected, so it’s not surprising that larrikinism and politics continually converge. They are made for each other.

Shannon Burns

TOP BLOKES

Correspondence

David Hunt

Scott Morrison is a dingo in sheep’s clothing. Lech Blaine’s Quarterly Essay leaves us in no doubt that the chickens of the PM’s self-publicised coop should be wary whenever their jailer ambles towards them with a carefully curated bowl of kitchen scraps – and not just on curry night.

On this subject, Top Blokes: The Larrikin Myth, Class and Power presents nothing new. Politicians pretend their way to power? Who’d have thunk it? While Morrison’s masquerading as “a typical Aussie bloke” who loves a beer at the Sharkies’ game is disingenuous – and coming up with his own nickname (after road-testing it with a focus group of men in shiny vests) is just plain sad – these deceptions pale in comparison to those of some of Australia’s early Labor leaders.

In 1886, Chris Watson left New Zealand for Sydney, where he found work mucking out Government House’s stables. Seventeen years later, with an intuitive understanding of the connection between government and shovelling shit, he became prime minister of Australia and the world’s first Labor/Labour national leader. Watson didn’t just give himself a new nickname – he manufactured a whole new identity. No one knew that Kiwi Chris Watson was really Chilean John Tanck until after his death. Tanck, who had a non-British father and had never applied for British citizenship, would have known he was constitutionally ineligible to sit in the Australian parliament, let alone serve as prime minister.

King O’Malley, Labor’s minister for home affairs in the 1910 Fisher government, was another proto-Barnaby. This is, of course, a reference to O’Malley’s foreign citizenship excluding him from the Australian parliament and is in no way intended to imply that Barnaby had home affairs (he appears to have used his workplace and discreet motels). O’Malley, the man responsible for constructing the national capital in a frozen sheep paddock, pretended to be a respectable British Canadian, rather than an insurance salesman from Kansas.

Thomas Walker was a Labor man who actually did come to Australia from Canada … to escape a manslaughter charge. A coronial inquiry found the young medium had killed a combustible seance attendee who’d come into contact with the phosphorous he used to make “spiritual lights.” In 1877, Walker fled to Melbourne, where he delivered the first of a series of Australian spiritualist lectures, during which he claimed to be possessed by the spirit of Giordano Bruno, a Dominican friar, cosmologist and occultist burned at the stake in 1600 for saying sacramental wine was not the blood of Christ and Mary was not a virgin. In 1892, while a NSW member of parliament, he was charged with shooting and wounding a clergyman while drunk. None of this stopped Thomas Walker serving as a West Australian Labor attorney-general and minister for justice and education.

Politicians who lied about their name or nationality, or claimed to be an undead Italian heretic, make Morrison’s frauds on the Australian public seem milder than one of his chicken curries. But the falsehoods of these early MPs were essentially personal in nature and didn’t interfere with their policy platforms.

Some other early Australian leaders abandoned ideology and jettisoned principle for political gain. Joseph Cook, the first leader of the NSW parliamentary Labor Party, ditched the silent “e” in his name as an ostentation unbefitting a working man. He then ditched being a working man, joining, and later leading, the Free Trade Party; becoming prime minister as leader of the anti-Labor and anti–free trade Liberal Party; and again turning coat to serve as deputy prime minister in the Nationalist government of Billy Hughes.

Hughes, another Labor man turned political weathervane, represented six parties during his parliamentary career, leading five of them. Prime Minister Robert Menzies once commented that Hughes had been a member of every political party, at which point Arthur Fadden interjected he’d never joined his Country Party. Hughes, showing that what he lacked in political consistency he made up for with a sense of humour, retorted, “I had to draw the line somewhere, didn’t I?”

I reference these Labor men (and they were all men for a long while) not to attack their party or ideology, or to pump the wheels of the Coalition bus, but to make the point that Morrison is merely at the tail of a conga line of suckholes of all political stripes.

Politicians should not be criticised for changing their views over time or in response to altered circumstances, but Cook and Hughes arguably ditched their core political beliefs for personal political gain. In fairness to Morrison, he can’t be accused of ditching his core political beliefs, because he’s never held any. No Australian politician, even one-armed Peter Lalor, has had Morrison’s facility for not holding things. His capacity to say one thing and then declare the opposite, while unashamedly maintaining his position has never changed, is unrivalled in Australian political history. While another conservative leader was not for turning, Morrison is not for sticking. He is human Teflon.

Many Australians recognise this. The question is: why do they put up with it? Lech Blaine is right in laying the blame, at least in part, on “the identity crisis at the heart of Australia,” although he over-eggs the larrikin pudding.

One of the issues I have with Blaine’s eminently readable and enjoyable essay is that while he accuses Morrison, Hawke and other powerful people of hijacking the larrikin for personal gain, Blaine also appropriates the larrikin. He projects aspects of the current larrikin image (egalitarianism and disregard for convention) back in time and suggests larrikins shared a strong affinity with the working class and labour movement. A reader of Blaine’s essay would be left with the impression that striking shearers, bush poets such as Banjo Paterson and Henry Lawson, bushranger Ned Kelly, writer Miles (aka Stella) Franklin and feminist Vida Goldstein were all larrikins.

The term “larrikin” first appeared in print in Melbourne in 1870. Larrikins were not knockabout blokes who called a spade a spade – they were disaffected young people who formed loose gangs, known as “forties” and then “pushes”. The larrikin was a “yob” – that is, a boy in the back slang of the English costermongers (mobile grocers with attitude) whom the larrikins modelled themselves on. “Yob” came to mean a lout or hooligan, because that is what larrikins were. Following the 1886 sexual assault of Mary Jane Hicks by members of the Waterloo Push, and a series of similar offences, they were popularly perceived as gang rapists.

While most nineteenth-century larrikins had “working-class” backgrounds, they were generally unskilled labourers – tuppenny capitalists who disdained those who’d learnt a trade. They loathed the labour movement, and the emerging trade unions loathed them in return. Larrikins disrupted union parades and pickets, hurling abuse and rotten food at the marching or striking workers. Causing mayhem at union picnics was a favourite larrikin sport.

The nihilism at the heart of larrikin culture drew them to the legend of Ned Kelly, a man whose charisma and showmanship elevated him from being a poor, horse-thieving, police-murdering terrorist with a penchant for cast-iron fetish wear into Australia’s answer to Robin Hood. The “larrikin class was strongly represented” at the 5 November 1880 Melbourne rally that called for the government to commute the bushranger’s death sentence, but Kelly was in no way a larrikin. He was country, while the larrikins were very much city.

Bushmen were not larrikins. The striking shearers did not see larrikins as co-revolutionaries in the war between labour and capital but as self-indulgent, antisocial townies. Banjo Paterson painted larrikins as vicious urban thugs in “Uncle Bill: The Larrikin’s Lament”, with Henry Lawson doing likewise in “The Captain of the Push.” Larrikins, like many other Australians, were drawn to the professional sports that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in particular boxing and Australian Rules football, and later rugby league. Lawson saw the Australian obsession with sport over the arts as a blight, writing in “A Song of Southern Writers”:

Lawson was in no way a larrikin. Neither was his protégé and fellow writer Miles Franklin. Franklin was a deep thinker and keen social observer, while larrikins cultivated an air of insular anti-intellectualism. Vida Goldstein, like Franklin, was a feminist – a charge that could never be levelled at larrikins, who the popular press accused of demeaning and assaulting their “donahs” or “tarts”, as women who inhabited the edges of larrikin society were known. Goldstein was unabashedly intellectual and passionate about politics and improving Australian society, again areas into which larrikins rarely strayed.

Nobody liked a larrikin, not even other larrikins, with the most vicious larrikin assaults reserved for members of rival pushes. Strangely, it was the arts, not sport, that began the rehabilitation of the larrikin image, first with music-hall larrikin acts in the late nineteenth century, then with the writing of C.J. Dennis, whose Sentimental Bloke and Ginger Mick were uncomplicated working-class blokes with hearts, dreams and aspirations. World War I gave rise to the larrikin digger trope, an irreverent bloke whose dishevelled dress showed his disrespect for the British officers he served under. As larrikins stopped their street brawls and shooting each other in the late 1920s, the larrikin menace faded, and the larrikin mantle settled on the shoulders of the knockabout anti-authoritarian male.

Blaine’s historical larrikin is myth, as is his story of the foundation of the Australian Labor Party, a fable nurtured by generations of Labor men and women, most of whom undoubtedly believe it to be true. Blaine traces the ALP back to the 1891 striking shearers who gathered in the Queensland town of Barcaldine – and the shearers’ 1891 May Day march and reading of the Manifesto of the Queensland Labour Party to a gathering of workers under the Barcaldine ghost gum on 9 September 1892 – undoubtedly key moments in the history of the Australian labour movement.

However, this myth ignores the NSW origin story, which traces the birth of the party to quarryman Charles Hart convening the first Labour Electoral League meeting at Balmain’s Unity Hall Hotel on 4 April 1891. South Australians, by contrast, insist they founded the Labor Party, when the United Trades and Labor Council met on 7 January 1891 (almost certainly at a far creepier location than a pub or a tree) to form the United Labor Party of South Australia. All and none of these foundation stories are true. There was no angelic trumpet, or even the drunken cry of a striking shearer tripping over an unshorn sheep, to herald Labor’s birth. There were instead a number of meetings of unionists, socialists and radicals, held across the colonies, where it was agreed that industrial action, in the absence of political representation, was no longer sufficient to advance workers’ rights.

The fact is the Queensland origin story is more romantic – and it has a tree in it, a key element in many origin myths. Labor even named the ghost gum “The Tree of Knowledge,” a blatant biblical rip-off. The Queensland story was a deliberate attempt by Labor’s founding fathers to link the party to the biggest Australian myth of all – the bush legend – a myth so powerful that it made citizens of the most urbanised society on earth (if you ignored First Nations people) build a common identity around the idealised bushman, his stoic wife and their golden-haired, ruddy-cheeked children, a myth with the power to make a mild-mannered Sydney accountant who owned an Akubra think he was the Man from Snowy River.

The emerging labour movement latched onto the bush legend like a blowfly to a jumbuck’s jacksy, hoping that a little of its magic would rub off. As acknowledged by William Guthrie Spence, foundation president of the Amalgamated Shearers’ Union of Australasia and a founding father of Labor:

Blaine’s essay identifies a number of other key Australian myths, in particular that Australians are naturally anti-authoritarian, a myth closely tied to that of the larrikin. Australians, as acknowledged by Blaine, are one of the most law-abiding people on earth. From the foundation of the convict colony of New South Wales, government provided services that were delivered by churches, charities, friendly societies or private enterprise in other societies. Despite these services, and the administrations and budgets that grew to provide them, the residents of the Australian colonies paid no direct taxes until Victoria introduced a modest land tax in 1877. The Australian colonies led the world in establishing the modern secret ballot, postal voting, full women’s suffrage, independent electoral bodies and a host of other reforms that increased public confidence in government and its institutions. Most Australians have accordingly been historically trusting of the state, its institutions and, sometimes regrettably, its politicians.

Australians’ willingness to embrace myths have allowed them to reinvent themselves. Their desire to rinse the convict stain from the moral fabric of the nation, which remained strong until the late 1970s, led them to fabricate their own family histories, replacing ancestral handkerchief thieves with sturdy farmers, adventurers and down-on-their luck aristocrats. They pushed the inconvenient truths of the dispossession and frontier murder of First Nations people, and of White Australia, to the back of their collective consciousness and conscience, embracing John Howard’s 1996 “Bex, a cuppa and a good lie down” mantra that we should feel “comfortable and relaxed about our past, as the balance sheet of our history is one of heroic achievement.”

Blaine cites Clare Wright, one of Australia’s most compelling and insightful historians, as arguing that Labor can’t “consistently win federal government until it tells a coherent story that links back to deeper myths about Australian identity.” I respectfully disagree. My view is that we Australians and the politicians that serve us should not attach ourselves to myths, but to truth.

Our susceptibility to myth-making allows us to accept the bush and larrikin legends, and their appropriation by elites. It allows us to embrace the myth of anti-authoritarianism, without asking difficult questions of those in authority. It allows us to look inwards on our own self-created realities, as we lock out the world from Fortress Australia, lock out the “new foreigners” of the other Australian states from our resurrected parochial fiefdoms and lock out the disadvantaged and the dispossessed from our McMansions.

Blaine cites Russel Ward’s 1958 The Australian Legend, which concluded that the “typical Australian” “believes that Jack is not only as good as his master but, at least in principle, probably a good deal better.” Sixty-three years later, it’s now, “I’m alright, Jack.”

Until we Australians look beyond our own self-interest, discard myths for truths and accept our past in all its beauty and its terror, we will be condemned to a stunted present and an even more diminished future. We will turn a deaf ear to the lies of politicians such as Morrison as long as they comfort us with platitudes about being at the front of the queue and being the best people in the world. We get the politicians we deserve.

David Hunt

TOP BLOKES

Correspondence

Rachel Nolan

In Top Blokes, Lech Blaine applies his intellect and kind-hearted curiosity to an essential current of Australian identity, the myth of the larrikin: the anti-establishment figure (invariably male) who employs a “reckless collectivism,” bringing mates together in the face of injustice.

Lech is from Toowoomba, but that’s a conservative, uninteresting place. His worldview arises from the cultural identity of Ipswich, the working-class city his late parents came from and of which Lech’s cousin Allan Langer remains the most celebrated son.

I’m from Ipswich, and as no one’s written about the city since the now ageing poet Thomas Shapcott, Lech’s interest in the place makes my heart sing. The story of Ipswich is the story of class, identity and labourism in Australia.

The Labor Party was born in Barcaldine in 1891, but before that, in 1888, Australia’s first Labor MP emerged from Ipswich when Thomas Glassey, a coalmining unionist describing himself as “independent Labor,” won the seat of Bundamba in the Queensland parliament.

In 1899, the region contributed members to the world’s first Labor government, that of Queensland premier Anderson Dawson.

From 1915 to 1948, the workers of Ipswich were represented by Frank Cooper, an eight-hour-day campaigner who became treasurer in the reforming government of William Forgan Smith. Elected in 1932, that government rejected the austerity of the Premiers’ Plan, rebuilt Queensland in Art Deco style and entrenched the state as the highest wage, highest-taxing jurisdiction in the country. As premier himself in 1942, Cooper stood by Labor prime minister John Curtin through World War II.

Ipswich produced Queensland’s first Labor woman MP when Vi Jordan was elected member for Ipswich West in 1966. She was backed by mining and rail unions, all-male workforces. Years after her death, Vi Jordan’s son told me about the atmosphere of the times, how Gough Whitlam would stay with the family when visiting the city as federal Opposition leader, and how the house would be filled with excited and erudite conversation as unionists, directly influenced by the more radical British socialist movement, envisaged a program of industrial relations reform, free public health and free tertiary education.

In 1977, Bill Hayden, a working-class policeman from Ipswich, became leader of the federal parliamentary Labor Party. Hayden had already built the structure of Medicare as health minister before seeking to salvage economic policy as Whitlam’s last treasurer. As Opposition leader, Bill Hayden built the foundations of the modern Labor Party, socially progressive but economically robust. He was replaced by Bob Hawke on the day writs were issued for the 1983 poll, with Hawke winning the election Hayden himself said “a drover’s dog” could have won.

The Hawke and Keating years coincided with, but didn’t cause, Ipswich’s deindustrialisation. From the 1970s, coalmining moved to the Bowen Basin, and electric trains didn’t require local workshops employing 3000 men. Ipswich people resented economic liberalisation and were suss on Paul Keating’s Zegna suits. The politics of class shifted from economic to cultural identity.

After Hayden’s preferred successor, a working-class boy and Rhodes scholar named David Hamill, missed out on federal preselection in a shonky factional stitch-up, the ALP lost the Ipswich-based seat of Oxley to Pauline Hanson in 1996.

She remains our gift to the nation.

By the 2000s, unionism in Ipswich had collapsed. The Labour Day march was a shadow of its former self, and the Trades Hall, the original building with its wrought-iron verandahs having been replaced by a jerry-built concrete block in the 1980s, gradually became empty.

With the city becoming a commuter satellite of Brisbane and its working-class identity adrift, the political void was filled by populism. The new mayor, Paul Pisasale, developed a classic larrikin persona, taking the longstanding resentment of class and directing it towards an “other” defined by geography rather than income. Pisasale’s schtick was that Ipswich people should be proud of where they came from, sticking it to sneering outsiders, including those from Brisbane. He was making Ipswich great again.

As a member of the ALP, Pisasale neutralised Ipswich’s only potential source of organised political opposition, but did little for the city or working people. As his cult of personality grew, Pisasale was re-elected with as much as 87 per cent of the vote, making him the most popular politician in Australia. Under his mayoralty, property development became Ipswich’s boom industry, the city sprawled and the CBD became derelict. He’s now serving seven years for official corruption related to taking cash from developers and for sexual assault.

While Pisasale’s populist cult is an extreme example, the truth is that every one of Australia’s large former industrial cities has seen some kind of scandal combining elements of populism, sex, property developers and/or larrikins.

In Wollongong, a sex-for-development-approval scandal contributed to the downfall of the last state Labor government. The Newcastle mayor, a property developer, resigned after he was caught funnelling secret donations to Liberal MPs, and Geelong Council has just emerged from administration after the council, dominated by a former paparazzo turned larrikin, was sacked for bullying and failing to provide good government.

Once, the local politics of these places would have been defined by class, with an active civic culture characterised by unions and Labor activists on one side and chambers of commerce and service clubs on the other. Lech is right to say Australia’s working-class towns have held together better than Trump’s Pennsylvania or the Brexit-voting north of England, but it’s a near-run thing. There is, as the councils have shown, a constant vulnerability to shysters.

Lech Blaine’s thesis is a simple one: that Anthony Albanese, with his working-class authenticity, may neutralise the culture wars through which conservatives separate educated Labor representatives from their working-class base. Perhaps, he says, by staying mum on coal and Instagramming photos of tinned peas and corn on his plate, the dinky-di Albo can defeat ScoMo, an entirely confected character whose feigned interest in rugby league disguises a puritanical rah-rah from the Eastern Suburbs.

I hope, of course, that Lech is right. Surely Labor can defeat a government that has systematically suppressed wages while delivering tax cuts that most benefit the rich, that has endangered our economy and security by stirring up China while dropping the ball on critical relationships in Southeast Asia, and that caused half the country to be needlessly locked down for months through its incompetent management of the vaccine rollout?

Not having a crystal ball, I don’t know if it can. What I do know, having spent a good part of my working life representing Ipswich, is that the cultural markers as they’re currently defined are hard to cut through. I was never so shameless as to feign passionate interest in rugby league, but my earnest commitment to social justice and good economic policy was no competition for the vacuous identity politics of the uber-larrikin Pisasale. A solid voting record on IR reform, public education and public health is harder to sell when there’s no sense that class is an economic phenomenon and justice can only be achieved through collective action. The term I decided I didn’t want to run again was the term I bought an Alfa.

It must be possible for Australia to get beyond the mindless and divisive identity wars that lure working Australians to vote against their own economic interests and for a smaller, meaner country. We can do so either by seeking, as Albanese has, to neutralise the most shallow of cultural markers or by elevating the elements of cultural identity that unite us in an expansive vision: the Olympic team, an affinity with the landscape, the music of Paul Kelly.

That musician is, in my view, the great storyteller and unifier of Australian popular culture. In 1998, as John Howard was turning his back on Aboriginal reconciliation, Kelly wrote “Little Kings,” a song about how power is exercised, how lies told as history can alter our sense of identity and about how, everywhere, warning bells ring out across the lucky country:

Rachel Nolan

EXIT STRATEGY

Correspondence

Andrew Wear

Reading George Megalogenis’s eloquent and thoroughly researched essay on Australia’s recent political economy, it’s hard not to relive the rollercoaster of emotions that accompanied the onset of the pandemic in Australia. His essay recalls the pride in Australia’s collective response, the sense of security that came with a system of government that functioned when it needed to, enabling us to get on top of the virus and respond appropriately to the economic challenge. There were the trials and quiet traumas of long lockdowns, accompanied by the guilt that came with the knowledge that what we were suffering did not compare with the devastation experienced in places such as the United States or the United Kingdom. And finally, there is our present bewilderment at Australia’s lack of any obvious pathway out of the crisis, even as other nations are opening up.

Megalogenis’s central insight – that lessons from past recessions informed our economic response to the pandemic – is an important one. It points to the method we might deploy as we shape our approach to recovery, once we finally figure out how to emerge from the shadow of the pandemic: lessons from past crises have the potential to shape the recovery that remains ahead of us.

Megalogenis shows us that the transfer of insight from the global financial crisis to the present was largely by virtue of the personal experience of Treasury officials. While this demonstrates the value of this type of policy transfer, it also reveals that Australia’s approach to learning across time and from other jurisdictions is somewhat ad hoc and perhaps Anglocentric. Other nations, such as Singapore, embed policy transfer deeply into the fabric of their public sectors, regularly sending public servants on learning missions abroad, where they seek to absorb knowledge from the world’s best. Australia has room for improvement here.

It must have been challenging for Megalogenis to land a piece like this in the midst of an evolving crisis; the pandemic has yielded a steady supply of plot twists. I am writing this response just as Melbourne enters its sixth lockdown and, with Sydney showing no signs of being able to rein in the virus, it’s clear that Australia’s response is not quite so textbook as it may have seemed when Megalogenis completed his essay. With the pandemic having a way to run, it’s now clear that the depth of the 2020 recession is an inadequate – and overly simplistic – way to assess Australia’s economic performance. More important will be where Australia finds itself when the pandemic is over. In May – before Australia’s latest Delta-driven wave – the OECD was forecasting that Australia would be back to its pre-pandemic GDP per capita by the first quarter of 2022 (surely now an optimistic assessment), meaning we would have experienced two years of lost growth. That puts us tenth among the G20 countries – mid-pack. While our 2020 recession wasn’t as deep, other countries – with higher vaccination rates and more open economies – are recovering faster. As the pandemic has progressed, the importance of the health response to the economy has only become clearer.

While the essay is subtitled “Politics after the Pandemic,” its focus is predominantly on politics during – and in the years before – the pandemic. The promise of an exploration of what comes next remains largely unfulfilled. Yet there are enough insights to point us to a method with which to approach the challenges that await. While Australia responded well to the GFC, it squandered the recovery, experiencing a decade of stagnant economic growth, negligible improvements to productivity and median incomes that went backwards. An effective tactical response to the crisis won’t be enough if we forgo the opportunity the crisis presents.

Following the Spanish Flu in 1918–19, the United States boomed through the Roaring Twenties, fuelled by new technology and social change. In the 1930s, President Roosevelt’s New Deal inspired the confidence that pulled the country out of the Great Depression, with enhanced social security, labour protections and infrastructure investment. Germany and South Korea boomed in the decades after World War II and the Korean War, driven by a determined focus on education and industry policy; both countries pulling themselves out of misery to emerge as among the world’s most advanced economies.

What is common to successful recovery from a crisis is a big ambition for what the nation might become, and a preparedness to plan and deliver over the medium to long term. What might such an agenda look like for Australia? Most obviously, fiscal stimulus must flow for as long as it takes to build economic momentum. The opportunity now is to fashion that stimulus into an agenda that fuels long-term economic growth, ideally while tackling legacy challenges at the same time. Megalogenis is right to point to climate change as the obvious candidate here, and there are no shortages of projects that deliver on this dual objective. Large amounts of private-sector capital are poised and ready to be spent on decarbonisation projects. To unlock this potential, it’s critical that governments provide policy certainty. This will involve a fast-tracked transformation of energy supply towards renewable sources and investment in infrastructure such as energy storage and transmission. Germany, for example, is investing more than €50 billion of its stimulus on initiatives such as electric vehicle–charging infrastructure and the establishment of a green hydrogen sector, a next-generation export industry that will enable it to store and sell surplus renewable energy. South Korea’s “Green New Deal” involves a US$62 billion investment in advanced technology to create jobs – in areas such as renewable electricity, electric vehicles and the circular economy.

The central message that the study of past crises yields, though, is that they do not have to leave a long-term legacy of harm. Places recovering from devastation can create prosperous, exciting futures. People living in New York, Aceh or South Korea now enjoy a quality of life that far exceeds what existed before their crisis. In many instances, such places have not merely recovered, they have gone on to lead the world. It will soon be time – if it’s not already – for Australia to craft a similarly suitable ambition for the decade ahead.

Recovery is not guaranteed. History is also strewn with examples of places that failed to recover. They withdrew economic stimulus too early, or held too tight to their pre-crisis world view. As Megalogenis demonstrates, it’s important that we approach our future in a considered fashion, learning the lessons of the past. While the Covid-19 pandemic has been the biggest crisis of a generation, our recovery also represents an enormous opportunity.

Andrew Wear

EXIT STRATEGY

Correspondence

Travers McLeod

Reading Exit Strategy as most of Australia went back into lockdown with one of the world’s worst vaccination rates made me wonder whether the title was an oxymoron.

When historians examine Australia’s response to Covid-19, the absence of a clear strategy to steer Australia beyond a pandemic into a brighter future may well be the most mystifying part of the whole episode. Our inability to plan and implement a response to a known systemic risk could be one of the biggest own goals in our nation’s history. If repeated on climate change, we are doomed to fail.

None of this discounts George Megalogenis’s essay, which offers a dose of history on how Australia has tackled systemic shocks, the latest of which is Covid-19. His story of the distinctive values and culture of Australia’s public services and the widespread acceptance that they should be able to offer frank professional advice without fear of losing their jobs provided a ray of light in an otherwise grim time, as did his snapshot of the new lease of life in Joe Biden’s America, where strengthened social infrastructure and a US$450 billion investment in early childhood development are central tenets of the response.

Australian policymakers have known about the devastating regularity of pandemics for some time, and they were warned about the risk of coronaviruses specifically nearly a decade ago. A Senate Estimates hearing in federal parliament way back in June 2013 was told the possibility of a “novel coronavirus” was “very scary.” Among the participants in that exchange was Jane Halton, then secretary of the Department of Health, who was appointed to the National Covid-19 Coordination Commission (NCCC) in March 2020 and was a key adviser as Australia explored suitable vaccines.

When the prime minister established the NCCC, he said it would “coordinate advice to the Australian government on actions to anticipate and mitigate the economic and social effects of the global coronavirus pandemic.” This was, he said, “about mobilising a whole-of-society and whole-of-economy effort.” The NCCC sounded like a “red team” for Covid-19, and it should have been, yet by 3 May 2021 its work had concluded. “We have moved past the emergency phase of the Covid-19 response and are now on the path of economic recovery,” said the prime minister. “Australia’s strong health and economic circumstances and our strong outlook make it the right time for the Board to conclude its work.” With Australia then at the bottom of global vaccination rates, and the Delta strain having just been used to justify a ban on Australians returning from India, it beggars belief the NCCC was told to down tools early. One wonders what it actually did, or whether it offered nothing other than smoke and mirrors. Whatever the NCCC spent time on, it does not appear to have war-gamed different strategies on quarantine hubs or vaccination rollouts, or to have tested various tactics to keep Australia one step ahead of the virus.

The grim short story of Covid for Australia is that we were caught napping at the start and have been reactive throughout. While some of our responses have been inspired, overall we have lacked the courage and creativity to use the crisis to imagine a better future for Australians and our region. The initial flurry of national collaboration that we saw at the beginning of the outbreak has been replaced by a fractured federation. According to the Oxford Covid-19 Government Response Tracker, Australia now has some of the most stringent restrictions among OECD countries. That is a predictable consequence of sticking with last year’s strategy, not chasing and securing multiple vaccines, being too slow to add new technologies to our arsenal, such as rapid lateral flow tests, and not preparing effectively for the inevitable future waves and variants.

Megalogenis is spot-on about Australians placing their faith in government being the story of the pandemic. I am willing to believe the desire Australians have for more active government was growing before Covid-19. Two years ago, in the Quarterly Essay Australia Fair, Rebecca Huntley wrote that Australia is a nation of democrats. The Centre for Policy Development’s research on public attitudes reinforced this, revealing that, as Australians, we share a unique resolve to make democracy work, solve big problems and improve the lives of others. The 2019 federal election did not disprove Huntley’s thesis. The twin crises since, the bushfires and pandemic, have put it firmly back in the frame. When CPD asked Australians in June 2020 what the main purpose of their democracy is, the answer three times more popular than any other was ensuring all people are treated fairly and equally, including the most vulnerable. This answer was chosen by 45 per cent of respondents, up from 36 per cent in 2018, far ahead of other answers, such as ensuring people are free to decide how to live (15 per cent) or electing representatives to make decisions (13 per cent).

The other key takeaway from this attitudes research was how voters across the political spectrum are at the end of their tether with the contracting-out services. On this, Australians are united. Ninety per cent now think it is important for government to maintain the capability and skills to deliver services directly, instead of paying others to do it. This is up from 75 per cent in 2018. In a sign of the times, Coalition voters are now the strongest supporters of rebuilding an active role for government in service delivery. The failure of private contractors to efficiently roll out Covid-19 vaccines will only reinforce this view. Let’s not kid ourselves: when lives are on the line, you want someone to take responsibility, not outsource it.

Megalogenis nails this issue, although I wish he had given us more on the central question he poses: can Australia restore faith in good government? His essay dares to dream that Australia can adapt its model of governing and delivering services “to the new consensus for a more active government” and “reconceive the political economy of the nation.” I agree that the answer lies in reconnecting with communities, just as Lynelle Briggs found in the aged-care royal commission, and that one part of the answer is a more effective approach by the Commonwealth to partnering with (and funding) state and local governments to deliver services in communities. But I want to suggest the challenge is more profound, for at least two reasons.

First, the how is not for the faint-hearted. As Megalogenis writes, “The gaps in the safety net which the coronavirus exploited will become poverty traps in recovery if the government continues to defer to the market.” A new approach requires a reorganisation of government and a commitment to regional and community deals involving levels of government alongside business and the community. That’s very difficult with anaemic public-sector capability and depleted memory at the national level, especially in social policy. Even if it prefers to fund than to deliver, the Commonwealth will need, and the community will expect, more feet on the ground. Digital delivery helps but is no substitute for interpersonal relationships and knowing what it takes to run things well at neighbourhood level, whether this is in early childhood development, aged care, disability or employment services. Each of these service systems faces acute challenges. Take employment as one example. As of 30 June 2021, there were 1,013,452 Australians on the employment services case load. Around three-quarters have been there for over twelve months. More than a third have been there for more than two years. We have been asleep at the wheel.

Second, this century demands a richer understanding of what a sustainable economy looks like over the long term. Unless we change tack, it will be impossible to disentangle Australia’s strategy to exit the pandemic from our future approaches to care, climate change and growth. In each, we see danger signs of the old model: reactive, not proactive, policy development that is based on events, not on evidence and foresight; the government not valuing or nurturing work in the “caring and brain economies” for Australians young and old; and a fossilised approach to boosting economic and social participation in communities in desperate need of new energy and fresh horizons.

Since Megalogenis wrote his essay, the federal government has published its Intergenerational Report, with rosy projections for productivity growth. But at the same time, we have seen a drain of international students and skilled migrants, and a stubborn lack of national planning for carbon transition. Optimistic forecasts are no substitute for an exit strategy.

This future has caught up with us. It demands that Australia change now or be steamrolled. In the run-up to a federal election, the prime minister and Opposition leader need to answer the questions Megalogenis poses. Otherwise, to use a word deployed by the prime minister during the current lockdowns, we will “squander” the natural advantages and opportunities already open to Australia and be on a road from which there is no exit.

Travers McLeod

EXIT STRATEGY

Correspondence

Andrew Norton

Since Australia’s borders closed in March 2020, preventing new international students from enrolling onshore in Australian universities, the government has made higher education policy errors. At this high level of generality, I agree with George Megalogenis in Exit Strategy. But I would like to present a different analysis of events since, and to share the blame more broadly.

Like many in the higher education sector, George Megalogenis argues that “denying” universities access to JobKeeper was a mistake. But JobKeeper was never the solution to the problems universities face. The program suited businesses that could recover swiftly once Covid restrictions lifted, taking back their old workforces to serve customers newly freed from home detention. It wasn’t right for universities, which face a prolonged decline before a slow recovery.

The first Covid lockdowns created an immediate cashflow problem for many Australian businesses. Financial problems developed more slowly for universities. After a fast move to online teaching, they delivered most of their scheduled classes to most of their expected first-semester 2020 students. Direct travel from China stopped on 1 February, stranding some Chinese students overseas, but fortunately many of them studied online. With a few exceptions, first-semester international students from other countries arrived before all routine international travel ended in the second half of March. But with the borders still closed, midyear international student intakes fell well below previous years.

Financial results in university annual reports confirm that 2020 revenue declines were contained. For the thirty-five universities with published 2020 annual reports as of late July 2021, total revenue was down 5.3 per cent on 2019 levels. A slight increase in government grant and HELP student-loan income partly offset reduced fee income.

The federal government did tighten university JobKeeper criteria to make universities less likely to qualify. But university annual reports suggest that few would have satisfied the rules applying to other organisations. Their loss of revenue just wasn’t large enough.

Rather than the quick dip and rapid recovery envisaged by JobKeeper, universities face accumulating financial problems caused by long-term border closures. As of May 2021, commencing international enrolments were a third lower than those of the same period in 2019. Although that may sound better than expected, the enrollees are students who were already in Australia. As time goes on, the number of potential international students who arrived before March 2020 will dwindle.

Losses against pre-Covid revenue projections will continue growing past mid-2022, when borders are expected to reopen. Someone who is not a first-year student in 2021 will not be a second-year student in 2022, and so on. It will take years to rebuild total numbers and fee income.

Under this scenario, a JobKeeper-style policy to keep all employees and employers together is not feasible. It would mean keeping staff on the payroll to teach students who won’t be back for years, and whose enrolments are not vulnerable only to Covid-19 or Australian border policies. China might stop its citizens studying here, changes to visa rules may deter prospective Indian students, or our competitors could gain lasting market shares while Australia remains a hermit nation.

Some jobs could be preserved by teaching more domestic students, and the government allocated $550 million in temporary funding for additional domestic student places, mostly in short graduate-certificate courses. But the unmet demand for domestic student places is well below the numbers of lost international students.

The university business model means that retrenchments reach way beyond staff directly involved in international education. Profits on international students have financed many otherwise unaffordable university activities. On my estimates, these profits funded at least $3.3 billion of the $12 billion that universities spent on research in 2018, and quite possibly much more.

Although the 21st-century university research boom is clearly over, an orderly phase-down of research activity would avoid projects being closed prior to completion, with all the waste that would involve. It only gets a passing sentence in Exit Strategy, but the government did provide an additional $1 billion in research funding for 2021.

The problem is that no additional research money, and only a small amount of temporary student-places funding, will continue into 2022, which is likely to be the peak year of the Covid crisis in higher education. That was a significant omission in the May 2021 budget.

In explaining these and other absent dollars, Exit Strategy pursues two arguments, around educational spending priorities and voting patterns.

According to Exit Strategy’s account, since John Howard’s term as prime minister, Coalition governments have pursued a dubious long-term strategy to preference private-school funding over public-university funding. The essay says that the Whitlam, Fraser, Hawke and Keating governments never considered giving more money to private schools than universities.

At one level, it would not be surprising if private-school funding surpassed university funding, as private-school enrolments exceed domestic higher education student numbers by more than 200,000. But the poor presentation of higher education assistance in Budget Paper No. 1, which looks like the source of Exit Strategy’s numbers, obscures much of the Commonwealth’s funding.

According to Budget Paper No. 1, non-government school funding in 2021–22 is $14.7 billion, while higher education funding is put at $10.6 billion. The budget documents don’t explain this, but the $10.6 billion consists of grants authorised by the Higher Education Support Act 2003. It omits funding from the annual appropriations bill, along with money authorised under separate legislation for the Australian Research Council and the National Health and Medical Research Council. It doesn’t include higher education student income support or HELP student loans. The budget papers do not itemise all funding sources according to sector, but I estimate that total Commonwealth cash outlays for higher education purposes will be approximately $22 billion in 2021–22. HELP repayments will probably be around $4 billion, leaving $18 billion in net cash outlays – more than the Budget Paper No. 1 figure for non-government schools.

University and private-school funding are similar in the ways they fit into the Australian system of funding social services. Both mix public and private funding; private schools have done so since the late 1960s, and universities have always done so, although there were no domestic higher education student tuition charges between 1974 and 1988. In both sectors, the government means-tests public contributions, although in novel ways, using parental income for schools and graduate income for higher education students via the HELP repayment system.

Despite the similarities in their funding models, their political circumstances differ. Like George Megalogenis in Exit Strategy, many people who support more funding for public universities see something wrong with funding private schools. The Coalition, on the other hand, sees a bigger and more sympathetic constituency in private schools than universities. Neither major political party believes that many votes turn on higher education policy.

Despite this political calculation, public universities, overall, did as well or better than private schools in the government’s Covid response. Both were excluded from the JobKeeper registered-charity category, and were therefore required to demonstrate a revenue decline of at least 30 rather than 15 per cent to qualify for payments. The fact that both sectors receive significant Commonwealth funding already is the common factor, meaning that sector-specific mechanisms of support already existed, if needed. Some private schools did nevertheless qualify for JobKeeper. No public university received JobKeeper in its own right, although thirteen had subsidiaries that did.

Private schools could receive their government grants early, forgoing future income, while public universities could keep their teaching grant money, even if their domestic enrolments fell. Universities could retain previously budgeted HELP student-loan revenue, to be repaid between 2022 and 2029 if not matched by student borrowing. Private schools could also benefit from modest cash payments available for small businesses and not-for-profits, but there was nothing like the extra $1 billion in university research funding for private schools. But nor should there have been, as this money responded to a problem unique to universities.

We are left trying to explain why this research money does not continue into 2022. Limited and fractured advocacy from the sector itself may be a factor. Throughout the Covid crisis, it has, at least in public, offered few specific suggestions about how the government should respond. This may reflect the sector’s diversity of interests. The research money mostly helped the research-intensive sandstone universities, and outside the Group of Eight lobby group, support for another year of it may have been lukewarm.

On the government’s side, it may feel that it did not get a political dividend for its first $1 billion. This was partly its own fault; it revealed the funding in the very busy October 2020 budget rather than announcing it in the preceding weeks. But while the higher education interest groups acknowledge the significance of the funding, the broader higher education community reaction matches Exit Strategy’s. The additional money might be mentioned briefly, only to be reframed as a cut when future funding drops back to previously announced levels, before returning the discussion to grievances about JobKeeper, an unsuitable scheme now closed to everyone.

Higher education is never going win votes for the Liberal Party, but this does not mean the party won’t respond to persuasive analyses of policy issues in the sector. There was a significant Covid response, albeit with the major elements of that response announced late in 2020 and finishing too early. The Job-Ready Graduates policy, released in June 2020, which was unrelated to Covid issues, jeopardises courses and campuses with reduced per-student funding in some disciplines, and needlessly adds many years to HELP repayment times for some students. But Job-Ready Graduates should deliver more student places for the “Costello baby boom” cohort, who will reach university age in the mid-2020s.

On both sides, the government and the higher education community, there is room for more engagement, so that the next few years have fewer avoidable policy and political mistakes than the past few years.

Andrew Norton

EXIT STRATEGY

Correspondence

Dennis Altman

The difficulty with writing about current events is that they change faster than it takes to produce and circulate an essay. I am writing this during Sydney’s Covid-induced lockdown, which has shattered the myth that the New South Wales government could manage the epidemic more successfully than the other states, even as it reinforces George’s argument about the fracturing of the federation.

Where George’s essay is strongest is in its assessment of the shifting political landscape of party loyalties and the Coalition’s hostility to universities, which he sees as connected. He is correct that state allegiances have changed, particularly that of Victoria, once the jewel in Menzies’ Liberal Party and now the strongest Labor state. But there seems to be some confusion in his argument, which shifts between suggesting that political fault lines lie along state lines and that there is a city–country divide.

Massive swings against Labor in regional Queensland at the last election certainly reflected perceptions that Labor is hostile to coalmining, but this hardly explains Labor’s failure to win back seats in suburban areas of the capital cities. While Labor seems obsessed with winning back coastal Queensland seats, it could easily win government if the five metropolitan areas of Australia voted similarly to Melbourne. Of the ten most marginal government seats following the last election, all but three are in the capital cities, and those three include electorates in Cairns and Launceston, neither of which depends on mining.

Only in Melbourne and Adelaide does Labor hold a clear majority of seats; Sydney, once reliably Labor south of the harbour, is now fairly equally divided. That Sydney has become much more culturally conservative than Melbourne is suggested by the results of the plebiscite on marriage equality in 2019. Of the ten electorates that recorded the highest “no” vote, eight were in Sydney, with only one (Maranoa) in rural Australia.

George suggests that the Coalition’s hostility to universities is closely related to Morrison’s apparent disregard for Victoria. Yes, the major export industry of Victoria has become higher education, while New South Wales’ is coal, but it is unlikely that this is a major factor explaining votes in metropolitan Sydney. Josh Frydenberg claims universities are victims of their own success, citing their willingness to embrace a corporate model, but he saw no problem in allowing major corporations to access JobKeeper and JobSaver programs, which were denied to universities. Given there are well over a million local university students in Australia, one would have thought the electoral calculus alone would encourage governments to be more supportive.

The consequences of declining financial support for universities are severe, not only for staff who lose jobs and students who can expect declining support. After the University of Western Australia, one of the richest universities in the country, embarked on a round of midyear cuts, Professor Mark Beeson pointed out that the cuts would drastically reduce the number of people working in the areas of international affairs and the politics and societies of the Indo-Pacific, with Asian Studies becoming further marginalised, Other universities have seen major cutbacks in language programs, including major Asian language programs.

Governments of both persuasions are obsessed with the need for more science and technology students, but in a complex and threatening global environment there is an equal need to increase competencies in disciplines associated with international studies. If, as the Morrison government believes, China presents a major long-term threat to Australia’s security, there should be a greater emphasis on building deep ties with the countries of Southeast Asia and expanding Australia’s diplomatic footprint, which is smaller than that of other countries of comparable wealth. One detects in Morrison something of an echo of Tony Abbott’s obsession with “the Anglosphere,” and a failure to recognise the long-term damage of successive cuts in foreign assistance to regions other than the Pacific.

The key question is whether either side of politics has the skills and vision to guide Australia into a post-pandemic world. One of the consequences of the pandemic has been an emphasis on the role of government; the neoliberal panacea of letting the market rip is no longer attractive, as George indicates. Sadly, the lack of a vision for the future is largely bipartisan; having been scared off by the reaction to Shorten’s mild suggestions for correcting some of the rorts within our taxation system, the current Labor Party finds itself unable to argue for the increased government commitments needed to improve our health, education and welfare systems. At a moment that calls for radical innovation, Labor risks missing the opportunity to offer a genuine alternative to the lack of imagination which George so accurately points to in the Morrison government.

Dennis Altman

EXIT STRATEGY

Correspondence

Jennifer Rayner

One of the more interesting parts of the Covid-19 era has been observing the ways people can and can’t imagine our world will be different after this once-in-a-century crisis. Apparently cities, with their crowded CBDs and coop-like apartments, are over; the logistics and supply chains we’ve relied on for half a century will be radically reshaped; and the frontline work of carers will finally be valued in line with its social contribution (if only). But in George Megalogenis’s Exit Strategy: Politics after the Pandemic, something that is not questioned is the primacy of the federal government in setting the direction for Australia’s recovery and beyond – whether by commission or omission.

This is puzzling because, as Megalogenis notes, the story of the pandemic is the story of a federal government being absent when leadership was needed, slow and hesitant when speed and decisiveness were essential. Late in the essay he observes, “Morrison’s approach has posed a question no one thought to ask before the pandemic: who actually runs the country? The answer in this crisis was the national cabinet, with the premiers claiming their greatest share of power in the federation since Whitlam commenced the long march of centralisation in the 1970s.”

The essay treats this as a temporary state, with Megalogenis’s thoughtful counsel being addressed to a federal government that is assumed to be back in the driver’s seat. But there is another way to see it. Arguably, what the pandemic has really done is lay bare a progressive shift in power between levels of government that has been taking place since the fractious start of the Abbott–Turnbull–Morrison government. Looked at this way, what we’ve seen during the Covid crisis is not an aberration – it’s a window into an alternative way to govern this country as we emerge from the pandemic.

As Megalogenis points out, in September 2021 the government will mark eight years in office, with the first five years being, “on its own admission, wasted.” The rapid burn of leaders has prevented any policy idea or agenda from sticking for too long. Party-room dynamics and the scarring experience of the 2014 budget have tempered any appetite for complex reform. Pretty much the only flag all parts of the party have consistently been able to rally around is the idea of getting the federal budget back to surplus, necessitating a smallness of ambition and a reduced scope for government action in the name of “budget repair.”

All this has created a vacuum: of ideas, of reform, of a willingness to face up to the hard challenges confronting Australia and actually do something about them. This vacuum is one that states and territories have increasingly been stepping into over the past eight years.

Australia lags the world on climate action, doesn’t it? The federal government has refused to join other advanced economies in pursuing genuine emissions reduction, but it’s happening anyway – because of the states and territories. In the past few years, all jurisdictions have signed up to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 and are getting on with the hard change needed to achieve this. That includes both Labor and Liberal governments, which have realised that the window to act is closing and we can’t keep playing politics while the world literally burns.

Today’s politicians lack the guts to deliver real economy-shaping tax reform, don’t they? Someone must have forgotten to tell that to Victoria, South Australia and New South Wales, which are all in the process of delivering road-user charging reforms that will address the long-term structural decline in federal fuel excise revenue, while helping to tackle emissions and congestion all in one handy tax. Or the ACT, which is well advanced in getting rid of stamp duty – a reform that the Henry Tax Review and approximately 4000 other experts believe is essential to improve productivity and equity in the housing market.

The states and territories have even demonstrated that near-national tax reform can be achieved through coordinated action. The introduction of point-of-consumption gaming taxes, capturing offshore betting operators, is a notable recent example, led by the South Australian government in 2017. All jurisdictions except the Northern Territory now have point-of-consumption taxes in place, tightening the tax net for an age of digital service delivery. The approach to developing these particular taxes was a case study in collaborative yet competitive federalism, with jurisdictions agreeing to create a broadly common tax base but leaving room to compete on the rate.

Australia is bound for gridlock and lost growth because we’ve failed to invest in infrastructure, right? Infrastructure Partnerships Australia tracks the Coalition’s infrastructure spend since coming to office in 2014 at $50.2 billion, an average of about $7 billion a year. Over the same period, New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland alone spent $217 billion, or around four times as much per year. In fact, in every year of the Abbott–Turnbull–Morrison government, New South Wales alone has invested more in infrastructure than the federal government has across the entire country. To give credit where it’s due, the Morrison government’s last two budgets have significantly stepped up infrastructure spending, with a little over $40 billion earmarked for the next three years to 2024. But that investment is entirely dwarfed by the $140 billion that Australia’s three largest states plan to spend on making their cities and regions more connected, efficient and productive over the same period.

All this is by way of demonstrating that the federal government’s wasted years have been anything but for the states and territories. There are many more examples of these jurisdictions rolling up their sleeves and getting on with the job while Australia’s media and commentariat have been preoccupied with the Coalition’s successive unravellings and rebuildings. Important lessons have been learned in these years about how the states and territories can go it alone, together.

For example, they are increasingly working together through channels and forums that are completely independent of the federal government. This is a distinct operating shift from the hub-and-spoke model that dominated during the Rudd–Gillard government, where all roads led to Canberra. An important example of this is the Board of Treasurers, which exclusively comprises state and territory representatives. It was established by the NSW Liberal treasurer Dominic Perrottet as a forum for jurisdictions to debate and pursue economic reform. It has proven to be a welcome circuit-breaker on the interminable lemniscate conversations within the Commonwealth-controlled Council of Federal Financial Relations.

The strengthening of direct ties has also opened new opportunities for healthily competitive collaboration. This has seen states and territories learning from one another while also jockeying for position. On issues as diverse as tax, industry development, zero emissions transition, waste, mental health, hospitals, skills and energy, jurisdictions are looking over each other’s fences for ideas and to benefit from the experience of governments that have tackled hard things first. While the federal government seems afraid to stick its neck out too far on anything at all, states and territories are increasingly making it a point of pride to be the first out of the gates and have other jurisdictions follow their example.

At the same time, the capability of the states and territories has been significantly boosted by an inflow of former federal public servants and advisers who believe in the power of government and want to wield it to drive real change. Regardless of your political persuasion, the Abbott–Turnbull–Morrison years have been an uninspiring time to work in government – dominated by messy and politicised decision-making processes, frequent policy reversals and a reticence to act on problems even when all the indicator lights are flashing red. Many workers have simply made the choice to take their skills elsewhere, strengthening state and territory governments with their knowledge, networks and larger frame of reference.

All this meant that Australia arguably entered the Covid-19 pandemic with the strongest states and territories and the weakest federal government for several decades. The collective action on display when premiers demanded a seat around the table at crisis HQ didn’t materialise overnight. It was an expression of existing relationships and power dynamics six years in the making. The possibility that Megalogenis’s essay missed is: what if we were to go forward like this, not back to the old world of centralised federal control?

This alternative would see the federal government take on the role of partner, not paterfamilias, to the states and territories. Vertical fiscal imbalance and the benefits of a national perspective will mean the federal government always has some role to play in guiding our collective future. But there’s no reason the federal government needs to be the pre-eminent decision-maker on the post-pandemic economy and policy agenda. Jurisdictions would no doubt welcome an approach in which ends were collaboratively agreed, but each had more autonomy to decide on the means. While national consistency in policy has its merits, its pursuit has often also led to gridlock and paralysis, or lowest-common-denominator outcomes that don’t end up moving the dial much. Being closer to communities, the states and territories may also choose to put different issues on the policy agenda than those the federal government has prioritised in recent years. It could only strengthen our democracy for citizens to feel that their concerns are being heard and acted upon.

In some ways this would mark a return to an earlier phase of the Australian federation, when the colonial states regularly muscled up to the nascent Commonwealth. But at the same time, it represents the kind of dispersed and flexible governance that is increasingly seen as necessary to meet the challenges of a world that is becoming more plural, more complex, and is demanding more innovation and experimentation.

If Australia ever gets around to having a credible national climate policy, it will need to be built around frameworks that are already in place and working across the states and territories. The next tax-reform agenda won’t look like the last one, because the up-to-date expertise in designing and delivering complex reform sits in state treasuries and revenue offices, not a Commonwealth Treasury exhausted from the vast effort of keeping the economy together through Covid. More coordination on infrastructure, service delivery and post-recovery program design will be essential to avoid a repeat of the gaps and inefficiencies that the pandemic put up in lights.

The question, then, really is: will future federal governments go with the flow and share more power with states and territories that have shown themselves capable of wielding it well? Or will the coming decade be a fight by the feds to take back all the ground given away since 2014? These are not just questions for Scott Morrison’s Coalition; federal Labor, too, will need to decide what sort of role it wants to play when its next prime minister fronts the premiers. With such a strong cast of experienced and popular state Labor leaders, it would be bold to think Anthony Albanese or anyone else could easily slip back into the old federal role.

Early in his essay, Megalogenis notes that “Covid-19 has demonstrated a wicked genius for exploiting gaps in the old model.” He was talking about the economic model, but in fact the pandemic has laid bare gaps and fractures right across our society – including in how we are governed. The relationship of levels of Australian government may be a rare instance in which what has been exposed is actually an improvement on how we believed things were. We shouldn’t therefore assume that the only way forward is back – back to centralised federal control, back to states and territories as the second tier by design and by function. To do so would be to miss an important opportunity to build a better system of government for our post-pandemic future.

Jennifer Rayner

GETTING TO ZERO

Correspondence

Ian Lowe

Dr Finkel correctly warns of the complexity and formidable challenges involved in achieving the target of zero emissions. As a former chief scientist, he is understandably reluctant to comment on the political climate and the extent to which elected politicians represent an obstacle to progress, but we must be realistic. While better technologies are more likely to succeed, we don’t live in a world of technological determinism. Policy decisions by governments have a critical impact on the scale and rate of progress.

There are some technical issues on which I believe the essay is unhelpfully optimistic. It is not sensible to talk about “zero-emissions” nuclear energy. It would be equally misleading to talk about “zero-emissions” solar or wind energy. In each of those cases, carbon-based fuels are not burned to produce the delivered electricity, but significant amounts of emissions are required to fabricate solar panels, wind turbines and nuclear power stations. Overall, they produce much less emissions than burning fossil fuels, but they are not zero-emissions technologies. That label implies we can cheerfully scale them up to meet any improbable level of demand.

The essay also refers to “carbon capture and permanent storage.” The promise of CCS has been used repeatedly as a get-out-of-jail-free card by those who want to keep using fossil fuels. Don’t worry, they argue, the carbon will be captured and permanently stored. There are three problems. First, it has not been convincingly demonstrated that carbon dioxide, liquefied and injected into geological layers, will stay there forever. Secondly, the process of capturing and liquefying carbon dioxide uses considerable quantities of energy (and costs a lot of money). Thirdly, while there may be some niche operations that use this technology because there are suitable strata near the site producing the carbon dioxide, it is simply not credible to envisage it being scaled up to manage the global problem. The volume of carbon dioxide that would be produced if we captured and liquefied the gas from the world’s coal-fired power stations would be comparable with that handled by the world’s entire oil industry. That volume would need to be transported and stored in suitable geological strata every year. It just can’t happen.

On the other hand, I think the essay understates the pace of change in the global electricity industry. After noting that solar and wind accounted for almost all new generating capacity in recent years in Australia, it states, “In the rest of the world, the comparable figure is a bit over half, because natural gas and coal-fired generators continue to be built.” In 2019, the world installed about 170 gigawatts of new renewables and about 70 gigawatts of fossil-fuel generators. So “the comparable figure” wasn’t “a bit over half” but about 70 per cent. The International Energy Agency’s 2020 figures are even stronger: 107 gigawatts of solar, 65 gigawatts of wind and 18 gigawatts of hydro, giving a total of 190 gigawatts of new renewable capacity. New gas? About 40 gigawatts. Coal? Zero. In fact, the closures slightly exceeded new capacity, making 2020 the first year in living memory in which coal capacity declined. So last year, renewables were over 80 per cent of new capacity globally. What about nuclear power? IEA estimated 8 gigawatts of new capacity coming on line but 5 gigawatts being decommissioned, giving a net gain of 3 gigawatts, compared with 190 gigawatts of renewables. It is clear which way the world as a whole is going.

The editor of the annual World Nuclear Industry Status Report, Mycle Schneider, recently gave figures for the changes in the average prices of power from different supply sources in the last decade. Coal-fired electricity went up slightly, from 11.1 to 11.2 cents per kilowatt-hour, while nuclear power increased from 12.3 cents to 16.3. By contrast, the average price of wind power came down from 13.5 cents to 4.0, while solar improved from 35.9 cents a decade ago to an average of 3.7 cents a kilowatt-hour in 2020, with one new installation in Portugal delivering energy for 1.1 cents. That change in the economics is breathtaking. Ten years ago, solar power cost about three times as much as nuclear power, on average, while wind was slightly more expensive than nuclear. Now, nuclear power is more than four times the average price of either solar or wind power.

The economics is driving change in the way existing capacity is being used. The International Energy Agency’s figures for the absolute changes in delivered electricity between 2019 and 2020 are startling: renewables about 400 terawatt-hours more, coal about 500 terawatt-hours less, gas about 130 terawatt-hours less, nuclear about 100 terawatt-hours less.

I was disappointed by the essay’s lack of emphasis on the need to improve the efficiency of using energy. There is a statement that says it all: “If our use of energy were more efficient, we would not have to produce nearly as much.” Quite. People don’t want energy, they want hot showers, cold beer and the ability to get around. But the discussion of supply needs implicitly assumes we will continue to waste massive amounts of energy through inefficiency. The National Framework for Energy Efficiency, presented to the Howard government in 2003, estimated we could reduce our emissions by 30 per cent using cost-effective existing technology, with payback times of less than four years. Almost nothing has been done in the eighteen years since to implement these recommendations, or to utilise the subsequent improvements in technology. Our electrical appliances, our vehicles and our buildings are very inefficient, wasting money as well as energy. Solar hot water makes economic sense almost everywhere but is still not encouraged by the national government. Rather than introducing efficiency standards to entice motorists to buy smaller vehicles, we have encouraged the move to large SUVs, while the retreat from sensible urban planning and the lack of public transport has condemned thousands of people living on the edges of our cities to long commutes by car. We could live at the same level of material comfort using half the energy we now do. That would make more sense than continuing to invest in ever-increasing amounts of supply.

Dr Finkel’s optimistic closing vision of a net-zero-emissions future is one I would dearly like to see. We should be moving urgently in that direction. But we need to be realistic – and angry – about the formidable obstacle that is the bitterly divided Coalition government. I recently talked with farmers who were apoplectic about the National Party’s failure to recognise the damage climate change is doing to rural Australia. “Haven’t they noticed we are having one-in-a-hundred-year events every bloody year?” one said. Apart from stupidly waving a lump of coal around in parliament before he displaced Malcolm Turnbull, Scott Morrison has restricted himself to baseless claims that we will meet “in a canter” our inadequate Paris target. Josh Frydenberg, while Turnbull’s energy and environment minister, attacked South Australia’s Weatherill government for investing in solar, wind and battery storage. It was a nakedly political attack; there has been no criticism of South Australia’s current Coalition government for doubling down on that successful strategy since it was elected. While the modest carbon price set by the Gillard government clearly reduced emissions, it was demonised by the Coalition as a great big tax on everything, with ridiculous claims it would make a lamb roast cost $100 and reduce Whyalla to a ghost town. Everyone from right-wing economists to leftish environmentalists would support a price on greenhouse gas emissions, but that is ruled out on ideological grounds. The election of Zali Steggall and the recent support of her climate initiative by other crossbenchers should be a warning to the government. Once the dust has settled from the pandemic and the toxic patriarchal culture in Parliament House, the big challenge for our politics will be responding to climate change. Tony Abbott will not be the last casualty if the government continues to be part of the problem, rather than part of the solution.

Ian Lowe

GETTING TO ZERO

Correspondence

Hugh Saddler

Alan Finkel’s essay opens with an excellent, brief account of how atmospheric carbon dioxide affects climate and how the facts show precisely why those who reject this science are wrong. The remainder of the essay sets out his assessment of which technologies will most effectively enable Australia to transition to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions. Finkel is a very good technology writer. The text is consistently readable, while almost always achieving the difficult feat of being simultaneously precise, accurate and concise. To summarise it, the pathway to the zero-emissions energy supply system that Finkel advocates consists of three major components. The first is 100 per cent renewable electricity generation (he correctly considers nuclear generation to be a “non-starter” for Australia), supported by a combination of battery, pumped hydro and hydrogen-based storage. The second is a combination of electrical technologies and hydrogen for all thermal energy requirements. The third is a combination of battery electric and hydrogen fuel cell power for transport and other mobile equipment. Most well-informed commentators would broadly agree with this pathway.

Finkel’s account, of course, goes into far more detail about energy supply technologies than my summary suggests. One way he achieves readability is to present a single narrative, seldom acknowledging the existence of differing views and current debates about some of the particular technology choices he advocates. As well as achieving readability, the single narrative is probably a necessary consequence of his overall approach of focusing on “the technology, not the policies, which are for our democratically elected political leaders to determine.” Unfortunately, the separation between technology choices and policy choices is not as distinct as his words imply, which creates problems for the essay.

The essay is certainly political, in the broadest sense, because of the way Finkel goes about the entirely appropriate task of persuading his readers. Unfortunately, at several points, it degenerates into what is best described as heavy-handed debating tactics. For example, early in the essay Finkel states, in an apparent attempt to be positive and encouraging about the coming energy system transition, that “the good news is that there is momentum. From 2005 to 2018, the OECD countries cut emissions by an average of 9 per cent, Australia by 13 per cent.” Australian emissions did indeed fall, but entirely because of dramatic reductions from the land sector. Energy combustion emissions increased by 6 per cent from 2005 to 2016, before levelling off in 2017 and 2018. As a share of Australia’s total emissions, they increased from 58 per cent in 2005 to 71 per cent in 2018. If, as Finkel states, emissions are the only really important performance indicator for the energy transition (an absolutely correct assessment), Australia has, as yet, no momentum at all. (Energy emissions fell in 2019–20, but almost entirely because of the dramatic negative impact of the pandemic lockdowns on consumption of petroleum fuels for road transport and aviation.)

A little further on, Finkel seeks to present himself as holding the reasonable middle ground between “some at one end of the debate who want no change at all, and others at the other end who want to move faster than is feasible.” This grossly oversimplifies the diverse array of positions advanced by participants in Australia’s energy emissions policy debate.

Finkel later singles out for explicit criticism one group of debate participants as being, by implication, part of the faster-than-feasible cohort. The group in question comprised twenty-five scientists who wrote him an open letter taking issue with his public support for gas generation. (I was one of the twenty-five.) However, what they objected to was not the use of gas itself, but Finkel’s failure to explain that its use would be limited, which would have required him to simply indicate the volume of gas he believes will be required – a failure repeated in this essay.

Finkel argues that “natural gas will be a part of Australia’s energy mix for many years to come” because of its important role in providing “firming” for renewable generators. There is wide support for this position from, among other respected sources, the Integrated System Plan prepared by the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) and, most recently, a Grattan Institute report (an earlier Grattan report is highly critical of the government’s “gas-led recovery” proposals). However, both AEMO and Grattan say that the volume of gas required will be very small and will certainly not require any increase in gas-fired generation capacity. In all of the scenarios modelled by AEMO for the Integrated System Plan, the share of gas generation in total electricity supply will be significantly lower than its current level, which is already low (about 5 per cent per year in the National Electricity Market). By failing to state that the share of gas generation needed will be small and transitional, or to reference the AEMO plan, Finkel (perhaps inadvertently) allows his words to be used by the government to advocate building new gas-fired power stations and increasing, rather than decreasing, the share of gas generation.

This may seem a rather nitpicking criticism, but the key point is that Australia, and almost all other countries, have already delayed acting decisively to reduce emissions for far too long. We cannot afford to make any investments, such as new gas-fuelled generators, which will lock emissions at higher than absolutely necessary levels for years to come.

When I reached the end of the essay, having read what Finkel himself calls a “gloomy forecast” in the section on climate change, the very last words came as a shock: “be patient.” The rationale for this injunction is the time it will take for the new energy-supply technologies, most especially hydrogen, to reach technological maturity. But this argument reflects that the essay is largely written from the supply-side perspective, as it is called in energy policy terminology. While only some forms of energy are sources of greenhouse gases, those gases are only emitted to the atmosphere when that energy is used, in relevant types of equipment, to deliver energy services for consumers. The energy system consists not only of energy-supply technologies and equipment, which are where fossil carbon originates, but also energy-using technologies and equipment, from which fossil carbon is emitted as fossil carbon dioxide. Energy-using or demand-side technologies are no less important, though less exciting, than supply-side technologies, when thinking about energy-system transition. The energy used to deliver transport and thermal processes (heat) is currently supplied almost entirely by petroleum products, gas and coal, and it accounts for about half of Australia’s total energy combustion emissions. Replacing these fuels with electricity and hydrogen means completely replacing existing equipment with new equipment that uses electricity and hydrogen.

As Finkel explains, transitioning the energy supply to renewable electricity and hydrogen will require investments of many billions of dollars, but the investment decisions themselves will be made by a relatively small cohort of executives – certainly far fewer than a million, if passive corporate shareholders are excluded. By contrast, there are over 4 million householders and small-business owners with gas connections to their dwellings or business premises, almost all of whom use gas for space heating, water heating or both. Gas heaters typically have an operational life of at least twenty years. How long will it take to replace them all with reverse-cycle air conditioners and heat-pump or electric-resistance water heaters (often a sensible choice for buildings with rooftop solar generation)? Unless decisive action to drive the changeover is introduced very soon, state governments will be unable to meet their net-zero emissions targets by 2050, except by mandating the scrapping and replacement of serviceable gas appliances and providing appropriate compensation to hundreds of thousands – or millions – of appliance owners. We cannot afford to be patient about starting this transition.

Nor can we be patient about road transport emissions. The number of registered passenger and light commercial motor vehicles in 2020 was about 18 million, according to ABS statistics. The number of individual owners is not known, but is likely to be over 10 million. New vehicle sales each year are equal to about 7 per cent of the total registered fleet, and the average age of registered passenger and light commercial vehicles is about ten years. It is certainly the case that older vehicles travel less distance than newer ones; in 2019–20, vehicles that were fifteen or more years old accounted for about 26 per cent of registered vehicles but only 17 per cent of the total distance travelled. Nevertheless, unless far more aggressive policies to support the uptake of electric vehicles are introduced in the near future, a target of zero-emissions road transport by 2050 will be unattainable.

It is obvious that the issues I have raised combine technology with policy, and that is why the attempt to separate the two creates problems. I suspect that Finkel may share my view that announcing emission-reduction targets without providing some details of the policy program by which the target will be achieved is like announcing an aspiration or a hope and is actually quite useless as a way of “getting to zero.” However, a carefully compiled and skilfully written menu of new technologies is also useless by itself, irrespective of how much more attractive the new technologies may be than old emissions-intensive technologies, on the basis of either performance or cost. The menu must be accompanied by an account of how the technologies will be rolled out on the scale needed to get to zero. The perceived need to separate “technology” from “policy” seems to be yet another manifestation of how the poisonous politics surrounding the climate change challenge in Australia continue to impede real progress on planning for deep emissions reduction.

Hugh Saddler

GETTING TO ZERO

Correspondence

Ben Wilson

I have had the privilege to work with Alan Finkel as part of the advisory panel for the National Hydrogen Strategy and, more recently, as a member of the ministerial council for the Technology Investment Roadmap, which Alan chairs.

Dr Finkel’s article is a first-class discussion of the challenges and opportunities presented by Australia’s energy transition. I recommend it to anyone looking to cut through the mixed-quality debate on this topic.

We all bring a personal perspective to the challenges of climate change and humankind’s response to it. I grew up as a voracious reader of science fiction – “hard SF,” the kind where the laws of physics are obeyed – and in particular the works of the great twentieth-century sci-fi authors Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke. In their books, humankind has often migrated throughout the solar system or across the galaxy. The future is mostly utopian: many of the social problems of contemporary society seem no longer to exist. The advance of technology has continued to transform lives, almost always for the better. Sometimes the future Earth is portrayed as a kind of nature reserve: with a small human population and returned to its former natural glory. Climate change, of course, is almost never mentioned; it was not a focus before the late twentieth century. My childhood reading and scientific education left me with a core belief that technology, innovation and the application of human endeavour and ingenuity is the best way to solve our problems, including the pressing need to decarbonise our energy system and achieve net zero.

In 2015, I moved to Australia from the United Kingdom, where I was a senior executive at UK Power Networks, the country’s largest electricity distributor. I came to run Australian Gas Networks, now known as the Australian Gas Infrastructure Group, which is Australia’s largest owner of natural gas distribution networks. There are many similarities between running an electricity grid in the United Kingdom and a gas grid in Australia, so it was the differences that struck me most. Most importantly: what was the plan to stay in business? We distribute fossil fuel in a world that is moving towards net zero. For electricity distribution, the energy transition comes under the category of an interesting challenge: renewables penetration is disrupting the operation of the electricity system, but no one really thinks we will do without electricity networks in the future. For a natural gas network, however, the threat is existential: to use the metaphor of former Nokia CEO Stephen Elop, we sit on a “burning platform.” If we don’t find a way to decarbonise, then customers will find alternative solutions, potentially well before 2050.

In 2015, the threat didn’t seem quite so urgent, but I could see that it would come soon enough, and so I looked around for a solution. At that time, our UK sister company, Northern Gas Networks, was working on a project called H21 Leeds. The study looked at the feasibility of converting the natural gas network of the city of Leeds, in northern England, to run entirely on zero-carbon hydrogen. Almost immediately, I could see that this provided the answer we were looking for. In principle, there is no reason why we cannot deliver hydrogen through gas networks for customers to use as they use natural gas today. Burning hydrogen produces only water vapour, and if it is produced from electrolysis of water, using renewable electricity (green hydrogen), or from methane, with carbon capture and storage (blue hydrogen), then there are no carbon dioxide emissions from production.

We moved quickly to turn this idea into reality. This started with “Gas Vision 2050,” a report published in 2017. It laid out an ambitious plan for the gas sector with three stages: first, studies and pilot projects (“make hydrogen a thing”); second, large-scale blending of green hydrogen into existing natural gas networks (“make hydrogen plan A”); and, third, full-scale conversion of the gas networks to green and blue hydrogen (“make hydrogen business-as-usual”). Stage one is complete, and stage two is now the focus, to be completed this decade. We aim to achieve stage three, full system conversion, by 2040.

When you have a burning platform, you need to work fast, and we certainly have. Pilot projects are now in operation across Australia, including our own hydrogen park, a 1.25 megawatt electrolyser (Australia’s largest), which is blending green hydrogen into the local gas network and supplying pure green hydrogen to industrial customers. It seems as if a new hydrogen project is announced every week, and some of our largest industrial companies are mobilising behind this emerging economic sector. Dr Finkel’s work and communication skills have been absolutely key in building the momentum we now see for hydrogen.

The rapid growth of interest in hydrogen in Australia, from almost nothing five years ago, is just one example of the fundamental force I referred to earlier: human ingenuity, which will drive the technological change that can solve our problems. Technological advances, combined with our natural competitive advantages in Australia, including abundant solar and wind resources, allow us to meet the challenges of climate change and create new national opportunities. One example is green hydrogen, which offers us a way to store and transport our renewable power, and could make us an exporting superpower of renewable energy in a decade or two, in the way we are today with natural gas, coking coal and iron ore.

More than two centuries ago, Thomas Malthus forecast that the clash between constant population growth and limited food production would lead to disaster. Technological advances have deferred this scenario, but our ever-growing energy consumption and the earth’s finite ability to cope with atmospheric carbon dioxide is another Malthusian trap. But as with food production, human ingenuity can harness technological change to avoid catastrophe.

Unlike the authors I read growing up, twenty-first-century science fiction writers do address climate change. In Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel 2312, humans have spread throughout the solar system and are pushing on to the stars. Earth is at least two degrees hotter, but the damage stopped years ago, and attempts at repair are underway. In Robinson’s book, the first half of our century is referred to as “the Dithering,” and future generations wonder what took us so long to fix the problem!

Until Elon Musk and others like him can transport us through the solar system, this planet is all we have. We need to take care of it. I am convinced that technology, human ingenuity in action, will enable us to make the energy transition to net zero – by 2050 or before. This will create new and exciting opportunities for Australia.

Ben Wilson

GETTING TO ZERO

Correspondence

Nick Rowley

For anyone who has endured what passes for debate on climate change and emissions reduction in Australia, Alan Finkel’s forward-looking, largely optimistic and rigorous presentation of the elements of Australia’s required transition to a net-zero energy economy is a refreshing and at times exciting read.

How nice to now understand how and why wind turbines require three blades, and the various methods whereby electric vehicles can be charged slowly, quickly or – if you are lucky – very quickly. And who could fail to be thrilled at the prospects for a country not only so richly endowed with wind and solar resources crying out to be harnessed, but also now potentially on the cusp of developing a whole new zero-or low-emissions industry based on hydrogen?

Alan is more than across the technical detail. He is genuinely enthused by the challenges of climate change and marshalling the forces required to address them. The task of achieving net zero is indeed immense. It is something no economy has ever achieved or tried to achieve. It means overhauling existing energy, industry, agriculture and transport systems, which are established, employ people and largely add to emissions. But Finkel does not let the magnitude of the task dissuade him from understanding the technologies required to achieve it.

Yet it will take more than “technology to solve technology’s problems.” Finkel’s hero, Buckminster Fuller, can no doubt teach us much, but we must beware magic-pudding thinking. No technology emerges in a vacuum. Much of it relies on public policy, public funding and a suite of additional incentives. Achieving net zero within the required time frame must involve policies that deliver a “just measure of pain” to the existing fossil-fuel infrastructure that is intensifying the climate problem. To ignore this, as Finkel does, is to neglect much of the challenge we face.

And yet I am with Alan in his frustration with those who wish achieving net-zero emissions were somehow straightforward. Climate advocates who argue that Australia must reach this target by 2035 are, sadly, whistling in the wind – or “dreamin’,” as the Michael Caton character said in the classic Australian film The Castle. If you are serious about achieving a net-zero economy, you must be at ease with the complexity of achieving change that goes to the heart of our political economy and replacing the high-carbon infrastructure on which we all rely.

The job of chief scientist, which Finkel occupied for five years until last November, is hard at the best of times. Where science meets policy will always be a place of tension. Politics is concerned not with positive questions, but with collective decisions and action: not “What is true?” but “What shall we do?” Because many of the questions most relevant to policy decisions may not or cannot have scientifically informed answers, politics challenges science. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw chief medical officers Brendan Murphy and Paul Kelly standing side by side with Scott Morrison, but even in response to the pandemic, Murphy and Kelly could only inform, not make, what are rightly political decisions.

An effective chief scientist can be a powerful scientific voice in policy debates. But they must walk a fine line, disentangling policy debate into clear questions and establishing which of these relate to scientific knowledge and which to our values, hopes and political principles. This is particularly hard when it comes to climate change. The link between carbon emissions, our existing means of generating energy and Australia’s clear vulnerability to the smorgasbord of climate risks – physical, environmental, economic and social – makes it particularly hard for even the most disciplined scientist not to spell out the all too human (and political) implications of failing to develop and implement effective climate policy.

During my time at the Downing Street Policy Directorate between 2004 and 2006, I worked closely with Sir David King, then the United Kingdom’s chief scientist. I was charged with advising Prime Minister Tony Blair and guiding UK efforts on climate change in the lead-up to the 2005 G8 summit: the first time a leader had made climate change a key priority for heads of state. In my policy work, I could get ambition, adjectives and rhetoric from any climate advocate on any day of the week. What King and scientists such as Sir John Houghton (who advised Margaret Thatcher, established the Hadley Centre for Climate Science and Services, and led efforts to establish the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) could deliver were numbers – the specific emissions reductions required to reduce climate risk, domestically and globally – which allowed the government to develop and argue for more ambitious policies and legislation.

King was respected. He had been integral to the government response to the vicious outbreak of mad cow disease three years earlier. But just two months before I started work in the office above Number 10’s black door, he damagingly overstepped the mark on climate change, commenting that it was “a more serious threat to the world than terrorism.” Climate advocates might have been pleased by the chief scientist’s bravura, but so soon after the 9/11 attacks, Washington was deeply offended. King was persona non grata in the US capital, and his insensitivity stunted Blair’s efforts to argue for progressive climate policy with President George W. Bush. It took months of diplomatic effort with Bush and those around him for the White House even to countenance serious discussion of how to strengthen the international climate response.

In contrast, King’s immediate predecessor in the role, the Australian scientist (and champion of the now famous “R number” so useful in understanding the spread of infectious disease) Lord Robert May, played a powerfully supportive role: using science to strengthen diplomatic effort. As president of the Royal Society, May led and orchestrated the first joint statement from the G8 science academies on the need for a more effective response to the climate problem. Their concise statement cut through: diplomats seeking to play down climate risk could be reminded, publicly or behind closed doors, of the statement signed by the president of their own leading science academy. This was science powerfully helping to build political and policy ambition.

For Finkel, there is only distraction to be had in looking backwards, but plenty to inspire us looking forwards. His concern is the future. Each page of his essay brings reasoned hope that achieving net-zero emissions is both possible and highly desirable. Surely our path needs more go signs and fewer stop signs. But, sadly, if we – as Finkel does – see climate response in the coming decade as having the potential to be every bit as exciting as space exploration in the 1960s, we ignore the key missing ingredient: political will.

Much as I would like to believe that Finkel is right, his optimism is naively blind to Australia’s current domestic politics. Our future is affected by our past. Look back and we can see the political and policy mess of the past fifteen years. Depressingly, Australia’s current climate-policy confusion goes beyond the position of the Morrison government. We are now at a point where both major parties favour a so-called “gas-led recovery” and will not rule out new coal-fired power stations. Any statements from our political leaders on the need to achieve a net-zero economy are meaningless if they continue to support new fossil-fuel infrastructure. They might as well tout the benefits of a healthy diet and exercise while ordering the double burger, large chips and a super-sized sugary drink.

The excitement of space exploration in the 1960s was founded on political leadership driving national purpose. Although NASA was created in 1958, it was President John F. Kennedy’s “We choose to go the moon” speech in September 1962 that led to the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs. This was no “sentence or two” in a speech as a means to avoid international criticism, it was an unequivocal national priority backed by institutions, policy and money. With the average age of those employed on Apollo being just twenty-six, a whole generation was enthused. Between 1964 and 1966, public investment in NASA’s work amounted to around 4 per cent of the federal budget. When Neil Armstrong first set foot on the moon, the moment was televised live, alongside that key quote from Kennedy’s speech.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson may have little in common, but Johnson has made achieving net zero a core priority for the United Kingdom, influencing economic decisions and the diplomatic positioning of “global Britain” after Brexit. Contrast Scott Morrison’s tokenistic words with the serious political and policy commitment of his UK counterpart. The Johnson government has just laid an order before parliament to enshrine a new carbon target in law by the end of June 2021. The United Kingdom’s existing target of a 68 per cent reduction of 1990 emissions levels by 2030 is the highest set by any country under the Paris Agreement. Now under the new laws it will aim to achieve a 78 per cent reduction by 2035, while also incorporating the carbon emissions contributed by the United Kingdom’s international aviation and shipping. Our prime minister might not believe in targets, but Johnson clearly does. The British prime minister is also willing to be legally bound by them, and supports them with policy informed by the independent Climate Change Committee, together with an ambitious ten-point plan to achieve net zero.

The development of technology does not and can never occur in a policy vacuum. As the economist Mariana Mazzucato shows so brilliantly, smartphones were not solely dreamed up by entrepreneurial tech wizards in garages. They were the result of government decisions in the form of focused public investment and subsidy. And we can thank the CSIRO – Australia’s own publicly funded scientific research institution – for the development of the wi-fi that the world has relied on to stay connected through the COVID-19 pandemic. As much as I would like to purchase an electric vehicle – as I am sure many other Australians would – I cannot afford any of the comparatively few cars available here. The paucity of options has everything to do with politics and the resulting lack of policy. It has nothing to do with technology. UK consumers receive a generous grant of £2500 ($4500) towards the price of a new electric car. This year, Volkswagen plans to sell around 450,000 electric vehicles globally, not one of which will be in Australia.

In his current role as adviser to the government on low emissions, Finkel cannot absent himself from the politics of climate change, even though he might like to. Rather than using his rigorous scientific, engineering and technological know-how to help build a more effective political and policy response, Finkel’s wide-eyed enthusiasm for technological solutions to the climate crisis runs the risk of supporting and legitimising the very rhetoric and politics that got Australia into its current woeful climate position.

Being deaf to the politics of climate change does not mean you can remove yourself from it. Bolstering the likes of Senator Matt Canavan and energy minister Angus Taylor sadly serves to legitimise their – weak at best, hostile at worst – stance on the net-zero outcome Finkel is so enthusiastic about delivering. That Finkel quotes the prime minister’s recent half-hearted rhetoric on reaching “net-zero emissions as soon as possible, and preferably by 2050” leaves the reader confused. The 2019 National Hydrogen Strategy and the 2020 Low Emissions Technology Statement might serve to give the current “emperor” some policy “clothes,” but Finkel must realise that the economic transition required to achieve a national energy switch of this scale demands far more than funding for research into new technologies (vital though that is). Context is everything, and as uplifting as technology optimism can be, it must not be blind to it.

Finkel is, perhaps, the Anthony Fauci of Australian domestic energy and climate policy. Amid the noise – lumps of coal being brandished in parliament, prime ministers being “rolled,” and statements likening the promotion of electric vehicles to a “war on the weekend” – he has remained calm, considered and committed to the job at hand.

Part of what stultifies our climate politics is a lack of optimism and imagination. Some of that Finkel brings in spades. No one person can be everything: negotiating internal and external politics, contributing to policy, and appreciating and promoting the technologies that must be brought to bear at scale. I recall Robert May once sharing with me that almost everything he knew about being chief scientist and advising the government on scientific matters he learned from playing chess. I don’t know if Alan Finkel plays the game. But if he does, my sense is he plays it well.

Nick Rowley

GETTING TO ZERO

Correspondence

Ross Garnaut

Alan Finkel has his critics on climate change in the scientific and policy communities. They argue that his prescriptions would do too little, too late, and provide cover for vested interests influencing policy to continue in old ways.

This response provides another context for Alan’s work on climate change as chief scientist from 2015 to 2020 and now as our prime minister’s special adviser on climate and the energy transition. The latter role is of national significance, through the series of demanding heads-of-government conferences in which Scott Morrison participates as a member or observer. The meetings commenced with President Biden’s virtual Climate Summit in April 2021, and will continue through the G7 in London and the G20 in Rome, to the Glasgow conference of the parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change hosted by UK prime minister Boris Johnson in December.

We should be under no illusion about what is at risk through these international meetings: Australia’s reputation as a nation that pulls its weight as a member of the international community of democratic countries. We should be under no illusion that our national interest is at risk, as the country which stands to lose most from failure on global climate change mitigation and to gain most economically from full participation in success.

Australians who understand what is at stake can be glad that Alan Finkel has the ear of senior figures in a government that in its early years had resisted scientific reality and set out to remove effective instruments for reducing Australian emissions. In Superpower: Australia’s Low-Carbon Opportunity, I said that the prospects of building Australia’s prosperity by embracing the world’s movement to zero net emissions is the bridge over which the Morrison government can walk across the chasm, from the spoiling side of climate action to constructive participation. Alan points out to government that stepping onto this bridge is necessary and safe.

But we have to make sure that the bridge, which has scientific, engineering and economic components, goes all the way to the other side. In Getting to Zero, Alan describes himself as an engineer. The engineering design is in good hands. We must make sure the scientific and economic components are soundly built as well.

The engineering

Getting to Zero presents a fascinating description of how the chief scientist and Australian governments became committed to major use of hydrogen in the transition. Alan calls hydrogen the hero of the story and describes its many potential roles. He expects it to play a big role in the future Australian economy. He is probably right, in a time frame that will allow him to see the fruits of his work.

Getting to Zero provides background on the development of the 2020 First Low Emissions Technology Statement – or Roadmap. It says a little about the selection of five technologies that will have higher priority than others for government support: clean hydrogen; energy storage; carbon capture and storage in geological structures; low-emissions steel and aluminium; and soil carbon. In the absence of a carbon price, government fiscal support is the main policy instrument for promoting the application of new technologies. Priorities guide government allocation decisions. All technologies on the list will have a role in a future zero-emissions economy. Others have strong claims. I hope that they are not neglected. Alan says that they can be added later.

Alan tells an interesting story of his involvement in the review of Australian energy institutions after the blackout in South Australia in 2016. Political partisans blamed the blackout on the high proportion of renewable energy. Alan explains that the problem was the National Electricity Market’s operation and design, and not an excess of renewables. As the system operators have gained experience, “it is now clear that it will be possible to achieve the ultimate goal of a zero-emissions electricity system.” Alan has contributed to that learning from experience.

The science

Getting to Zero describes the scientific basis of climate change and the need for climate action in a simple and compelling way. Alan and I, engineer and economist, both absorb the realities of atmospheric physics from specialists in the field. Alan presents the scientific reality faithfully: theory tells us that increased carbon dioxide and methane, and to a lesser extent other greenhouse gases, raise the average temperature and reduce variations in the temperature of the atmosphere, and also of the land and sea; human activity over the past century or so has already lifted average global temperatures by around 1.2 degrees (1.4 degrees on average in Australia); increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases destabilise the climate upon which established patterns of life on Earth depend; damage has already been done, and increases with each increment of emissions. We have to get to net zero by about the middle of the century. There is no reasonable cause for doubt; denial is irrational. We can be glad that our federal leaders have been exposed to such clear expression of important truth.

Alan ends his discussion of the science by saying that “zero” really means low or very low; that low really means less than 10 per cent from where we started. My reading of the physics raises questions about that reinterpretation of zero. Ten per cent of where Australia started, or where the world started? Ten per cent of Australia in 2005 is an amount per person that is around half of where the world was in 2005, or about the whole of where India was. Would India think it reasonable to stay at Australia’s 10 per cent, or the world’s? Which of these would be fair? Which of these would be acceptable?

Be that as it may, my reading of the physics says that concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and the trend in global temperatures will continue to rise while net emissions exceed zero. Absolute zero, not 10 per cent of an old number. The Summary for Policy Makers in the IPCC’s Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C says that to hold temperature increases to 1.5 degrees, we have to have net-zero CO₂ for the world as a whole by 2050. Malte Meinhausen, professor of climate science at the University of Melbourne and adviser to the IPCC, suggests that we think of a range from 2047 to 2055. Start late or slowly and we have to finish fast and early.

Hold emissions at one-tenth of current levels and we fail to stabilise average global temperatures and end up higher – eventually much higher – than 1.5 degrees. If we continued after 2050 with emissions of 3.7 GtCO₂ per annum, equal to one-tenth of the present, temperature after fifty years would exceed 1.5 by 0.3 degrees (Professor Meinhausen suggests a range of 0.19 to 0.43 degrees, with about 0.3 degrees extra for every subsequent half-century).

Of course, it matters what happens to methane and other gases that have a relatively short life in the atmosphere. Alan says that New Zealand has excluded agriculture, with its large methane emissions, from its “net zero” target. Methane has an average life in the atmosphere of about a dozen years, compared with hundreds of years for carbon dioxide. Methane emissions are net zero if we hold them steady at the levels of a dozen or so years ago: as many molecules are being removed from the atmosphere each year as are being added. Reduce absolute methane emissions to zero and atmospheric concentrations will fall gradually to zero during those dozen years. There are relatively straightforward ways to reduce methane emissions. Unlike carbon dioxide, reduction of methane is a source of negative emissions. Far from excluding agriculture from the net-zero objective, New Zealand is seeking to measure its impact scientifically.

Getting to Zero clears up one point of dispute with a number of environmental scientists. In his presentation to the National Press Club on 12 February 2020, Alan argued that gas had a large role to play in balancing intermittent renewable energy – providing power when the sun is not shining and the wind not blowing. Pumped hydro storage and batteries could do the job and eventually would, but gas had a substantial transition role for many decades. Twenty-five people, several of them eminently qualified in atmospheric physics, published a letter in a scholarly journal later in the year, saying that the proposed reliance on gas was inconsistent with holding temperature increases within the 1.5 degree objective. They said that the time had passed for building any new fossil-energy infrastructure, including for power generation from gas.

At the National Press Club, Alan was silent on whether new gas infrastructure should be built. At one point in his address, he said he was aware that building new natural gas generators may be seen as problematic, and that he would come back to that. He didn’t come back to it. But he has done so in Getting to Zero. Gas has purely a peaking and transitional role. In the quantities implied by that role, there is ample existing gas processing, transportation and power generation infrastructure in place now. Alan has implicitly made the case against investment in new gas infrastructure. The twenty-five scientists should be pleased.

One quibble about language. Alan doesn’t like calling carbon dioxide a pollutant, because in moderate concentrations it makes our kind of life possible. Many substances that he would be happy to call pollutants do no harm and some good in suitably low concentrations. I understand that undergraduate engineers are taught that the solution to pollution is dilution. Pollution is the introduction into the environment of a substance which has damaging or unpleasant effects. No doubt about carbon dioxide in concentrations not much higher than they are now! US courts had to adjudicate on the matter about a decade ago, and concluded that carbon dioxide was a pollutant, and therefore subject to regulation by the Environmental Protection Agency.

The economics and policy

Alan’s essay is “about the technology, not the policies, which are for our democratically elected political leaders to determine.” He notes that governments have “to balance competing priorities across economic growth, scientific advice and community values.”

True. But the choice of policy instruments affects how far we can get towards each of several competing objectives. For example, if there were a conflict between economic growth and climate stability, superior policies would give us more of both.

There is no trade-off with scientific and engineering advice; that is what it is, to be understood or not; to be accepted or ignored. Within constraints defined by science and technology, superior policy allows us to eat more cake (economic growth) and to have more left (climate stability).

Laws of economics are as unforgiving as science and technology. Breach them, and the community suffers loss. But much of economics is about optimisation of community value in the light of scientific and technological realities. In the end, some choices among alternative community preferences must be made by political leaders – in our fortunate case, through democratic processes. Australians will do well if we accept the scientific reality as a foundation for choices on climate change mitigation, accept the technological reality to define various paths to emissions reduction, accept the economic realities defining lowest-cost paths to reducing emissions, and in the process clarify any irremovable choices between fundamental objectives. The irreducible choices will mainly involve the distribution of the costs and benefits of change across the community.

There are many advantages in using market exchange to allocate resources across competing uses, wherever conditions exist for effective market competition. That was essential to the victory of Western market over centrally planned economies in the systemic competition through the second half of the twentieth century. But for the optimal supply of public goods – including the electricity transmission networks discussed by Alan – markets don’t work and planning is necessary. And they don’t work if one firm’s activities impose costs or confer benefits on others that are not carried or received by those causing them. This was subject to close analysis in my climate change review, presented to all of Australia’s heads of government – federal, state and territory – in 2008.

Networks need to be in public hands, or else their investment and pricing need to be regulated by public authorities. Australia has been slow to learn what is necessary. Getting to Zero tells us about the path we have travelled, at least to a position where we can see what needs to be done.

Two kinds of imperfections, in the way costs and benefits of market exchange to society are reflected in private benefits, are important to the transition to zero emissions. Correcting them both with taxes and subsidies or regulation will allow market exchange to drive economic development while achieving required emissions reductions at the lowest possible cost.

One imperfection is that raw market exchange does not value the damage that greenhouse gas emissions from activity impose on others. A tax on emissions, or a subsidy to low-emissions alternatives to established ways of doing things, can reconcile the profit-maximising decisions of businesspeople and the welfare-maximising decisions of citizens with the public interest. In the end, subsidies are paid for by taxes, so the difference is not as great as it may seem at first sight.

After the abolition of the carbon price in 2014, we retained the Renewable Energy Target. Alan notes that it was so successful it led to the costs of solar and wind falling below those of fossil energy, so that it was no longer necessary. Unnecessary in what sense? A new tranche or stronger target would have led to a higher level of output, and lower emissions. Modelling done for the Coalition’s own 2014 Warburton review showed that it would have led to lower electricity prices. Unnecessary? Maybe in some sense, but extension of the policy would have led to more cake eaten and more left behind.

The second imperfection is that market exchange does not lead to socially desirable levels of technological and business innovation in the absence of public support. The pioneer produces knowledge that is valuable across the whole of society that she cannot capture for herself. Market exchange without public support does not produce enough innovation. This is especially important when circumstances require rapid technological development – as they do now with climate change.

Correct the market imperfection from greenhouse gas emissions with a carbon price and we can enjoy the magic of markets finding the best trade-offs between cost and emissions reduction. Correct the innovation imperfection with judicious allocation of fiscal subsidies across activities in proportion to the expected value of social benefits and we see an optimal rate of introduction of new ways of doing things.

Our awful history of climate change discussion has ruled out market-based approaches to reducing emissions for the time being. That history carries a high price. There will be a large reward to our standard of living if and when history lifts its veto.

In the meantime, we have to get as far as we can by relying on correcting the imperfections related to innovation. That can be a long way. In some circumstances, the underlying scientific and technological realities mean that deployment of new zero-emissions technology at scale takes costs below those of the old, high-emissions processes. That has happened with solar and wind, and may happen with battery and pumped hydro storage in competition with peaking gas generation. It has happened with supply of electricity for aluminium smelting and may happen for use of zero-emissions hydrogen. But whether or not it happens in any particular case is in the hands of the technological gods.

In some important cases it can never happen. In the words of a song I used to play our grandchildren on a long car journey: “Science is real; you’ll never see a unicorn, but you can see a rainbow.” No matter what the subsidy for geological capture and storage, it will never be cheaper than releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Large-scale deployment requires a carbon price or economically equivalent regulation. Public expenditure on technological development is wasted unless it is accompanied or followed by a carbon price or by regulation mandating its use.

In our public discussion at the release in Melbourne of Getting to Zero, Alan said that other countries’ requirements plus some private companies’ preferences for zero-emissions inputs will provide the incentives for deployment of CCS. That requires other governments accepting Australia’s free-riding on their carbon price or regulation, or some companies being prepared to accept competitors securing advantage by failing to take similar actions themselves. This is thin ground on which to build a transition strategy.

Larger fiscal subsidies are more likely to push the costs of a new, low-emissions technology below those of the established alternatives. Our subsidies are tiny compared with those of other developed countries. Add up all of the support for low-emissions technologies in the 2021 budget and it may amount to several hundred millions of dollars per year. By contrast, the energy and climate transition subsidies embodied in President Biden’s infrastructure package presented to the US Congress in February are proportionally about one hundred times the Australian amount. Other developed countries are closer to the US than the Australian position.

Getting to Zero concludes with an exhortation to “be ambitious, be patient.” Be more ambitious and less patient on reducing emissions, and we are more likely to prosper as the energy superpower of the low-carbon world economy.

Ross Garnaut

GETTING TO ZERO

Correspondence

Tim Flannery

Dr Alan Finkel was Australia’s eighth chief scientist, serving from January 2016 until he was succeeded by Dr Cathy Foley in 2021. Finkel describes himself as an engineer (the field in which he trained), and he has held many illustrious positions, including president of the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering. The approach Finkel takes in Getting to Zero stems from his engineering background. Notably, it builds on a speech he gave to the National Press Club on 12 February 2020 and indeed recycles much of his Press Club text verbatim.

At the time Finkel addressed the National Press Club, he was speaking as Australia’s chief scientist and representing Australian science. Yet his words so concerned twenty-five of Australia’s top climate scientists that they penned a letter in response. While welcoming Finkel’s role in helping to expand renewable energy, the scientists expressed concern “about the scale and speed of the decarbonisation challenge required to meet the Paris Agreement and, in particular, [Finkel’s] support for the use of gas as a transition fuel over ‘many decades.’” They concluded that Finkel’s approach was inconsistent with a safe climate, and they found no evidence that Australia needs an expanded gas industry in order to transition to renewables.

How could the chief scientist give a major address so out of kilter with the country’s most eminent scientists? The answer, I think, can be read between the lines in Getting to Zero, which is essentially an assessment of the technologies required to achieve deep emissions cuts in the eight sectors of the Australian economy that produce greenhouse gases.

The first and largest of these sectors is electricity generation, and Finkel does a great job outlining the scale of the transition required for it to reach net zero. To convert Australia’s electricity supply to solar and wind, he says, we would need to increase the current electricity production from wind and solar sevenfold. But if we hope to electrify the entire economy (including transport and industry), we’d need to do that three times over and to store energy on an unprecedented scale at the same time. Finkel’s analysis here is masterly, and his analysis would meet with agreement from the nation’s scientists.

But it’s the role of gas in achieving net zero that is contested. Energy minister Angus Taylor has called for a gas-led economic recovery, and in the past Finkel has echoed the minister’s view that we need more gas. In Getting to Zero, Finkel soft-pedals on the issue, saying only that “it is not clear at this time whether existing gas generators will be sufficient to provide firming services.” Notably, he also backs away from his previous openness to nuclear power, saying that the cost of electricity from conventional nuclear is “too high,” while leaving the door open to smaller nuclear reactors that are not yet developed.

In his Press Club address, Finkel talked up the virtue of making hydrogen from coal and gas, arguing that carbon capture and storage (CCS) can be economical in sequestering the carbon dioxide generated in the process. In Getting to Zero, he says, “The main criticism directed at producing hydrogen from fossil fuels is that it will proceed without carbon capture and storage. Wrong.” Yet this is exactly what is happening right now at Australia’s first coal-to-hydrogen plant (in Victoria’s La Trobe Valley). While the plant claims to be “carbon capture–ready,” right now it’s venting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at the rate of around 88 kilograms for every kilogram of hydrogen created. If CCS is as economical as Finkel suggests, why isn’t it being used by the industry from the outset?

Finkel also outlines an interesting synergy between hydrogen and gas, pointing out that generators running on gas can easily be converted to hydrogen, as can many pipelines. The effect of this claim is to blunt opposition to new gas infrastructure. In light of Finkel’s claim regarding fossil fuels, CCS and hydrogen, I’m sceptical that the conversion to hydrogen will occur in a timely manner.

Finkel’s detailed assessment of what remains to be done to reach net-zero emissions makes it clear that the nation faces an immense task. On this all agree. The real question is how quickly it must be done, and on this point Finkel is largely silent, focusing instead on how long it would take given current economic and technological constraints. The thing climate scientists know, but which Finkel does not fully acknowledge, is that the time we have to achieve the task will be determined by the Earth’s system. If we trigger one or more of Earth’s nine climate tipping points, we may find ourselves irrevocably sliding towards catastrophic climate change. If that happens, nothing we do with our energy systems will alter our fate. So the key question becomes: how quickly do we need to decarbonise our economy to give us a fair chance (a 66 per cent chance, say) of avoiding catastrophic change? Scientists are currently working on an answer, and their early findings suggest that by 2050 it will be too late.

As with all transitions, the closer a deadline looms, the more expensive it is to achieve: long before it becomes impossible, it becomes extremely costly. For argument’s sake, let’s examine the implications of needing to reach net zero by 2035. Australia would need to close all of its coal in the next eight and a half years and build seven times more wind-and solar-powered energy systems than we’ve built to date. But that would only be the start. Australia would need to repeat the exercise more than twice over to electrify transport and industrial energy completely. We’d need to retire hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of assets, including steel mills, aluminium plants, coalmines and power plants, and of course almost every vehicle in the country. Given the technological obstacles, and the lack of incentive in our current economic model, this would not be achievable in the Australia of today. The only way to reach net zero would be to put the nation on a war footing, as Australia did in 1939 (and again in 2020 when confronted by the COVID-19 pandemic). When a nation is in a struggle for its very existence, nobody counts the cost. The imperative is to win regardless.

Finkel refuses to countenance this possibility, saying that “it is simply unrealistic to think that with political will we can immediately reverse course.” He adds: “No trade-off, no dichotomy. Prosperity and low emissions. It is my firm belief we can have both.” Before the year is out, scientists are likely to publish their analysis on when we need to reach net-zero emissions. I would be interested in speaking to Finkel at this point, to see what he makes of it.

Finkel uses several ruses to respond to those who want action commensurate with the scale and immediacy of the threat. For example, he puts up the straw man that we cannot immediately shut down coal. And, although he is no longer chief scientist, he steers clear of discussing the role of government and the impacts of policy. Finkel is a good engineer, saying that “the first step in developing a solution is to identify the problem.” Yet in Getting to Zero, he tragically fails to do that: the real problem, as climate scientists know, is that unless we take timely action and view cost as a secondary consideration, we seem destined to precipitate a new, dangerous climate that will threaten our global civilisation.

Tim Flannery

THE HIGH ROAD

Correspondence

Bain Attwood & Miranda Johnson

Laura Tingle’s Quarterly Essay seeks to draw out “point[s] of comparison” between New Zealand and Australia, two unusually interconnected and geographically proximate countries. Her aim is twofold: to raise the question of why Australians don’t understand more about their smaller neighbour – though it is worth pointing out that Papua New Guinea is closer and probably even more misunderstood by most Australians – and to offer some examples of successful New Zealand principles, policies and practices from which she thinks Australians could learn. We welcome this essay because, as historians who have undertaken trans-Tasman comparisons, we also believe that comparative work can show us what we might otherwise be unable to see.

Why compare? Historians engage in comparison all the time, implicitly or explicitly. This can take various forms. For instance, we might draw analogies between present-day Trumpist politics and fascism in the past, as numerous historians in the American context have done over the past four years. In other words, we can compare in order to reveal similarities between the past and the present. Alternatively, we might undertake comparison in order to identify differences between nations (or other entities) and to isolate the truly important factors that caused those differences from the merely incidental ones. In order to learn from comparison, we must ask: what are the truly significant differences and similarities between the examples chosen, and what has caused those differences and similarities?

In our view, Tingle does a good job of describing a number of differences and similarities between New Zealand and Australia. However, we are left unsure about what Australia could learn from New Zealand, because she does not establish whether the differences between the two countries are in fact truly significant, nor does she provide a convincing account of the causes or sources of those differences. This has implications for what problems in Australia she thinks could be better addressed by attending to the New Zealand experience.

Miles Fairburn, one of the few historians to have recently undertaken comparative analyses of Australia and New Zealand, argues that it is difficult to make a strong case for New Zealand exceptionalism, because many of the phenomena that are claimed to be unique to New Zealand turn out, on close and careful inspection, not to be unique at all. As he argues, there have been many events in New Zealand’s history that did not happen elsewhere, but a society with “an exceptionalist history is one where the history is composed of many events that are both unique (or highly unusual) and significant.” Furthermore, an exceptionalist country “must not only experience a unique or unusual event but also take a divergent path from that of others in consequence.” Exceptionalism, he argues, usually results from “very slow-moving forces” – and thus a structure that determines a “range of possibilities” in a country, “allowing some and preventing others” – rather than “faster medium-term social and economic trends and cycles” and “rapidly occurring short-term political events.” Tingle focuses on short-term political events without providing a compelling case for there being significant underlying differences between Australia and New Zealand.

Tingle claims that the policies and practices used in the colonisation of New Zealand differed significantly from those used in Australia and led to a divergent appreciation of the value of indigeneity in the two societies today and thus major differences in the recognition of indigenous peoples’ rights and the redress of disadvantage. In making this kind of claim, Tingle is by no means unusual. As the New Zealand historian Deborah Montgomerie pointed out more than twenty years ago, comparative projects often tend to exaggerate national differences and become exercises in either national castigation or national congratulation. This has certainly been true of studies of race and colonialism. New Zealand has frequently been compared with Australia, in both popular and scholarly discourse, in order to claim that Māori were relatively well treated. As Montgomerie has observed, “the good cop/bad cop school of comparative imperial history has been remarkably long-lived.”

Yet if comparative work is to provide lessons for the future, it is vital that we pinpoint the causes of the problems being investigated as well as the reasons they have been tackled differently or similarly in the past. Otherwise, our suggestions for future change will be severely limited or badly flawed. For her part, Tingle claims that colonisation in Australia and New Zealand had very different “starting points”; she attributes this to the fact that Australia was “established on the legal idea of terra nullius – that it was unoccupied land when the British arrived – [and so] no thought was given to negotiating a treaty with the original inhabitants,” whereas in New Zealand the British sought to negotiate a treaty with Māori chiefs in regard to the cession of “sovereignty over their lands.” In fact, she argues, “between terra nullius and the Treaty of Waitangi, it is hard to think of more opposite circumstances in which two places were settled.”

Yet in 1769–70, James Cook claimed possession of parts of New Holland (what became eastern Australia) and New Zealand on the very same legal basis, namely the legal doctrine of discovery (not terra nullius). Moreover, it can be argued that if the British government had decided to plant a colony in the islands of New Zealand, or more especially the South Island, at the same time it did this in New Holland, it would not have sought to negotiate a treaty with Māori. Most importantly here, the making of the Treaty at Waitangi in 1840 was not, in and of itself, the reason Māori were treated as having some legal rights to land. New Zealand and Australian colonies such as New South Wales did have different beginnings in respect of the treatment of indigenous sovereignty and rights of property in land, but Tingle is unable to pinpoint, let alone explain, why this was so and how it has come to matter in recent decades.

More fundamentally, it can be argued, as Fairburn and others have done, that relations between white settlers and indigenous people in Australia and New Zealand did not actually follow a significantly different course after their beginnings, because they were both “the result of [British] colonisation, and wherever colonisation took place it led to the same fundamental outcomes, though not necessarily to the same degree: indigenous people lost their resources or autonomy or both.”

Tingle occasionally, but only fleetingly, acknowledges this, as well as the fact that Indigenous peoples in both countries today experience social and economic marginalisation, and poorer health outcomes, longevity, earning power and educational attainment vis-a-vis non-indigenous – and particularly white – populations. Indeed, what is striking about the two countries, not least in the last forty years, is the degree to which their past neoliberal policies and practices devastated the livelihoods of many, especially indigenous people, in very similar ways. But Tingle is largely unable to grapple with and make sense of those similarities and instead exaggerates the importance of the countries’ differences. Likewise, she seems at one point to grasp the paradox that much of the progress in recognising indigenous peoples’ rights and attempting to redress their grievances occurred in both countries at the very same time that governments across the political spectrum undid a social contract premised on egalitarianism and a fair go for all – but she does not explain adequately why this was the case.

Tingle overstates the differences between Australia’s and New Zealand’s attempts over the last several decades to address the historical injustice that indigenous people have suffered. For example, at the same time as she acknowledges the similarities between the work of the Waitangi Tribunal in New Zealand and the National Native Title Tribunal in Australia, she makes the wild claim that Australia has barely sought to address questions about the status and rights of Indigenous people. Like many commentators, Tingle errs in claiming that Australia continues to suffer from a great silence or a cult of forgetfulness in regard to its relationship with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. There has been a great deal of historical truth-telling about this in recent decades (just as there has been in New Zealand). Similarly, Tingle ignores the fact that it is not only the New Zealand state but also the Australian one that has emphasised the importance of recognising the value of indigenous culture. What is more, she overlooks the deep, unresolved tension in both countries between claims for equality and claims for the recognition of cultural and political differences.

To be sure, there are important contrasts in the degree to which each country has sought to address historical injustice, but rather than simply attributing this to the presence or absence of normative moral, legal, philosophical and political forces in their governments, as Tingle does, it makes more sense to take note of the role played by material factors – for example, the fact that Māori are a much larger minority in New Zealand than Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are in Australia, or that there was less post-war non-British migration to New Zealand than to Australia. Unforeseen consequences of government policies and practices must also be taken into account. For example, the New Zealand Labour government in 1985 had no inkling that granting the Waitangi Tribunal the authority to hear cases about historical breaches of the treaty dating back to 1840 would lead to a veritable flood of claims and the compensation of many Māori iwi (tribes).

In short, Australia and New Zealand are different in some matters – in shades of degree. But we will be better served by thinking of the similar and entangled histories of the two countries than by emphasising differences for the sake of drawing moral lessons. Such an approach might also help us to grasp the limitations of viewing the world through the lens of the settler nation-state and allowing it to stand in for all histories of the region. What happens to national accounts when we engage in comparisons between the pre-colonial indigenous histories of the two places, which in Australia stretches back 60,000 years and constitutes one of the earliest successful human migrations to a new land, and in New Zealand goes back around 800 years to the last of the great Polynesian waka (canoe) migrations to new islands? Or, as the historians Tim Rowse and W.H. Oliver have each asked, what happens to our take on the two nations if we consider intra-national regional differences (between north and south, east and west) much more seriously? And what of these countries’ relationships to the broader regions of Southeast Asia and the Pacific? The yawning absence of the latter in how we see our past and future (despite our 21st-century demographic profiles) poses significant challenges to historians, journalists and other commentators, the majority of whom are white, often monolingual (or tutored in other European languages) and largely monocultural.

Bain Attwood & Miranda Johnson

THE HIGH ROAD

Correspondence

Shireen Morris

Laura Tingle is right that Australians should think more deeply about what our nation can learn from New Zealand. Her essay illuminates the parallel histories of two similar yet contrasting countries, grappling with comparable social, economic, political and cultural challenges in different ways. Most saliently for my work, New Zealand has implemented structural mechanisms for the recognition of Māori people, culture and heritage in ways that can provide inspiration for Indigenous constitutional recognition in Australia.

On Waitangi Day in 2020, Labor Opposition leader Anthony Albanese tweeted:

Seven years prior, in 2013, former prime minister Tony Abbott (then the leader of the Opposition) similarly invoked New Zealand as a positive role model for Indigenous recognition. “We only have to look across the Tasman to see how it all could have been done so much better,” Abbott said in a speech to parliament. “Thanks to the Treaty of Waitangi in New Zealand, two peoples became one nation.” Here was conservative Abbott using the “T” word, pointing to New Zealand and calling on Australia to do better at coming to grips with our colonial history. It was no Redfern speech, but it was a moment of principled compassion and empathy. It didn’t last.

In 2017, when Malcolm Turnbull dishonestly rejected the Uluru Statement’s call for a First Nations voice as a “third chamber of parliament,” Abbott also abandoned his support. For both leaders, compassion unfortunately gave way to political calculation. The Uluru Statement was sacrificed midst two men’s self-interested tussle for power. At least Barnaby Joyce, who originally coined the misleading “third chamber” phrase, subsequently admitted the mischaracterisation and apologised “unreservedly.” There has been no such honesty from Abbott or Turnbull.

Tingle is right that Australia was handed a momentous, generous gift with the Uluru Statement: the opportunity to undertake substantive yet modest and constitutionally conservative reform, to empower Indigenous peoples with a voice in their affairs. The proposal would give effect to decades of Indigenous advocacy for greater self-determination, while addressing conservative concerns about upholding the constitution. But as Tingle puts it, instead of accepting the gift, Australian political leaders “comprehensively stuffed it.”

Despite that debacle, debate has rolled on. Public support for a First Nations voice has since grown. The 2020 Australian Reconciliation Barometer found that 81 per cent of the general community support the proposal (up from 77 per cent in 2018), despite past government negativity. Scott Morrison came to power promising an end to the “Muppet Show” and vowing to govern for the “quiet Australians.” Given that polls indicate ordinary Australians can see the sense in Indigenous people having a constitutionally guaranteed say in laws and policies made about them, hopefully Morrison can succeed where Turnbull and Abbott failed. With goodwill and leadership, Morrison could be the conservative Nixon that can take this cause to China.

Lessons from New Zealand can assist in forging a path forward. In 2014, I was lucky enough to organise a research delegation to New Zealand with the Cape York Institute. We were awe-struck by the difference in political attitudes towards Māori recognition, displayed by both progressives and conservatives alike. I asked the then attorney-general, Chris Finlayson: “How is it that conservatives here respect the treaty and contemporary settlements so much?” He explained that conservatives believe in the rule of law and property rights. If the Crown breached Māori rights in the past, then it is only right that those matters are justly settled. It is about behaving with honour. Tingle correctly homes in on this word: honour. A quality too often missing in Australian politics.

Yet New Zealand demonstrates how political leaders can marshal difficult, painful and polarising debates about national identity and history in ways that diffuse, rather than inflame, the contemporary culture wars. Keating’s historic Redfern speech was a masterpiece of oratory and an unparalleled call for Australians to have empathy in such matters. However, in retrospect, his repeated evocation of “we” – “We committed the murders. We took the children …” – may not have been the best way to facilitate consensus-building conversations about reconciliation. “We” can be morally confronting and can unhelpfully raise defences. It can be interpreted by some as an allocation of present-day blame for past wrongs. By contrast, Kiwis use the language of “the Crown” more than Australia, especially in matters of reconciliation. “The Crown” denotes the state, the government and political institutions. The Treaty of Waitangi, for example, was an agreement between Māori chiefs and the Crown, and breaches of the treaty are dealt with by the Crown. This language has arguably helped alleviate the sense that responsibility for past injustice must be borne by the present public: instead, “the Crown” takes responsibility and seeks to rectify past wrongs. In New Zealand, as in Canada, the idea of “the honour of the Crown” imbues dealings between Indigenous peoples and the state with moral gravitas and honour. This honour can similarly be ignited in Australia. We need not use the language of “the Crown” if it doesn’t suit us. But political leaders can adopt language demonstrating that the Australian state is taking institutional responsibility for our shared history – to forge a fairer future on behalf of all Australians.

New Zealand teaches us that Indigenous constitutional recognition requires more than a static, symbolic statement. It requires more than a new preamble to the constitution, and more than a two-word change to the national anthem. True recognition involves dynamic, constitutional and structural reform to the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the state. Such reforms for Māori recognition and empowerment have been achieved over time. As Tingle explains, the Treaty of Waitangi was signed in 1840, but its promises were often breached by the more powerful Crown. As attitudes evolved, however, parliament pursued reforms such as the national Māori Council to ensure Māori a voice in Māori affairs and policy (similar to a First Nations constitutional voice), the Waitangi Tribunal and settlement processes (similar to the Uluru Statement’s call for a Makarrata Commission to oversee agreement-making and truth-telling) and the gradual consolidation of Māori-reserved seats in parliament. As part of the Waitangi settlements process, formal Crown apologies are given for past wrongs – delivered in both Māori and English. Restitution can include some financial redress (though this is never commensurate to the real losses suffered) but also cultural recognition, including dual place-naming. The cultural component of the treaty settlements has propelled recognition of Māori heritage in a tangible way. The Māori language has been recognised as a taonga (treasure) under the Treaty of Waitangi, and as an official national language; the Māori Language Commission is charged with Māori language revitalisation.

New Zealand also demonstrates that rousing symbolic expressions can be important for national unity and pride, but they must sit alongside and complement the necessary substantive, structural reforms. Indeed, New Zealand has pursued both: the necessary institutional structures for Māori empowerment, complemented by the symbolic power that comes with true cultural embrace. As Tingle identifies, Māori culture is increasingly seen as New Zealand’s culture. Witness the way in which variations of the haka are performed by New Zealand sports teams, including the All Blacks, as an expression not only of Māori culture and heritage, but also of New Zealand culture and heritage. By contrast, a few seconds of an Aboriginal war dance performed by Adam Goodes in 2015 prompted widespread contention in Australia. By some it was taken not as a celebration but as an affront, demonstrating that Australia remains uneasy with our national history and heritage.

From New Zealand we can learn that recognition can be mutual and cultural embrace can flow both ways. Pākehā embrace of Māori culture found a dignified role model when the New Zealand prime minister donned a traditional Māori cloak to visit Buckingham Palace, and when she gave her daughter a Māori middle name: Te Aroha, which means “love.” Of the cloak, Māori weaver and lecturer Donna Campbell remarked: “To wear something that is so intrinsically of this place here and for her to wear it at that event, knowing that she would be photographed from every angle – that’s a real acknowledgment of her relationship with the Māori people and with New Zealand.” Māori experts advised this was not cultural appropriation, but a gift of honour bestowed on dignitaries. In Australia, Ken Wyatt, the first Indigenous Minister for Indigenous Australians, donned a kangaroo-skin coat to mark the occasion of his appointment. But how long will it be before non-Indigenous Australian politicians see fit to truly honour this country’s First Nations heritage and implement the structural reforms that would see such heritage flourish – beyond the token words of Ngunnawal that Turnbull delivered in parliament the year before he rejected the Uluru Statement? Symbolic gestures mean nothing if not accompanied by substantive reform.

There are also constitutional differences that must be acknowledged. Achieving Indigenous constitutional recognition has arguably been easier in New Zealand than in Australia because of key contextual differences. Australia has a written, entrenched and rigid constitution, which can only be amended through a “double majority” referendum. By contrast, New Zealand’s constitutional arrangements are not entrenched but enacted through ordinary legislation and conventions: a strong form of parliamentary sovereignty prevails, which entails constitutional flexibility. This has facilitated structural adaption and reform with greater ease. For example, New Zealand abolished its provincial system in 1877 and its upper house in 1950 via ordinary legislative change. It has also facilitated reforms for Māori recognition over time, in line with changing political attitudes.

Another factor is the relative size of the indigenous populations. At 15 per cent of the population, Māori can wield a stronger political voice to advocate for such reforms. As a significant minority, they are probably harder for political leaders to ignore than Indigenous people in Australia, who represent 3 per cent of the overall population. A 3 per cent minority will always struggle to be heard, which makes achieving a constitutionally guaranteed First Nations voice all the more important in Australia – it should not be possible to abolish the institution as soon as it becomes politically unfashionable (as happened with ATSIC), although of course its institutional design should legislatively evolve as needed. In New Zealand, the existence of institutions like the Māori Council and reserved Māori parliamentary seats are anchored in principles of the treaty, which forged a sense of partnership between Māori and the Crown. Given Australia lacks a recognised founding treaty establishing such principles, a constitutional guarantee is needed to ensure a First Nations voice carries permanency and authority. Of course, the extreme minority status of Indigenous people in Australia also exacerbates the vastness of the comparative reform challenge. The Indigenous 3 per cent must persuade the general population that constitutional reform is a good idea. Yet this should not just be the job of Indigenous people: non-Indigenous people must help champion this cause too. But persuading the people is not enough. In addition to requiring a double majority referendum, section 128 of the constitution also makes parliament the initiator, and thus the gatekeeper, of any constitutional change. In reality, the roadblock to meaningful constitutional recognition in Australia is parliament, not the people.

On breaking through parliamentary blockages on progress, New Zealand also offers ideas for discussion. As Tingle notes, mixed-member proportional reforms were implemented in the 1980s after two “referendums” – what we in Australia would term plebiscites. These were ordinary political initiatives governed by a legislative framework, rather than constitutionally required referendums for constitutional change, as in Australia.

New Zealand regularly holds binding and non-binding referendums on national reform issues. In 2014–16, referendums were used to enable citizens to choose a national flag. In 2020, a non-binding referendum on the legalisation of cannabis was rejected by New Zealanders, while a binding referendum on euthanasia received strong support. Similarly, New Zealand’s 1993 Citizens Initiated Referenda Act means any ordinary citizen can start a petition to ask for a nationwide referendum, and non-binding referendums can be held on any subject. Non-constitutional referendums are not totally foreign in Australia: the same-sex marriage postal survey of 2017 was not the first time Australia experimented with a non-constitutional popular vote for a national policy question. In 1977, a popular vote was used to enable Australians to choose a national anthem – in contrast to the prime minister’s perplexing unilateral decision to change its lyrics from “young and free” to “one and free” on New Year’s Eve. Could a similar public vote, or even a citizen-initiated public vote, be a circuit-breaker on other important national issues – perhaps on a First Nations constitutional voice? Such a mechanism would not be binding on parliament (just as the same-sex marriage vote was not binding), but it could nonetheless help generate political pressure conducive to parliamentary action. A pre-referendum plebiscite may help persuade parliament to initiate the constitutional referendum.

Political leaders who want to connect with disengaged citizens should seriously consider such ideas. Recent research shows Australians want greater participation in government and in policy and law formation, especially on constitutional issues and matters of principle with which they can readily engage. The strongest support for greater direct participation is evident among politically disaffected citizens, suggesting the potential for citizen-based deliberation to enhance trust and participation in formal politics. With satisfaction with Australian democracy at historic lows and trust in political institutions in decline, perhaps Australia should take a leaf out of New Zealand’s book and give citizens a more direct say in policy questions.

I think Australians would tell politicians to give Indigenous people a constitutionally guaranteed voice in decisions made about them. Because Australians understand it is the honourable thing to do.

Shireen Morris

THE HIGH ROAD

Correspondence

Don Russell

I like Laura Tingle’s notion that the similarities between Australia and New Zealand make our differences interesting. In a sense, comparing the two countries can be viewed as a controlled experiment. We are so similar in background and culture that wherever we have made different choices – either by design or accident – the difference in outcomes is powerful information that both countries should reflect upon.

Tingle is most insightful in her discussion of how the indigenous populations of the two countries have fared and how the countries have sought to deal with their distressing respective legacies. The evolving processes around the Treaty of Waitangi have been supported by New Zealand prime ministers over the years, who have dealt with community concerns and helped change attitudes. These efforts have meant that New Zealand has built something of a functioning bicultural country, which is now a recognised and comfortable part of the New Zealand national identity.

As Tingle highlights, Australia’s response is more limited and confused. The path-breaking Mabo judgement from the High Court is progressing on its own complex track, but it has not triggered a process of national reconciliation or led to some form of national settlement, as the Treaty of Waitangi has done in New Zealand. As Tingle notes, there is no sense of national honour at stake in Australia, as has been the case in New Zealand, where Prime Minister Bolger said that when it came to Waitangi settlements the country was really talking about New Zealand’s honour; Prime Minister Key regarded completing settlements as one of his greatest legacies.

The starting point for bringing a measure of justice to indigenous people tends to be community concern and political leadership, which prompts a legal response. This is understandable, as what is normally at stake are property rights and entitlements. Courts and tribunals are best placed to sit in judgement on such matters, away from winner-takes-all politics or “the tyranny of the majority,” as the Americans say. Both New Zealand and the United States are fortunate that treaties were signed with tribal groups or nations in the nineteenth century. Those treaties did not stop both countries behaving as if terra nullius was the reality, but there was a readymade platform to restore lost property rights and entitlements when community attitudes changed in the second half of the twentieth century.

Community attitudes were also changing in Australia, but until terra nullius was overturned it was hard not to view Aboriginal dispossession and disadvantage through a social-welfare prism. While we should have been able to do better, it was almost impossible to build a basis for truth-telling or mutual respect. The High Court, in its Mabo and subsequent Wik decisions, changed all of that and established that native title survived European settlement and terra nullius was wrong in law. From that point, Australia had the basis for a new understanding or settlement with its Indigenous people. Whereas before they were a disadvantaged people treated very badly by history, they became a people with a High Court–sanctioned property right that had carried over from before European settlement. It was unclear what native title meant in practice, but the High Court had lifted the standing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and breathed new life into groups that could demonstrate an ongoing link to the land. In this respect, we were moving down a path well known to New Zealanders.

As Tingle sets out in her essay, the key change in New Zealand was the 1985 legislation overseen by Labour prime minister Geoffrey Palmer, which allowed Waitangi claims to go back to 1840. This was highly contentious. However, as Tingle also highlights, it was subsequent National Party prime ministers Bolger and Key who made the legislation work. As conservative political leaders, they appear to have been attracted to honouring the legal rights enshrined in the treaty signed between the Crown and tribal chiefs.

In Australia, it was a Labor prime minister, Paul Keating, who made the Redfern speech after the Mabo decision and who then championed the Native Title Act through the Senate. However, unlike in New Zealand, there was little honour seen in delivering on the new-found native title rights established by the High court. Rather than an acknowledgement of the importance of the rule of law and the role of the court in protecting the rights of a minority in the face of potential majority opposition, there was widespread criticism of the court for going beyond its authority and usurping an authority that should rightly lie with elected governments. There was no acknowledgement that Australia’s system of government – with its High Court, Senate, states and written constitution with enumerated federal powers – follows the US model. Or that Australia’s founding fathers, by their actions, embraced the checks and balances built into the US system.

The American constitution reflects the deeply held view of the US founding fathers that democracy is not the election of George III. In embracing much of the US structure, Australia has gone down the same path. This can make life challenging for executive government in Australia, because authority is dispersed across the federal cabinet, the Senate, the states and the High Court. An Australian prime minister does not have the sweeping authority of a British prime minister, but our system tends not to have the fragility that political systems wedded to command and control often exhibit. By necessity, successful Australian political leaders bring people with them, and because we have a powerful High Court, we also have a mechanism to deal with highly contentious matters that no elected government could ever hope to address. Australia’s system of government is not tidy, but political leaders have many pathways to success, which potentially gives Australia great capacity to change and evolve; when we do make big decisions, there is some confidence that those decisions have been appropriately scrutinised and assessed.

Tingle’s essay can be seen as a tale about the negative consequences of winner-takes-all politics and how New Zealand decided to constrain the power of its prime minister and executive government, forcing it to operate with mixed-member proportional voting and coalitions of political parties. Tingle then marvels that, rather than creating paralysis, the New Zealanders have not only made it work but taught themselves the art of statecraft, as she calls it, to the point where Australian ministers and officialdom now look like amateurs. Her essay finishes with the triumphal re-election of Prime Minister Ardern.

My point would be that Australia never had a system of winner-takes-all politics and that in the past we have managed to achieve impressive and lasting policy outcomes because of that. Australia had to suffer the smirking condescension of New Zealand officials during the Lange/Douglas years as they watched the Hawke/Keating government patiently negotiate reform through the Senate, the Accord and with the states.

However, Tingle is right to highlight Australia’s comparative failings with our Indigenous population. There was a time when Xavier Herbert’s searing criticism of Australia – that it was not a nation but a community of thieves – could have been applied equally to New Zealand. Through collective endeavour and some inspired political leadership, this is no longer the case. Tingle’s essay makes it clear that there is nothing stopping Australia from following New Zealand’s example.

But it is not a one-way street, and I am sure Tingle would be the first to acknowledge there are areas where New Zealand can learn from the Australian experience. I have in mind a common problem the countries faced in the 1990s: a low and declining household saving rate. Both countries suffered from low national savings, a heavy reliance on debt and a dependence on saving from the rest of the world through an uncomfortable current account deficit. Both countries gave high priority to reducing public-sector borrowing and saw merit in running budget surpluses to reduce the call on overseas borrowings and to free up resources for business investment and better domestic economic outcomes. However, at the time, only Australia took direct action to lift household saving. In 1992, Australia legislated to require employers to pay a proportion of every employee’s ordinary time earnings as an additional payment into a superannuation account. This superannuation guarantee was initially set at 3 per cent, but over time it rose to 9 per cent. The guarantee is now 9.5 per cent and is legislated to increase to 12 per cent.

While the superannuation guarantee continues to attract debate, there is broad agreement that it has lifted national saving, a view that is strengthened by the fact that in 2007 New Zealand introduced KiwiSaver, a scheme also designed to lift household saving, albeit on a more modest scale. The history of household saving in the two countries is set out in the following chart. The data are annual and come from the OECD. The household sector also includes unincorporated enterprises.

Household saving: percentage of disposable income

Source: OECD Economic Outlook No 106 (Edition 2019/2)

As can be seen, there was an alarming period before the introduction of KiwiSaver when New Zealand household saving was consistently negative. It was during this period that New Zealanders gained an international reputation as the worst savers in the OECD. While household saving has recovered in New Zealand, it is still tepid and runs at levels well below that in Australia.

English-speaking countries like the United Kingdom and the United States have long had a reputation for being excessively focused on current consumption, with low household and national saving. It is unclear whether this flows from cultural pressures to consume or easier access to credit, but this tendency for Anglophone countries to be low savers is recognised. With their low level of savings, both the United Kingdom and the United States have experienced low levels of investment, including investment in infrastructure. Over time, countries find that low levels of investment degrade their capacity to deliver for their citizens, and this has been a problem for both the United Kingdom and the United States. Fortunately, this is not where Australia finds itself.

As Tingle notes, New Zealand policy-makers feel some measure of frustration. They have embraced what would be regarded as conventionally good policy settings, but the outcomes have been ordinary. The New Zealand Treasury likes to benchmark New Zealand against other small but advanced economies. Unfortunately, labour productivity in New Zealand has fallen further and further behind that of others in this group. New Zealand has one of the lowest research and development intensities – both public and private – in the OECD. And perhaps most alarmingly, the Treasury acknowledges that New Zealand has “a long tail of low-productivity firms, indicating a lack of ‘up and out’ dynamics.” Again, this is not where Australia finds itself.

With economics, everything is connected with everything else, and identifying causal factors can be complicated. However, if one reason had to be found to explain the performance difference between the two countries, it is hard to go past the quite different approaches that they have taken to retirement-income policy. Australia now has a superannuation pool close to A$3 trillion in size. This large and growing pool of assets has led to the development of a range of competitive, innovative and large superannuation funds, determined to extract the best value for their members. Most importantly, there are now many large sources of patient capital in Australia. This has deepened Australia’s capital market – a process that has helped fund Australian companies and infrastructure. It has also invigorated Australia’s private equity market. Private equity has always been one of the drivers of innovative small businesses and startups in the United States. While the Australian private equity market has not reached the maturity of the US market, it has brought support and competitive tension to developing Australian businesses that would appear to be missing in New Zealand.

KiwiSaver seems to have made some difference, but with balances around NZ$60 billion it is still not large enough. Combined with a universal government pension, this has implications for New Zealand’s budget and the dynamics of its economy.

Australia has a means-tested government pension, which means that as superannuation balances grow, there is some offset to government pension payments. At present, the Australian age pension costs around 2.7 per cent of GDP and is forecast to fall to around 2.5 per cent of GDP in 2038. The cost of the New Zealand pension was 4.8 per cent of GDP in 2015 and is forecast by the New Zealand Treasury to rise to 6.3 per cent in 2030 and 7.9 per cent in 2060. This is a big hole in New Zealand’s budget and will put great pressure on other government spending, such as aged care and health. Moreover, the universal New Zealand pension is less generous than the Australian means-tested pension. As KiwiSaver balances are small, 40 per cent of New Zealanders retire with virtually no other income than the pension. The consequence is that New Zealanders see housing as their principal form of saving, further pushing up house prices and skewing investment away from productive areas of the economy.

As Australian superannuation funds explore investment opportunities in New Zealand, New Zealanders are beginning to focus on the design of the superannuation guarantee. The guarantee is compulsory and contains tax preference, because it is locked away until retirees reach the age of sixty. These features are missing from KiwiSaver, limiting its growth. There is also a growing realisation that Australia has a deeper and more sophisticated capital market than New Zealand because of the guarantee. And what really rankles is that while Australian superannuation funds are investing in expanding the New Zealand economy, New Zealanders remain mesmerised with housing.

As part of the controlled experiment that is New Zealand and Australia, New Zealand might want to look at the Australian experience with retirement-income policy.

Don Russell

THE HIGH ROAD

Correspondence

Tim Hazledine

I’m a New Zealander and an economist at the University of Auckland. I met Laura Tingle in Auckland in November 2019. I was impressed, of course.

However, when Laura told me that her next big project was to write a very long-form essay – an essay that would be published under the title The High Road: What Australia Can Learn from New Zealand – well, I wondered if the great Australian people were quite ready for that.

The essay – in itself, excellent – does not immediately soothe these doubts. And they seem all but confirmed by what follows in the same issue of Quarterly Essay: forty pages of commentary by nine people on Katharine Murphy’s essay The End of Uncertainty from the previous issue, and a response from the author. The commentaries – which must all have been written just a month or so previously – are fluent, friendly and informed; all of them focus on the current Australian administration’s response to the COVID crisis.

And the number of times the words “New Zealand” appear in those forty pages? Zero, zip, zilch. (The words “Jacinda Ardern” appear once, in passing.) I am not complaining. That would be hypocritical, given my own lack of learning about Australia. When I met Tingle, I think I may have implied or even claimed that the prime minister of Australia was a man named Michael Turnbull. Perhaps he was.

But anyway, why should the people of, say, Sydney care any more about goings-on in Auckland, 2350 kilometres away, than the people of London care about what’s happening in Chişinău, the capital of Moldova, which is the same distance away? I note that our countries’ governments have never had enough to talk about to support a viable direct air service between Canberra and Wellington (and, yes, there is a direct service between London and Chişinău).

Of course, an obvious difference is that anyone setting out in an eastward direction from London to seek commerce or companionship is likely to find it somewhere in Western Europe, long before they get as far as Moldova, whereas between Sydney and Auckland there is just empty sea – there’s nowhere else to stop. So the relationship we do have, as the only Anglo countries in the Southwest Pacific, may just be a matter of faute de mieux, as we often say in New Zealand. And it’s not even that we like each other. We pretty clearly don’t much. Tingle’s essay deflates the bubble of Anzac comradeship, quoting Australia’s official historian of World War I, who viewed New Zealanders as “colourless,” and another historian, who claims that Australians of that era saw New Zealanders as a “pale imitation” of themselves.

There’s a lot of this sort of nonsense around. In World War II, a young British officer, Frank Thompson (brother of the social historian E.P. Thompson), after coming across antipodean troops in Egypt, wrote that “the New Zealanders are rough-hewn and intelligent; the Australians are rough-hewn and villainous.” Perhaps the funniest put-down came from our dear departed John Clarke, a New Zealander who happily resettled in Australasia’s only great city – Melbourne. When asked why he had left New Zealand, Clarke said: “Because it was there.”

But all this is the reason Tingle should write her essay. If there is something for Australia to learn from New Zealand, who better – who at all? – to break through the apathy and antagonism than Tingle – author of three previous Quarterly Essays and held in the highest esteem in her country. Still, I am not sure that even she will succeed, but I will do my small bit to help by adding to her analysis of two topics – one on which I know a lot, one on which no one yet knows a lot, because it is an exciting work in progress.

The first topic is New Zealand’s infamous “Rogernomics” episode of rapid, radical economic liberalisation over the seven years from 1984 to 1991. Tingle’s essay is very good on why Labour finance minister Roger Douglas wanted to liberalise: he and his colleagues in Treasury genuinely and disinterestedly believed that massive “reform” would supercharge New Zealand’s productivity performance. It’s good on how they were politically able to do it: they were empowered by a combination of New Zealand’s small size and its unicameral system of government, buttressed by less obviously disinterested support from the slightly sinister Big Business Roundtable lobby group. And it’s clear about why the reforms were rammed through so quickly: they were quite openly aiming to get it all done and dusted before anyone could stop them.

But there’s another notable dimension to this extraordinary episode. A list of the reforms implemented in those seven years is staggeringly long: more than 200 separate corporatisations, privatisations, liberalisations and so on, in both private and public sectors. How could a small, albeit honest, civil service – in a country of fewer than 4 million people – administratively deliver as many major policy upheavals as it most assuredly and successfully did? The answer is that implementing nearly every one of the 200-plus reforms was simply a matter of repeating the same basic formula over and over again.

Rogernomics is often casually claimed to be a textbook example of economic reform. Something to do with “free” markets. But it wasn’t fundamentally to do with free markets, and the textbook had not been written, and still hasn’t. The liberalisation formula – if mentioned at all – is buried away in the section of standard economic texts that deal briefly with issues of “asymmetric information,” which arise when one party has knowledge that is not available cost-free to another. The formula is called the “principal–agent model,” or just “agency theory.”

The pervasiveness of asymmetric information in just about all social or economic interactions cannot be denied. We each know more about our own nature and actions than any other human being can. The issue is: what do we do with our private information? Agency theory assumes the worst: we will use our personal information advantage without scruple in our own narrow self-interest. I call this the “selfish shit” model of human behaviour. Its policy implications are stark. First, deflate the value of private information by removing from management anyone who actually knows something about how a business, a hospital or an industry works, and replace them with generic managers with no specialist expertise. Then write simple performance contracts for the new managers with narrow, measurable targets (key performance indicators, or KPIs) and incentivise them to meet those targets with carrots (bonuses) or sticks (the threat of dismissal).

This procedure could be (and was) rapidly deployed in just about every economic and administrative setting: from minding the money in the till of a cafe to minding the monetary policy of the nation. Employees were to be dissuaded from cheating on their employers by cranking up the threat of dismissal, which was achieved by weakening the trade union movement and increasing unemployment. The governor of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand had to sign a very simple contract specifying only that he keep inflation in a narrow, low band to get his bonus.

There are three big problems with agency theory in action. First, it’s not that KPIs won’t be met, but that they will be met at the expense of other worthy goals that didn’t make it into the job contract – full employment, in the case of the central banker; willingness to act with initiative, in the case of the cafe worker.

Second, although the stark “selfish shit” assumption is factually false – in general, most people do behave in a trusting and trustworthy way – if applied long enough it can create the amorality it presupposes. If you persistently treat agents as untrustworthy, then eventually they may just say: “Stuff it. Why should I be honest if you aren’t going to believe in me anyway?”

Third, a logic puzzle. If Roger Douglas believes everyone is a selfish shit, why shouldn’t we believe the same of him? Why should we, the people, simply trust him – or anyone – to be our agent in these matters? “Quis custodiet custodes ipsos?” as we often say in New Zealand.

Well, to be fair, Roger did not trust himself – or at least he did not trust his successors. One of the reforms enacted slightly later is New Zealand’s 1994 Fiscal Responsibility Act, which limited, in particular, the ability of the finance minister of the day to spend up big in election years, which practice had been shamelessly indulged in by all parties hitherto. Quite a good reform, that.

But, as a whole, Rogernomics has failed dismally, as Tingle documents. New Zealand’s productivity, far from being supercharged, has spluttered along in Australia’s wake, actually slipping further behind, with widening income inequality.

Why has there been no outcry, particularly from the protected precincts of university campuses? Well, the minority of academics who did speak out were treated with disdain or worse. In the mid-1990s, an emissary of the Big Business Roundtable came to the vice-chancellor of the University of Auckland and demanded that he fire New Zealand’s most active public intellectual, the legal scholar Jane Kelsey, and “the socialist economist Hazledine.” The vice-chancellor – an Australian – responded by promoting Kelsey to a personal chair and confirming tenure of my professorship.

The stupidity and viciousness of this little intervention was typical of the times and is still embedded in a strong rightist, conformist bias to New Zealand politics, including in our governing Labour party. Really, labelling a wishy-washy social democrat like me a “socialist” (not that there’s anything wrong with being a socialist, of course) – because I am against monopolies and handouts to business – reflects what I hope Australians would regard as a rather distorted perspective.

The second topic of Tingle’s I wanted to add to – the work in progress – is race relations. In 2011, I read a New Yorker article by Hilton Als on Jane Fonda. Als recounts the wedding of Fonda’s son, Troy Garity, to Simone Bent, an actor. Garity is white, Bent black. The groom’s father, Tom Hayden, a former Chicago Seven activist, made a speech saying he was particularly happy about the union because it was “another step in a long-term goal of mine: the peaceful, nonviolent disappearance of the white race.”

If I had read this in, say, 1981, I would have responded: “Yeah, right!” But by 2011 – perhaps a little late – I was uneasy. I didn’t, and still don’t, give a fig about the disappearance of my race in a commingling of the bloods, but wouldn’t that also mean the disappearance of the minority race – Māori, in New Zealand’s case? And wouldn’t the minority race have something to say about that?

Well, they did have something to say, and Tingle’s essay is very good on the steps taken – in the nick of time – to regenerate Māori language and culture, particularly with the settlements that have been reached since 1987, supported by both political parties, through the Waitangi Tribunal hearing process. The slogan here is “self-determination,” and (citing the Australian scholar Shireen Morris) Tingle summarises its outcome as the establishment of a “mostly comfortable biculturalism.”

But what does biculturalism mean in this context? The term apparently originated in Canada, where it refers to the cordial separation between Anglo and French Canada: “two solitudes,” as it was once described. I’d say that what is now happening in New Zealand is actually going in a quite different and very interesting direction – towards the building of a national culture that, perhaps uniquely in the world, is heavily influenced by the indigenous race.

Take the success of iwi-based Māori businesses, which operate commercially under a strong social charter – something which, according to Rogernomics, is not just undesirable but impossible. Our ongoing revolution in resource stewardship policy applies the principle that natural resources are “owned” not by humans but by themselves: te mana o te wai – the river owns the river, and the river has a right to be clean. The statement in Tingle’s essay that “Māori culture is increasingly seen as New Zealand’s culture”: this is terrific, but it isn’t about biculturalism – is it? Perhaps Australians can tell us.

Tim Hazledine

THE HIGH ROAD

Correspondence

Frank Bongiorno

It seems a lifetime ago, but I was there in the crowd at the Melbourne Cricket Ground on 1 February 1981, when Australian cricketer Trevor Chappell bowled the last ball of the match underarm. Even as an eleven-year-old, I didn’t need the media to tell me that what the Australians had done was ugly. When conversation in the car ride home turned to whether it was possible, in a game of cricket, to hit a six against an underarm delivery bowled along the ground, Tanya, the lovely English migrant who used to take her son and his friends to sports events, said she was sure the great West Indian batsman Viv Richards would have found a way.

New Zealand National Party prime minister Robert “Piggy” Muldoon said, “[It was] the most disgusting incident I can recall in the history of cricket … an act of cowardice, and I consider it appropriate that the Australian team were wearing yellow.” Muldoon was never inclined to understatement, nor one to let an opportunity to kick the Aussies pass by, but the basic thrust of his opinion found some backing on both sides of the ditch in 1981.

The underarm incident was the emblematic event in the trans-Tasman relationship of my childhood, even once the nuclear ship controversy came along a few years later. New Zealand’s stand against visits by nuclear ships – and therefore against visits by any US ships at all, because the United States had a policy of neither confirming nor denying their nuclear status – attracted admiration on the Australian left at a time when the anti-nuclear movement was strong and disillusionment with Bob Hawke over his pro-US foreign policy provided much of the glue holding Labor’s Left together. Hawke couldn’t stand New Zealand’s prime minister, David Lange. He thought him a buffoon who had made a devil’s pact by using the nuclear issue as a bargaining chip with which to appease his own party’s Left as the fourth Labour government pursued radical free-market reform. Lange’s frequently incompetent handling of the issue didn’t help.

The bad blood left by these matters can easily obscure the remarkable closeness of the relationship between the two countries. Even as the underarm incident was doing its work, Australia and New Zealand were moving toward an agreement that would allow the free movement of goods and services between them. Citizens of each country already had the right to travel, live and work in the other, as they do today.

Laura Tingle’s thoughtful Quarterly Essay is not merely valuable for bringing together a great many details about Australia, New Zealand and the relations between them: she also resists the temptation to imagine that New Zealand does in every way better than Australia. Australian progressives have been a bit this way about New Zealand in recent years. Their glance across the Tasman has often seemed superficial and simplistic.

The Australian progressive attitude to New Zealand has been driven by a number of things, many of which are discussed in Tingle’s essay: New Zealand’s greater independence of the Western alliance, its more humane approach to refugees, its more civil and consensual politics, its more frequent Labour governments and the overwhelmingly attractive image of Jacinda Ardern. There is no makeover that will ever turn “Scotty from Marketing” into a figure with Ardern’s charm, celebrity and appeal.

Unfortunately, those who celebrate New Zealand’s superior ways are not “details people.” As Tingle suggests, the story is a complex one. When social reformers from other places – Britain, continental Europe, the United States – looked to the antipodes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they often understood Australia and New Zealand together as forming a “social laboratory.” In many respects, New Zealand was slightly advanced, instituting both women’s suffrage (in 1893) and industrial arbitration (in 1894) a little ahead of Australia. New Zealand premiers of that era, such as John Ballance and especially Richard Seddon, were admired by the reformers of many nations, and the country’s social policy attracted international attention and even emulation. Marilyn Lake has recently emphasised the extent to which American progressives such as Theodore Roosevelt engaged with ideas pioneered in both Australia and New Zealand, including the arbitration of industrial disputes and the living wage. Clare Wright has revealed the influence that Australian suffragists had on the struggles for women’s voting in Britain and the United States.

Between 1935 and 1949, New Zealand’s first Labour government was ahead of both Britain and Australia in extending its welfare state in the direction of a “cradle to the grave” system. Australia’s Labor government did similar things between 1941 and 1949, although with greater hindrance from both vested interests and the Australian Constitution.

But the point is that the two countries, despite going their own ways as dominions of the British Empire from the first decade of the twentieth century, had much in common as highly regulated mixed economies and welfare states. The sociologist Francis Castles argues that they formed the “wage-earners’ welfare state”: a social order that sought to modify market outcomes in favour of the family by emphasising the “social deserts” of the male breadwinner via wages. And as the historian Melanie Nolan has suggested, both countries liked to present a classless, egalitarian, consensual image to the world, although New Zealand’s commitment to this self-image was probably more dogmatic than Australia’s.

Were these societies all they were cracked up to be? Mention of the male breadwinner should already alert us to a darker side. The antipodean democracies were willing to allow women to vote, but both were rather less enthusiastic about giving them opportunities comparable to those enjoyed by men – that is, opportunities to be educated or to earn a living.

They were also racist. Australia is notorious for its White Australia policy. Did New Zealand have its own version? It did: it’s just that it was smart enough not to proclaim it to the world with quite the same level of enthusiasm as the Australians, as if it were a proud national brand.

There were other complexities in New Zealand. The anti-Asian racism New Zealand liberals and radicals shared with their Australian counterparts coexisted, in New Zealand’s case, with a more respectful attitude towards the Māori. The intellectual gymnastics involved in this process of forging honorary whiteness were remarkable. There was a widely held theory that they were an Aryan people from India and therefore shared a common racial origin with white settlers. Australians played these kinds of games at times too, but they never took hold quite as firmly on our side of the Tasman. Tingle rightly points out that the Treaty of Waitangi also proved an efficient instrument for dispossessing Māori of their land, a process that occurred in Australia without the fig leaf of an agreement with the original owners.

As New Zealand’s record on race indicates, there has been a pragmatism, even an opportunism, that underpins its idealism. Its government knew, when it banned nuclear ships, that New Zealand would receive the benefits of protection without the costs. It had been a similar story in World War II: Australia brought most (although not all) of its forces home to fight the Japanese in 1941 and 1942. New Zealand kept its troops in Europe, where they would participate in the invasion of Italy. Again, geography mattered: New Zealand’s isolation meant it was safe from the Japanese. Still, New Zealand looked the more obedient and helpful child of empire, at Australia’s expense, at a time when both countries valued their Britishness. It is also revealing that Helen Clark told Tingle that New Zealand’s remoteness made it less concerned it might face a Tampa-like maritime refugee incident, another matter on which New Zealand has gained considerable prestige at Australia’s expense.

None of this makes New Zealand either especially venal or unusually hypocritical. But it should at least prompt some hesitation about making easy comparisons that are unflattering to Australia. Ardern and New Zealand have rightly won praise for their management of the pandemic, but New Zealand is an isolated archipelago with a population smaller than Queensland’s, as well as a unitary state with a unicameral parliament. Even allowing for the effects of mixed-member proportional representation, matters ought to be simpler there.

The similarities between the two countries remain. New Zealand still ranks very well on the Human Development Index. The latest index data – recorded pre-COVID – has New Zealand at fourteen (up three places over the last five years) and Australia at eight (down two). But the economic story is increasingly one of divergence. In the great post–World War II boom, the countries’ incomes were similar and New Zealand could boast – and did boast – that it had the third-highest living standard in the world in the 1950s. In more recent decades, it’s a different story. New Zealand’s productivity is low, and its incomes have fallen well behind Australia’s. While both countries have benefited from China’s spectacular economic rise, mining has had significant positive effects on Australia’s economic prosperity, contributing to highly favourable terms of trade. But mining isn’t only an economic phenomenon. It’s a political, social and cultural one too. That difference between the two countries matters a lot, and it is discussed, if perhaps underplayed, in Tingle’s essay. When the mining companies defeated Labor’s proposed super-profits tax in 2010, they succeeded in presenting themselves as the custodians of the national interest in a manner that has bequeathed problems to the Australian political system that no politician has been able to navigate successfully since. This sets us apart from New Zealand: it’s a far cry from some short-lived anguish over where The Hobbit would be filmed.

It’s true that News Corp’s domination of Australian media, and the lightness of Murdoch influence in New Zealand, helps to account for some positive features of the latter’s political and cultural life, including the muted nature of its cultural wars. But I would place more stress on the distinctive role of mining in Australia’s economic and political life. When Rio Tinto destroyed two caves at Juukan Gorge, it wasn’t merely enacting a business decision. It represented a particular way of being Australian and dealing with the world – white, entitled, masculine, violent and acquisitive – that echoes resource-dominated economies elsewhere but also has deep roots in the nation’s history. It resonates more widely in the country’s cultural, political and corporate life.

Does this sound like the international image of New Zealand in 2020? Hardly, although economic pressures might eventually tilt New Zealand in ways that its progressive admirers will find unsettling, rather as its post-1990 industrial laws have been anything other than a model of labour rights recognition.

Still, the cultural differences between Australia and New Zealand seem greater now than at any time in the respective histories of the two countries. Despite Tingle’s hope that we might be a bit more like New Zealand in some respects, the capacity of either country to see much in the experience of the other that is worth learning is arguably more doubtful than it used to be.

Frank Bongiorno

THE HIGH ROAD

Correspondence

Hugh Riminton

Laura Tingle’s splendid survey of Australia and New Zealand covers a lot of ground. Usefully, she addresses the great mystery of the two former colonies – their differing treatment of their indigenous populations.

Why was a treaty a foundational moment in New Zealand as long ago as 1840, when even today the subject remains taboo in Australia? It is an issue so fraught with suppressed rage there is not a barbecue in the country that could not be stopped by the mere mention.

The Treaty of Waitangi not only recognised Māori sovereignty over their lands and waters, it was negotiated and drafted in the Māori language by Europeans who had taken the trouble to learn it.

In his classic work Pakeha Maori, Trevor Bentley records treaty debates that were “attended by more than 2000 Māori and sixty chiefs.” Acting as translators were some of the escaped convicts, deserters, whalers and adventurers who had found their way to New Zealand. One of them was Jacky Marmon – the son of Irish convicts in Sydney – who deserted the whaling ship Sally in 1817.

By the time he assumed his pivotal role at Waitangi, Marmon was not only acting as an interpreter for the chiefs but “vociferously opposed their signing the document,” writes Bentley. Marmon believed European colonisation “would degrade” the Māori. After some lengthy debate, they rejected his advice.

Laura Tingle accurately observes that for 135 years the treaty remained a mere bauble, routinely ignored as land-hungry settlers arrived in increasing numbers. But it remained in the national imagination. Every child learned about it. Unlike Australia’s shameful lack of curiosity about frontier violence, every Kiwi kid learned of the “Māori Wars” (later more neutrally reclassified as the “New Zealand Wars”) between settlers and the original inhabitants.

Tingle is right to observe that “New Zealand has embraced its indigenous culture over the past thirty years – and become both comfortable with and proud of it – in a way we have not.” This is clear in daily life.

When I returned to my old hometown of Christchurch in 2011 to cover the disastrous earthquake, it was striking how many city leaders used Māori concepts unselfconsciously to communicate with a largely Anglo-Celtic population.

Earthquake survivors were urged to look after their whānau – a concept of family much broader than the close blood relatives that still define the Australian ideal.

“Kia kaha,” people were encouraged. “Be strong.” It is telling that this Māori phrase became the touchstone for the city, both then and during the even more shocking mosque attacks in 2019.

Also telling was that in the hours and days after the mosque attacks, when Christchurch citizens came to lay flowers and pay their respects, I witnessed two spontaneous outbreaks of the haka – one from a group of senior school children, boys and girls. Laura Tingle makes note of it.

Australia has nothing to match it. The haka, best known to Australians as the ritual that precedes an All Blacks international rugby match, is used increasingly widely in New Zealand to release inexpressible emotion.

In 2015, at my old school, Christchurch Boys’ High, the head boy Jake Bailey delivered the end-of-year address from a wheelchair. Bailey, just seventeen, was afflicted with Burkitt’s non-Hodgkins lymphoma, a cancer so vigorous that in a matter of weeks he had gone from a fit young man to a shrunken figure, almost lost in his school blazer.

With great poise, he addressed the staff and his fellow pupils. He urged those who were leaving for the last time to “be gallant, be great, be gracious and be grateful.” As he finished, the boys in the hall launched into a haka. As the last sounds faded, Bailey mouthed, “Thank you,” and he was wheeled away. It is hard to do justice to the power of the moment.

I have seen the haka performed elsewhere, spontaneously, for a retiring headmaster and for fallen Kiwi soldiers. The latter lives on YouTube. You can see for yourself.

When I asked the man who led a haka outside Christchurch’s Al Noor Mosque why he had done it, he said he was throwing out mana to all those suffering from the massacre. Mana is another Māori concept that defies simple translation but which every New Zealander understands. In this case, through the haka, the people were projecting their own empathy, their spiritual power and strength, onto a shattered community.

“Māori culture,” as Laura Tingle notes, “is increasingly seen as New Zealand’s culture.”

For someone largely raised in New Zealand, but who has lived as an Australian for nearly forty years, I cannot help but lament our Australian impoverishment.

The Uluru Statement from the Heart says Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander sovereignty “is a spiritual notion.” It goes on: “We believe this ancient sovereignty can shine through as a fuller expression of Australia’s nationhood.”

Given a chance, how could it not?

New Zealanders have long since abandoned the pernicious notion that there is nothing to be learned from Māori culture. Māori concepts pervade daily life. Australians, on the other hand, remain overwhelmingly closed to the interior world or practices of our sovereign elders. One notable exception, after the bushfire horrors of 2019–20, was the sudden interest in Aboriginal mosaic burning techniques as a means to limit the largest fires.

It is time for Australians to look east and learn from our strange-vowelled cousins. We are nearly 200 years behind them. Surely it is not too early to start.

Hugh Riminton

THE END OF CERTAINTY

Response to Correspondence

THE END OF CERTAINTY

Correspondence

THE END OF CERTAINTY

Correspondence

THE END OF CERTAINTY

Correspondence

THE END OF CERTAINTY

Correspondence

THE COAL CURSE

Response to Correspondence

THE COAL CURSE

Correspondence

THE COAL CURSE

Correspondence

THE COAL CURSE

Correspondence

CRY ME A RIVER

Response to Correspondence

CRY ME A RIVER

Correspondence

CRY ME A RIVER

Correspondence

CRY ME A RIVER

Correspondence

CRY ME A RIVER

Correspondence

CRY ME A RIVER

Correspondence

RED FLAG

Response to Correspondence

It might be intended as a rhetorical question, but I’m going to answer it anyway, because it is vital and urgent. In her response to my essay, Caroline Rosenberg sets out some of the complexities of growing up as a Chinese Australian. She writes, “But to return to the idea that we should stand up for ourselves, I wonder if Hartcher would mind standing with the Chinese-looking Australians?”

I do not mind. On the contrary, I gladly, firmly stand with Chinese Australians.

Caroline, you and the other 1.3 million Chinese Australians are an asset to our country. You are also part of a community under unique stress, and needing unique support from the rest of the country. It is a fundamental test of Australia’s national cohesion.

The Chinese Communist Party has put you in an invidious position. The party claims the unswerving loyalty of Chinese people. It is a political claim, yet staked on the basis of biology. And so even when you leave China, choose to live in another country, make that country your home, conceive children there, take up citizenship there, Xi Jinping demands your loyalty to an authoritarian political project in another land.

Of course, the CCP doesn’t present it as a political matter. The party has long conflated itself with the Chinese nation, Chinese ethnicity and Chinese civilisation. But Beijing demands not just a gesture of affection or acknowledgement of Chinese civilisation. It insists on your support for the policies of this administration. Worse, Xi demands it as a higher duty than any loyalty to your adopted country. Even if you’ve never lived in China, even if you and your family have chosen another land, other loyalties, generations ago.

Australia has lots of experience with immigrants who retain residual attachments to their homelands. Such attachments are normal and natural. Australia has no objection to these, and shouldn’t have. But when a foreign power makes a demand on the “flesh and blood” ties of its diaspora, in the phrase emphasised by the Chinese government’s United Front Work Department, to infringe on the freedoms and rights of Australians, that is a red line.

Kevin Rudd has called the CCP “the enemy of liberal democracy.” It works to advance its values and policies in Australia through hundreds of front groups. Some, like the Confucius Institutes and Confucius Classrooms, have more obvious ties to the Chinese government. Others, masquerading as community associations, business chambers, campus associations or patriotic societies, are less identifiable, even though organised through the covert activity of Beijing’s United Front Work Department.

Professor Feng Chongyi of the University of Technology Sydney counts more than 300 such associations active in Sydney alone, and hundreds more across the country. These groups commonly put pressure on Chinese Australians to carry out political tasks for Beijing, undermining Australian values and interests in the process.

These Chinese Australians need support from Australia to resist such pressure. And they need help in upholding what many have pledged in becoming citizens: their “loyalty to Australia and its people, whose democratic beliefs I share, whose rights and liberties I respect, and whose laws I will uphold and obey.” Until now, they have not had any support in facing these pernicious pressures. The rest of Australia has been oblivious to their quiet dilemmas and private struggles.

The Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme and the espionage and foreign interference laws passed by Australia’s parliament in 2017 were designed to make a start by unmasking these groups and curbing their activities. But the laws were hollow. The government did not provide the money, the staff or the political will to enforce them.

Since my Quarterly Essay was published, two things have changed. First, the Morrison government has announced that it is allocating $40 million to enforce the laws. So that should supply the money and the staff. And the political will? We will know that they are serious when we start seeing arrests and expulsions. Second, the COVID-19 epidemic broke out. This epidemic is making many Chinese Australians feel isolated and disdained by the rest of the country. This is precisely the opposite of what they need to feel – that they are a valued part of the community – and precisely the opposite of what Australia needs to preserve its national cohesion and social harmony.

Some leaders have led. For instance, Queensland’s premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, and Sydney’s Lord Mayor, Clover Moore, were quick and visible in joining Chinese New Year celebrations and expressing solidarity with their Chinese Australian communities. They lent support and countered fear-mongering.

Weeks later, Scott Morrison expressed the right sentiments in parliament. He stated that Chinese Australians “deserve our great appreciation and support.” Labor’s Anthony Albanese did the same. Both leaders could and should do much more: visiting Australia’s various Chinatowns mask-free, consistent with their own health advisories, and sitting down to yum cha; embracing the Chinese Australian community; making speeches in support.

It is a moment of great stress for the Chinese Australian community, and a great opportunity for the rest of Australia to help ease that stress. All Australia’s political, business and community leaders should stand with the “Chinese-looking Australians,” Caroline, in the national tradition of looking after our fellow Australians when they suffer adversity. And they should be doing this even as the authorities seek to disrupt the CCP’s covert efforts to press the Chinese Australian community to serve a foreign authoritarian project to undermine our sovereignty.

The Chinese Australian community is an asset that must be protected; the Chinese Communist Party is a liability that must be constrained.

And Caroline, you pose a question about attitudes to communism. Please allow me to point out that communism is not really the issue here. China is not the only communist party–ruled regional state with a large Australian connection. Vietnam, formally the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, is ruled by an authoritarian Marxist–Leninist party. Australia is home to a substantial Vietnamese-Australian community: about a quarter of a million people. Yet there is no tension here. Because Vietnam’s government is not making systematic efforts to lay claim to the loyalties of the Vietnamese-Australian community. It is not organising the covert penetration of Australian politics. It is not attempting to subvert Australia’s freedoms.

The federal government has dramatically elevated diplomatic relations with Vietnam over the past couple of years. Relations are flourishing. Communism as a movement or an ideology is neither necessary nor sufficient to pose a threat to Australia’s sovereignty. The risk stems from the policy and strategy of a specific political organisation, namely the CCP, bent on domination of its neighbourhood, and not any stripe of political ideology in itself.

To Amy King, I have not so much an answer as a question. Are you feeling lucky? Because you are essentially rationalising Australian inaction in the face of China’s challenge. In doing so, you ignore every sign of Beijing’s organised, determined program to take control of Australia’s decision-makers.

You draw attention to my case studies of attempted CCP intrusion into Australian politics – the cases involving Joe Hockey, Stephen Conroy, Bill Shorten, Penny Wong and Richard Marles. You observe, correctly, that all these attempts failed. And conclude that I am therefore disregarding my own evidence when I urge Australia to better protect its democracy against such interference. But this is to misunderstand. I cite these examples to show that the party’s intrusions are very real, very bold and very high-level. We are not jumping at shadows. Beijing is waging a concerted effort to gain as much influence as possible over our political leaders. We know about these cases because they failed: principled Australian politicians rejected Beijing’s overtures. And because those patriots were affronted by the Chinese government’s actions, they alerted their colleagues. That’s how we know of these incidents. But how many successful efforts has Beijing made? These are the ones we don’t hear about – where threats or inducements are quietly accepted, and the Chinese government gets its way. With a wide-open system of political donations, desperately cash-hungry politicians and no federal anti-corruption body, our system is wide open.

The successful intrusions are the ones we will probably only wake up to long after they’ve succeeded. As the former Hong Kong chief secretary Anson Chan warns, “By the time China’s infiltration of Australia is readily apparent, it will be too late.”

And Amy, you are right, of course, that China’s diplomacy is often ham-fisted and counterproductive. The CCP is not infallible. But if you look at the broad trajectory of China’s growing power and influence over the past forty years, you would have to be feeling very lucky indeed to punt that it will stop here and go no further. If we sit inert waiting for China to fail, we surrender control pre-emptively.

You argue that what Australia really needs is an overarching China strategy. Of course it does. But this doesn’t mean we should do nothing until our leaders manage to produce one. We could be waiting an awfully long time, and time is not our friend with this problem.

Similarly, Sam Roggeveen thinks that it’s pointless to try to protect ourselves until we achieve a precondition, but an even bigger one: “For Australia to meet that challenge, the major parties will either need to redefine themselves as they did in the Cold War, or make way.” Can we really afford to wait for a wholesale reorganisation of our political system before we deal with an urgent challenge to our sovereignty?

Other correspondents also make the case for inaction. David Walker may be right that climate change is the bigger problem. Yet even if this is accurate, it is also irrelevant. Surely we must deal with both?

The responses to my essay have changed my mind on one important recommendation. David Walker, together with others, including Richard McGregor and Sam Roggeveen, have persuaded me to modify my proposal that Australia needs to subject new MPs and senators to security vetting. I still maintain that they do need to be vetted. In discussing this idea in a range of forums, from talkback radio to university seminars, I discovered that most Australians assume that this happens already as a matter of course. They are shocked to learn it does not. And, in conducting the Sydney launch for the essay, Julie Bishop agreed that a security screening was necessary for federal lawmakers. But where I suggested ASIO could do the security screening, I’ve subsequently been convinced that this isn’t the best approach. Because it would make the domestic intelligence agency the gatekeeper to Australia’s democracy.

The better way, I propose, is to create an independent parliamentary office to run security checks on new MPs and senators, and to do so at the candidate stage. Set up as a parliamentary agency, it would be accountable to the parliament itself. We have a precedent, though in a different realm of expertise. The Parliamentary Budget Office was created in 2012 to make expert, non-partisan costings of the political parties’ budget proposals. Why did we need this? Because we’d learnt that we couldn’t trust our politicians to be honest about the true cost of their election promises. This problem had dogged every election campaign for decades and confused the electorate. The Parliamentary Budget Office, well regarded by all political parties, solved the problem.

We should set up an independent, non-partisan parliamentary agency along the same lines to examine the backgrounds of candidates standing for parliament. Surveyors of the history of democracy – including John Keane, in his work The Life and Death of Democracy, and Francis Fukuyama, in his two volumes on the history of political order – observe that democracies either innovate or die. Innovation, anyone?

Wanning Sun, you have rather nicely built a strawman and dressed it up as being one of my proposals. Please allow me to knock it down. A couple of quick points. First, I do not object to immigrants from the People’s Republic of China. I object to covert agents of influence of a foreign autocracy pretending to embrace Australia’s democratic pluralism while devoting themselves to destroying it. Australia’s problem is that it has been failing to tell the difference.

Wanning, you ask for evidence. Among other evidence you overlook in Red Flag is the well-publicised case of Huang Xiangmo. The billionaire property developer was given permanent residency in Australia, where he set about trying to buy as much influence as possible among Australian politicians and others on behalf of the CCP. He was the donor behind the Sam Dastyari scandal. He was also the donor who tried to use a $400,000 donation to the Labor Party to convince Stephen Conroy to change his policy on China’s claims to the South China Sea. The NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption is still working through some of the networks of influence he bought and paid for in the NSW political system on behalf of the United Front Work Department.

Australia eventually cancelled Huang’s permanent residency on the grounds that he failed the good character test. He is now persona non grata and the Australian Tax Office is pursing him over $140 million in what it claims to be unpaid taxes. The problem, of course, is that Huang was allowed to live in Australia and operate freely for eight years before being barred.

Australia needs to be better able to detect such people before granting them the immense privilege of free access to our country. The Department of Home Affairs and intelligence agencies evidently lack the skills and resources to do so. I propose that, until they can more reliably sort genuine immigrants from subversive ones, we shift the balance of risk by favouring applicants from Hong Kong and Taiwan over the mainland – because they are more likely to be committed to liberal-democratic principles.

And no, Henry Sherrell, I don’t propose a “values test,” as you choose to represent it. A quiz on cricket or compulsory voting is not going to filter out subversive foreign agents. I do suggest a more careful sifting of the backgrounds, allegiances and finances of applicants, so that we only admit new citizens who will value our freedoms, not seek to destroy them. I do not propose cutting the intake of ethnic Chinese immigrants. If anything, I propose increasing it. But it must be on condition that they are seeking to become Australians, participants in our liberal democracy, not phony Australians who are here to serve the interests of a foreign autocracy bent on bleeding Australia’s sovereignty. Wanning Sun calls this a “discriminatory” immigration policy. I’m certainly not suggesting discriminating on the basis of race. I am suggesting discriminating on the basis of honest intentions and good citizenship. Do you seriously think we should do otherwise, Wanning?

Inaction is not an option. If we don’t take prudent measures now, one of two things will happen. Beijing will slowly but surely extend its control over our decision-making systems and we will have surrendered our freedoms without a fight. Or a frustrated Australian electorate will make radical choices at the ballot box and Australia will join its fraternal democracies of the United States and Britain in turning to drastic, populist alternatives that could have ugly consequences.

Enough complacency, enough excuses. The red flag is up. It’s time Australia acted on it.

Peter Hartcher

RED FLAG

Correspondence

As an early product of the infamous one-child policy, and now a proud Melburnian, I read Peter Hartcher’s essay with mixed feelings. Despite twenty years of introspective reconciliation, I still struggle to process all the contradictions that come with being a migrant from communist China to democratic Australia.

In China I wore the red scarf in primary school as a symbol that I was part of the Young Pioneers of China – so did every student in every school I knew of. Like Aussie kids wearing the scarf of the AFL team their family has always supported, we wore our scarves proudly, though you could argue that neither Aussie nor Chinese kids have much say in the matter. We were taught how great the Communist party is, how it liberated the whole of China, and how corruptible capitalism is, with little children getting paid only a dollar a day to work in mines. I was quite happy that I didn’t have to work in mines, and that my parents loved only me.

Within my first week of school in Australia, on a bus ride, I overheard someone say, “Chairman Mao was a dictator, he killed millions in China.” I had to look up what a dictator was, discreetly, on my little handheld electronic translator. Nowadays, with smartphones, it would be much easier to be inconspicuous, but this was 1999. I was horrified by the stupidity, absurdity and audacity of someone making such a statement in public. Surely, I, a real Chinese person from China, would know if someone had killed millions of people in my own country. I concluded that the ignorant speaker had never been to China, had never seen the massive portrait of Mao at Tiananmen. But I was tremendously curious that no one else on the bus seemed bothered by the inflammatory conversation. Like a good child of the Middle Kingdom, a follower of the Middle Way, I withheld my burning desire to protest. Mainly because I couldn’t construct grammatically correct and fluent sentences in English, even in my head, yet. Really. It had nothing to do with being a coward.

I often reflect on that twenty-minute bus ride. The waves of China’s past caught up with me steadily, piling up without any regard for my psychological wellbeing. I learnt the realities of the Tiananmen Square massacre, the “liberation” of Tibet and Xinjiang, the real horror behind the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, abandoned baby girls and “prevented births.” This new knowledge hit me head-on at the beginning of the new millennium. I was one of millions of international students from China seeking a better education in the West. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who struggled to make sense of right and wrong, good and evil, as we digested this information. Degrees, promotions and mortgages helped with day-to-day orientation in Australia. Mostly, I assimilated and pushed on. Really. Life keeps getting in the way, and who has the time to question and make sense of these big issues? It’s not that I am a coward.

Reading Hartcher’s call to action, where he quotes former ASIO chief Duncan Lewis saying that Chinese Australians “could and should” be “vital” in protecting Australia’s democracy, I did a little celebration dance inside. I was excited to read on. But the Chinese Australian community did not feature again in the essay as part of the solution. Instead, Hartcher argued they needed to be educated more about democratic values, and assisted to participate fully in their new democracy. I recognise the importance of macro strategies, broad strokes. I wish someone had given me Hartcher’s essay when I arrived in Australia as a teenager. I don’t mean that literally, of course, as I didn’t know much English at the time and I couldn’t have cared less about politics. But I wish I’d had a crash course, an overview, like Hartcher’s essay, on how Australians and the West view communism, China and the Chinese. I knew how I viewed the West, but I was utterly unprepared for how it views me. This reverse shock is not dissimilar to the shock that Hartcher describes Joe Hockey and the Labor trio going through. I recognise that it is irrational and unreasonable to expect one essay by one journalist to have all the answers, especially when it is clearly titled: Red Flag: Waking up to China’s challenge, not Green Light: Working Solutions for China’s Challenge. As a Chinese Australian, I am grateful for the essay. I may not have read it the way the author intended, and I am ashamed of my disappointment. What have I done in twenty years? I have mixed feelings.

But to return to the idea that we should stand up for ourselves, I wonder if Hartcher would mind standing with the Chinese-looking Australians? Would he be intimidated if there were too many Chinese-looking Australians around him? Would he wonder if these Chinese-looking Australians were spies? Or comrades? Would he trust Chinese Australians, amphibians of the two cultures, never to lose sight of our democratic values? Would he ever see Chinese Australians as individuals – intelligent individuals, the way he sees Ross and John Garnaut? I am curious. Even a coward can be curious.

I can construct proper sentences now, grammatically correct and fluent for the most part. I can’t change the fact that I was born a Chinese single child, but I choose to sip a Magic (a distinctly Melburnian coffee with a perfectly balanced ratio of coffee and milk) every morning and cheer for the Pies in my black and white scarf once in a while. Whenever Chinese Australians are asked to choose between China and Australia, the ultimate answer must be that we choose humanity.

Caroline Rosenberg

RED FLAG

Correspondence

Peter Hartcher’s essay is a timely call to action about the Chinese Communist Party’s intentions for Australia. He outlines a host of decisions collectively awaiting Australia, and raises the prospect of a more difficult future, where economic and security trade-offs are more explicit. The brazen nature of the intimidation he describes is particularly concerning. This is a conversation worth having. Yet a detour into Australian immigration policy shows how easily it can go off-track.

Nearly three in ten Australian residents were born overseas. Yet in public debates like this one, immigration policy is often treated as a pawn on a chessboard – something small to be sacrificed for a larger purpose. Hartcher’s essay is only the most recent example of this phenomenon.

Hartcher calls for civil society and governments to do more to educate “immigrants and the wider community alike on the value of democracy and the responsibilities of citizens.” It is hard to argue with this proposal, though such efforts often go awry in clumsy execution. He calls for better-qualified officials to assess prospective immigrants more closely. Finally, he suggests the introduction of some form of values test, as “immigrants who are committed to liberal-democratic principles should always be given priority over those who are not.” This is not a new concept. Speaking in the federal parliamentary debate on the Immigration Restriction Act in 1901, James Ronald MP said, “Let us tell these foreign races that when they can live up to our social and moral ideals we shall welcome them.”

Like many areas of public policy, the administration of immigration policy is not straightforward. Assessing visa applications is different to looking for contaminated food during quarantine screening. No government official can peer into someone’s soul and understand their true intentions. In particular, the introduction of a formal liberal-democratic values test in the immigration selection process would generate extreme difficulties. What would an objective test for commitment to liberal-democratic values look like? How would an official from the Department of Home Affairs assess this test in relation to individual visa applications?

Instead of buttressing Australia’s liberal democracy, such a test would undermine it. A values test would be impossible to assess without considering where people come from. Despite our aspirations to non-discrimination, where people hail from remains a core criterion shaping Australian immigration policy. A British tourist has no difficulty coming to Australia, but ask an Afghan or Indian citizen about the process and you will find it beset with hurdles. Yet the CCP, not to mention many migrants, would view an Australian values test for immigration selection as a proxy for race. It is worth recalling that under White Australia, migrants were not ostensibly excluded on the grounds of race, but of language.

Hartcher is not racist, nor is he “anti-Chinese.” He explicitly argues for additional immigration from Taiwan and Hong Kong. In the past, he has articulated support for a larger Australian population, which will increasingly depend primarily on Asian and African immigration. But in a country that was federated in part on anti-Asian prejudice and is now home to a large and growing Asian-Australian population, we are compelled to take perceptions of our actions seriously.

How would citizens from countries like the Philippines, Vietnam and Pakistan successfully showcase their commitment to liberal-democratic principles? These are people Hartcher would welcome with open arms. Yet these people also live in countries governed by non-democratic or illiberal regimes. Alongside mainland China and India, they are among the largest recent migrant cohorts to Australia.

For almost all immigrants to Australia, the act of migration itself is a vote for our liberal democracy. There is no evidence to suggest the vast majority of migrants from these countries are undermining Australia’s political system. If anything, it is the opposite. The 2015 report Australians Today found people born in China and Hong Kong who had migrated to Australia between 2001 and 2014 were more likely than recent migrants from New Zealand to feel a sense of belonging in Australia. And they were just as likely to feel that sense of belonging as recent British-born migrants. Those fleeing authoritarianism – people born in Iraq, Afghanistan or Iran – had the most sense of belonging of any group. Like Cold War Soviet émigrés, those who have lived under authoritarian regimes may become the loudest supporters of their new home.

This points to alternative means for addressing the threats Hartcher details. As he argues forcefully, Australian governments and civil society can and must do better to strengthen ourselves against active interference from the CCP. Given the existing, almost limitless powers granted to the Minister for Immigration, directing resources to cancel visas through ministerial discretion is likely to be more effective than empty screening devices such as a values test. We would also do well to consider existing policy directions – such as the ongoing privatisation of parts of the visa application process – and ask what risks this may pose for future Australian capacity to assess threats. Boiled down, visa privatisation is an example of the trade-offs presciently outlined by Hartcher: more fiscal operating space at the expense of poorer oversight and administrative control.

Finally, Hartcher’s immigration proposal shrinks from the promise of Australia. By rebalancing immigration opportunities away from people who may not share a strong affinity for liberal democracy before they get here, he dismisses the prospect that living in Australia can itself foster liberal-democratic values. His proposal fails to consider how the idea of Australia, the very values we seek to protect, can influence those who move here. This is the strongest argument for immigration as a nation-building enterprise, where we engage newcomers by the lived commitment of all Australians, old and new, to our shared liberal-democratic values.

To counter the rising authoritarianism of this political moment, we must socialise our values through our actions. As well as asking hard questions about a host of other immigration policy decisions, this means refusing to judge prospective Australian immigrants’ commitment to liberal democracy by the actions and worldview of regimes such as the CCP.

Henry Sherrell

RED FLAG

Correspondence

Peter Hartcher’s recent Quarterly Essay provides an excellent, informative and insightful analysis of the challenges Australia faces in managing its deepening relationship with China. But like many important works of analysis, it raises just as many questions as it answers, a few of which I will address here.

The first point is that Hartcher may be guilty of overestimating China’s historical economic and political power. He highlights the economic power of China when he notes that “China’s economy was the biggest in the world for at least half a millennium, until as recently as 1820.” While that may be true, over this same period China progressively slipped behind Western Europe and especially the United Kingdom in terms of GDP per capita, which is a better indicator of economic and technological sophistication than total economy size. Although Chinese and Western European GDP per capita were similar for the first millennium of the Common Era, by the year 1500 Western Europe’s GDP per capita had leapt 30 per cent ahead of China’s. And by 1820, Western Europe’s GDP per capita was more than double that of China, and by 1950 it was more than ten times China’s. The reality is that for much of the past 500 years (in fact, until the reforms launched by Deng Xiaoping in 1978) China had a stagnant and relatively declining economy. In other words, its economy was big thanks to its enormous population, but backward. And this economic stagnation made it highly vulnerable to outside forces like the Manchus, who conquered China in the seventeenth century and created the Qing dynasty, and also Japan and several Western countries, which invaded China in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Overestimating China’s historical power is now a widespread trend, and gives the impression that China’s renaissance is returning the country to its natural dominant position in global affairs. The reality is that for more than 500 years, China was a fading power with a relatively declining and stagnant economy.

Second, Hartcher mentions some of the challenges facing the Chinese economy today. Indeed, despite its rapid development in these past few decades, China still has a big but backward economy, with a GDP per capita that is only one-quarter that of the United States. And China faces significant challenges, such as its enormous debt, rapidly ageing population, weak productivity, and trade and geopolitical tensions with the United States and other Western countries. Chinese productivity is only 30 per cent of that of world leaders like the US and Germany.

In this context, one issue not explored by Hartcher is how Australia’s relationship with China might be affected if China fell into a scenario of long-term economic stagnation (as Japan, Asia’s previous superstar, has done) or if it succumbed to an economic crisis like some Asian countries did two decades ago. The Australian economy would suffer from such a scenario, given our close economic relations. But the Chinese Communist Party, which relies on strong economic growth as a source of political legitimacy, would likely ramp up nationalism to maintain popular support. Such nationalism could take many forms, such as assertive behaviour towards Australia’s close friends, like Japan. It could also involve more coercive behaviour towards Australia’s ethnic Chinese population. Further, a weakening economy could see more Chinese citizens seeking to leave China for countries like Australia, as well as even more capital flight.

In short, a China that gets bogged in economic stagnation and becomes more paranoid and insecure may well prove an even more dangerous country to deal with. We see this today with Russia, which is an economic basket case, but is flailing about on the international stage, causing havoc wherever it goes.

Lastly, Hartcher lavishes praise on the Chinese state: “Imperial China, a world leader in technology, also pioneered the capable, modern nation-state. It took Europe almost two millennia to catch up. China is again thrusting to the forefront of technological know-how and pioneering a more effective nation-state.” While this is true, it is also true that China has never had the rule of law, by which the country’s highest political authority should also obey the law. Even today, the Chinese Communist Party is a law unto itself, and China’s judiciary is highly politicised and corrupt. “Constitutionalism” is a taboo subject in China. Nor have China’s rulers ever been subject to “downward accountability” to the country’s citizens through democratic elections. The nation-state may have come to the West very much later than in China. But the Western nation-state is vastly superior to that of China thanks to the rule of law and electoral democracy, even if Western democracy is struggling somewhat today.

How long China’s anachronistic political situation can persist is a big question. Today, the CCP is visibly worried, as is evident from the growing repression, surveillance, use of propaganda, and nationalism. The political crisis in Hong Kong shows the limitations of authoritarianism. Any political instability and possible regime change in China would certainly have a massive impact on the world, and especially on Australia.

John West

RED FLAG

Correspondence

MEN AT WORK

Correspondence

There aren’t many of us, apparently. Or at least not nearly as many as there could be.

It’s a Thursday – my regular day off to care for my one-year-old daughter – and during a nap time of unpredictable length I’m reading Annabel Crabb’s Men at Work. Crabb’s essay reveals just how far we are from anything approaching gender equality when it comes to caring for our own offspring. As more and more women with kids have joined the workforce, men simply haven’t picked up the household slack. Crabb notes that in Australian families with at least one child under twelve, more than 40 per cent of mothers work part-time. The figure for fathers is only 4 per cent.

It is clear, though, that Australian men want to dedicate more time to raising their children, as Crabb argues. The strength of her analysis is in pointing to the stubborn attitudes that act as a handbrake on that change. Taxpayer-funded parental leave is seen as easy money, and flexible work is seen as something you get away with (rather than a necessity). More than a quarter of men actually experience discrimination when they return to work after taking leave for the birth of a child – this kind of “soft” work is still associated with women.

One of the things that struck me while reading Men at Work is that any discussion of gender, child-raising and the workplace needs to be part of a deeper project of economic justice. Crabb’s essay is strong in its survey of the leading parental-leave schemes modelled in Scandinavia and by some of the big corporates in Australia. But if, as she argues, our own perceptions of gender roles are in urgent need of adjusting, we would do well to start by providing decent and equitable wages to those professionals who devote their time to caring for our young. One of the powerful things you realise as the parent of a newborn is the crucial importance of the “caring economy” that supports you. My partner and I wouldn’t have survived those tricky early months of parenthood without friends and family. But equally important have been our cleaner, early childcare educators, local librarians and child health nurses. These are largely female-dominated and underpaid professions. For example, an astonishing 97 per cent of early childhood educators are women – some paid as little as $22 an hour.

Beyond the demands of child rearing, Crabb rightly points out the benefits of extending flexible work practices to all workers, regardless of whether they are parents. It is worth reflecting, however, on how we arrived at the point where the idea that workplaces should “flex” to accommodate the needs of self-fulfilment and nurture is seen as novel. The truth is that the neoliberal project of the last forty or so years has been brutally efficient at pricing all sorts of commodities while dangerously undervaluing a range of “externalities” (such as our warming climate). Blindness to the true cost of caring for the planet and ourselves is at the heart of the current economic order.

I wasn’t surprised when Crabb’s essay pointed to research finding that close to half of millennial men feel excluded from gender equality measures, and that men still tend to judge their worth by reference to their paid rather than caring work. Our political and economic systems create powerful norms that ripple through society to the level of the self. It’s vitally important for millennials and others that we address the gender inequalities in our home and workplaces, but let’s couple these efforts with the wider project of making the economy work for all of us.

Andrew Thackrah

MEN AT WORK

Correspondence

As the father of young children, I find the scenarios Annabel Crabb presents all too familiar. In public settings, some people seem to regard fathers attending to their children as remarkable rather than routine. When my children were infants, it was disconcerting to be patronised with congratulations (“Aren’t you good?”) for the mere act of looking after them. In the workplace and online, discussions focus on the challenges for women of balancing work and family. They rarely seem to involve men; the implicit – and infuriating – assumption being that men don’t face the same challenge. Given many men are engaged in a day-to-day struggle to stay upright as they attempt to balance work with parenting and being a responsible partner, I suspect men need to do a better job of creating spaces to talk about this.

It’s easy to understand why Crabb is taken with the idea of a “daddy quota” as part of an enhanced parental leave system. Recently, I interviewed a number of people in Iceland about their experiences of gender equality and was amazed to learn that Icelandic men take an average of eighty-seven days of paternity leave after the birth of each child. Picture almost every fisherman, lawyer or construction worker spending months away from work caring for their child, and you get a sense of how transformative this is. While their partner returns to work, these men are pushing prams, at the playground or at home, cleaning and changing nappies. Imagine what that means for how their families function.

The discussion in Iceland is now focused on a further extension of paid parental leave to twelve months. The government has agreed that this will be implemented between 2020 and 2021, although the detail is still being resolved. One option being considered is that each parent may be given five months of leave, with the remaining two months to share.

There’s a big evidence base demonstrating that parenting behaviour established at childbirth tends to persist as children age. Parental leave arrangements are undoubtedly critical in laying the foundations for parenting equality. But parental leave in the first year of a child’s life is not enough. Parenting is a long game, and we need to consider how we support parents throughout the entire life course.

Crabb does us all a great service by shining a light on the gendered assumptions that underpin the notion of the “primary parent,” which is built into much of our policy. Yet the primary parent would not be possible without its inverse: the primary worker. Many policy settings still harbour an implicit assumption that one parent – usually a man – is working full-time to provide for their family. There’s a long history of this in Australia, dating back to the Harvester judgment of 1907, in which the Commonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration proclaimed that a minimum wage should be paid to a male worker that is sufficient to provide for a wife and three children. While we’ve since moved in the direction of gender-neutral pay structures, the assumption of the primary worker lives on in the practical way that work is structured. A standard working week might be thirty-eight hours, but in practice full-time work in Australia mostly involves working for more than forty hours per week. According to the OECD, about 60 per cent of Australian men work longer than forty hours each week. By contrast, about half of Australian women work part-time (thirty-four hours or less) and fewer than 30 per cent work more than forty hours. This is one reason women are paid almost $500 – or about 31 per cent – less each week than men, as recent ABS data reports.

Crabb envisions a world in which domestic work is shared equally between both parents. She rightfully points out that this is what a new generation of parents are often striving to achieve. Yet if we are to move away from the assumption of the “primary parent,” I posit that we also need to dismantle the assumption of the primary worker. If the fatigued and stressed parents at my daughters’ primary school are any indication, full-time work as a parent seems possible only if there’s another person to pick up the load at home at least some of the time. Equality is unlikely to be achieved with both parents working forty hours or more each week. This has the potential to drive families to breaking point. Rather, to achieve greater domestic equality, increase female workforce participation and move closer to equal pay, fathers will need to spend less time at work and more time at home. According to the OECD, in countries where unpaid labour is more equally shared, there tend to be smaller gender-specific differences in hours spent in the workplace.

Spending less time at work may mean men working part-time or more flexibly, as Crabb suggests, but it should also include a consideration of how we can reduce the hours associated with full-time work in Australia. Annual working hours in Australia are by no means the longest in the developed world (that honour goes to Mexico), but the average Australian worker spends 249 hours more at work each year than workers in Norway – the poster child in Crabb’s essay. This is the equivalent of an additional six weeks each year. In Norway, hardly anyone works for more than forty hours per week, strict working hours of 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. are common, and overtime is limited by law. Five weeks of annual leave is standard. Under these conditions, and with childcare heavily subsidised, it’s possible to see how a shared work and home life might be achievable. Aside from greater potential to balance the demands of work and home, reduced working hours have other benefits too. Countries with fewer annual hours worked tend to have higher labour productivity. It seems that stress, fatigue and sleep deprivation may make overworked employees substantially less productive. Who would have thought?

It is somewhat surprising that Crabb doesn’t really consider the gender pay gap in her analysis. The answer to the question of who works and who stays at home involves a complex calculus, worked through within each family. No doubt cultural and identity factors are relevant, but families also consider the financial implications of various decisions, including the cost of childcare and the wages earned by each parent. Even when working full-time, Australian women earn 11.7 per cent less than men, on average. With most Australian fathers earning more than mothers, and at a life stage when every dollar is tight, it’s no real surprise that a majority of Australian families choose to send the father off to work.

For this equation to change, real progress in tackling the gender pay gap is required. Australia’s performance in this area has been fairly dismal. In twenty years, the gap in full-time earnings has decreased only marginally, from 13.2 per cent in 1998 to 11.7 per cent in 2018. Over the same time period, other countries have done much better. Belgium has reduced the gap in full-time earnings from 15.2 per cent to 3.7 per cent, and this hasn’t happened accidentally. With strong trade union membership, 96 per cent of workers are covered by collective bargaining agreements, making it nearly impossible to pay women less to do the same job. The Belgian government has mandated that the gender pay gap be taken into account when wage agreements are negotiated. And all companies with more than fifty employees have to report publicly on their gender pay gap.

Crabb was right to focus on the need for fathers to play a greater role in parenting. As she suggests, we need to do more to ensure that parents are able to share the load at work and at home. Other countries show us that it can be done. With sufficient determination and a concerted effort, it’s possible in Australia too.

Andrew Wear

MEN AT WORK

Correspondence

Last year I wrote a column inspired by the imminent birth of the baby of New Zealand’s prime minister, Jacinda Ardern. I mused that it might be difficult to be a breastfeeding mother and prime minister, even of New Zealand. Babies are naturally bonded to their mothers. Indeed, bonding is part of the natural biological imperative of breastfeeding. But Ardern had announced that she would only take six weeks’ leave before passing “parenting” to the child’s father. Well, good luck with that one, I said, because she needed a lot more time off.

The responses I received were pretty virulent, and mostly from various high-powered female types. How dare I criticise the feminist pin-up of the Southern Hemisphere! A woman can have a baby and a job! Well, yes. I know that. I had to do it, and so did my mother, and in both cases it was a matter of dire necessity.

Left-leaning feminist commentators on family issues often can’t see past the flaws in the ideological symbolism to the simple everyday practical realities: like new mothers having to learn to breastfeed and wanting to bond with babies; or what happens at home when the father simply can’t be there, because despite all the hype and wishful thinking on the part of feminists, men are still the main earners in most Australian families.

Annabel Crabb’s Men at Work, which quotes my view of Jacinda as part of the mindset of the “parenthood trap,” is basically about why fathers aren’t mothers. It is a long complaint about fathers not taking parental leave.

It is curious that she uses the word “trap.” Why is it a trap to be a mother or father? Why is it so important, as she seems to think, to get out?

Perhaps, despite her artfully recherché image with matching culinary accomplishments, Crabb can’t stand the heat in the everyday meat-and-potatoes kitchen. Like most of the women – and it is mostly women – who comment on this stuff, she betrays a somewhat scornful attitude to the hard yakka of the domestic front. Many women are understandably resentful of the grubby everyday domestic necessities: the washing and cleaning; the cooking; the changing of the nappies; putting one foot in front of the other through the zombie like days of three-hourly feeds; not to mention that when children are sick, upset or in trouble, it is always Mummy who is expected to be on the frontline. First-time mothers often don’t understand all of this, and they often need much longer leave than they can get; and naturally, they don’t want to do it alone. But someone has to do it, and Crabb seems to think that men taking more paternity leave is the solution.

Her thesis is that women’s exit from dreary domesticity into the workplace (often just as dreary) is not matched by an exit from work by men to support the poor overburdened women. Why should men want to be out of work? The plain truth is that in most Australian families, no amount of take-it-or-leave-it paternity leave or any other inducement will change these arrangements, because most families are still dependent primarily on the father’s earnings, as they have a whopping big mortgage. The family enterprise depends on the main breadwinner, who is usually the man. The consequence of this is that in most families, even if the father takes paternity leave, it is only for a short period. Since nature equipped women to be mothers, and most will take maternity leave, it is imperative, especially if mothers have a long time off, that fathers don’t.

Of course, it doesn’t make it any emotionally easier for men. Crabb interviewed Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenberg about their family life, which she says is all about “coping with and compensating for absence” and asks, “Why do we expect so little of fathers?” Who says it is “little”? Anyone who observes these men at close quarters knows that what they do is not little. In fact, it is good that they are aware enough to want to manage absence. What is wrong with that? Crabb seems oblivious to the reality of being prime minister and treasurer. Does she think that their wives holding the fort at home is wrong, because it makes it practically easier for these two men, or any man, to do their jobs? Dads should share, but often they just simply can’t. And never mind about the prime minister – ask any tradie trying to build up their business.

What really upsets the commentators is that the general population dismisses the impractical pretence that a father can be a mother, hence the handy gender-neutral term “parenting,” which smothers the difference. That there is a difference between “mother” and “father” doesn’t mean that fathers should not be involved with their children. On the contrary: it is absolutely vital that they are. However, their involvement is different from the mother’s. And sometimes that difference is qualitative, and can’t be measured in time.

Actually, the best way that fathers can be involved with children is to be involved with their mothers. But in the fractured social milieu, where the natural biological bonds of parents and children have been frayed by family disintegration and gender ideologues who would like to obliterate them completely, we have forgotten that good parenting is actually a function of a good marriage.

As far as the solution to the “work–life balance,” as it is sometimes called, the availability of maternity leave and part-time work is a boon for Australian mothers, who have never been keen on full-time work with small children, even mothers with highly paid careers. Two of my daughters – who have five children between them – have been able to take extended maternity leave, and through their generous leave and part-time work provisions have been able to continue their careers, including gaining seniority. But they are fortunate, and not all women can do this. Many first-time mothers I have spoken to, who are usually over thirty when they finally have “the baby,” are not keen to return to the drudgery of work at all.

My own upbringing and experience as a mother of nine children taught me that the ordinary suburban world is full of many different families whose priorities are usually centred on their children’s welfare, while trying to juggle their finances as best they can. But the family is not an ideological construct built around economics. It doesn’t always fit into sociological models. It is a natural thing of flesh and blood. That is why if you ask anyone, male or female, which is more important for a mother, getting back to work or cultivating a warm and lasting maternal bond with her infant child, I think I know which they would choose.

Angela Shanahan

MEN AT WORK

Correspondence

THE PROSPERITY GOSPEL

Correspondence

THE PROSPERITY GOSPEL

Correspondence

THE PROSPERITY GOSPEL

Correspondence

THE PROSPERITY GOSPEL

Correspondence

AUSTRALIA FAIR

Response to Correspondence

Rebecca Huntley

Usually, the author’s response to Quarterly Essay correspondence gratefully accepts praise given, addresses criticisms levelled and reflects on anything that has happened since the essay was published, building further on the central thesis. But I think we can accept that this is an unusual moment in Australian political history. And so I will use my right of reply as a chance to review what I wrote in January and outline my initial reaction to the results of the election, addressing the generous and insightful responses as I go.

In the essay, I talked at some length about how much we can trust public opinion polls. I wrote:

While this statement was based on the evidence available at the time, it’s clear that I placed too much faith in the methods of pollsters in Australia and the extent to which compulsory voting had buffered our national polls from the kinds of inaccuracies exposed by Brexit and Trump. The reality is that our fetish for polls never made much sense. Polling never told us the full story, because the act of voting is a very blunt tool to measure the complexities of public sentiment. However, we can’t let this polling fail license a retreat to “anecdotalism”; polling data will still play a role in the mix of different kinds of information that help inform strategy. That being said, there is no sugar-coating the immediate impact of all this on my profession’s reputation. Political polling represents about 1 per cent of social and market research, but it is the research that gets the most attention. The election result presents a challenge to all polling and research agencies to come up with new tools to understand how the public feel about politics and policy. However, there may be one very good outcome from this result: that we care less about published polling, that journalists talk about polls less and politicians refer to them less.

Just because I am not a pollster doesn’t mean I haven’t had cause to reflect on my methods. I trusted the polls and the fact that the trend consistently favoured Labor shaped my expectation in the essay that Australians were responding favourably to Labor’s plan for government. When I started my career, I came to understand the Australian community through a unique research project that no longer exists, the Ipsos Mind & Mood Report. It involved a highly intelligent and empathetic group of women working as a team, travelling around Australia, listening to groups of friends and colleagues talk very broadly about how they felt about their lives, their families, their communities and the direction of the country. We visited homes, workplaces, garages, classrooms, cafes and community centres. I haven’t conducted research like that for about four years. Instead, the research I have undertaken has been on very specific issues. So it’s no surprise I missed the meta-sentiment. Marc Stears, director of the Sydney Policy Lab at the University of Sydney and former speechwriter for British Labour’s Ed Milliband, wrote that people vote on overall feel and rarely on individual policies; the more you have actual conversations with people, the more apparent that is. To quote a classic Australian movie, it’s the vibe. So as a researcher, I have recommitted myself to more listening, to asking more open questions of people, to reconnecting with the vibe.

As I write this, we are still in the swirl of analysis about what happened and why. Some of it is intelligent and thought-provoking, some of it is not. Views range from “nothing much has shifted” to “everything we know to be true is not.” The correct interpretation must lie somewhere in the middle. I certainly have more questions than answers at the moment, but I also have a few thoughts worth sharing. One wise head told me on election night that for Labor (in particular) to win federally, all the elements need to line up – a strong leader, a strong campaign and the right policy settings to fit the mood of the electorate. All those elements might not have been equal contributors to the party’s election loss, but they all need to be considered in its wake.

In the essay, I underestimated the importance of the leader. I recalled people voting for a leader they didn’t particularly like in Tony Abbott and thought the same logic would work for Bill Shorten. Perhaps the more disengaged and anxious voters are, the more the leader matters, particularly to the undecided. Given Labor was promising a suite of complex policies, the likeability of the leader and the strength of the campaign became even more important. Understanding what works and doesn’t work in a campaign is not my forte, but what I didn’t consider in the essay was whether Labor’s agenda (even though it dovetailed nicely with what the majority of Australians say they want) could withstand the negative campaigning and misinformation that was thrown at it. Finally, what I outlined in the essay was a policy agenda for a popular Labor government rather than a policy platform to win an election. The question I didn’t ask myself was this: how does the progressive centre of sentiment hold up when those sentiments are translated into policy and sold to an anxious public? The idea that Australia is trending to the right doesn’t line up with political reality: Labor governments in Queensland and Western Australia as well as the more progressive Victoria. The results in South Australia, with a conservative state government in power, saw a two-party-preferred split of 56/44 in favour of Labor. While the majority of Australians support progressive policies in the social-democratic tradition when presented with them in surveys and focus groups, the challenge progressive parties face is this: how to sell that to people during a campaign, when trust in politics is so low? And so I wouldn’t be surprised if what Labor campaigners take out of this loss is that to win campaigns you need a strong, likeable leader, a small-target policy strategy and a generous side-serve of fear about the alternative.

The essay made an argument that there is a progressive centre in Australian society and that the foundations exist for a revived social democracy with environmental concerns at its core. Yet Labor fell short and I underestimated the impact of a few issues. The first of these is tax. As I said in the essay, tax reform is where the rubber hits the road when it comes to revitalising social democracy. Will voters cop modest tax increases if it means more spending on the services they consistently say they want? I made the point that when it comes to a possible loss in one area in exchange for gains in another, trust becomes essential. You have to trust the party in government to do as it says it will: to take and give rather than just take. But the reaction to Labor’s tax reform ideas also prompts a broader, more nuanced discussion about our attitudes to fairness. Of course, our concept of fairness is pretty malleable. And we are, overall, an affluent country. So did people think it was unfair to take franking credits away? And was that perception of unfairness enough to provide fertile ground for a scare campaign on a retiree tax and a death tax? As Carol Johnson comments, “it was Labor that was construed as unfair to ordinary voters ranging from retirees to home owners.” (It should be noted that negative gearing policies didn’t seem to hurt Labor in 2016, so perhaps the focus on franking credits was taken as an attack on those aged over sixty-five, a sizeable part of the voting population.) Again, I think one of the lessons for Labor campaigners must be that it’s only in government that you are able to show that the politics of economic redistribution are possible, that your kind of government will give more to the vast majority of citizens in return for modest tax reform. And that, ironically, the language of all-out class warfare can backfire in a “classless” society like Australia, even when social inequality is becoming more pronounced.

The second issue is climate change. The ballot box has always been an imprecise tool for measuring public sentiment on complex issues, especially ones that provoke the spectrum of emotion in us as climate change does – fear, denial, guilt, anxiety, anger and hope. This was the climate election, but not in the way people (including myself) thought it would be. Again, I looked to the past to predict the future; concern about climate helped Labor in 2007. Climate change concern was a reason why the Liberal Party lost Warringah and an independent held on in Indi. It was one of the reasons we saw swings away from the Liberals in seats like North Sydney. But results for the LNP in Queensland and even One Nation in the Hunter show a swing in the opposite direction in parts of Australia where mining jobs are being threatened and where workers don’t feel they can be nimble in response to a changing economy. I said in the essay that I thought that as a community we were inching towards recognition of the scale of the climate threat. In fact, if the election result is any kind of gauge, while some parts of our society are quickly moving in that direction, other parts may be pushing back. Griffith University academics Anne Tiernan, Jacob Deem and Jennifer Menzies argue that the results in Queensland reflect a decentralised and highly local reaction to the “climate change versus coal” equation.

As Travers McLeod points out, Australians are not sure government will look after them, their families and their communities over the long term. Perhaps this is particularly so in regional communities struggling to survive. And so they respond to appeals that focus on local jobs over those that focus on the “national interest.” All politics is local but some politics is more local than others.

The election result also makes me reflect on where exactly the community is on climate. Beneath the top-line figures that point to consensus, there are schisms that are going to be hard to shift. Susan Carland writes that “we are living in a time of profound social silos and tribalism.” James Walter makes a similar point, saying that we need to be wary of “the phantom public” and instead understand there are various “publics” that are “created by political mobilisation, triggered by insiders for their own ends.” Interestingly, while I didn’t anticipate the election result, in my work on attitudes to climate change I have been coming to the realisation that the approaches to understanding sentiment on climate and therefore the strategies to mobilise climate action are inadequate. My current research, which will eventually be a book, is on climate change and emotion and how individual and group psychology should inform how those in the climate change movement communicate and persuade.

To reiterate, I don’t think Australia is inherently an ideologically conservative nation. I do think it may well be a temperamentally conservative one. This result doesn’t mean we are right-wing. It means we are scared. We want change desperately, but we are equally scared of change when it involves trusting the political system to bring it about. So politically we are stuck, at a time when so much else – in the economy, society and environment – is moving quickly.

One area I spent a lot of time exploring in the essay is the lack of trust in politics. All the responses address this in their own way. Isabelle Reinecke wrote that the election result is not a repudiation of progressive values but a reflection of deep cynicism about the ability of political parties to deliver competently on these issues. If I were to write my essay again, it would be focused through the lens of public distrust of politics, because if there is one big message coming from this election result, it is that despite our voting record Australians are alienated from the system. Before anyone speculates on how people responded to Labor’s policies, they first need to ask: were people listening much in the first place? There are signs they weren’t. The high number of pre-poll votes, 4.7 million in this election, was driven by our desire for convenience, but must also reflect that people had made up their minds before the campaign started and wanted to block the whole blasted business out. Not exactly an environment for change. And the cynicism about the two major parties continued unabated. In my essay, I outlined the decline of public trust in institutions and our growing despair about politics and politicians. I pointed to the increasing number of younger people wondering if Australian democracy can deliver on its promise. In an election where there was in fact a stark choice in policy, there was still the prevailing “they are both the same as each other” sentiment. Many independents did well, capitalising on negative feelings about the two parties. And contrary to so many predictions (not mine), scandal after scandal didn’t do much to the One Nation vote and delivered votes for Clive Palmer, even in a place like Townsville, where he still owes people money.

Indeed, the irony is that Labor was the most stable and united team on the ballot: the Liberals, Nationals, Greens and One Nation were all involved in very public, ugly fights in the twelve months leading up to the election, even during the campaign itself. (The United Australia Party wasn’t even a party but an electoral scaffold for a scare campaign aimed at Bill Shorten so that Clive Palmer could advance his interests in the Galilee Basin.) Disunity may no longer be death if the voters assume you are all a rabble. What this says to me is that we need to explore different ways for Australians to get involved in public decision-making, not just the kinds of deliberative-democracy mechanisms I mentioned in my essay but also the community organising that was successful in seats like Indi. It’s a lesson too for the major political parties, that internal party reform is as important as ever and that “politics as usual” will deliver lower and lower numbers of primary votes.

On social media, I’ve watched Labor and Greens supporters lash out at Queenslanders and other Australians who voted for the status quo, calling them stupid, lazy, racist and selfish. The cynicism about the electorate from some parts of the left never goes away. The conclusion to draw is not that Australia is no longer progressive or no longer cares about equality or is becoming like America, or that all social research lacks credibility. The conclusion is that the lack of trust the electorate has in politics has undermined its belief that structural reform – whether that be economic, social or environmental – is something that can be delivered by the politicians running the show. That is especially the case when some kind of exchange is being promised – more tax for better services.

The challenge is to take what the majority of Australians want and connect that with a government they feel comfortable electing. The alternative is a race to the bottom, with campaigns run on slogans about fear and the status quo, allowing no possibility of reform. That’s not what the nation needs, or what it consistently says it wants outside the ballot box. The task for progressives is to build trust, from the ground up, that what we need and want can actually be delivered by the politics we have.

I remain a defiant optimist. Just one who now recognises the scale of the challenge ahead.

Rebecca Huntley

AUSTRALIA FAIR

Correspondence

Travers McLeod

At the heart of Rebecca Huntley’s Australia Fair is the idea that we are a nation of democrats. Our affinity with democracy is much more than the process of voting to elect a government. It is our collective desire for a confident democracy, with government as an active and effective partner, and a fairer society where all Australians can live flourishing lives.

This is a powerful idea in an essay that I felt was spot-on in its claim that “there is an opportunity to renew social democracy, Australian-style.” The Centre for Policy Development’s research, which Huntley cites, discovered an Australian appetite for democratic and policy renewal, along with broad agreement on the direction of travel. We found that Australians believe democracy is a force for fairness and equality and would throw their support behind changes that get government and the economy working better for the community.

The federal election result does not disprove Huntley’s core claim. Elections are about placing trust in a person and a party to respond to the biggest problems and the greatest opportunities of our time. A clear set of ideas and policies can help to build trust. Ideas can also sow distrust and division. The election confirmed that citizens remain profoundly divided on the best path forward for the nation. But I am willing to believe, as Centre for Policy Development research shows, that all Australians share a desire to improve the lives of others and tackle our biggest problems together.

Many conservatives have forgotten the point Robert Menzies made in October 1942, when he said that Australians “disagree among ourselves on almost every conceivable subject, but we are all democrats.” Menzies said our “most grievous error” has been to think “too much of democracy in mechanical terms.” He also said, somewhat ominously, that “if, as a voter, I am concerned only with my own advantage and am indifferent to the cost to others, I am simply corrupt. I am selling my vote for an individual mess of pottage.”

Truth be told, most Australians have equated national politics in Canberra with a thick stew. The pressure-cooker environment of the past decade has produced an enormous gap between what Australians want from their democracy and what it has delivered. More than two-thirds of Australians told CPD that they do not believe their elected representatives serve their interests. Three-quarters believe politics is fixated on short-term gains instead of long-term challenges. They are not sure government will help to look after them, their families and their communities over the long term.

In April, Gabrielle Chan reported for The Guardian on the fury in Farrer, an electorate in country New South Wales stretching along the Murray River from Wentworth to Albury. The source of the fury was water, or the lack of it, in a land beset by drought. Months earlier, the South Australian Murray-Darling Royal Commission had described the “do-nothing” conduct of the senior management and the board of the Murray-Darling Basin Authority in relation to climate change as “negligent” and “unlawful.” Farrer didn’t fall to an independent, as some thought it might, but there was a swing of almost 10 per cent against the sitting member.

I spent six months in Albury in 2017. What struck me was how different the conversation about climate change was on Dean Street in Albury, compared to the rhetoric a few hundred kilometres up the road in Canberra. What the locals in Albury couldn’t stand most of all was being treated like mugs – taken for granted or ignored in the national conversation. Tellingly, it was a road trip from Sydney to Adelaide via Deniliquin, a town near the Murray River, that the Reserve Bank’s deputy governor, Guy Debelle, used to frame his landmark speech about climate change and the economy in March this year. Describing climate change as a “trend” change likely to have “first-order” economic effects, Dr Debelle said:

The election result has not washed away these problems. They will become more acute. The murkiness of the Murray-Darling Basin Authority and water buybacks is one thing. The lack of a coherent national strategy on climate change is another. Bizarrely, compelling evidence in support of constructive policy change does not lead to political action. But inaction like this is not limited to climate change.

Instead of climate change, consider “jobs” as an example. In the 2018 December quarter, the unemployment rate in Albury City was 9.26 per cent, more than double the overall rate in New South Wales. That same month, the report I Want to Work: Employment Services 2020 was released by the then federal minister for jobs, Kelly O’Dwyer. This expert review of jobactive, Australia’s $6.5 billion employment services system, consulted more than 1400 jobseekers, employers, employment services providers and community groups. Its blunt assessment was that Australia “can do better. Much better.” Consultant-to-client ratios were 1:148. Only 4 per cent of Australian employers were using jobactive in 2018 (down from 18 per cent in 2007). The system was failing a large majority of jobseekers who had been on the books for twelve months or more.

Given that outsourced delivery contracts for jobactive were due to expire in 2020, here was a great opportunity to think big, act on expert advice and embrace local solutions that were fit for purpose. To build an employment services program in Albury, for example, that was designed to meet the needs of that community. The response? Apart from two trials, the can was kicked further down the road. Shortly before the federal election was announced, Minister O’Dwyer extended existing jobactive contracts for a further two years, to the middle of 2022. One of 2019’s biggest policy reform opportunities sank with barely a ripple. Providers damned in a national review won contracts for another two years. Our most disadvantaged jobseekers lost out – again. A thick stew indeed.

Huntley’s essay tells us that Australians do not want to do away with democracy. We want to save it. The big question is: how?

Just as Australian democrats value substance over style, so it goes that ideas developed with local communities will matter as much as national reforms to systems and processes. Good democracies are stable. But they are not static. Nostalgia, whether it be for the reform era of the 1980s and ’90s (vale Bob Hawke) or the sanctity of our Anglo-American alliances, will not help Australia to grow and decarbonise our economy, create secure jobs, find our way in Asia, build an education nation, achieve equal rights for women and give substance to the Uluru Statement from the Heart. Blind faith in markets, microeconomics and outsourced services will not elevate the public interest above shareholder interest. Put simply, the “good society” in the twenty-first century does not resemble the “good society” of last century. It is, Huntley writes powerfully, “there for the making.”

What is the point of Australia? Ben Chifley famously described one “great objective – the light on the hill,” which he defined as striving for the betterment of humankind not just in Australia but anywhere we may give a helping hand. Huntley offers another, built on the Australian Settlement, which is to solve big problems. She spruiks the strong social licence to act that governments often gain when Australians are convinced that “something is harmful to the collective good.” She also makes it clear that some of these challenges, not least climate change, will require “the kind of mobilisation of people and communities, assets and resources, governments and infrastructure usually reserved for a world war.”

Too often, attempts to galvanise communities around big challenges are done half-heartedly. As the Harvard University political scientist John Ruggie said on a visit to Australia in April, “If they’re not with you at take-off, they won’t be there when you land.” “Community deals” to boost economic and social inclusion, built from backbone institutions at the local level and based on place-based approaches, are a way forward. They can be used to tackle disadvantage and the inevitable transitioning of coal communities to new industries and opportunities. But they require honesty about the change ahead and genuine agency for affected communities to find hope and aspiration in a frank conversation about their future. We must be able to talk positively about what we hope to start in regional Australia, not simply what we want to stop, and bring everyone along on that journey.

The chance to mobilise Australia around new, bold missions was precisely why the Centre for Policy Development brought Mariana Mazzucato to Australia last year. Mazzucato’s work on public value and the entrepreneurial state doesn’t pit government against business, unions or the community. What it does provide is a framework for us all to agree on missions that we can have a crack at together. Achieving them would engage the long-held ambition Australians have for their democracy as a force for equality and help to satisfy their disposition to put growth on a smarter, more inclusive and more sustainable path.

Travers McLeod

AUSTRALIA FAIR

Correspondence

James Walter

Rebecca Huntley’s Australia Fair has two striking virtues. It reminds us of how important the mobilisation of belief is in politics. And it is a tonic for those of us who might think the absence of any productive action on worrying social problems over the past decade represents not only political incompetence but also public indifference. Yet the Coalition’s win in the 2019 federal election raises profound questions about how to reconcile Huntley’s evidence of a persisting public commitment to social democracy and the apparent repudiation of such a program by the electorate.

Huntley sets out to clear the ground, exploring public opinion to show that it is not resistance to reform or withdrawal from democratic engagement that are at issue, but a perception that political institutions and elites are failing to heed the clear opinion of majorities on our signal challenges: climate change, housing, immigration and the treatment of asylum seekers. Underlying this is an argument that, if only the people at large were listened to, the Australian commitment to social democracy – government that intervenes when necessary to ensure services are delivered, fairness and relative equality are sustained and market failure is addressed – would be acted upon.

Hers is an optimistic essay, acknowledging in the closing pages persisting hurdles, but clearly framed both in relation to the strength of opinion on these key issues, and a conviction that the time for a progressive renaissance is at hand – and, she hoped, almost certain to be delivered at the 2019 federal election. She does not oversimplify, recognising that the task can only be undertaken by a Labor government, and noting that though majority opinion is moving in the right direction on climate change, for instance, the public is “only inching” towards realising the scale of the threat it represents. In fact, a Lowy poll published since the essay was released, during the 2019 campaign, registered for the first time that climate change had reached the top of the list of public concerns: had a tipping point been reached? Apparently not, if the recent election outcome is taken into account.

I wanted to believe that Huntley was right, and still hope her essay is widely read. Yet reading it in the midst of the 2019 election campaign – as the polls tightened – prompted me to confront some questions that it begs, to do with how beliefs are mobilised in politics.

The first is this: if one accepts Huntley’s analysis of the progressive zeitgeist, then why is it that the Coalition government was so deaf to public demand? Well, of course it came to power on the back of Tony Abbott’s war on “the great big tax” supposedly represented by emissions trading. It’s not easy to backtrack after that, even as public attitudes move on, so thereafter the Coalition vigorously defended the status quo. It was also undoubtedly influenced by coal industry donations, lobbying and the strategic placement of industry insiders in ministers’ offices, as has been well documented. But more important than all of that was that it was hobbled by wars over belief within the party. Huntley’s focus on public opinion – polls and focus groups – does not sufficiently attend to the beliefs of party insiders and the dynamics among party activists and supporters.

Three research studies are indicative of the problem. Huntley cites CSIRO research that supports her contention about the growing support for government action on climate change. That research also hints at the divergence of conservatives from the mainstream, since it notes that conservative voters are less likely to believe that climate change is caused by human behaviour and less likely to think government should do more to address the issue. An earlier study, in 2012, by Kelly Fielding and others at the University of Queensland, sharpens this differentiation. It shows that among politicians, political party affiliation and ideology have a powerful influence on climate change beliefs, since centre-left and progressive parties exhibit beliefs more consistent with scientific consensus about climate change than non-aligned or conservative leaders, and that motivated social cognition (that is, accepting only information that accords with existing views) is a powerful factor among conservatives. Finally, new research published by Anika Gauja (University of Sydney) and Max Grömping (Heidelberg University) in 2019 demonstrates that there are not only differences between party supporters and the rest of us, but also between party supporters themselves. The stronger party identification becomes, the lower the congruence between the views of supporters and the broader public. Parties now can be conceptualised as a series of concentric circles of increasing engagement but declining representativeness.

This clarifies the Coalition’s predicament over recent years. In an age when the shared commitments that sustained mass parties have evaporated, leaders are relied on to stand in for the party, to speak for what it represents. Their success in doing so is evaluated by constant polling. But as party membership gets ever smaller, and residual true believers increasingly diverge from the mainstream, leaders are trapped. Abbott, arguably, faithfully represented the views of his party’s most intense identifiers, and fatally lost public support. Turnbull instead spoke for what the public wanted – a more progressive program in general, including action on climate change – but each attempt to respond to popular demand provoked insurgency in the party room from those claiming (with some justification) to represent the beliefs of the party base. Has the task of satisfying both public expectations and party demands become impossible?

One might think that this is a problem only for the Coalition parties; that a change of government and the cold reality of Opposition might have forced the Liberals to adapt and to reform the party to recapture a broader, small “l” liberal constituency. That is to assume that the more progressive parties are immune from that dynamic of concentric circles, where party central turns out to be least in tune with the public at large. The research does not support that assumption.

Bill Shorten, as his equivocation during the campaign revealed, had his own difficulties in balancing the demands of some of those workers the ALP represents (in mining areas) with the public demand for climate action. Labor’s lead in the polls tightened as, on one side, Queensland unionists worried about their jobs and, on the other, progressive climate activists rued his inability to go as far as some wanted. And while progressive parties now might be more attuned to the general directions of public opinion, the intense identifiers among them are prone to characteristic mistakes. Among the Greens, for instance, self-righteousness and the conviction that “most people” agree with them, at least on climate change, renders them blind to something Huntley also identifies: the pragmatic temperament of the Australian electorate.

Thus, at a time when the millennium drought had made the public receptive to a climate change message, the sainted Bob Brown refused to accept any pragmatic compromise and helped to spike Labor’s first attempt at legislating emissions reductions in 2009 because it was not “good enough.” It set the stage for a decade of climate wars. And there he was again this year, leading the Adani protest convoy, apparently oblivious that a tactic that plays well in St Kilda is completely counter-productive in Clermont, where, as one resident said, “Up here, coal is our economy. It is … everything!” Yes, Adani must be stopped, but to ride into town with an injunction, yet offer no suggestion for how to manage the transition to an alternative economic future, simply provoked derision: “Those guys have taken time off from their barista jobs and unemployment to drive up here in fuel-guzzling cars. I just think it’s an insult, a slap in the face.” It was a gift to the hard right struggling to hang on in those areas, encouraging some to bet that the egregious George Christensen would hold his marginal seat of Dawson. In the event, the election saw a swing of 11.26 per cent in favour of Christensen, with similar swings in adjoining coal-belt seats.

One other thing niggled away at my wish to share Huntley’s optimism: reliance on what seem to be solid majority trends underestimates the way shifts at the margins can now be manipulated to destabilise “common sense.” We have seen in Donald Trump’s campaign and in Brexit how marginal and diverse minority opinion groups can be influenced through social media into aggregate coalitions of resentment and fear, leaching support away from commonly held views. The hired guns of opinion analysis have become experts at nudging belief to these ends. The Cambridge Analytica scandal was a stark instance. But our homegrown outfits working the same vein are no slouches. Crosby Textor’s role in British elections and the Brexit “leave” campaign was notable, and Scott Morrison mentioned Lynton Crosby as among the “experts” he “listened to” while campaigning. More worryingly, it is clear that the big spending and disruptive tactics of Clive Palmer’s UAP campaign, an overt instance of targeted messaging, were significant in influencing voting preferences to destroy Labor’s chances in Queensland, as Laura Tingle persistently reminded us on election night. He won no seats, not even a seat in the Senate, but note what he gained: leverage over a government that will likely facilitate exploitation of coal reserves in the Galilee Basin in which not only Adani, but Gina Rinehart and Palmer himself hold mining tenements.

Despite mulling over these concerns, I, like most, persisted in believing that the consistency of Labor’s apparent lead would ensure a win for progressives in 2019, but doubted there would be a landslide. It was not to be. And my concern about the disparity between public opinion and party insider belief underestimated the scale of the upset that eventuated. Labor’s dreams were smashed. There will now be many debates about why. The immediate question for Huntley is whether the disjunction between the election outcome (the repudiation of a progressive reform program) and her prior exposition of the Australian penchant for social democracy fatally undermines her argument. My conclusion is: not entirely.

Others will parse this question by looking closely at the differential clustering of opinion by age, geography and demography, to ask whether segmentation manifest in different regional voting patterns can explain how a very close election result can run counter to “national” opinion (as reported by Huntley). For my part, in trying to fathom the wreck of my own hopes, three things seem pertinent. First, one of my early mentors, the late Alan Davies, long ago explained the incoherence and inconsistency of our political outlooks, describing them as like a DIY project where we fashion a response “good enough” to satisfy a particular need, then put that aside until another challenge arises, when we might adopt something different, building up an assemblage of contradictory elements that we can draw on when prompted, but that we never squarely address (see his Skills, Outlooks and Passions, 1980). Different events will then elicit disparate responses (the question of a survey researcher on climate change, versus the task of deciding a vote, for instance). So it becomes possible for an individual to believe that action on climate change is needed, yet to vote for a party that shows little potential for action because a supervening belief (on sound economic management, for instance) is called forth.

Second, Chris Achen and Larry Bartels (Democracy for Realists, 2016) have shown convincingly that voting decisions are driven not by assessments of evidence and policy, but by group identity, emotion and a search for cues from those one regards as “people like us.” Thus, even Liberal supporters, well removed from the inner circles of party activism, closer to mainstream opinion and inclined to support climate action (Huntley notes that 60 per cent of Coalition voters are in this category), once in the voting booth will nevertheless succumb to the emotional pull of party identity and bridle at voting against “people like us.”

Third, one of the pioneers of opinion research, Walter Lippmann, nearly a century ago, warned us to be wary of “the phantom public” in a book of that title (1925). There is, he argued, no “public” out there waiting to be tapped; rather “publics” are created by political mobilisation, triggered by insiders for their own ends. They are emergent rather than stable entities, continually evolving in response to political action and representation. Thus Tony Abbott, always ready with simplifying binaries, articulates the crucial factor in how belief around climate change was mobilised in the 2019 campaign: “Where climate change is a moral issue, we Liberals do it tough. But where climate change is an economic issue the Liberals do well.” The responses Huntley records might well be construed as answers to a normative question: “What should we do?” But the actions of voters on the day can be thought of as an evaluation of economic interests. The Coalition, in successfully mobilising climate action as an economic issue, created a countervailing “public” to that which Huntley and others thought representative of the zeitgeist.

James Walter

NET LOSS

Response to Correspondence

Sebastian Smee

I am not an optimist about the possibility of self-improvement, or even dramatic personal change, so I regret the extent to which my essay came over as a rebuke: You are spending too much time online! You must change your life!

What I really meant, of course, was: I am spending too much time online. Help!

Help is just the thing an online existence can offer, as Fiona Wright reminds us in her response, my favourite among all these generous and eloquent replies. I loved reading them all, but Wright’s was my favourite. It felt like a just rebuke and it was wonderfully written: “In the hour before midnight we all dance in the front room, loose-limbed and sweaty and silly, and we laugh, hard, at the playlist we’ve all added tracks to. The air feels close and warm and like a heartbeat.”

I found Bri Lee’s description of online connections in the wake of trauma as “a gradual fumbling toward the light, often made easier by connections that might be impossible to forge in real life” utterly convincing. The passage in Briohny Doyle’s response that included “We don’t want to be alone, but we mourn the death of solitude” rang so true. I loved Ashleigh Wilson’s description of the threatened status of daydreaming – “those meandering jumbles of thought that can lead, every now and then, to clarity, and even to art” – and Imre Salusinszky’s evocations of the experience of travel before smartphones: “The isolation was painful, but also bracing.”

Somewhere in my essay I acknowledged the upside of social media, but I consigned it to a single paragraph. Lee is right: I “understated the power of the internet to allow previously disempowered, disconnected people to find each other and share their stories.” So let me state clearly that I don’t think social media is inherently bad. Not at all. It’s the drive to profit from it and the ensuing business model that, to me, looks bad – even disastrous. Part of the reason I wrote Net Loss was simply to join a growing chorus of voices sounding the alarm about these business models. I wanted to urge people to go beyond the naivety that treats social media companies as innocent platforms and insists, “But it’s central to my life and so helpful” – all of which is doubtless true – and to acknowledge instead that this experience, both individualised and collective, is part of an unfolding, society-wide crisis. I do not, as Lee suggests, “consider the internet the enemy.” That would be tilting at windmills. I use the internet every day, I depend on it, and I want, what’s more, almost all the things that Wright, Lee and Doyle value. I value them too.

I am worried, rather, about the companies that harness internet technology in order to profit from it, and the effect this is having on all of us. There is no doubt that these companies provide a compelling user experience. But that experience is also, in many cases, dangerously addictive – and not by accident. It is made to be so. This is affecting our children, who are more or less defenceless against the power of the gadgets we give them. In fact, I believe it is changing the very nature of childhood.

It is also affecting society at large, on a scale we are struggling, I think, to understand – in part because we don’t want to understand. Facebook is the punching bag du jour, but that’s because Facebook, which also owns Instagram, had 2.32 billion monthly active users last year. That’s almost a third of the world’s population. Instagram, meanwhile, has more than 1 billion active monthly users. (And yes, I got these figures from the internet.)

Facebook’s 2.32 billion users place their trust in the company. Its profitability depends on that trust, which Facebook converts into “surveillance, the sharing of user data, and behavioral modification,” in the words of Roger McNamee, an early Facebook investor and the man who introduced Mark Zuckerberg to Sheryl Sandberg. Facebook exploits vulnerabilities in human psychology to manipulate attention, because that’s how it makes money. If it did all this as a neutral platform, which it claims to be, that would present a difficult problem. It would be difficult because Facebook has frequently made itself “neutrally” available to bad actors who weaponise it, amplify prejudice, undermine democracy and incite violence, sometimes – as in Myanmar – on a horrific scale. But the premise is wrong, because Facebook is not even close to being neutral. Facebook starts out, according to McNamee in his book Zucked, “giving users ‘what they want,’ but the algorithms are trained to nudge user attention in directions that Facebook wants. The algorithms choose posts calculated to press emotional buttons because scaring users or pissing them off increases time on site. When users pay attention, Facebook calls it engagement, but the goal is behavior modification that maximizes engagement and therefore makes advertising more valuable.”

Facebook is the fourth most valuable company in America. It has detailed profiles on every one of its users. It is controlled by a young man who, during the company’s period of maximum growth, did not believe in data privacy, who sought only to maximise user growth, engagement time, disclosure and sharing because he knew that his company’s value derived from these things.

The implications are massive. Remember: 2.32 billion active monthly users. “Behavioural modification” on this scale might make us all happier, healthier, more connected. Or it might not. It might instead lead, for instance, to changes in government. The results of the Brexit referendum and the US election triggered analyses showing that Facebook, in McNamee’s words, “conferred advantages to campaign messages based on fear or anger over those based on neutral or positive emotions.”

America is living with the results right now, in the form of a raging, infantile president, a corrupt and inept cabinet, a judicial system that looks set to change American society for decades to come, and a widespread, atavistic assault on science, journalism and truth itself.

This worries me. And since every social media company – not to mention every government with authoritarian leanings on both the left and the right – is learning from Facebook’s business success, I worry that down the track, we will only have to worry more.

But did I write my essay because I care so deeply about social media, its uses and abuses?

Not really. Each to his or her own. My wife is active on Facebook and uses it to keep her relationships with family and friends back in Australia meaningfully alive, whereas I, who have deleted my Facebook account (and never used it for personal purposes anyway), struggle to keep up with friends back home. Dear friends. Why? What’s my problem?

I wrote the essay more, I think, to find ways to talk about an obscure feeling I have, and have always had, of being somehow inside myself – full of thoughts and feelings, some exuberant, some melancholy; some simple, some absurdly elaborate – yet being unable, except in rare moments of consolation or bliss, to connect those feelings with other people.

Unable or (and here’s the strange thing) unwilling. Because often the feeling I have is that I don’t want to share, that what is in my head is too special, too precious to share – and that by inference, perhaps, I am too special and precious. This is a kind of narcissism, to be sure.

But it is also what I meant by inner life. We are all, I think – and to a larger extent than we like to admit – islands. No one is carrying around the same experiences in their heads that I do. No one has anything like the same experiences and feelings as my mother, or my father, who are now in their seventies. When they die, we will talk about how special and irreplaceable they are, how much has been lost. But why not talk about it now? They are both utterly unique – not just their genetic make-up but the things they have experienced, learned and read, the things they have made with their hands, the places they have been, the languages they speak, the patterns of connection inside their brains, the things that have most moved them, their inner lives.

“Only connect!” exhorted E.M. Forster (one of the great describers of inner life). But aren’t missed connections so interesting!

When I was in my early twenties and feeling low, a concerned family member suggested that I do some volunteer work, just to get me out of my own head. It was good advice. I took it. My aunt had a contact at the Children’s Hospital. I went along and for a few days worked on the adolescent ward, where the kids who had eating disorders and were long-term patients were gearing up for a party. My job was to help out – garland the place with paper ribbons and so on – but also (ironically, given my own state of mind) to try to contribute a bit of festive cheer. I knew nothing about eating disorders and didn’t learn much either. But I got to know one of the girls there. She was unwell, bedridden, very thin, but making progress. She had been hospitalised for several months.

The part I remember most vividly is when she had a visitor, who was also a teenage girl. The visitor had been to a Madonna concert the night before, and was coming in to tell her friend about it. She had auburn hair, light freckles and a slight accent I couldn’t place. Until a few days earlier, she had been a long-term patient herself. Through the trial of hospitalisation, the two girls had clearly formed a close, mutually supportive friendship. The visitor had made good progress and been released. Her friend still had a way to go. Their conversation that day was awkward, sweet, hopeful, sincere. They didn’t seem to mind me being there, although perhaps they were just being polite.

The tough part came when it was time for the visitor to leave. Both girls put a brave spin on it, but the farewell was full of sadness, in mutual acknowledgment of a cleaving reality: you are free to go, I have to stay; you got to dance the night away at the Madonna concert, I get a pathetic party in this hospital ward; we formed a life-saving bond; you are now leaving me with this random guy, these nurses, these doctors.

The point of my telling this story? I suppose I am trying to signal that I think I understand Wright’s explanation of the benefits of Facebook, and that I understand that yes, all of this online activity is also inner life – urgently so. Had it existed all those years ago, social media would likely have helped the visitor and her friend, providing practical help for survival, ameliorating their separate struggles by fusing them, as much as possible, into a shared struggle – the very definition not just of community, but of something like love.

But I am also still thinking about the problem of connection and the strange dynamics of being there and not being there. This dynamic, which haunts our online existences, but also our lives more generally, somehow remains at the heart of what I was trying to say.

There is a woman in an Alice Munro story who finds herself at the checkout in a small town’s general store. She presents her unusually big pile of groceries to the woman at the cash register, who says – with a “comradely sort of envy” – “You must’ve brought home company.”

“When I wasn’t expecting it,” confirms the woman, adding (of men): “What a lot of bother they are. Not to mention expense. Look at that bacon. And cream.”

“I could stand a bit of it,” says the shopkeeper.

It’s odd, I know, but the shopkeeper reminds me in some strange way of the girl on the ward listening to her friend’s account of the previous night’s Madonna concert. “I could stand a bit of it,” she seemed to be thinking that day, in her comradely sort of way.

And I felt a similar thing myself while reading Wright’s description of dancing in her living room. One of the most beautiful things I have ever seen was a man and a woman dancing at a party. I would write about it (they were dancing together, sweaty and loose-limbed, for more than an hour, their movements and the thing that was going on between them so intimate and extravagant at the same time, and I, a terrible dancer, like a shameful voyeur, couldn’t look away because it was like looking into a fire: I felt I was looking at life itself) but if I say more I will surely betray that feeling, and anyway, this is not the occasion.

Sebastian Smee

NET LOSS

Correspondence

Melanie Joosten

Until I read Net Loss, I had not considered the possibility that my inner life was damaged beyond repair. I was holding onto the belief that not clicking on ads made me unfathomable to advertisers, that turning off the notifications on my social media apps rendered me immune to the internet’s deleterious effects. I thought I was safely standing at the edge of the vast ocean of the internet’s subsuming mediocrity, just dipping my toes in, admiring the view. Reading Smee’s essay, I realised I was already drenched in online distractions. I was possibly even drowning (definitely not waving), and it was time to get serious about nurturing my inner life lest it disappear altogether.

Cannily, Smee puts readers like me at ease with his confession that he spends hours on his phone every day. This was kind reassurance that he would not be preaching from some higher place beyond the wifi signal. In an eloquent but never patronising manner, he argues that all this mindless scrolling is insidious, damaging our minds and filling them with detritus, so that we can no longer judge what is important and what is not. We are in danger of spending so much time preening our surfaces – our Instagram-ready light-drenched homes, our aerial shots of nourishing foods, our long-haired children with their wooden toys and organic cotton rompers – for the viewing pleasure of others that there is no room within our minds for what makes us feel truly seen or understood, what snaps and sparks our intellects into the service of joy.

Net Loss touches on the way being a parent or being in a marriage can bump rudely against one’s inner life; how even as these relationships provide a sense of ballast and happiness they are essentially in competition with the self. Reading this, it struck me that the heavy weight of mothering (yes, mothering, not just parenting – don’t @ me), brings an even more consuming threat to a robust inner life than just the perilous distractions of social media – a double whammy, if you will.

The quandary of looking after young children is well known: so much time spent on tasks that require little more than your presence and, consequently, so much time to think about all the intellectually satisfying things you could be doing if you weren’t pulling errant textas out of the subwoofer, coaxing a nipple into a teething mouth or cleaning smooshed banana from the couch. Claudia Dey describes it perfectly in an essay in The Paris Review:

She speaks the truth. I have just spent twelve months on maternity leave with my second child and among the antics, the terror of the growing list and a lack of adult conversation, I often found myself reaching for my phone, desperate for a signal from the outside. Or even better, a “like” of one of my social media posts, carefully constructed to prove that I was still a functioning part of the world “out there,” which now seemed so distant.

Increasingly I realised that these distracted dips into the online world were making me feel listless – sometimes even useless, jealous, pathetic or sad – rather than invigorated. My hyper-awareness of all the voices in the online world was making my own world harder to be in. My daughters had laid claim to most of my time – I needed to ensure social media did not devour every remaining moment of the day, leaving me with nothing. So I stepped back. I stopped checking Twitter, I logged out of Facebook, and I looked up from the screen. Smee’s essay came at just the right time to help me articulate why this was necessary.

I had believed everyone who told me that becoming a mother was going to be the end of my inner life. That changing priorities and the subsuming love would overpower any personal direction or desire. I knew I would no longer have time for the reading or writing that were integral to my sense of self; I was resigned to being reduced to the algorithm of first-time mother, even as I raged against it. Every time I opened my browser, there were ads for baby paraphernalia and links to articles about mothers: women who existed only in the service of their offspring. I couldn’t see myself in them, but who else could I possibly be?

So I was genuinely surprised to find that when I had recovered from the bloody cleaving and splitting of my body, I was still very much the same person I had always been. I still wanted to read the same books, see the same theatre and start piecing together a new novel. It was the logistics that had changed rather than the desire – and need – for the activities themselves. I now write in small moments of snatched time or larger ones negotiated with my husband (also a writer). I try to avoid the time-suck of social media and make efforts not to search out reviews of every movie I’ve seen or book I’ve read, opinion pieces on what to be outraged by or where to direct my scorn. It’s not easy; I’d become used to the piecemeal energy that the clamour of online distractions offered. Instead, I try to make enough room for my own voice, even if only within my own head, because otherwise I am shouting to be heard: at myself; at my children; at the void.

It is hard to put time aside to nurture my inner life, because it seems like an indulgence. By way of demonstration, Smee’s essay refutes this, making the statement that consuming and creating art are important. His references to various artworks and how they make him feel and think attest to the worth of their creation and his taking the time to understand them. This is what I needed to hear. I write because it engages my mind, allows me to express things I must and gives me the opportunity to think on the page. Writing is an imperfect rendering of my inner life and indispensable to holding together my sense of self. The word “hobby” has always seemed too light, too diminutive for the pleasure and purpose that such activities bring, but I have begun to see that it is through my “hobbies” that my sense of self expands in a way that the reductive online world discourages.

Busier now, I cannot go to a gallery or read long texts without taking myself away from my children, even when in their presence. This is hard: not to resent the hours lost to playgrounds and swimming pools. So, in order not to isolate myself, I turn to my daughters to do some of the heavy lifting – I observe them being in the world and creating their own selves just as I might observe actors in a play, or an artist rendering emotions in paint. Smee’s description of video artists Trecartin and Fitch is eerily and hilariously reminiscent of toddlers, who also demonstrate “what the human personality looks like when there is no inner life, when everything is externalised.”

As the inner life of my three-year-old daughter forms, it bursts out of her constantly, her body and face expressing what she will one day learn to restrain. Watching her learn to “perform” her self, and to start hiding away some of her feelings, I realise that my inner life – this thing I cultivate in time away from my children – while so essential to my own being, will always remain obscure and unknowable to them. As it should. However, when Smee writes about the panic induced by the realisation of our aloneness, and that death will one day take with us whatever we regard as a soul or self, I wonder: am I guarding my inner life too fiercely? Recording an online version of oneself is a valiant attempt to share – to be seen and heard, to be a part of something. But it is damagingly reductive. Algorithms don’t allow for the ambivalence, the nuance, the multiple truths. I want my daughters to grow up and accept the mess of life, not just cleaned-up data and identities shorn of subtlety and ambiguity.

So perhaps – in real life – I need to attempt to make the line between the inner and outer self more permeable. Sharing some parts of my inner life with those I am close to will give me less reason to seek the voices and validation of the online world. It may also strengthen and magnify my inner life – or at the very least, keep it visible to me.

Melanie Joosten

NET LOSS

Correspondence

Fiona Wright

To say upfront what needs to be said: I am a millennial. I am a millennial, and this response will probably seem solipsistic, and it will be fragmentary. It’s not that I can’t help it. It’s not my attention span, my inherent narcissism. I’m just making a point.

*

I went to a party on New Year’s Eve, a fairly small party, at my friend Theo’s house. Early on, I started chatting to some people hanging about in the kitchen, near the chips, near the cheese; I asked them how they know Theo and one said, oh, I know him from Twitter. Yeah, me too, said another.

I know Theo as a friend-of-a-friend, and I found out later that the friend who introduced us also met him on Twitter. And he was new to Sydney, he adds, so we went out for a drink.

In the hour before midnight we all dance in the front room, loose-limbed and sweaty and silly, and we laugh, hard, at the playlist we’ve all added tracks to. The air feels close and warm and like a heartbeat.

*

On Facebook, I have a group of men and women whom I met in hospital, as well as men and women I haven’t met who’ve been admitted there since. We ask each other for advice, for recommendations of dietitians and psychologists, we share frustrations and small triumphs and those niggling awful thoughts that only people who know this illness understand. It’s these people I go to when I can’t stop thinking that I should stop taking my meds because I’ve decided they’re making me hungry. It’s these people I go to when I fit back into my older, larger swimsuit, and feel triumphant and terribly sad, both at once. And yes, we share photos of food – but here they mean something powerful, something exultant, something extraordinary.

*

On Instagram, my artist friend is cutting up old canvases to stitch them into something new. Another is hanging her show in Dubbo and her beautifully detailed miniatures look like the scales of a giant sea-creature, silvery and somehow fluid, there on the wall. My friend, a burlesque dancer, posts photos from the class she teaches, a line of women, all shapes and sizes, laughing and shimmying. A photographer, some glossy stills from a recent shoot, low-lit landscapes, eerie and plangent. None of these I would ever, otherwise, have seen.

*

On Facebook, I have a group of writers who share job opportunities, and competitions, and calls for pitches and submissions, who share book and research recommendations, warnings about dodgy clients, advice about pay rates, commiserations over rejections. One writer is working on a PhD proposal, so I send her mine to use as a model. Another isn’t sure if the word he’s using is a regionalism, and within an hour has responses from all across the country, confirming or denying that it’s used there. I need access to a university library, and someone loans me their credentials. We’re freelancers. We have no job security, no company resources, no employers. But we do have each other, and this feels important.

*

On Instagram, I follow an account where women – it doesn’t explicitly say they’re women, but they so obviously are – post screenshots of the awful or disgusting or just generally creepy messages that men on Tinder send them (the sender’s name always obscured), and this feels revolutionary.

On Instagram, I follow an account where a woman, an ordinary-looking, unmade-up woman, takes photos of herself beaming and holding junk food – a Heineken beer she calls “green juice,” three broken-open crème eggs labelled as a “protein breakfast,” a Bounty chocolate bar captioned “coconut and cacao bite” and this feels revolutionary.

*

Through Facebook, a woman in the States has organised both the funds to pay a migrant woman’s bail and a convoy of volunteer drivers to take her across the breadth of that country to where her children had been taken after they were separated at the border by migration officials. So many people offered money, offered help, that she has since arranged to do this for many more women, to provide them with legal aid, assistance with housing, amenities, clothes.

On Twitter, I read about a woman raising money to pay the fines of impoverished Indigenous women mandatorily imprisoned in Western Australia for being unable to make those payments themselves. Five thousand people donate in four days. Thirty women are set free in the same time. This isn’t clicktivism. This is defiance.

*

On Instagram, a poet friend takes photos of her semi-industrial suburb – concrete driveways, wire fences, bougainvillea gone rampantly wild – and is using them to write a new collection. On Instagram, a novelist friend takes photos of details of suburban houses – art nouveau friezes, dichromatic brickwork, porticos and pebbledash letterboxes – and uses these to write his debut. On Instagram, a writer friend takes photos of old-fashioned and outmoded Sydney buildings – a dusty milk bar on Parramatta Road, a mushroom-shaped reservoir towering above Petersham, a roller-skating rink, a civic centre – and maps these in her work. These books are smart and literary, thoughtful and odd, and full of joy and longing.

*

On Twitter, last year, I started following people writing about chronic illness and disability, and I read and I read: their posts, their links, their articles. On Facebook, I joined a group of writers with chronic illness and disability, and I read, and I learned. I would not have been able to come to terms with my own illness, to think of and accept it as disability, without this, not at all; and this is a revelation.

And all of this is inner life.

Fiona Wright

NET LOSS

Correspondence

Briohny Doyle

Sebastian Smee doesn’t feel like an algorithm. He feels more like a character in one of Chekhov’s short stories, or a quality of attention in a painting by Cézanne, or even, at moments of digital overload, like the electric hum that passes between the unhinged and sinister occupants of Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch’s surreal post-internet art-films. As corporate entities vie for our attention and collapse human existence into data, Smee accesses his inner life via these works of art. Inner life is hard to pin down, though. It’s to do with meaning, Smee asserts. It is imaginative, quiet and particular. It’s not about production, though it can be creative. It’s an undervalued part of our identities right now, as we scramble to broadcast our “selves” out into the white noise of culture. Critically, Smee demonstrates that inner life can be framed as a space of refuge and even resistance in late capitalism.

I’m sceptical of claims to authenticity – intimations of a real you behind the stage-lit scrim – but Smee’s melancholy over neglected inner life suggests he thinks this realm is muscular, requiring discipline to strengthen rather than existing a priori in the manner of a Catholic soul. I can certainly get behind this and I suspect the higher-ups at Facebook and Twitter would too. They want us to work this muscle in a particular way. They are helping us to train. How long was Facebook in action before we started thinking in status updates? What impact does trimming our ideas and opinions to 140 characters have on their content and scope? Ruminating on art and literature seems like a sensible strategy to counter this training. But although developing our inner life seems unambiguously worthwhile, I don’t hold with Smee’s hope that it will protect us from corporate incursions into our privacy. Inner life is not hermetically sealed. It’s a catchment into which the flows of everyday life swirl and bubble. This produces a particularly heady mix at present, but hasn’t it always, at least to some extent?

If art communicates the richness of human experience, the diaries and notebooks of artists show lives simultaneously riddled with anxiety and superficiality, even before the internet. On a Friday morning in June 1938, before sitting down to work on The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck wrote in his journal, “I had wanted to hear some music but the washing machine is going and I’ll have a fairly hard time. I would do it tonight but I must go to the dentist and my jaws will be battered. My whole nervous system is battered. Don’t know why. I hope I am not heading for a nervous breakdown.” The next day, he begins an entry with “My traffic fine was $2.50. Thought it might be twenty-five. But now to work.”

Susan Sontag, who helped us read the dangerous metaphors of the twentieth century, had other things on her mind too. In 1960, she realised how bad her posture was: “It’s not that my shoulders and back are round but that my head is thrust forward,” and four years later, a list of her faults includes a special note: “NB: My ostentatious appetite – real need – to eat exotic and ‘disgusting’ foods.”

Tennessee Williams, a playwright whose characters are often destroyed by a violent dissonance between their inner lives and the social structures they’re embedded in, kept obsessive notebooks full of tweet-worthy confessions. “I have a periodically painful tooth that worries me,” he wrote in 1936. “It is surprising that all of us don’t go mad in this world.”

For every hour Cézanne and Chekhov spent pondering nature and human interaction, and every hour we have been enriched in turn, there have been billions collectively whiled away in worry, distraction, ambition, pettiness, hypochondria, narcissism, lust over a maiden’s ankles, or coveting the neighbour’s goat. Is the internet making this worse? Certainly. The internet is sculpted in the image of present-day capitalism. Today, many of us have more time for leisure, but we feel more pressured to produce, consume and perfect. In the future, we may feel less pressured but will also likely have less time and energy, due to the realities of surviving in new climates, both political and environmental.

I was reminded, while reading Smee’s essay, of the Spike Jonze film Her, in which lonely, perpetually networked characters in a not-so-distant future convene and even fall in love with artificial intelligences. For protagonist Theodore (who works appropriating the emotional lives of others by writing their love letters), the emergence of Sam, his AI “girlfriend,” inspires him to relate to the world in profound new ways. In the end, though, the film reveals that human consciousness is too limited to access the infinite possibilities of existence, and Sam leaves to hang out with some more open-minded entities. Poor humans, we can only think one thought at a time, are limited in our communication by language, and are utterly unable to see beyond our selves. It is our tragedy and also our gift, as these limitations provide the conditions for art, and for love.

Writing about digital technologies tends to reproduce a ubiquitous contemporary conflict. We benefit from the internet, can see possibilities for further benefit, while also encountering negative effects. We are reluctant to unplug, even if this means disconnection from other, more meaningful aspects of life. Smee doesn’t want to be a snob proclaiming high and low forms of experience, yet he can’t help it and neither can we. We don’t want to be nostalgic, but we ache for the imagined simplicity of lost worlds. We don’t want to be alone, but we mourn the death of solitude. We grapple, we are conflicted, and then, sometimes mercifully, we are distracted.

Briohny Doyle

FOLLOW THE LEADER

Response to Correspondence

Laura Tingle

Paul Kelly, a great journalistic mentor to me early in my career, would often say, exasperatedly, to the more junior reporters in The Australian’s Canberra bureau in the late 1980s and 1990s: “It’s the context that’s important!”

Context really is everything in political reporting. It is the way of understanding how a political statement or position can remain unchanged, but the movement of everything else around it can leave the statement or position – and the person who holds it – occupying completely different ground to that on which the statement was first made. And of course context, more broadly, means understanding where events or developments fit into a larger story.

Preparing to read through the correspondence on Follow the Leader, I reread the last sections of the essay to refresh my mind on where it had ended. You would think that they would be still fairly fresh in my mind, given it is just on two months ago that I was making the last few tweaks to the essay.

Yet the context for doing that was the tumultuous madness of an imploding government terminating yet another Australian prime minister. When you write a book or an essay, you often sneak a look at it a year or two later, hoping that your arguments have withstood the test of time. These days, you wonder whether they have stood the test of even a couple of months.

The point I am getting around to is that rereading the end of the essay made me contemplate how context seems to have disappeared almost completely from our political dialogue. And that has profound implications for our relationships with our leaders, and for our perception of events.

For example, consider the way we viewed the results of the Wentworth by-election pretty much in isolation from many of the political events that preceded it. Sure, there was plenty of discussion of an angry electorate making its feelings known about the toppling of the last prime minister – and the popular local member to boot. There was plenty of discussion, too, of issues such as climate change and asylum seekers. But how much analysis of the historic swing against the Liberal Party was put into the context of what happened just three months earlier, on 28 July, the day of the so-called “Super Saturday” by-elections?

It was noted that the swing in Wentworth was double that in Longman. The result in Longman had, after all, been one of the reasons given for toppling Malcolm Turnbull. But in the Wentworth postmortems, little attention was paid to the outcome as a continuation of what we saw more broadly on 28 July, across five by-elections: a splintering of the major-party vote, and the failure of the major parties to win the centre.

The argument made about Longman was that it was not the size of the swing that was important, but that the LNP’s primary vote collapsed to just under 30 per cent. I think that rather misses the point that comes out of both Super Saturday and Wentworth, and which is relevant to my essay.

That obvious point is that, as I said in my essay, the Australian response to disillusionment with politics is overwhelmingly towards disempowering the major parties, rather than looking to a “strongman.” I’m sure some voters would still like a strong leader who makes a few sweeping but simple promises about how he or she would make their lives better. But we have had a few of those recently – notably Tony Abbott – and most voters have decided it is not their cup of tea.

The irony here is that, whether in the form of the upset vote for an independent in Wentworth or the now minority status of the Morrison government, voters are stripping the formal leaders of our national politics of their status.

Amanda McKenzie reflects in her response to the essay on the rise of leadership outside formal positions of authority – the sort Ronald Heifetz considers in his book. McKenzie gives the #MeToo movement as an example of this. But it is interesting to consider the extent to which the rise of parliamentary independents is, or becomes, an institutional way to recast the political agenda.

That is, as voters move away from the major parties, and even from minor parties, simple protest votes to reject the current political incumbent may gather enough scale and force to reshape the debate entirely.

To show how tin-eared our professional politicians can be, the prime minister, Scott Morrison, and his colleagues not only disavowed the Wentworth result, but implied that the seat’s voters were electoral freaks whose views didn’t reflect those of the rest of Australia and, thus, that there was no message to be had from the biggest swing against an incumbent government ever.

All of this gives a little context with which to consider some of the thoughtful contributions made by the correspondents. Katharine Murphy speaks of how politicians need to see themselves – in their positions – as institutional forces, not just players in a drama. And her observations echo those of Sean Kelly, who notes Scott Morrison’s dismissive words about not only his new office, but also the institutions that surround it: his own party and both federal–state and international governance.

Morrison has been two months in the job, and the image we have of our latest prime minister is of the ultimate cynic and political apparatchik. If we generously concede that he has little room to manoeuvre because of the imminence of a federal election, we much less generously observe that this did not stop him, nor justify, trashing sensitive and bipartisan policy, and policy-making processes, as he did when publicly raising the question of whether Australia should move its embassy to Jerusalem a week before the Wentworth by-election. This is not leadership. It is not consensus-building. It is not running a calm debate, or consulting with the community.

Senate hearings revealed that this announcement was made without consulting the foreign affairs or defence establishments, without a full and proper cabinet process, and with the foreign minister only finding out about it two days before the announcement.

If you think the prime minister is within his rights to make such a call in such circumstances, you only have to look at what he himself said when he re-adopted the hardest lines on offshore detention – lines softened in the lead-up to the Wentworth by-election. The prime minister was not going to “horse-trade” on this issue, he told a Canberra press conference. He took his advice from the experts on border security matters, not from other politicians. The standing of advice, it appears, varies considerably depending on the subject at hand.

So it seems, under this government at least, that the day-to-day mechanics of leading the country, or showing leadership, have only more sharply deteriorated with a change of prime minister.

But what about the context in which these decisions are made? There is much to be said for Scott Ryan’s argument that it is the rise of social issues that previously didn’t form part of the domestic political debate that has changed the way our political conversations are conducted.

It is certainly true that it is easier to find compromises or trade-offs on economic issues than it might be on a contentious issue like same-sex marriage, where, as he says, you can legislate or not legislate. But I would argue the change in the way we see our leaders predates the rise of such social issues to the foreground of political contention.

Like Ryan, Nyadol Nyuon considers how the policy context has influenced the conduct of our politics, observing that the War on Terror has transformed Western democracies by expanding what it is acceptable for leaders to do in the domestic sphere.

We should think further about how today’s pressing issues have changed and shaped the way we conduct our debates, an idea that, compared with the usual resort to explaining things as an outcome of a faster media cycle, raises interesting questions.

Just as leadership is a two-way relationship between leaders and followers, I’m sure it is true that the scope for leaders to emerge, and the shape of debates that can be had, is driven in part by the nature of the issues we face at any given time. And different subjects also require different tactics.

Political tactics now seem to dominate our leaders’ repertoires, yet for all that, these tactics are often simplistic and bombastic. Shireen Morris observes, “The best leaders, when dealing with vexing policy and political problems, take on board the legitimate concerns of their opponents, learn from them and use the lessons to forge a new and better synthesis position. They hammer out a noble compromise.” Her observation reminded me that some of our more cunning political leaders of recent decades were experts in the art of stealing their opponent’s policy clothes, but wrapping them up in their own decoration, in a way that made it hard for the other side to oppose a policy. Since it generally feels that our leaders these days start from the point of assessed political advantage, rather than policy principle, it is difficult to see how they can then adapt such fleet-of-foot tactics.

Discussing Follow the Leader in many forums and interviews in the last couple of months has only confirmed to me the deep pessimism many Australians have about the state of our political leadership. Strangely, having thought about it so intensively in the last year, and having to observe the paucity of it in my day job over the past few decades, I am not as pessimistic as many others. We should not despair and believe it is impossible for our leadership to get better, or that the modern news cycle makes it impossible. I look at leaders like Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand, and what Angela Merkel was able to achieve over two extraordinary decades in Germany’s history, and am reminded that periodically, often when you least expect it, someone does come along with a particular set of talents and finds themselves in a context where they can change the political conversation. They can speak intelligently to the electorate. They offer substance, not slogans.

The institutions of our political leadership may be on the wane and being transformed by disillusioned voters. But that does not mean good political leadership is a thing of the past.

Laura Tingle

FOLLOW THE LEADER

Correspondence

Nyadol Nyuon

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Thomas Jefferson’s oft-quoted words, from the Declaration of Independence, continue to inspire many today; however, they were written by men who “participated in the brutal and degrading institution of slavery.”

In his book Less Than Human, David Livingstone Smith writes that in light of Jefferson’s participation in the institution of slavery, his words in the Declaration raised the question who “should be counted as human.” And to “square the moral circle” between the “economic attraction of slavery and the Enlightenment vision of human dignity,” the Founding Father of the American Republic found a way by denying that African slaves were human. This view was shared by many “champions of liberty” at the time, and such views continued to be enshrined in laws and administered by democratic institutions (such as the US Supreme Court) until the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s.

While the Founding Fathers and Enlightenment thinkers might have reconciled their apparent inconsistencies, the words of the Declaration never had the power to persuade the likes of Frederick Douglass, a former slave and abolitionist. In a speech delivered seventy-six years later, he invoked the Declaration to point to the hypocrisy embedded in America from the time of its founding. He described what the anniversary of independence meant to African slaves in America:

I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you this day rejoice, are not enjoyed in common …

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sound of rejoicing are [sic] empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanks-givings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy – a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.

These are strong words, but appropriate for their time.

What, though, does the Declaration of Independence have to do with an essay about political leadership in the modern world? The simple answer is that the inconsistencies and hypocrisies that existed at that time are an inherent part of Western democracies – at least as viewed by those who have never fully enjoyed democracy’s fruits.

Those inconsistencies and hypocrisies, arguably, still exist today. “When was it ever great?” was one African American reply to Donald Trump’s campaign slogan “Make America Great Again.” Some of the issues discussed in Laura Tingle’s essay, such as the apparent failure of democracy and its links to the rise of the “strongman” leader, would not be new to certain groups of people, because even if leaders with strongman personas did not exist, they were governed in ways that mirrored strongmen politics and tactics.

It has been argued, for example, that, “the relationship between the American democratic government and African Americans is analogous to the totalitarian power hierarchy. The U.S. government bears a resemblance to elites while African Americans resemble the ruled class in the totalitarian power structure.” On that view, Donald Trump is a new incarnation of an old type.

That said, there might be a difference that explains the reaction of moderate Americans to Trump. The possible difference is that there has been an expansion of the category of scapegoat – in the Trump era, moderate and liberal Americans and political opponents are now targeted alongside more traditional scapegoat groups, such as African Americans, other minorities and foreigners.

Tingle quotes Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, from their book How Democracies Die:

Republican politicians … learned that in a polarized society, treating rivals as enemies can be useful – and that the pursuit of politics as warfare can mobilize people who fear they have much to lose.

The labelling of political opponents and others as scapegoats changes the conduct of politics (by “rewriting the rules of politics to permanently disadvantage” rivals) and of leaders (all the way from Newt Gingrich to Donald Trump).

Nikki Haley, the outgoing US ambassador to the United Nations, denied this applied to the United States recently, when she said:

In our toxic political environment, I’ve heard some people in both parties describe their opponents as enemies or evil. In America, our political opponents are not evil. In South Sudan, where rape is routinely used as a weapon of war – that is evil. In Syria, where the dictator uses chemical weapons to murder innocent children – that is evil. In North Korea, where American student Otto Warmbier was tortured to death – that was evil. In the last two years, I’ve seen true evil.

Haley’s statement reveals the inconsistency and hypocrisy of American democracy. While the United States holds itself up as democratic, better and greater than other nations, a close look at recent American history, domestic and foreign, would produce a list of “evils” to rival those given by Haley: the use of torture in the War on Terror; the indefinite detention without trial of prisoners at Guantanamo; the killing, rape, torture and humiliation suffered by prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison during the Iraq War; or the recent Trump policy to separate immigrant children from their parents and relatives at the US border.

Some of the examples above relate to American foreign policy, and I accept Laura Tingle’s view that foreign policy is a different area of leadership. Tingle, however, acknowledges that how foreign policy is conducted can influence domestic politics. It can change “the way we see and judge our leaders” and has been used by political leaders to “escape the obligation to consult and build a consensus – whether to pursue actions they believe in on the world stage, or to present themselves as strong leaders at home.”

Perhaps in addition, the conduct of foreign policy (and the way we treat minorities or “enemies” within) influences our domestic politics in more insidious ways. The War on Terror has possibly transformed Western democracies as it has transformed countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq. It shifts the “Overton Window” by expanding what it is acceptable for leaders to do in the domestic sphere. In my view, one of the ways this occurs is by gradually eroding belief in the importance and the indispensability of principles and norms that were once held to be fundamental to how a society saw itself. One wonders, for example, whether the reported abuses against American citizens under the Patriot Act would have occurred without the War on Terror. A report in 2007 showed the FBI was “increasingly targeting citizens and green card holders, with more than 11,517 requests in 2006 targeting U.S. persons, while Non-U.S. persons were targeted with 8,605 requests.”

In 1852, Frederick Douglass registered how the treatment of those deemed to be enemies, and therefore deserving of hostile treatment, could corrupt all. In his speech, he asserted that the existence of slavery “destroys your moral power abroad; it corrupts your politicians at home.”

In another, related context, David Smith emphasised that one would be “sorely mistaken” to think of rhetoric dehumanising others as mere talk. He argued: “Dehumanization isn’t a way of talking. It’s a way of thinking … It acts as a psychological lubricant, dissolving our inhibitations and inflaming our destructive passions. As such, it empowers us to perform acts that would, under other circumstances, be unthinkable.”

Like the author, I have zoomed out a little further than “Trumpian political developments” to the underlying subject of the essay: how do we best organise a community of people? The answer will depend in part on who is considered part of the community and therefore who is consulted, listened to and protected. I have argued that because certain groups have never enjoyed the full benefits of living in democracies, and have in fact been the direct victims of strongmen politics even as their societies claimed to be democratic, there is, in fact, no slide to some more worrying type of political leader, nor is there a crisis of democracy – at least not one justifying the current reaction.

In their 2014 article “The Crisis of Democracy: Which Crisis? Which Democracy?” Selen A. Ercan and Jean-Paul Gagnon argued, “there is nothing new about the democratic crisis diagnosis. In other words, crisis has never been the exception to the rule; rather, it is an inherent feature of democracy … [yet] if crisis is an inherent feature of democratic politics … what we need is a more reflexive democracy – a type of democracy that continuously confronts its own limits and logics of exclusion.” That democracy is not a settled concept is revealed in terms such as “the American experiment,” or in President Macron’s statement that “France, the country of revolution, is once again a leading political laboratory.”

Conceivably, a good place to start in understanding how to confront the limits and logic of exclusion in a democracy is the essay’s recommendation that leaders have to rebuild “the national political discussion after years of it being under assault.” Perhaps by doing so they can foster an environment that does more for democracy than “keep the word of promise to our ear, and break it to our hope.”

Nyadol Nyuon

FOLLOW THE LEADER

Correspondence

Shireen Morris

“Why would you want to go into politics?”

I’ve been standing at train stations the past several weeks, handing out flyers in my fingerless gloves. Shivering in the morning sun. Saying hello to commuters.

This is a new experience. I’ve been an actor, a singer, a check-out chick and an admin assistant. A constitutional lawyer and an advocate. Never a unionist, a staffer or a wannabe politician. Never a campaigner on the street. The hustings, as they say, is an exciting new place.

A sample of the flustered public rushes by, half of them blocking me out with earphones, iPhones and well-planned head-down avoidance of eye contact (I don’t blame them) – but others are eager to chat. Among the occasional “Well done!” and complaints about the Liberal leadership spill, the “I’m not voting for a Dutton man!” declarations and the bread-and-butter questions about healthcare, schools, wages and penalty rates, plus the odd “Piss off, you’re all the same!” reprimand, people also occasionally pause to ask: “Why on earth would you want to go into politics?”

The disillusionment underlying the question is palpable. Politicians are liars and backstabbers, seems to be the view. “It’s a dirty game. They’re just in it for themselves,” people observe. And given the machinations of recent times, they appear to be right. “Do you think you can really make a difference?” one local asks, genuinely wanting to know. My answer is, as usual, “I hope I can. I will work hard to.” But people are fed up with self-serving politicians. They have every right to be sceptical.

As the new Labor candidate for Deakin, I found that Laura Tingle’s Quarterly Essay posed a bracing question: what are the characteristics of a true leader, and what is true leadership in politics? And why did I think I could, or should, put myself forward to represent my community – this particular part of the eastern suburbs of Melbourne where I grew up – in federal parliament?

The bullying and backstabbing that seem to characterise contemporary Australian politics raise a further question: why would a woman strive to be a politician in today’s climate? And if parts of society now crave a “strongman,” as Tingle contends, how does one strive to be a strong woman in a political system that is not only male-dominated, but also increasingly vitriolic, vengeful and polarised?

Is it possible to be better than the existing culture, or even to change that culture for the better? Within this system, can one be not only a good politician, but also a good leader?

An experienced parliamentarian, offering advice on my campaign, observed that Parliament has many consummate politicians – people who can talk well, play the game and appear polished. “But Parliament needs more thoughtful people,” he said. This set a nice challenge. Don’t just be a slick politician. Be thoughtful. Be a leader.

I tend towards optimism, so I believe Australia’s democratic culture can change for the better. It requires the Australian people, and the politicians themselves, to insist things change. To demand it.

I largely agree with Tingle’s stated criteria for a good leader. Leaders should explain, advocate and persuade people to adopt good ideas. Follow the Leader discussed the former US president Lyndon Johnson. Noel Pearson also often talks about LBJ’s strategic prowess, and the way he seized a historic moment to deliver the Civil Rights Act in the face of tough conditions. LBJ was a great persuader. I watched the movie All the Way, which dramatises his civil rights strategy, and was struck by a key line. Johnson’s advisers were trying to warn him that pursuing Kennedy’s civil rights bill could jeopardise his electoral chances. “What the hell’s the presidency for?” LBJ demanded. He stuck to his guns. The Civil Rights Act was signed into law in 1964.

Tingle is correct that leaders must know how to seize historic opportunities. Instead, we often see politicians baulking at leading necessary reform, in favour of playing it safe at the polls. Clinging to power, instead of wielding it for the national good. In doing so, they too often underestimate the people.

One of my frustrations working as an advocate for Indigenous constitutional recognition has been the way some politicians blame the public for their lack of reform action. In rejecting the Uluru Statement from the Heart, Malcolm Turnbull not only verballed the Australian people – he blamed them for his cowardly stance. A First Nations voice in the constitution is not “desirable or capable of winning acceptance at referendum,” Turnbull claimed. “The government does not believe such a radical change to our constitution’s representative institutions has any realistic prospect of being supported by a majority of Australians in a majority of states.”

When asked if the government had evidence to back this up, Indigenous Affairs Minister Nigel Scullion said they had done no polling – he was just “following his gut.” The Australian people were used an excuse for government inaction, but with no evidence. These so-called leaders chose to pessimistically predict that Australians would reject a First Nations voice, instead of just asking them – through a referendum.

Polling exposed the dishonesty of the Liberal government’s excuse. An Omnipoll showed 61 per cent of Australians would vote yes to a First Nations Voice in the Constitution – and that was in the face of government opposition. Does that figure sound familiar? It’s the same proportion that voted “yes” in the same-sex marriage postal survey.

On same-sex marriage, Turnbull, despite his procedural incompetence, at least advocated for the reform. “Lucy and I will be voting yes,” he said. With such leadership, Australians voted 61 per cent in favour. He showed no such leadership on Indigenous recognition. On this issue, Turnbull was a deliberate wet blanket and even promulgated lies about the proposal, calling it a “third chamber of parliament.”

The proposal is not a “third chamber” and not “radical” – and Turnbull knew it. In 2015, in a private meeting, Turnbull (then communications minister) told Noel Pearson and me that an Indigenous advisory body in the Constitution “sounds sensible” and even offered to help promote it, perhaps through a pub event in Wentworth. A few years later, as prime minister, he fearmongered. My best explanation is that he caved in to pressure from the right of his party in order to cling to his position.

Yet what is the prime ministership for, if not for Indigenous constitutional recognition?

Paul Keating understood the importance of reconciliation for the soul and future of our nation. Perhaps Turnbull, deep down, understood it too. In 2011, he reflected on the history of colonisation in Melbourne in The Monthly:

When governments say doing the right thing is “too hard,” what they are really saying is that it is more lucrative, or expedient, to do the wrong thing. Our forebears preached protection of native people and the blessings of Christ while they largely destroyed a people and a way of life.

So if you ever walk quietly along Robert Hoddle’s wide boulevards or along the banks of the Yarra, tamed to look like an English river, listen carefully. You may hear the weeping of the Kulin – betrayed, dispossessed, but not yet quite forgotten.

Yet in 2017, faced with the political realities within his party, Turnbull rejected the Uluru Statement. Doing the right thing was evidently too hard. It was more expedient to do the wrong thing.

It takes a leader with both moral courage and strategic nous to achieve substantive reconciliatory reform – especially constitutional reform, which requires the support of both left and right. I’m not saying it’s easy. One, of course, must compromise and rally consensus. One must keep power in order to use it.

Yet after capitulating to internal right-wing detractors on many important policies and principles, Turnbull still got knifed. The lesson is clear: selling out does not necessarily stop insurrection. It only shows you don’t stand for anything.

The same-sex marriage survey demonstrated that many Liberal Party politicians are often behind the Australian electorate on matters of social justice. The Liberal Party insisted on the postal survey. But Tony Abbott, an elected representative of the Australian people, did not respect his own electorate’s wishes. Although Warringah voted 75 per cent in favour of same-sex marriage, Abbott left the parliamentary chamber before the final vote on the legislation, along with his conservative colleague, Michael Sukkar. Sukkar had promised he would respect the outcome of the survey and respect his electorate’s wishes. His electorate, Deakin, voted 65.7 per cent in favour – also above the national average. Yet Sukkar ran out of the Parliamentary Chamber behind Abbott when the final vote was imminent.

What does this say about how connected the right wing of the Liberal Party are to their democratic constituents? Refusing to listen to Australians you represent – that is not leadership. Breaking a promise to respect the electorate’s wishes – that is not leadership. Running out of the Chamber – that is not leadership.

The best leaders, when dealing with vexing policy and political problems, take on board the legitimate concerns of their opponents, learn from them and use the lessons to forge a new and better synthesis position. They hammer out a noble compromise. When I say noble compromise, I do not mean a lowest common denominator compromise. It is possible to find a noble compromise on persisting disagreements.

Finding this “radical centre” requires both parties to shift. To shift one’s position, even if slightly, shows humility. It also shows intelligence – for the smartest people know they cannot be right on everything, and even their rightness can be refined. The insights of others, bringing different life experiences to our own, can open our minds – if only we have the courage to hear what others say. It also shows empathy. Listening to and acknowledging opposing views lets others know their grievances have been heard. Feeling heard is conducive to cohesion, inclusion and unity.

Tingle is correct, I think, that a huge part of leadership is the ability to corral opposing factions into compromise agreements, both within one’s own party and within the broader parliament, but also across the public sphere. This is also the way to create good policy. The best policy is not simply that of the left or right. The best policy synthesises the brilliance that can be found across the political spectrum, and across the breadth of philosophical thought: good ideas from socialism, liberalism and conservatism. The Liberal Party’s slide to the right demonstrates a loss of balanced leadership, and this is bad for Australia. Politics needs balance, not extremism.

“Why would you want to become a politician?”

When Malcolm Turnbull rejected the Uluru Statement, I, like so many Australians, was heartbroken. A historic, unprecedented First Nations consensus was ignored. Years of lobbying from the outside came to nothing. I realised then that you have to be inside parliament, where the decisions are made, to truly change things – and not just on constitutional reform, but on climate change, health, education, inequality and so much more.

The events of the past several months, and indeed the leadership instability of the past several years, pose a challenge to politicians and would-be politicians – on all sides. Our democracy needs to do better. My hope is that political representatives can find ways to pursue leadership in the inclusive and intelligent centre, to focus more on the best policy and the best ideas, and less on plotting and “playing the game.” The challenge for all of us is to work together to herald the better angels of our nation’s nature.

Shireen Morris

FOLLOW THE LEADER

Correspondence

Sean Kelly

Laura Tingle, in order to point to the structural changes to the presidency that Donald Trump may leave behind, helpfully cites Miranda Carter on Kaiser Wilhelm II. Carter argues that the Kaiser had certain odd personality traits, which found sympathy in Germany during his reign, but which left the nation depleted after his abdication.

Of course, as Carter’s description makes clear, both men can rightly be called egotistical fools. We can hold them in contempt, but holding them personally responsible for the deep wounds they might open is another matter.

But what of our current batch of political leaders in Australia? Think of them what you like, they are sane and capable of complex thought. Their attacks on democracy are not so strident. The legacy these attacks will leave is not really structural; it is emotional. It is still a legacy.

Now that prime ministers are removed with alacrity, we can easily forget the specific beginnings of the current period of tumult. There were several factors behind Kevin Rudd’s removal, but one was the importation of a model that had seemed to work, up to a point, in New South Wales. One of the very great mistakes in this was the assumption that a prime minister was just like a premier – when the relationship between voters and the leader of the nation is very different from that between voters and the leader of a state. Premiers are important, but I suspect a prime minister affects the way we think about our own identity in a way a premier never will. The move was self-fulfilling: by treating a prime minister like a premier, a course was embarked upon which leads us to the place where we now find ourselves, in which prime ministers have in fact been reduced almost to the status of premiers.

The point, an obvious one, though not quite so obvious at the time, is that actions taken to preserve power in the short term can end up having long-term effects. Again, leadership change is not the only factor in the rapid escalation in disrespect for politicians and government, but few would suggest it has not been a major one.

This put me in mind of more recent and more minor examples, which are still, I believe, important. The new – at the time of writing – prime minister, Scott Morrison, has already, in just under two months, made several comments that seem dismissive of the job he has taken on and the institutions that surround him.

He began by talking about the “Muppet show” around the removal of Malcolm Turnbull. The diagnosis was fair, but in making it – presumably in an eagerness to empathise with voters – he overlooked, perhaps, the authority a prime minister’s words still, against all odds, have. The leader of one of the country’s two major parties describing his party in that way does nothing to restore respect.

Not long after, the prime minister cancelled a Council of Australian Governments (COAG) meeting, which was expected to deal with school and hospital funding. The move was understandable; a new prime minister may well want to alter arrangements. But at a press conference he was asked a bland question about the status of various meetings and took the opportunity to attack Labor, with the risk of casting aspersions on COAG itself: “The Labor Party can have as many meetings as they like, they [don’t] seem to be able to resolve anything when they are in government. They were great at having meetings. The only thing that happens as a result of not having that COAG meeting is less Tim Tams will be consumed in Canberra that week.”

More recently, Mr Morrison was asked by Alan Jones about the conclusions of the IPCC’s latest climate change report. Again, he chose to go on the attack on something he had not even been asked about: “No, we’re not held to any of them at all, Alan, nor are we bound to go and tip money into that big climate fund, we’re not going to do that either. So I’m not going to spend money on global climate conferences and all that sort of nonsense, I’m not going to get in there … ”

In the space of a few weeks, the prime minister sought to ridicule his own party, federal–state governance and international governance. Then there was his threat to intervene at the ABC: “I expect the ABC board to do better. And if they don’t, well they can expect a bit more attention from me.”

There is no mystery about this approach. In a 2017 address to the Liberal Party federal council, Morrison, then the treasurer, talked about the appeal of Donald Trump and Jeremy Corbyn, who, he said, had taken “on the role of the authentic outsider; challenging a system that many voters did not think was serving them any longer.” In other words, our prime minister is borrowing from the strongman’s playbook.

Lack of civility is a related issue. Tingle mentions, in passing, Bill Shorten’s use of “Turnbull” instead of “Mr Turnbull.” Shorten and Morrison have each used “this guy” to describe the other. In that federal council speech, Morrison said this of Shorten: “It’s no coincidence his initials are BS.”

There is reasonable political thinking behind all this. Morrison wishes to present himself as the practically minded outsider, focused on action not meetings. Neither man wishes to accord respect to his opposite number. But this is the point: what are seen as short-term political gains – with rhetoric as the main weapon – increasingly come at the expense of respect for politicians and government. You cannot tear down an institution you are leading, or want to lead, without ultimately being yourself weakened.

The reckless use of rhetoric is not limited to government. Tingle rightly points to the fading influence of other voices that once held authority in national debates, such as religious organisations and business. Here, too, we can observe the deleterious effect of crazily antagonistic words. I am reminded of businesses railing against the political instability of the past few years, seemingly forgetting their own starring role: the ferocity with which they sought to destroy a carbon price and a mining tax, and the leaders behind those policies. I am also reminded of the more recent scaremongering from Catholic schools over new funding proposals, their attempts to mislead voters and parents.

Tingle ends her essay calling for national leaders to help rebuild the national debate. It is a worthy hope. There is an open question as to whether it is possible, for at least two reasons. The first is that the rhetoric of both politicians and stakeholders is driven partly by the desire to cut through an increasingly noisy public sphere. The volume and tempo of media seems unlikely to drop. I might want these groups to moderate their rhetoric, but if their voice is not being heard then the temptation to yell will remain.

The second is the possibility that voters are no longer listening to leaders, experts and institutions because they believe the world is fundamentally broken – and if those groups haven’t led us here, who has? The analysis and its attendant suspicions may not be entirely fair – but then again, they might be. You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to agree that there is a kind of club of those who hold formal authority in this and other countries – and that the rules by which those in the club operate have not always been helpful to those outside the club. I agree that a civil and intelligent national debate is essential. But if “rebuilding” is, or is perceived to be, an attempt to build again what was there before, then it is likely to fail, and perhaps deservedly so.

Sean Kelly

FOLLOW THE LEADER

Correspondence

Katharine Murphy

We should be looking for strong leaders to follow, not a strongman, Laura Tingle writes at the end of her essay about leadership. Given the quality of the analyst, this conclusion is, of course, very persuasive. But if we examine our addled politics, both domestically and internationally, this worthy objective seems ambitious, almost ludicrous. Imagine happening upon such a leader, a politician capable of exhibiting strength and purpose in the maelstrom of contemporary public life, a political leader to inspire hope. Even if one had the good fortune to happen upon such a person, would their colleagues permit them to lead, given the past decade of Australian politics has produced leaders with brutally short shelf lives – prime ministers programmed with planned obsolescence, as if they were iPhones?

The story behind this unmooring is multifactorial, but Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott are catalytic figures in different ways. Rudd increased the pace of politics when he gave himself the objective of trying to set the agenda from Opposition, rather than respond to the government’s agenda. The new Labor man felt he had to puncture the somnolent tempo of the Howard era as part of grabbing the nation’s attention and positioning himself as putative prime minister in a matter of months.

Rudd’s arrival in the Lodge coincided with the profound technological disruption that created the rolling news cycle. Australian politics became a spectator sport, with the action from Canberra delivered blow by blow. Public life began to assume the death-match atmospherics of a football final. The rise of death-match atmospherics created the perfect conditions for the rise of Tony Abbott and his cacophonous politics of destruction. Just as Rudd had changed the pace of politics from Opposition, Abbott changed the tenor of politics from Opposition, elevating wrecking to the core of the enterprise. Abbott eschewed the business of deliberation and compromise, enterprises once considered to be the heart of the democratic model, and inculcated a sense of crisis in order to question the legitimacy of his political opponents.

Australian politics is still battling these two influences – an unrelenting pace narrated too often with hyperbolic, valueless commentary; and a culture where destruction is considered a legitimate tool of war – and they are poisoning political leadership in this country.

Mostly, Australian politics has been sleepwalking into the current nadir, reluctant to face up to or articulate the truth, lest some tribal taboo be broken, but interestingly, during the last leadership challenge, when Malcolm Turnbull was driven from office by the animus-fuelled faction that couldn’t abide him, something cracked inside the Liberal Party, and despair tumbled out.

The despair was heard primarily in a small chorus of women’s voices, women speaking critically about party culture, a culture where unhinged things seemed to happen over and over, and dissenters to the unhinging were bullied by self-appointed powerbrokers into submission and quiescence. The Victorian Liberal Julia Banks, who announced she would leave political life after enduring the leadership fracas, felt and said implicitly that the national interest could not be served by staying, which is about as damning as self-assessments get. Despair was new, a break from previous practice. Whether despair leads to anything productive remains moot.

The whole political ecosystem is impatient. The honeymoons once enjoyed by new prime ministers are short, and highly conditional, if they materialise at all. Voters are drifting away from partisan loyalties, and this seemingly inexorable drift to political disruptors is enabled by the major parties themselves, because the major parties have forgotten the premium they once offered voters was stability. Because voters are drifting, there is a preoccupation with “the base” that has become a strange form of religion, a fundamentalism which can pit the interests of political movements against the wishes of the mainstream, thereby intensifying the estrangement.

In an age where politics and public activism structures itself around the permanent campaign – given the campaign is a mechanism always on the hunt for a crisis, given the crisis has become a focal point to recruit foot soldiers and raise money – compromise is also deeply out of fashion, which is highly problematic given progress depends on it.

In one of the most interesting political speeches of 2018, the Senate president, Scott Ryan, pointed out what should be obvious: the greatest successes of Australian politics had come from “compromise and negotiation” and the use of parliamentary process to resolve competing points of view.

In a message both to colleagues and the ecosystem as a whole, Ryan noted that “the idea that compromise is wrong, that negotiation to achieve one objective and move onto another, represents a lost political opportunity for a contest or selling out is not one that has been rewarded in Australia.” Ryan observed that John Howard and the then National Party leader, Tim Fischer, “bore an enormous political cost among many of their traditional supporters when instituting national gun laws, but they weren’t relentlessly attacked as abandoning the base simply by virtue of challenging supporters, even on such a difficult issue.” The point being that the interest of the nation should always rank ahead of sectional interest, even if the sectional interest happens to be familial; and the art of politics is explaining the necessity of action to the losers and cushioning the impact of change – something that Australian politics once excelled at.

Tingle puts her finger squarely on the challenge by pointing out that leaders need to rebuild the national debate and protect other voices within it, a form of housekeeping that requires something more profound than dishing up perpetual motion and perpetual conflict. It requires political leaders to see themselves as part of an organism rather than as a saviour or a subduer, and to give priority to the health of the organism over their own short-term imperatives or corrosive acts of one-upmanship. It requires politicians to understand they are temporary custodians of a valuable tradition, rather than succumbing to the gravitational pull of dabbling in reactionary populism because it’s easier than attempting a course correction.

This sense of politicians valuing themselves as institutional forces, a politics where ego plays second fiddle to the articulation of collective purpose and responsibility, is a very big ask, particularly at this juncture. As Tingle points out, we are now at the tail-end of the global financial crisis – the greatest economic shock since the Depression – and we are witnessing a global upheaval in politics: the rise of autocracies and strongman politics and the decline of democracy and multilateralism. The world, she notes, is becoming more irrational, and we cannot assume that what follows from that is orderly.

In short, it is hard, and getting harder, to be hopeful. Not impossible. But hard.

Katharine Murphy

DEAD RIGHT

Response to Correspondence

Richard Denniss

For Grant, who personifies the best of Australian values.

As theologians know, it’s hard to write clearly about something that may not exist. Likewise, as an economist, I found it very hard to write about an idea that, while widely discussed, seemingly has no actual advocates in Australia. So why write an essay about neoliberalism if no one promotes it, I hear you ask. Simple: monsters don’t have to exist to scare children, gods don’t have to exist to give people comfort, and the fact no politicians admit to being racist doesn’t mean that racism isn’t a powerful idea in Australia. Similarly, that no federal politician declares himself or herself a neoliberal doesn’t mean neoliberalism isn’t a powerful rhetorical and political idea.

For a writer, there is nothing more frustrating than a reader who completely misses your point. Is it me? Is it them? Is it the limits of language? How could someone read so many of my words and miss my point so completely? In turn, the most frustrating critical responses to my essay were those that seemed to agree entirely with my main point without realising this. Clearly I need to improve my communication skills.

First of all, I thank the respondents for taking the time not just to read my essay, but to comment on it. As Oscar Wilde quipped, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. I am grateful and flattered that such a range of thinkers gave their time to discuss my essay.

John McTernan clearly didn’t like it. But while his response makes clear that he read my words carefully, it’s hard for me to understand how he failed to grasp their meaning. The whole point of my essay is to say that among modern Australian politicians, not one consistently relies on neoliberal principles to guide their words or deeds. Not one. As evidence for this, I point out that Matt Canavan (an ex–Productivity Commission economist) now wants to subsidise coalmines; that Tony Abbott (the man who gave us the Commission of Audit) now wants to nationalise coalfired power stations; and that the premier of New South Wales, Gladys Berejiklian (once renowned as a fan of privatisation), now wants to nationalise football stadiums. I thought it was important to show the way conservative politicians and business leaders lean on “neoliberal principles” when they want to explain their desire to cut welfare spending, but abandon these same “principles” when they feel like subsidising powerful industries such as mining and private education. Alas, it seems some of my respondents thought that this point didn’t really need making. I still do.

McTernan’s critique of my argument includes the observation that neither Tony Abbott nor John Howard was really a neoliberal because they actually supported government intervention when they felt like it. Yep. That’s exactly the point I was trying to make on page 1 of the essay. Similarly, in his response Damien Freeman agrees with McTernan that neither Howard nor Abbott was a neoliberal. Again, I can only agree. They weren’t. They were clever politicians who hunted with the neoliberal foxes when they felt like it and ran with the populist hounds when it was in their political interest to do so. (Damn, why didn’t I write that sentence so clearly in the essay?)

The most common criticism of the responses is that I didn’t clearly and consistently define what I meant by neoliberalism. I tried. I defined it on page 1 as “the catch-all term for all things small government, [which] has been the ideal cloak behind which to conceal enormous shifts in Australia’s wealth and culture.” I went on to say that:

It has provided powerful people with the perfect language in which to dress up their self-interest as the national interest. Without such a cloak, policies to slash income support for those most in need while giving tax cuts to those with the most money would just look nasty … the purpose of this essay is to consider, in the age of Trump, Brexit and Pauline Hanson 2.0, how the neoliberal agenda of “free markets,” “free trade” and “trickle-down tax cuts” has wounded our national identity, bled our national confidence, caused paralysis in our parliaments, and is eating away at the identity of those on the right of Australian politics.

Perhaps I was being too subtle, but what I was trying to say, at the very beginning of the essay, was that the term “neoliberalism” is primarily a rhetorical device used to conceal the underlying motivations of politicians who, for example, want to cut spending on public schools and increase subsidies for private schools without having to reveal their personal desire to do so.

The reason I quoted the mother of neoliberalism, Margaret Thatcher, saying that “Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul,” was to shift the way neoliberalism is examined. For decades, economists, social policy experts and citizens have debated issues such as whether privatising health leads to better outcomes at lower cost or worse ones at higher cost. But such debates have done little to dampen enthusiasm for privatisation among those in power (in both major parties). In my essay, I set out instead to explore the rhetorical and policy contradictions of those who sometimes push so hard for the neoliberal agenda of free markets, free trade and trickle-down economics.

Just as the desire of postwar Britons to pull together and invest in national health and welfare systems irritated Margaret Thatcher, my distinction between what neoliberalism says it is and what neoliberal rhetoric has been used to do clearly irritated McTernan, who points out that I inconsistently use the term more than one hundred times in the essay. I’m not sure that I do, but let me try to find common ground. I think there is a big difference between what neoliberalism is and what neoliberalism has done. Of the twelve different “definitions” that McTernan thinks I used, they fit pretty neatly into two groups.

The first group of definitions covers the underlying beliefs of neoliberalism, all of which I think are covered by my “catch-all” definition.

• small government
• outsourcing public services
• the profit motive
• measuring efficiency and quality
• reducing the budget deficit and public spending
• cutting regulation
• the idea that market forces are superior to government decision-making.

And the second group of “definitions” he says that I use are, I think, better seen as the cultural consequences of decades of inculcation in neoliberal beliefs about human nature and economics. These include:

• sponsorship of museums
• looking out for yourself
• the last thirty years of Australian government
• cultural change of hearts and minds
• the assertion “there is no alternative.”

While I’m glad I peppered the essay with different examples, I do sympathise with McTernan’s confusion. Abbott thinks that the tobacco taxes he increased while health minister were a good way to reduce smoking and that carbon taxes were a terrible way to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Abbott’s Commission of Audit was unambiguously based on the “principle” that reducing government spending was good for the economy, yet as prime minister he championed an enormously expensive paid-parental-leave scheme. It’s hard to write consistently about such inconsistent principles.

But again, I’d like to thank McTernan for helping me to clarify my point. In short, for the avoidance of any doubt, I didn’t mean to suggest that museum sponsorship is the definition of neoliberalism, but I very much meant to say that neoliberal rhetoric has played a central role in making a country as rich as Australia feel so poor that we need to use our National War Memorial to promote the logos of weapons manufacturers more visibly than we remember those individuals who died fighting for our country. I think the symbolism of war memorials is extremely important, but then again I think national identity is a very important, and contestable, concept. McTernan, on the other hand, thinks that national identity is “an inverted pyramid of piffle,” so perhaps it’s little wonder he doesn’t share my concern with the way that neoliberalism has been used to transform Australia’s identity.

I was happy to take the bitter medicine doled out by some respondents, but I was even happier that there was so much substantive and insightful analysis and critique to chew on. Adam Creighton, for example, shares my frustration with the lack of honesty that underpins what should be important economic and democratic debates about the relative size of the public sector in Australia and the best way to regulate private companies. Having accepted my definition of neoliberalism (phew), Creighton rejects my view that over the past thirty years neoliberalism has infected all corners of Australian life, and argues that, “if anything, government spending and regulation have increased. If ‘neoliberalism’ is to mean anything more than gouging, greed or ‘something we don’t like,’ then it’s a lack of it that is eroding confidence in the status quo.” I agree with him entirely. If we had a greater focus on small government and the efficient use of public money, there is no way the current government would be trying to spend $1 billion subsidising the Adani coalmine. No way it would have offered a $454 million grant to a small charity set up by a group of businesspeople without any tender process. And there is no way that we would have privatised the vocational education and training sector at enormous cost to taxpayers, students and employers alike.

Similarly, I agree with Creighton when he writes,

Meanwhile, government spending continues to soak up more and more national income. As a share of GDP, it’s increased from around 22 per cent at the end of the Whitlam government to 25 per cent today. The National Disability Insurance Scheme, which will cost more than $20 billion a year, is almost certain to see that that ratio tick higher. Both major political parties are promising to increase income tax as a share of the economy, the Liberals a little more slowly. Is this rampant neoliberalism?

Again, the confusion stems from the difference between the stated objectives of neoliberals and the actual behaviour of successive governments, which have told the public they have “no choice” but to cut spending on services and “no choice” but to reduce the regulation of the finance sector at the very same time they choose to spend a lot more money subsiding the fossil-fuel industry and introducing a lot more regulation of unions, charities and the unemployed.

Creighton is a respected economics writer who works for one of the more conservative of our broadsheet newspapers. His views are neither radical nor ill-considered and, in turn, it’s important that Australians of all political persuasions read his views about the role of the market carefully:

A free market only works effectively when prices are salient, when customers understand the product or service as well as sellers, and when there are many of both …

[T]hese conditions are far from satisfied in many cases, such as electricity or financial services, which enjoy vast implicit subsidies and exhibit little genuine competition. Too often, policy-making in Australia has naively assumed well-meaning policies wouldn’t be severely abused. Funding for vocational training springs to mind. This isn’t neoliberalism so much as stupidity.

Hear, hear. As someone who has lectured in economics for more than twenty years, I never cease to be amazed at how many people embark on an economics degree thinking that they have to “pick a team” and barrack for “free markets” or “red tape and regulation.” The rhetoric of neoliberalism has debased the language of public debate so comprehensively that calls for regulation are quickly labelled “creeping socialism” and efforts to reduce government waste are described as “heartless.” If only people like Adam and me could have such a debate without anyone calling either of us silly names.

As the head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet from 1991 to 1996, Mike Keating is far better placed than me to speak on the objectives of, and options considered by, prime ministers Hawke and Keating. Although he starts his response by stating that he shares my values, he takes issue with my depiction of the motivation for and effectiveness of a wide range of neoliberal policies. While I didn’t attempt to write the history of neoliberalism in Australia in the Hawke/Keating years, I do agree with Mike Keating that some neoliberal policies delivered some significant benefits to some groups in Australia. I thought I made clear that I supported some of them; as I said in the essay, I think the privatisation of Qantas was good for travellers and good for the budget.

While Keating and I clearly agree on many things, I reject his criticism that I exaggerate evidence of the impact of neoliberalism on our culture. In building his case, he cites but one example: “Denniss correctly considers that all children with cancer should receive high-quality treatment, and then implies that our health system is too mean to guarantee this. But this is quite false – these children do receive high-quality treatment irrespective of their parents’ means.” But I made no such claim. On the contrary, I simply posed the democratic question and explained that different democracies made different decisions:

Should all children with cancer receive high-quality treatment, or only those whose parents can afford it? Should all adults with cancer receive the highest level of care, or only those who have the most expensive insurance? Different people in different countries come up with quite different answers to these questions. Not even Barack Obama suggested that all US citizens should have universal access to high-quality health care, and not even Tony Abbott suggested that Australia’s publicly funded Medicare system should be removed.

I didn’t say, or even imply, that Australia didn’t help children with cancer. I simply used the question to highlight the fundamentally human nature of what are often depicted as “economic questions” about issues as complicated as the design of pharmaceutical subsidies. That said, a quick Google search would confirm for Keating that Australians who want access to certain drugs often decide to travel abroad and spend their life savings to obtain such treatments.

Other respondents raised specific concerns. Creighton, for example, was critical of my claim that Australia is no longer a “workers’ paradise,” even though today more than half of Australian workers no longer have access to paid holidays. While I don’t disagree with his statement that he would rather be a worker today than in the 1950s, and I don’t disagree that Australians work far fewer hours than the average Turk, Mexican or Colombian, I don’t share his overall assessment of the state of our labour market. While labour-market data is relatively objective, it seems the definition of paradise, and the countries we wish to compare ourselves to, are in the eye of the beholder.

Without doubt, the criticism that stung most was the suggestion by Roderick Best that, “The tragedy of Braxton’s death should not be cheapened by using it as a pop-up illustration for a discussion of ‘enormous shifts in Australia’s wealth and culture.’” Before including the example of the tragic death of Braxton Slager in my essay, I read the coroner’s report into his death carefully. While Creighton criticises me for relying on newspapers for the claims made in the essay, they were by no means the only sources I relied on. I did, however, choose to reference easily accessible sources to help make the point that my critique of neoliberalism can be easily checked, and indeed extended upon, by any reader with access to the internet and a keen eye for contradiction. Yet no matter how carefully a researcher conducts their research, we all harbour the fear that the permanent written record of our thoughts might be in error, so it was with trepidation that I reread the coroner’s report. On second reading, I think I pressed too gently on the role of neoliberalism. The NSW deputy coroner, Harriet Grahame, was damning of the process that led to the death:

the rushed nature of this whole process [finding accommodation for a two-year-old], once it finally happened, meant that there was no chance to properly consider the appropriateness of where Braxton was to be placed. Given that FACS [NSW Family and Community Services] had been aware of the potential risks in Braxton’s life since the first prenatal reports, it is disappointing that so little time and care went into this life changing decision … There was no physical inspection of the premises and certainly no record of any discussion with the out of home carers about what to expect, prior to “dropping off” Braxton … Even leaving aside the state of the premises, there were a number of factors which, if properly considered, should have indicated potential risk. Each of these factors should have been known to LWB [Life Without Barriers] during the assessment procedure …

In my view, the risk assessment procedure which took place was not a genuine assessment and is more accurately described as a rubber stamp given to a decision which had effectively already been made based on a lack of other options … Mr Best, the State Director of LWB for NSW and the ACT, agreed in evidence that the state of the backyard, as depicted in photographs taken on the day of Braxton’s death, was “alarming” and contained “many, many really obvious dangers for small children” … the information systems operating at that time within LWB contributed to the poor understanding of the environment in which Braxton was to be placed … The premises [his carer] could provide at that time were unsafe, and this should have been picked up by LWB … Tragically, a child who went into care to improve his chance of living in a safe environment, found himself in a situation of enormous risk. His death appears to have been a preventable accident, which occurred against a background of inadequate care.

The coroner’s report into the death of Braxton Slager is as gut-wrenching as it is damning of structural and systemic errors. But despite the content and the tone of the report, Best asserts in his response: “It is telling that none of the four recommendations from the coroner addressed deficiencies seen in the new model of outsourcing foster care.” And he concludes: “Honouring the tragic death of the vulnerable in our society requires us to honestly and respectfully consider what happened and then make real, verifiable changes in response. It is not about misconstruing what happened so as to apply a theory, out of context, to advance a different argument.”

While Best is correct that the coroner didn’t make recommendations about “the new model of outsourcing foster care,” few readers would likely realise that this silence says nothing, because by the time of the coronial inquiry both the NSW government and Best’s organisation had made significant changes designed to reduce the risk faced by children in emergency care. In the words of the coroner: “I accept Counsel assisting’s submission that there is no need for a formal recommendation pursuant to section 82 of the Coroners Act to provide a further catalyst for the reforms already identified. I accept a number of significant changes have already been made.”

The most depressing element of the coroner’s report, however, relates directly to the point of my essay (and the point rejected by Keating): that although Australia is one of the richest countries in the world, our governments frequently cite a shortage of funds as explanation for the low-quality services we often provide. The coroner recommended that greater psychological support be offered to those entrusted to care for vulnerable children, but “[t]he recommendation was not supported by FACS and LWB. Both were concerned by the potential expense.” As I wrote in my essay:

Mistakes and mistreatment in institutions are neither new nor entirely the fault of neoliberalism, but placing the profit motive at the heart of the delivery of care for the vulnerable creates a strong incentive to cut costs in an environment where customers are poorly placed to speak up for themselves, and at times literally incapable of it.

Braxton’s tragic death is a sad indictment of the choices, and priorities, of successive governments and organisations involved in the care of the most vulnerable people in our community. The fact that Roderick Best cannot see that the culture of cost-cutting and “reducing red tape” played a central role in creating a system where there was no money to support carers and not enough “red tape” to ensure that houses were inspected before two-year-olds were “dropped off” is sadder still.

Max Corden and John Quiggin not only are two of the best economists Australia has produced, but they have also spent their lives applying their knowledge to the practical policy problems our country faces. While both gave me plenty to think about, the fact that such luminaries thought the topic of neoliberalism warranted careful examination, and that my take on it added a fresh dimension, is gratifying. Kristina Keneally’s response contains a number of gems for my stump speech. Not only has she reminded me that the Business Council of Australia had been unable to provide her with a single example of a country where wage growth improved after a cut in the corporate tax rate, her US heritage prompts her to highlight the importance of our Australian Electoral Commission, whose independence is all that stands between us and the rampant gerrymandering on which American “democracy” is built. And I will be forever in her debt for alerting me to the fact that Adam Creighton and I share a propensity to use South Park episodes to make important points about the economy.

It is a privilege to have my arguments tested by such diverse voices. The conclusion of Dead Right is that the opposite of neoliberal economics isn’t progressive economics, but engaged democracy. And engaged democracy requires exactly the sort of well-meaning debate contained in these pages. While it’s inevitable that 25 million Australians will find it difficult to agree on priorities and policies, history suggests that good intentions and rigorous debate can move us forward, eventually. Our differences need not define us. Indeed, as the prime minister for whom John McTernan was head of communications once said, “We are us.” Like the definition of neoliberalism, it’s not quite clear what the phrase means, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep talking about it.

Richard Denniss

DEAD RIGHT

Correspondence

Michael Keating

I believe that Richard Denniss and I share the same values. We both want an inclusive society and think that such a society will not be achieved by relying purely on market forces. Instead, we see a continuing role for government intervention to achieve that inclusive society, and we think that this will require a modest future increase in government revenue. The future of capitalism and our democracy depends upon the success of governments in maintaining inclusive economic growth. Indeed, the failure of the governments of many advanced economies to maintain such growth throughout this century is most responsible for the swing to extreme right-wing populist governments – the principal challenge to the open, liberal international order.

Where Denniss and I part company is that Denniss blames all the faults he sees in modern society, some of which he exaggerates, on what he calls “neoliberalism.” He is in good company. There are many other critics of neoliberalism, who blame it for everything they don’t like about the direction our society and economy have taken over the last thirty-odd years.

The first problem that I have with these arguments is that typically neoliberalism is never explicitly defined. Its definition is inferred through its alleged impacts, without any regard for the logic of cause and effect. In fairness, Denniss is a bit better than this. He suggests that “Neoliberalism [is] the catch-all term for all things small government.” But, as Denniss himself concedes, the size of government is bigger than ever, as measured by the amount of regulation, and government expenditure and revenue are both at an all-time high relative to GDP. So, if neoliberalism is defined by smaller government, while government is in fact bigger, by what logic is neoliberalism responsible for the ills afflicting society? However, Denniss also has another approach to defining neoliberalism, suggesting that “it is possible to think of neoliberalism as an ideology focused on the idea that market forces are superior to government decision-making.” Again, he provides no evidence to show that this ideology has dominated policy thinking in Australia.

Instead, I suggest that the micro-economic “reforms” introduced in the 1980s and 1990s, so often referred to as neoliberalism, involved:

• floating the Australian dollar
• financial deregulation and (later) changing the type of regulation
• largely eliminating protection, and a shift in industry assistance in favour of more generic assistance and less specific industry assistance
• tax reform to make the system more efficient and fair, but not to reduce the total revenue
• decentralising wage determination in favour of more enterprise bargaining
• some measure of privatisation accompanied by the introduction of competition policy.

These reforms can be broadly characterised as making greater use of markets, but Denniss doesn’t really try to and I doubt that he could make the case that these reforms are directly responsible for the many aspects of today’s society that he decries. The fundamental reason for many of these reforms was that the previous regulations were not working. For example, the previous attempts to “manage” the Australian currency were proving counterproductive, signalling the likely next movement to the speculators, and giving them a one-way bet. Similarly, protectionism wasn’t working. These sorts of regulatory changes did not involve any attempt to reduce government responsibilities, as implied by the critics of neoliberalism. Rather, they represented an effort to improve the effectiveness of government intervention, as governments found that often they would be more effective if they focused more on managing markets and creating the right incentives and disincentives, and relied less on administrative controls that were increasingly being evaded or proving unworkable. Today, the equivalent approach would be to price carbon as the best way to reduce carbon emissions, rather than relying on direct action policies; it is curious that this reliance on pricing carbon has been supported by many of the critics of neoliberalism.

Privatisation and contracting out

My sense is that it may be privatisation that causes most of the disquiet about neoliberalism. There are, however, a few points to be made. First, the majority of economists long ago concluded that competition was a much more important determinant of corporate performance than ownership. Furthermore, the previous government ownership of commercial entities such as airlines and banks did not seem to be achieving any social purpose, with the government-owned airlines and banks behaving and having to behave in much the same way as their competitors to survive. Denniss himself agrees that whether a business should be publicly or privately owned should be considered on a case-by-case basis. I also agree with him that the case for privatising natural monopolies is much more difficult to sustain: governments must be confident that they can achieve the same outcomes or better by regulation than they can achieve by ownership and direct control.

However, Denniss has a particular beef about electricity that is worth exploring a little further. He claims that electricity privatisation has “cost Australian energy users billions of dollars” as “a privately owned monopoly [is] willing to spend millions of dollars to bamboozle the regulator.” The chair of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), Rod Sims, also agrees that “Australians are paying considerably more for electricity than they should.” However, in its recent exhaustive review, the ACCC never mentioned privatisation, and Sims in a press conference made it clear that privatisation was not a cause of high electricity prices. The most damaging criticism made by Sims was that “some states, with the excellent exception of Victoria, often privatised generation and retail assets without an eye to competition, and mainly to maximise sale proceeds.” Furthermore, the one period when electricity prices did stabilise was between 1993 and 2000, and this was when much of the privatisation actually occurred and when competition policy was introduced. In fact, as the Productivity Commission established in a review of the impact of National Competition Policy, “Before NCP and related reforms, it was widely recognised that electricity production and distribution activities were working well below best practice.” So competition policy and privatisation did realise major productivity gains that were passed on in lower prices, although these were largely one-off gains and cannot be repeated. Finally, I think experience suggests that the public providers find it easier to raise capital for dubious investments; for example, if the Liddell power station were still in public hands, does anyone think the present government would agree to close it when it becomes uneconomic in a couple of years?

Privatisation was not always carried out well, but neither has it proved to be the disaster that many of its critics assert it to be.

I have already mentioned the limits placed on competition by some states as they tried to maximise the proceeds from sale of their electricity assets. Similarly, Denniss rightly criticises the restrictions on competition that accompanied the sale of the ports in New South Wales, but those restrictions would never have been endorsed if neoliberal policies had been followed. On the other hand, the major privatisations carried out by the Australian government – airlines, telecommunications and banking – did first establish a competitive environment before the sale, even though this then depressed the sale price.

My major criticism of deregulation and privatisation is that too often the required new regulatory regime was insufficiently thought through in advance. For example, it was only after the almost-failure of a major bank in the 1991 recession that the prudential regulation system was appropriately tightened up. Similarly, in the case of vocational education and training, significant gains were made in efficiency and in moving to a more responsive system for disadvantaged people by allowing them greater choice. Yet too often the quality of the vocational education and training was very unsatisfactory because insufficient effort was made to restrict access to public funding to only those private providers who had a track record of quality.

The case for and against contracting out is similar to privatisation. For example, a long time ago – well before the advent of neoliberalism – governments started contracting out construction activity, such as road building – and this seems to have received community-wide acceptance. Similarly, the community has long supported the system whereby medical services are mostly provided by private doctors who are then reimbursed totally or partially by the state. What may be more controversial is the contracting out of decisions that in the end affect the nature of government programs. For example, the Keating government in its One Nation package of assistance to long-term unemployed people decided to contract out the provision of employment and training advice and assistance. The reason was that although the former Commonwealth Employment Service had a reasonable record of assisting the typical job seeker, its culture was built around the provision of the same uniform service to all its clients, whereas long-term unemployed people required more individual assistance, which non-government providers were better at delivering.

However, I question the increasing contracting out of the analytical and advisory functions of the public service. Evaluation of policies and programs should be the foundation for much policy advice, and if the public service contracts out this function, then it is no wonder that its capacity to provide sound policy advice has atrophied. In addition, too often the use of a commercial consultancy firm results in the government getting the sort of analysis and advice that it wants to receive rather than frank and fearless advice, as the consultant wants to please in order to gain another contract.

Has neoliberalism changed the nature of politics?

Denniss’s critique of neoliberalism is broader than the issues discussed so far. He decries what he sees as “the trick of neoliberalism”: “to convince the public that it is the economic dimension of big issues that we must always focus on.” In his view, neoliberalism “has been the ideal cloak behind which to conceal enormous shifts in Australia’s wealth and culture. It has provided powerful people with the perfect language in which to dress up their self-interest as the national interest”; “it has radically altered the way we see the role of government”; and in relation to health care, “it has also hardened the hearts of average Australians towards those most in need.”

This critique of neoliberalism has been made by others as well, although not always so eloquently. However, there is quite a lot of exaggeration in the evidence provided; and where the evidence is correct, the analysis does not really establish cause and effect, and alternative explanations are more probable.

Exaggerated evidence

For reasons of space, I will only give one example of exaggerated evidence, but there are others. Denniss says that all children with cancer should receive high-quality treatment, and then implies that our health system is too cruel to guarantee this. But this is quite false – these children do receive high-quality treatment, irrespective of their parents’ means. Furthermore, every other week more very expensive drugs are added to the pharmaceutical benefits list once they have been assessed as safe and effective, and, while the amount of co-payments may be debatable, I am yet to see the evidence that anyone who is seriously ill (say, with cancer) is missing out on necessary treatment.

More generally in his discussion of access to health care, Denniss provides no evidence allowing us to make a proper comparison with the past, but he nevertheless concludes that there has been a massive deterioration. Thus, he cites approvingly Menzies’ support for universal health care, but no one had more time to introduce such a system than Menzies, and he didn’t. Of course, the reality is that the original system of universal health insurance was introduced by the Labor Whitlam government, then abandoned by the conservative Fraser government, which had nothing to do with neoliberalism, while the present Medicare system was introduced by the Hawke government, which was also responsible for embracing the policies that are cited as representing neoliberalism.

Denniss also fails to mention that Australia today has a world-class health system, which the Harvard-based health research institution the Commonwealth Fund has ranked second of eleven first-world countries. I agree with Denniss that there could be improvements to the effectiveness and equity of health care in Australia, but typically more could always be spent on almost all public and private services if the money were available. A more balanced assessment would have acknowledged that the rate of bulk-billing has been maintained, and over the last two decades public expenditure on health has increased faster than GDP.

The logic of cause and effect

Inequality has increased since the early 1980s in almost all the advanced economies, although rather less in Australia than most others. Interestingly, according to OECD data the biggest increases in inequality between 1985 and 2014 have been in Sweden and the United States, followed by New Zealand, Finland and Germany – and of course Sweden, Finland and Germany are not notable for their embrace of neoliberal policies. Instead, there is widespread agreement that the major cause of increasing inequality has been technological change, which has “hollowed out” middle-level jobs and has also tended to be skill-biased. In short, the adoption of neoliberal policies, to the extent that it has occurred, has little or nothing to do with the increase in inequality.

Similarly, it is not hard to think of a host of other reasons why we are more individualistic and have less trust in government, instead of adopting Denniss’s hypothesis that these changes are all the fault of neoliberalism. Society has become more individualistic, which predates neoliberal policies. Key drivers are increased education, which has helped create citizens who are more critical of authority, but also more tolerant of individual differences; women have more independence; the car, television and the internet have increased people’s choices and people now feel they have the capacity to live as they choose and the right to do so. Well before the advent of neoliberalism, increasing living standards and modern technologies were also changing lifestyles; marriage break-up has become much more common, most of us no longer travel together on public transport, and our leisure time is more likely to be spent watching TV or a video, or using the internet, rather than engaging in community activities or even group activities in the home. With fewer opportunities for face-to-face contact with other people, it is not surprising that we have become more individualistic.

The loss of trust in government is also not a new phenomenon; many writers analysed it more than twenty years ago. According to Jane Mansbridge, it is the incapacity of governments to meet the different and typically incompatible expectations of different groups of citizens over a wide range of issues that are inherently insoluble that is most responsible for the decline in trust in government. In addition, in this century economic stagnation has meant that governments no longer meet the popular expectation that living standards will improve over time. Many people feel that they and their government have lost control over their destiny, and with that there is a tendency for governments to lose authority and trust. Perhaps not surprisingly, the people who feel most disempowered are those who have fallen behind economically. But whether these disempowered people have lost faith in government or faith in the elites whom they see as dominating government is a moot point.

Conclusion

Denniss states the curious opinion that “there has been no obsession among the political elite with the neoliberal goals of reducing government spending, regulation or tax collection over the past three decades.” But I don’t think that neoliberalism demands adherence to specific goals. Denniss also writes that “Paul Keating and former NSW premier Bob Carr were two prominent examples of a generation of ALP figures who passionately embraced some of the key tenets of neoliberalism, albeit in parallel with a strong welfare safety net and social wage.” As someone who worked closely with Paul Keating when he was prime minister, I have no doubt that he remained totally committed to traditional Labor goals, but he recognised that the best means of achieving them had to change with the times.

Denniss’s critique of neoliberalism presumes that it is some sort of government objective, in its own right. If that were true, it might be possible to argue that neoliberalism is to at least some extent responsible for the outcomes achieved. However, neoliberalism was never an objective of policy, nor strategy. Instead, improving markets is seen as a means to better achieve traditional government objectives.

Most importantly, policies described as neoliberal have aimed to improve the competitiveness and flexibility of Australian markets, and thanks to their success in this regard, Australia has managed to experience twenty-seven years of unbroken economic growth, something that Denniss fails to acknowledge in his critique. And although Denniss is no fan of improvements in material living standards, many Australian families say that they are struggling to meet their costs of living, and without this long period of growth, unemployment would be significantly higher.

Nor do I think that neoliberalism has had any major unintended consequences for our values. Australia remains a most egalitarian country. Our tax-transfer system is so highly targeted that it achieves more distribution than any other country in the world. It is true that conservatives support less redistribution than Labor, but that has always been the case, and even the conservatives have never radically changed the amount of redistribution achieved.

The so-called reform agenda of the current government and its business supporters, with its focus on tax cuts and reducing protections for workers, is not at all new. In fact, the acts of parliament covering taxation and industrial relations are the two most-amended pieces of legislation since Federation. What we are really seeing is the traditional conflict between labour and capital being played out in not very different ways.

Although it is easy to be critical of the present government’s agenda, or more accurately its lack of any agenda, that cannot realistically be attributed to neoliberalism. Instead, this government has allowed itself to become beholden to a very traditional set of conservative interests. These interests have nothing to do with neoliberal policies; indeed, these backwoods conservatives are usually opposed to any liberal policies and are only interested in promoting their own vested interests and finding scapegoats for anything that goes wrong.

Michael Keating

DEAD RIGHT

Correspondence

Danielle Wood

Richard Denniss’s Dead Right offers a burning critique of neoliberalism and a call to arms for our leaders to focus on making the country – and not just the economy – better. The essay lands some powerful punches, but at times I was left wondering what it was that Richard was actually fighting. As an argument for demoting the central role of economics in policy debate and design, the essay does not convince. But as a case for reforming institutions to curb the worst excesses of vested interest influence over policy, it is compelling indeed.

Richard defines neoliberalism as “all things small government” and the idea that “market forces are superior to government decision-making.” But he also slips in a very different concept: “the idea that’s what’s good for business is good for the country.”

Richard’s first definition of neoliberalism is all about competition and rugged individualism. It’s an Ayn Randesque world where private firms duke it out in a Darwinian battle for survival and governments “get out of the way” by reducing taxes and regulation. His second definition is crony capitalism writ large, with firms extracting special deals from government and profits growing ever larger at the expense of workers, consumers and taxpayers. But the first doesn’t have to imply the second.

He also draws out neoliberalism’s human toll: less time for barbeques and netball games, more time at the office. Less money for helping kids with cancer but more for maintaining subsidies for the fossil-fuel industries. The reader might be forgiven for thinking that Richard has fallen into the well-worn trap of using “neoliberalism” to mean “anything I don’t like.” Certainly, it would be difficult to find anyone rushing proudly to declare themselves a neoliberal under Richard’s broader definition.

But I – and I suspect many others – would be willing to be outed as what might be called “neoliberal lites.” (“Social liberalism” might be another term for this position but, like “neoliberalism,” it’s used too vaguely to be helpful, meaning all things to all people.)

We lites generally favour competition and markets. Competition among private providers is in most cases the best way to deliver better and more innovative products, and lower prices for consumers. Richard concedes that markets generally work better than central allocation – even for him, the idea of a fixed supply of public servant baristas pulling middling cappuccinos is a bridge too far.

Certainly, our heavily regulated world before the market-based reforms of the 1980s and 1990s was no consumer paradise. People sometimes waited weeks for the Telecom monopoly to connect the phone. Unmarried women couldn’t get home loans. Supermarkets closed by 4pm Monday to Friday and at noon on Saturdays.

But embracing competition is not the same as blind faith in market solutions or believing that we should “let the market rip” in all cases. The economist Oliver Hart won the Nobel Prize for highlighting the risks of “quality shading” when governments outsource public services. Private-sector operators might be more entrepreneurial, but some of their entrepreneurial spirit will be channelled into finding ways to cut costs and quality while remaining within the strict letter of their contract with government.

Neoliberal lites recognise that the risks of outsourcing to the private sector are much higher for services like aged care and child protection, where customers are vulnerable and it is difficult to specify and enforce service quality. Government or not-for-profit provision is almost always the right answer in sectors where poor service can risk lives or dignity and where monitoring costs are prohibitive. That a blind “private sector is best” mentality can lead to the terrible outcomes Richard compellingly documents would be no surprise to most economists.

Other markets require careful regulatory oversight. The privatisation of electricity poles and wires substantially lowered prices by reducing the gold plating and cost padding that occurred under government ownership. But flaws in the way the regulatory system was designed (including generous appeal rights and a naive Competition Tribunal) later saw prices head in the wrong direction. Ironically, the government-owned Queensland and NSW network providers proved the most rapacious exploiters of the system – a worthwhile reminder that government ownership is no panacea without well-designed regulation.

Richard’s essay provides little insight into how we should decide when government provision is best and when and how to regulate.

Lites also believe that incentives matter in policy design. That doesn’t mean we want to deny sick people health care or leave the jobless beneath the poverty line, as Richard claims. But it does mean recognising that all government decisions involve trade-offs. Governments can of course increase taxes to pay for more spending. But there’s no way around the fact that increasing most taxes comes at a cost. Higher taxes mean people work less or save and invest less. Free lunches are not always as delicious as they might seem. The reason so many economists drone on about tax reform is because we want to raise money to pay for social services in the way that creates the smallest drag on the economy.

Neoliberal lites embrace a proper analysis of costs and benefits. Richard is right that we shouldn’t ask technocrats to answer values questions. The size of government, how much we should redistribute income and the weight given to the interests of future generations are all issues for citizens and their elected representatives. But these values debates should not take place in an information vacuum.

The government is entitled to build inland rail or move the Pesticides and Veterinary Management Authority to Armidale, but surely citizens are entitled to know how much extra everyone else is paying for the promise of regional jobs in the (former) deputy prime minister’s electorate. Cost-benefit analysis works as a policy-maker’s Google Maps: it gives guidance on the best way to reach a destination and, importantly, the costs of deviating from the preferred route.

Richard claims that economic frameworks and language have narrowed the policy debate. Certainly, the constant (and sometimes content-free) calls to boost productivity are tiresome even for an economist. But the claim that economic reform advocates have convinced the media and the public that other debates are a distraction doesn’t ring true. Social policy reformers have chalked up a number of recent wins: the Victorian government legalised voluntary euthanasia, the NSW government legalised medical marijuana, and the Commonwealth government legislated for same-sex marriage after 62 per cent of Australians voted “yes” in a postal ballot. All of these took place against the backdrop of a wide-ranging (and generally constructive) public debate.

The economic language and tools that Richard derides are probably the most useful defence against the very real public policy concerns he articulates in his essay. Lites would be in furious agreement about the corrosive effects on policy when vested interests run roughshod over the national interest.

Economists have long warned of the danger of crony capitalism and the wastefulness of rent-seeking where firms channel their efforts into pushing for special favours from government rather than providing better service to their customers. Richard’s examples of coffee-cart-stifling cafe owners, militant pharmacists and overzealous patent protectors are but a few of the many business groups putting up their hands for more regulation where it suits their interests.

The Australian political system has proved a fertile ecosystem for rent-seekers. Australian political parties rely more heavily on private donations than those in most other developed nations. Lobby groups can pluck former ministers and their staff straight from office without any sanction. Outside of New South Wales, Queensland and the ACT, the public has no visibility over who meets with their elected representatives. While public servants can’t accept so much as a cup of coffee from a business because of the perceived risk of a conflict of interest, most of our elected representatives are free to accept as many overseas trips or tickets to major sporting events as they wish.

It’s no wonder Australians are cynical. More than half agree that government is run for a few big interests. And, according to the Australian Election Study 1987–2016, an alarming 74 per cent believe that people in government look after themselves. Richard is right that these perceptions of a rotten core contribute to a lack of trust in politicians and our system of government.

We can do more to blunt the power of vested interests in the political debate. A federal anti-corruption watchdog would help. So would restricting political expenditure to end the donations arms race, publishing ministerial diaries and enforcing waiting periods for ministers who want to move into lobbying roles. Boosting the advocacy capacity of smaller interest groups would reduce the undue influence of concentrated interests in much policy formation.

Ultimately, Richard’s essay doesn’t convince me that we need to throw the neoliberal market baby out with the crony capitalist bathwater. Promoting competition and harnessing market forces have generally served Australia well. Blind faith in markets and giving priority to vested interests over the national interest have not. By conflating the two, Richard misses the opportunity to show us how we can do economic policy better. And we need more economists of Richard’s calibre doing just that.

Danielle Wood

DEAD RIGHT

Correspondence

Kristina Keneally

“Remind me again how socialism causes lines,” I texted to my husband as I stood in a forty-minute queue in a car rental agency at Denver International Airport a few weeks ago. He was sitting on a bench outside the building, in the sunshine, minding our luggage. He definitely had the better end of the deal.

There we were, in the supposed home of laissez-faire capitalism, waiting in a long line for a car we had prebooked, because the big car rental company we were patronising had no reason to improve its customer service. The car rental industry in America is overregulated and dominated by a handful of companies. These companies know that customers have to cop long waits. Market rules and regulations don’t allow innovative competitors to emerge that might provide customers with a more efficient service.

Richard Denniss’s essay Dead Right provides similar examples of how private businesses in Australia rely on market rules, often set by right-wing governments, that protect their market share and increase their profits at the expense of consumers.

This is not very neoliberal.

In the past few years, a great deal has been written critiquing neoliberalism and pronouncing it dead. The rise of protectionism and the rejection of global free trade in countries like the United States and Britain is meant to prove that neoliberalism is a failed project.

Denniss’s essay doesn’t exactly traverse this path. His aim is not to demonstrate that neoliberalism itself has failed, but rather to show that the right wing of politics has killed it off. The wider community no longer believes neoliberal claims, Denniss argues, because people can see that the political right has been using neoliberal arguments to run down public institutions while giving market advantage and public money to their friends in big business.

Consider the Coalition government’s recent announcement of $444 million, described by the former prime minister as “the single biggest contribution and investment in the Great Barrier Reef ever.” The purpose of the funding is to help arrest recent environmental damage to the Great Barrier Reef and safeguard this significant natural asset into the future.

However, the government bypassed the public agencies with direct responsibility for the Reef, like the CSIRO and the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, and instead awarded all 444 million taxpayer dollars to a private organisation, the Great Barrier Reef Foundation.

The Great Barrier Reef Foundation is a creature of the private sector. It is backed by big mining companies like BHP and Rio Tinto, energy companies like AGL, ConocoPhillips and Peabody Energy, three of the big four banks, and industry bodies like the Business Council of Australia.

The Coalition government undertook no advertised grant application or tender process for this funding. According to evidence given to Senate hearings, the government didn’t consult with either the Authority, the CSIRO or the Foundation’s board until after it decided to give the Foundation the money. The CEO of the Foundation, Anna Marsden, described the grant, which is fifty-five times its 2016 budget, as “like we’ve just won lotto.”

The government says the reason it directed the funds to the Foundation rather than the Authority is because the Foundation will be able to “leverage” additional money from other businesses for the reef. Yet there is little evidence the Foundation has the capacity to do so, and no indication how much money that leverage could generate for the reef.

With this one announcement, the government has placed the future of a World Heritage site in private hands, and a huge wad of public money in the Foundation’s bank account.

The Great Barrier Reef Foundation has six full-time employees. When questioned at Senate estimates as to how the government could have confidence that a small organisation could manage such a large grant of government funds and implement the necessary environmental protection programs on behalf of taxpayers, a Department of the Environment official, Stephen Oxley, said:

We had a look at the overall composition of the board … there is a long list of people who have extensive experience in the corporate and philanthropic and research science sectors who collectively are, I think, very well-regarded Australians, and I think we can be reasonably confident in their capacity to oversee the operations of the foundation.

A few weeks later, the ACCC charged Great Barrier Reef Foundation board director Stephen Roberts with criminal cartel offences related to his time as country head at Citigroup. By the next day, Mr Roberts had stepped down from the Foundation’s board and his name and picture were removed from its website.

A Senate inquiry into the Great Barrier Reef Foundation grant is now underway. What should have been a positive announcement for the Reef is turning into a headache for the Coalition government, and another big blow to neoliberalism’s reputation.

Denniss considers what we should do in the wake of neoliberalism’s demise. I hope that the death of neoliberalism might lead to a more vibrant, creative, imaginative political discussion. Neoliberalism relies on fear to narrow our political debate to suit its terms: the range of policy options is artificially limited by dire warnings of lost credit ratings, debt and deficit emergencies, and lost competitiveness. These things are important, but they should not be considered in isolation, or over and above other options that could be on the table.

For example, the right wing of politics is constantly pointing to the United States, claiming we need to cut our company tax rate because that country has done so. Why don’t we ever seriously debate other examples? Scandinavian countries make different choices to the US when it comes to corporate and personal tax rates and social services spending, and their nations have some of the happiest populations on earth. Surely our political debate can consider a wider range of options than the neoliberal prescription.

The fact that Labor has been able to take on one of the “sacred cows” of Australian politics by proposing to curtail negative gearing without igniting a massive scare campaign suggests that the political dynamic in our country is changing – I say for the better.

Still, there are risks ahead for Australian democracy and political debate. The Business Council of Australia isn’t taking the death of neoliberalism lying down: instead, the BCA seeks to reincarnate neoliberalism in a more community-friendly guise. It recently set up an innocuous-sounding community organisation called Centre Ground as a front group. Centre Ground is wholly owned by the BCA, and Andrew Bragg, a former Liberal Party executive director and current BCA executive director for members, is one of Centre Ground’s directors.

Centre Ground’s main activity is to run a phoney grassroots campaign called “For the Common Good.” Designed to look and sound like a real community campaign (a tactic known as “astroturfing”), For the Common Good supports pro-business policies. The Common Good campaign pushed for a change to South Australian trading hours in that state’s recent elections. The BCA didn’t acknowledge its sponsorship of the Common Good campaign in South Australia until ten days after the polls closed. Similarly, voters in the recent Tasmanian and Queensland by-elections who saw Common Good advertising would not have been easily able to identify that the BCA was behind these efforts.

A healthy democracy requires transparency. Such attempts by political actors like the BCA to obscure their sponsorship and motivations should concern us.

While Denniss does not mention the BCA’s astroturfing efforts, he does dwell on the need to bolster our democratic system and safeguard it from veiled interference, especially online. He argues that we ought to focus on strengthening our democracy to empower the many over vested interests.

I think this is right. I agree with Denniss that we can never take for granted that the particular characteristics of Australian democracy – such as compulsory voting and compulsory preferential voting – are permanent and enduring. It is fundamental that our citizens understand and value these strengths.

I would add to Denniss’s list the independent Australian Electoral Commission, which allows us to avoid the partisan gerrymandering that occurs in the United States. Our democracy would be further strengthened with more timely transparency, if not immediate disclosure, of political donations. Federally, we should also consider caps on political expenditure and donations, as some Australian states have done. And, of course, we should implement a ban on foreign donations.

I wholeheartedly endorse Denniss’s call for a national federal corruption body. In February 2018, Labor announced that in government we will create the National Integrity Commission.

I also agree with Denniss that plebiscites may well be a way to revive Australians’ interest and trust in political decisions. In the wake of the Irish vote in the same-sex marriage referendum, I proposed that a plebiscite might be a way through the Australian federal parliament’s impasse on marriage equality. I later accepted the argument from many in the LGBTIQ community that the unnecessary public debate a plebiscite would prompt could harm vulnerable young people. In addition, I know from experience in 2010, when my government oversaw a conscience vote in the NSW Parliament on same-sex adoption, that MPs can and do manage such debates thoughtfully. Nonetheless, the idea of more plebiscites in Australia is worthwhile. The fact remains that the plebiscite on marriage equality gave power to the Australian people to take action after the Coalition refused to let the parliament do its job and legislate for same-sex marriage. Should Labor win the next election, we will take a plebiscite to the people to ask if Australia should become a republic.

While Denniss argues that neoliberalism is dead, he accepts that it may not yet be buried. There are some upcoming tests of its vitality.

For two years, the Coalition government has run a campaign to cut the corporate tax rate, arguing that the way to create “jobs and growth” is to give an $80 billion handout to business in the form of a corporate tax cut. The private sector will solve the problem, the government says, if we just give them a break on their taxes.

Unsurprisingly, the biggest cheerleader for the government’s proposed corporate tax cut is the Business Council of Australia. Twice in the past year, I asked the BCA to name just one country in the world where cutting the corporate tax rate led to higher wages for workers. Twice it failed to answer the question.

Earlier this year in the United States, the Trump company tax cuts came into effect. What has happened in the months since? Wages and investment have declined. Dividends to shareholders and executive pay have increased. Consider Harley-Davidson: one month after the Trump tax cuts came into effect, Harley-Davidson shut a factory in Missouri, put 800 Americans out of work, spent $700 million on share buybacks, increased dividends to shareholders and announced it was opening a factory in Thailand.

My favourite critique of the Coalition government’s proposed corporate tax cut comes from The Australian’s economics editor, Adam Creighton. In February 2018, he drew inspiration from the “underpants gnomes” in the satirical television cartoon South Park to ridicule the idea that cutting corporate tax rates leads to wage growth:

These fictitious creatures had a shonky business plan: Phase 1 was “collect underpants,” Phase 3 was “profits.” But when pressed by the character Kyle about Phase 2, how the collected underpants would actually lead to profit, the gnomes couldn’t explain but pressed on regardless.

It’s a bit like the government’s plan to cut corporate tax. Phase 1 is cutting the company tax rate to 25 per cent by 2026 and Phase 3 is higher wages. Phase 2 is unclear. Is it “capital deepening” or “investment,” or some sort of weird, unenforceable social contract that businesses will raise the wages of workers out of the goodness of their heart? Voters seem suspicious of all of them.

Australians know that economic inequality is widening. We see the scale of multinational tax avoidance. We are aware that wealthy people have access to rules and mechanisms to reduce their tax obligations. Middle- and low-income workers increasingly understand that tax cuts for the top end of town will not flow through to the average household budget. We don’t need to hear the IMF assessment that trickle-down theory is discredited. We know, after years of listening to broken promises from the right wing of politics, that fairness doesn’t trickle down.

Denniss points out that many Australians seem responsive to Labor’s renewed focus on reducing economic inequality and investing in public services. Policies such as removing most dividend imputation cash refunds and limiting the use of family trusts to minimise tax obligations seem to resonate with the community, especially when such policies sit alongside increased public investment in health, education and infrastructure.

The next general election will be a referendum on these issues.

Kristina Keneally

DEAD RIGHT

Correspondence

W. Max Corden

Right at the beginning of this essay we are told that neoliberalism is “the catch-all term for all things small government.” Later, on page 18, we are told convincingly that “Australian politics isn’t about ideology, it is about interests.” I assume from the context that “neoliberalism” is the ideology the author is writing about. Since neoliberalism has numerous definitions and interpretations in the world (notably in Latin America), it is thus best to ignore this confusing, ghastly term and get down to business. What really matters in Australia and other countries are “interests.” Possibly there is no relevant ideology governing our rulers other than self-interest (of individuals, groups and companies).

The author is concerned with the harmful influence and language of our political and business right-wing advocates and commentators. Call them the “elite.” Possibly this language masquerades as ideology and obscures the importance of their “interests.” There are two issues he discusses. I think both are extremely important.

The first concerns the size of government and (in the views of the elite) the need to keep this size as low as possible, for whatever reason. It is a right-wing obsession. This also involves the desirability of shifting many activities from government to privatisation. If one judges episodes of privatisation by the actual effects on costs and quality of services received by consumers, we have important examples in Australia of extreme failure. The author refers to these, and it seems to me that more detailed and comprehensive analysis of such private-sector failures is needed. But the evidence so far is remarkable. Well-known cases in Australia are the privatisation of national electricity supply and the privatisation of vocational training and education. What has gone wrong in these cases and why do measures that foster competition among private providers often fail?

Most recently, right-wing elements of the Liberal Party have apparently proposed that there is no “economic” justification for the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC). This seems to imply that it should be privatised (or even abolished). This is likely to be widely discussed, so it just comes under this general category of reducing the size of government. Australia’s right-wingers seem to have an obsession in this area. Are government agencies really so bad? And who would gain from ABC privatisation? In this case, as others, there is a notable use or possibly misuse of the term “economic.”

The second big issue has to do with the national budget. As Denniss writes, “reducing the budget deficit is very, very important.” It is what “neoliberals really seem to believe.” He notes that whenever some social spending (that he approves of) is proposed, the so-called neoliberals (meaning the right-wing elite) oppose it for the sake of avoiding or reducing a budget deficit. But then, he points out (and elaborates), they find many ways of spending for purposes they approve of, while opposing expenditures for social purposes.

There is no doubt that this essay by Denniss conveys an impression of bias on the part of its author, but as a reader of Murdoch’s The Australian I am inured to that from the other side. The author covers many interesting issues: for example, the difficulties of devising adequate rules and regulations to protect consumers in a “free” market, and why some monopolies are inevitable.

An ambitious final chapter, “Government Is Good,” is well worth thinking about, though, admittedly, I am somewhat sceptical. In this chapter, Denniss is full of ideas. He thinks there is too much emphasis on increasing the rate of growth, and especially that there is a tendency to blame the unemployed for their unemployment. He wants to see re-established a broad debate about the national interest. Strikingly and convincingly, he argues that the right-wing war on government and tax is, in reality, a war on democracy. He wants to see a revitalisation of faith in democracy, and he thinks there is a need for an improvement in the popular education of democratic processes. And, in addition to all that, he wants a whole lot of new institutions: a charter of rights, a national interest commission (to guide on what is good for the country), a federal corruption watchdog, a sovereign wealth fund, and – surprise, surprise – an end of talk about the economy all the time. The following sums up his ambitious message: “For thirty years our elected leaders have endlessly debated what is good for business or good for the economy, but it is time that we commenced a broader debate about what is good for the nation.”

He seems to be somewhat uncomfortable with the Productivity Commission, though some of his proposals go close to expanding the Commission’s activities. One of his ambitious suggestions for comprehensive reviews comes close to the Commission’s comprehensive “Shifting the Dial” review.

With some reservations, I would certainly recommend Denniss’s essay, especially the last chapter, to anyone (especially politicians) who wants to sponsor non-economic but radical social and administrative reforms in Australia.

W. Max Corden

MOMENT OF TRUTH

Response to Correspondence

Mark McKenna

The question took me aback. A listener phoned an ABC talkback session on the need for progress on Indigenous recognition and truth-telling about Australia’s history. “Why do Aboriginal people hate us?” he asked impassively. My reply probably sounded curt. “You’re wrong,” I said. “Judging from my experience with Aboriginal people, they don’t hate you or any other Australian.” Reflecting on the conversation afterwards, I realised that merely to suggest we should acknowledge the brutality of Australia’s foundation was enough to make some Australians feel persecuted. I also thought of the things I should have tried to explain: the difference between anger and hatred, the connection between the historical experience of Indigenous Australians in the wake of colonisation and the “powerlessness” they feel in the present, and the challenge that truth-telling entailed – having both the “capacity” and “will” to listen. Truth-telling is not a trial. No one will be placed in the dock. No one will be convicted and no one will be sentenced. But the fear is palpable. As Jill Gallagher knows, “talk of massacres and dispossession still frightens a lot of people in this country, especially on Capital Hill.”

Over the past few months, I’ve learnt as much from speaking about my Quarterly Essay as I did from writing it. Some of the questions that came my way have reminded me of the vulnerability many Australians feel when they confront the reality of the violence in Australia’s history. Faced with the knowledge of dispossession, their tenure seems even more fragile. Damien Williams is right when he suggests that “the biggest hurdles that a truth commission would face are the ingrained feelings of shame, anger and denial that recognition of Aboriginal people still provoke in the hearts of some Australians.” These emotions apply not only to truth-telling, but also, as Alan Atkinson notes, to the idea that Indigenous Australians should be given “a specific role in governance,” which, like the term “First Nations,” can be seen as “a sort of heresy” that “offends Australians’ sense of national unity.” The scale of the challenge is enormous.

Travelling around the country, I met many people who had never heard of the Uluru Statement from the Heart. “What’s that?” asked three university graduates in their mid to late twenties. This unfamiliarity was not necessarily accompanied by indifference or hostility. On the contrary, after I’d explained, it was usually followed by a desire to know more. Yet clearly those garnering support for Indigenous recognition, whatever form it finally takes, must, as Luke Stegemann reminds us, reach the “countless thousands [for whom the debate] barely registers.” Like Grace Karskens’ educated theatre-goer who had never heard of frontier massacres and was consequently “divorced from understanding the trauma” that accompanied them, the Australian electorate cannot be persuaded to support Indigenous recognition without at least a basic understanding of Aboriginal cultures before 1788 and the struggle they have faced to survive since then. It’s here that the need for genuine political leadership and truth-telling is crucial.

Rarely a day passes without someone complaining about the quality of our political leaders, particularly the governing cabal in Canberra. They lack “vision.” They are more interested in their own survival than the country’s future. Riven by internal ideological differences and personal rivalries, they are short-sighted, self-regarding and spineless. It’s a sadly familiar and all-too-accurate refrain. We’ve spent so long without true leadership that we’ve almost forgotten its potential. What exactly might genuine political leadership mean for the campaign for Indigenous recognition? It would contribute to building a bank of knowledge, empathy and understanding regarding Australian history, and help to counter what Karskens calls “the absence of shared understandings of Australian history and the true costs of colonisation.” In short, it would help to assuage ignorance, fear and hostility. Delivering the annual Reconciliation Lecture at the Australian National University in Canberra in February, the Indigenous leader Peter Yu explained why Australia desperately needs political leaders who will champion truth-telling regarding Australia’s history.

If we are going to transcend this nation’s bloodstained history of violent dispossession and exclusion of Indigenous people and become, as the Dalai Lama has suggested we could be, a beacon of light to the world, we must embark on a national commitment to learn and understand our history. This is what the Uluru Statement has called for as a fundamental aspect of reconciliation and treaty-making … Without a deep and meaningful understanding of this nation’s history, I don’t believe we will achieve national reconciliation. There simply will not be the appetite or passion for substantial change.

The link between truth-telling, treaty-making and support for an Indigenous advisory body to parliament is fundamental. Historical knowledge and understanding are essential, both to the creation of a political environment that is receptive to change and to meaningful citizenship. Our political culture benefits from historical literacy as much as it does from economic literacy. This is why some of the most important markers of real political leadership are almost intangible: the steady, painstaking creation of an atmosphere that is receptive to change, a readiness to listen to Indigenous Australians tell their histories, and an appreciation of the urgency of resolving the many challenges of recognition. Billy Griffiths points to the same potential: “We have seen how much cultural change can be achieved by listening to survivors give testimony – over a few short years at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. Imagine what listening to a generation of Indigenous voices would do for us as a nation.” Accompanied by reflective and courageous political leadership, it might also mean that the shadow of illegitimacy that has dogged every significant anniversary of national commemoration in the last five decades – the Cook Bicentenary in 1970, the 1988 Bicentenary and the centenary of Federation in 2001 – would finally be lifted.

Truth-telling on a regional and national scale, as imagined by Peter Yu and others, would naturally require more than a commission. Ceridwen Dovey highlights Kim Scott’s contribution to the Kukenarup Memorial near Ravens-thorpe in his Noongar homeland to remind us of the benefits of “physical memorials” that commemorate the “terrible past” – acknowledgment, acceptance and empathy – “How would I feel if this was done to me?” These memorials, already being erected by local communities at massacre sites around the country, are yet to be built with the sanction of state and federal governments. The glaring absence of a national memorial in Canberra to those who lost their lives in the frontier wars demonstrates yet again, as Dovey indicates, that “in spite of the reams and reams of evidence that have been accumulated about its past,” Australia has failed to confront its history. Only a federally funded national memorial in Canberra, with its unique authority and galvanising potential, has the capacity to end centuries of state denial.

Contrary to Greg Melleuish’s assertion, my support for a truth-telling commission and national memorials that remember massacres and frontier violence is not based on a desire to “condemn” non-Indigenous Australians, or to cast British colonisation as “evil” and irredeemable. Far from it. Listening to Indigenous oral history (evidence that should be no less subject to scrutiny and cross-referencing than any other record of the past) and contemplating memorials such as those at Myall Creek or Ravensthorpe will actually help us to understand how these horrific events occurred by allowing us to see them from multiple perspectives. It will help us to place them in their full historical context and prevent any “flattening out,” as Grace Karskens emphasises, of “the complexity, the contingency and unpredictability” of the frontier; help us to see it not only as a war zone, but also as a murky terrain of curiosity, cooperation, adaptation, “human drama” and cultural exchange that made Australia what it is today. Nothing in this history is two-sided or one-dimensional. As a self-described “third-generation legatee of mission protection” at Hope Vale on the Cape York Peninsula, Noel Pearson has described how “the missionaries’ kindness and humanity were mixed with the racialism of the time,” yet he has also explained how the same mission helped to preserve his Guugu Yimithirr language and culture after the first wave of frontier violence came to an end.

It’s impossible to imagine a more powerful and impassioned distillation of the reasons why Australia needs to grasp the opportunity offered by the Uluru Statement from the Heart than the one offered by Megan Davis. What I find remarkable about her response – not to mention the tireless dedication of her fellow Indigenous leaders, such as Pat Dodson, Marcia Langton, Noel Pearson and so many others – is that she has managed to remain defiantly optimistic in the face of the government’s betrayal, sluggishness and duplicity. The current bipartisan committee is, as Davis points out, the fifth government mechanism on recognition in seven years. Her response, written in the wake of “decades of rejection and reform inertia,” is yet another reminder that no campaign for human rights and social and political justice in this country has been as prolonged as that fought by our First Nations people.

I can well understand Davis’s fear, in the face of so much evasiveness and stonewalling from federal governments over the years, that generations of younger Indigenous activists will “entirely lose faith in the process of legal and constitutional reform.” This only underlines the urgency of finding a way through the current impasse. After so many decades of false beginnings and broken promises, the cost of failing to make the genuine structural reforms demanded by the Uluru Statement and the Referendum Council is too demoralising to contemplate. If the Uluru Statement was a defining moment in our history, so too was its rejection. In the long run, the Turnbull government’s response might well strengthen and sharpen the resolve of the movement for recognition. And there is ground for optimism, as Jill Gallagher reminds us, pointing to the progress being made towards treaties in Victoria: “Among the people I spoke to, including elders and traditional owners, there is a definite sense of change, a sense that the long decades of stasis are finally drawing to a close.”

One of the cornerstones of Moment of Truth was my suggestion that we should begin to see the larger project of re-founding the commonwealth “whole.” Rather than separating the quest for an Australian republic from the broader challenges of “recognition,” I argued that they should be seen as inextricably connected. I’ve been encouraged by recent signs that for the first time since the republic and reconciliation movements were launched within a month of one another in 1991, and travelled largely on separate trajectories ever since, we are beginning to see them as two inseparable components of an ambitious attempt to remake our constitution for the twenty-first century. In July 2017, Opposition Leader Bill Shorten insisted that “we should see [constitutional] recognition of Aboriginal people] and the republic as a chance to bring our Constitution home. To make it a more Australian document, more reflective of our times.” In February 2018, Peter Yu was even more explicit, arguing for the previously disconnected symbols of reconciliation and the republic to be seen as part of “one national re-founding project.” Writing in the Monthly four weeks later, Megan Davis claimed that Australia had been “too scared to dream big,” and she reminded the republican movement of the opportunity that confronts them. “Don’t go it alone,” she declared. “At Uluru we invited you to walk with us in a movement of the Australian people for a better future.” Shortly afterwards, Guardian journalist and author Paul Daley sensed the scale of the shift that was taking place: “Things are changing. There is an awakening among constitutional progressives that perhaps the Australian republic ought not be so divorced from the cry out of Uluru last May for a constitutionally enshrined Indigenous voice to parliament and a formal truth-telling.” It now seems possible, Daley suggested, that an “enduring Indigenous continental presence” could form “the bedrock of an Australian republic.” Daley’s perception was soon echoed by Richard Flanagan in his April National Press Club address: “We cannot hope to be a republic if [constitutional recognition] is not at the republic’s core, because otherwise we are only repeating the error of the colonialists and the federationists before us.”

Since its inception in 1991, the Australian Republican Movement (ARM) has resolutely resisted any suggestion that the push for reconciliation and recognition should be connected with the republic, so I was not surprised to read Michael Cooney’s response. “The role of the Crown in Australian life is just not acceptable,” he writes. “And the moment we can cut it out, we should do so. In an hour, if we get the chance.” In fact, the role of the Crown in Australian life today is negligible. Its relative invisibility is its greatest asset. If its presence were more obvious and even mildly damaging, it would be easier for republicans to make their case. Cooney misses the point. What is more unacceptable? The ongoing presence of a benign head of state upon whom we wait, ever so politely, to shuffle off this mortal coil, or the continued exclusion of our Indigenous people from the Constitution and the fact that our federal government has yet again failed to negotiate with them as equals?

Cooney is “most reluctant to see miscalculations made in goodwill hitch the weight of the republican wagon [is it really that weighty?] to this bright southern star.” “We should be prepared to wait,” he insists. “[T]he project of Voice, Treaty and Truth” is “Indigenous-led” and “Indigenous-defined,” and represents “a black solution to a black problem.” To my mind, this is cutting Indigenous Australians loose yet again. It mistakenly pretends that the structural reforms demanded by Indigenous leaders – the advisory body to parliament, truth-telling and treaties – can be put into effect simply by fiat when they can in fact only be achieved together, through the combined will and participation of all Australians and all levels of government. My starting point is the same as that of Megan Davis: if we continue on our current path, “we run the very real risk of a republic that renders the First Peoples invisible in the same way the constitutional monarchy did.” It is no longer tenable for republicans to claim that a republic can be declared while leaving the nation-defining challenge of Indigenous calls for constitutional, and social, justice unresolved. As Peter Yu asked earlier this year, “How could the political push to change Australia’s Constitution by severing the connection with the British Crown not involve Indigenous people? … The connections between the current British monarch and her fourth great-grandfather, King George III, are seamlessly pieced together as one symbolic temporal entity of profound significance to Indigenous people.”

For these reasons alone, arguing for a republic solely along the traditional axis of Australia’s relationship with Britain and the monarchy will no longer resonate. The true source of a more mature and independent Australia is not only the rejection of monarchy but also the grounding of our sovereignty on our own soil, in the songlines and shared histories of an ancient island continent, as the Uluru Statement invites us to do. Since 1991, we have grown accustomed to a political culture in which it is natural to speak of an Australian republic meaning nothing more than the absence of monarchy. For many involved in the long struggle for constitutional reform, that time has passed.

It’s important to realise that I am not suggesting the republic and recognition be merged in terms of process. The respective referendum questions must be put to the Australian people separately. What I am suggesting, however, is that Australian republicans must begin to speak to the broader challenges of recognition. As Russell Marks asks: “When is compensation due? What is the source of Australian sovereignty? Who are we?” Rather than look constantly across the oceans to Buckingham Palace, imagining the republic as an act of severance alone, we have to look within this country for the deeper and ultimately more powerful arguments for becoming a republic. Writing in The Lucky Country in 1964, Donald Horne optimistically suggested that an Australian republic lay on the other side of a “lightly locked door.” I’ve often pondered that image, especially because experience has taught me that the door is bolted firmly shut. If the door is ever to be pushed ajar, it will require a more substantial argument from republicans than the one we have heard since 1991: “nothing will change except the introduction of an Australian head of state.” Davis outlines the challenge: “Emotional appeals lamenting that the sons and daughters of the Southern Cross can never be the head of state are antiquated in this global world … I don’t feel an emotional connection to the Australian republican movement.”

If we truly hear the message that Indigenous leaders such as Megan Davis and Peter Yu and so many others are trying to convey, then we might begin to imagine an Australian republic that embraces the spiritual sovereignty of our Indigenous people as the origin of our collective sovereignty; a republic that, in the spirit of its rationale and manner of coming into being, reflects our feeling for the country and our sense of belonging to the “mother” country. This would be an Australia Day to remember, to commemorate and to celebrate.

Mark McKenna

MOMENT OF TRUTH

Correspondence

Damien Williams

“To listen you have to be silent.” The late historian Greg Dening enjoyed repeating that line to postgraduate students in workshops that he and Donna Merwick used to host at the ANU and elsewhere. He liked to quip that the word “listen” was an anagram of “silent.” That much was true. For Dening, the real significance of listening in silence was to create the conditions in which we could begin to encounter the other and reconsider the self. For that reason, I think he would have enjoyed reading Mark McKenna’s Quarterly Essay for its breadth, reflectiveness and emphasis on listening.

Even so, after reading the essay, I was left with three questions: does McKenna put too much faith in Australians listening to testimony in a truth commission? Would it bring about a lasting metanoia – a change of heart – in the nation? And, finally, will Australia have to be a more optimistic and equal place than it is today to become a reconciled republic?

To my mind, the biggest hurdles that a truth commission would face are the ingrained feelings of shame, anger and denial that recognition of Aboriginal people still evokes in the hearts of some Australians. Recently a friend told a story about visiting a Vinnies charity shop in Melbourne. The shop window displayed one of those little yellow signs you see around the place, which acknowledge the “traditional custodians” of the country you’re shopping on. In this case, it was the Wurundjeri. As my friend left the shop, two elderly people, perhaps in their eighties, passed the window. One stopped to spit – yes, spit – at that little sign, before walking on.

If we could open a window onto that person’s soul, what would we see? Undoubtedly, anger and contempt are the most likely contenders. I know this because I am descended from such people: small-minded, poorly educated, fearful, angry, white folk from the Mallee. They would just as quickly have called an Aborigine a “nigger” as they would have labelled a member of the Brethren a “scarfy.” (Catholics were beneath contempt.)

There was – and I am reluctant to cast this off into past tense so quickly – a lot going on on that side of the family. The one trip that my late grandparents ever made to Melbourne was to see “her” passing by, during one of the Queen’s early visits to Australia. In my late grandmother’s case, her family were market gardeners on the Tyntynder flats, just outside Swan Hill. Without doubt she knew the history of that part of the Murray: you only had to know someone born a generation before her to be told stories of the Beveridge brothers, who murdered seven or eight Wadi Wadi or Wemba Wemba people with poisoned flour when they colonised that country in the mid-nineteenth century. Local knowledge of those atrocities was bottled up, unacknowledged and pushed so deep that it became manifest in an appalling racism, directed at the Aboriginal people my forebears dispossessed and the Asians they feared would do the same to them. Such feelings have been massaged and validated by opportunists who have taken electoral advantage of people like them. People who, in their heart of hearts, know that what is theirs belongs to someone else.

Those for whom the Great Australian Silence became internalised as an angry scream now find themselves led by men caught in a political fight to the death within the federal Coalition party room. By contrast, the electoral centre of Australia, which is moderate, tolerant and secular, is leaderless. These are the people who wonder whether their children will enjoy the same standard of living that they do. They acknowledge that climate change is real and like to put solar on their roofs, not just to save on their power bills, but because they see it as a tangible gesture towards addressing a larger problem. Importantly, they have read, seen and heard enough to know that the colonisation of Australia was anything but peaceable. If a truth commission is to succeed, these are the people who will need to be encouraged to feel confident enough about the future to stop and listen to the testimony it will elicit.

Australia has come a long way since the nastiness of the History Wars at the turn of the last century. But for a Makarrata Commission to achieve McKenna’s aim of having Australians listen to the truths of the nation’s past, those in the political centre need to be shown that their future is a secure and bright one. It won’t be before that moment that they will find the stillness and silence in their hearts to truly listen to First Nations people or proponents of a republic.

The raging denial of history demonstrated in the act of spitting on the name Wurundjeri, or even thinking to call someone a nigger, is anything but silence. It is the bundling up of history inside the Union Jack, from which one derives sovereignty for us and the power, in our minds, to act and feel superior towards them. Our present constitutional arrangements and the leaders who tolerate them reflect that sense of superiority. Therein lies Malcolm Turnbull’s greatest mistake in rejecting the Uluru Statement from the Heart: he has squandered his opportunity to go down in history as the man who led his people into a new day, and who embraced a narrative of Australian nationhood that starts in the Dreaming rather than at Botany Bay.

Damien Williams

MOMENT OF TRUTH

Correspondence

Ceridwen Dovey

I’m not a historian but I’m in awe of the work historians do. Mark McKenna is absolutely right that the impact of Lyndall Ryan’s work (as well as the artist Judy Watson’s extraordinary research-artworks) in mapping sites of colonial frontier massacres based on careful research is due to how their maps force Australians to “see,” quite literally, “the imprint of violence in their history on a national scale.”

While reading McKenna’s thoughtful and timely essay, I was struck by his question: “exactly how much of the knowledge from the new Aboriginal history has seeped through into wider society?” And, more importantly, why hasn’t it seeped in? It is something I’d also wondered while researching a 2017 profile of Ryan. At a talk she was invited to give about her massacres research at an art gallery in Kings Cross, the audience – most in their sixties and seventies, very trendy, very enlightened and very white – nodded and murmured throughout her presentation; Ryan was preaching to the converted. But in the question time afterwards, a woman with spiky grey hair and a nose-piercing said, “Why didn’t we know this earlier? What was all that garbage we were fed at school?”

This is a common refrain among older Australians, Ryan told me afterwards, mentioning her mentor and fellow combatant in the History Wars, the historian Henry Reynolds, who titled his 1999 book Why Weren’t We Told? In it, Reynolds contrasted the code of silence (“soothing syrup”) about this violent past that took hold in the twentieth century (after the White Australia policy was introduced in 1901), with the openness with which massacres were sometimes admitted in the nineteenth. (McKenna mentions this too, that “in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, ‘warfare’ and ‘invasion’ were terms frequently used to describe the nature of frontier conflict in Australia” – they weren’t terms invented by “left-leaning historians.”) In other words, Australia has gone backwards in understanding the true nature of its history, in spite of the reams and reams of evidence that have been accumulated about its past.

To remain ignorant (amnesiac) about this past is entirely a political choice now, for the hard evidence is everywhere. As members of the Honest History coalition (which, in the wake of the History Wars, decided to put together “evidence-based interpretations” of Australian history) point out, proof of widespread massacres, and in-depth research on individual massacres, has been publicly available for many decades now, thanks to the diligent labour of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous historians. During the discussion after Ryan’s talk, for example, audience members mentioned other “massacre maps” they’d come across over the years: one created by Judith Monticone in a 1999 book, Healing the Land, and another created by the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation and distributed as a supplement in a major national newspaper in 1993 (how tragic that this seems unthinkable in the current political climate). There were group sighs of nostalgia for the days of Paul Keating, still the only PM ever to have publicly acknowledged the massacres (as McKenna notes). To me, the most powerful lines from Keating’s Redfern Park speech of 1992 are: “We failed to ask – how would I feel if this were done to me?”

I’m also grateful that McKenna delved into the complex issue of what kinds of physical memorials are appropriate when it comes to the highly political act of memorialising history, by tracing the local community’s conflicting ideas over time about how to commemorate Captain Cook’s landing at Kurnell. What a community, city or entire country chooses to commemorate about its past says a whole lot about how it sees its future. Yet it has always been much simpler for a country to memorialise individuals who were celebrated as heroes, explorers or adventurers in their own time. How does a nation instead remember the shameful, repressed aspects of its colonial history?

Judy Watson and Lyndall Ryan’s maps are virtual memorials to that past: each individual massacre site becomes more much than its geographical coordinates, McKenna writes, transforming into a “cartographic memorial, a shimmering testimony to a moral truth which is at once overwhelming and undeniable.” But this shouldn’t mean that we give up on the idea of building physical memorials to this terrible past too.

Tony Albert, an artist who was commissioned by the City of Sydney to create one of the first monuments to Indigenous servicemen and -women in 2015, told me that the frontier wars still need to be addressed in public memorials, “but you have to take these chances when they come, the slow, painful steps towards acknowledging historical truths.” His monument – seven-metre-high bullets beside three fallen shells – was erected in Sydney’s Hyde Park, close to the statue of Captain Cook that was later defaced. It holds a large metal coolamon, used for smoking ceremonies, and native foliage in the surrounding garden that can be used for fire. “We’re still living in a public landscape that is so barren of any Aboriginal indicators,” he said. “That’s why so many Aboriginal communities understand the power of engaging with an artist, and using the artist as a vessel for telling those unspoken stories from history.”

Genevieve Grieves, an Indigenous artist and filmmaker whose work deals with the history of massacres, agrees. “I don’t know how we’re going to be able to move into other spaces of feeling if we don’t have memorials to commemorate and mourn our history,” she told me. As a child, Grieves heard stories of massacre sites up and down the coast of New South Wales (her family is from the state’s north coast). “It has become an obsession of mine, understanding these sites.” Through her work, she has spent time at many massacre sites. “They’re all different in terms of how they’re engaged with, whether they’re kept secret by communities, held in their own knowledge but not shared more broadly.” She was inspired to mix art and history by the Indigenous historian and writer Tony Birch – like Ryan, a survivor of the History Wars. “He was asked by many people, ‘Where are the Aboriginal historians?’ And his answer was, we have so many. Playwrights, artists, writers, poets, filmmakers, we’re the Aboriginal historians, their art is a form of history-making,” a way of entering historical debates that had been closed to them. For a 2016 group show in Sydney marking the 200th anniversary of the nearby Appin massacre, Grieves created a video of a slow-opening fringe lily – a flower with special significance for the Dharawal people – and a wall containing 10,000 purple poppies that visitors to the exhibition could wear home, just as Australians do on Remembrance Day each year, in memory of World War I.

Grieves believes permanent memorials to massacre sites are also important for white Australians, who will remain unsettled in this country until they can accept, in the words attributed to the Indigenous activist and educator Lilla Watson, “that if you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”

The most prominent existing memorial is the Aboriginal Memorial – made in 1988 from 200 hollow decorated burial poles, or log coffins – which has stood since 2014 at the entrance to the National Gallery of Australia, honouring all Indigenous people who lost their lives defending their land. Mostly, however, the few massacre memorials that exist have been created by local communities: often simply a plaque on a single boulder, or sculptures arranged beside a walking path. Occasionally they take the form of “counter-memorials” (in landscape architect SueAnne Ware’s term), for example, the plaque added in 1988 to the existing Explorers’ Monument in Fremantle. The original plaque had honored three explorers “attacked at night by treacherous natives.” The new plaque reads, in part, “The punitive party mentioned here ended in the deaths of somewhere around twenty Aboriginal people.” Then there are what Ware would call “anti-memorials,” which do not take a fixed form but are transient or interactive, reflecting the mercurial nature of human memory and perceptions of the past. (Ryan and Watson’s online maps would fit into this category.)

I agree with McKenna that it is in Australian art, film and literature that the violence and dispossession at the nation’s core is most hauntingly addressed, processed, redressed. McKenna praises Kim Scott’s latest novel, Taboo, for dealing with “the legacy of frontier violence, and one massacre in particular, which took place in the early 1880s … in Scott’s Noongar homeland.” Not as well known is the contribution Scott has made to creating the physical memorial to that massacre. The Kukenarup Memorial was created in 2015 outside the small town of Ravensthorpe, in Western Australia, to commemorate a series of massacres in the 1880s of over thirty Noongar men, women and children. These were “reprisal” massacres, carried out after a white pastoralist was killed by a Noongar man for raping a thirteen-year-old Noongar girl. The memorial, which overlooks the farm homestead and massacre site, consists of a set of large sculptured red metal wings (in tribute to the wedge-tailed eagle, a Noongar totem) on either side of a walking trail cleared through the bush, and a number of plaques with quotations from members of the Noongar community set along the path. The text on the wings was written by Scott. It shifts between Noongar language and English, and reads in part:

This area of country has a harsh, complex and sometimes contradictory history. Many Noongar people were killed here, and all that death and the apartheid-like 20th century legislation meant many of our families were never able to return and reconcile themselves to what had happened … We believe all of us grow from our birth grounds, our histories and the quality of our human relationships. Now you are here. Listen. Breathe.

Scott told me he’s been “preoccupied” with the massacre site, which informs not only Taboo but much of his earlier work. He has elsewhere described going to this massacre place with a group of his Noongar relatives, and being invited by two white brothers onto the farm where killings took place. “The elders in our group had not thought they would ever return … to this particular area of ancestral country in their lifetimes – let alone … to be acknowledged in this way. Who knows? Such things, humble as they are, may be the harbingers of social transformation.” While Scott sees his novels as forming part of an alternate way of memorialising these massacres through art, which can be dynamic, with “possibility to evolve and grow,” he also believes that physical memorials are “strategically important, especially in terms of forcing acknowledgment.” They don’t need to be bronze statues – which is itself a very British way of commemorating the past – but whatever form they take, they “bequeath an equivalent status.”

Ceridwen Dovey

MOMENT OF TRUTH

Correspondence

Billy Griffiths

In April 2018, in an essay to mark the fortieth anniversary of the Australian Book Review, author and critic Beejay Silcox cast a sceptical eye on the “urgent, fractal logic of moments.” A moment, she observes, is an artifice that carries cultural and temporal weight; it is a prompt for action, something to be seized or savoured; it is an often self-fulfilling device to sell magazines, policies – even hope. We’re forever in a moment. “It can be exhausting,” she exclaims, “keeping up with the moment.”

What Mark McKenna has achieved in Moment of Truth is both to capture the urgency and emergent possibility of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, and to convey something deeper and more palpable: what Silcox calls “the energy of sustained momentum, rather than the fits-and-starts of moments.” By taking us back to the petitions of Aboriginal leaders in the 1920s and ’30s, and by guiding us through the decades of activism and scholarship that followed, McKenna places the Uluru Statement in its proper historical context. He reveals that we are indeed at a critical juncture in Australian cultural life.

The Uluru Statement is not simply the latest call for reform in Indigenous affairs: it is distinct from what came before. It is the culmination of decades of political struggle. For the first time a First Nations consensus position has emerged, and it is a resounding rejection of symbolic recognition. The regional dialogues of the Referendum Council united over a common theme: structural reform is the only reform worth fighting for.

McKenna’s essay helps Australians come to terms with the full meaning of the Uluru Statement as a mechanism for change. As well as exploring the role of a constitutionally enshrined First Nations voice to parliament, he teases out the possibilities intimated by the proposed Makarrata Commission. We have seen how much cultural change can be achieved by listening to survivors give testimony – over a few short years at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. Imagine what listening to a generation of Indigenous voices would do for us as a nation.

McKenna gives us a taste of what a truth-telling commission might look like, devoting several pages in the middle of his essay to the words of Jimmy Manngayarri, Ronnie Wavehill Wirrpngayarri, Emily Murray, Mavis Arnott and Donny Wooladgoodja. “Until we listen to the voices of Indigenous Australians,” McKenna writes, “we will continue to see the history of the country we share through European eyes.” The voices he includes are extracted from Yijarni: True Stories from Gurindji Country (2016), a bilingual, community-embedded retelling of the Wave Hill walk-off, Barddabardda Wodjenangorddee: We’re Telling All of You (2017), a historical collaboration between the Dambeemangaddee people and a group of researchers with deep links to the West Kimberley, and Ngurra Kuju Walyja: One Country One People (2011), a collection of stories from the Canning Stock Route. These ambitious cross-cultural enterprises confront the harrowing histories of the frontier and allow the survivors to bear witness. They are homages to Country – in all its social, symbolic and ecological complexity – and they have enabled many communities to archive and raise awareness of their cultural knowledge. As Donny Wooladgoodja says of Barddabardda Wodjenangorddee:

This project will help the younger generation, not just this generation, but the next one too. They have to learn what our ancestors did in the past and they have to be able to join the past together with the new, to see how it can work.

This growing genre shows us that much of the work ahead of us as a nation is already underway, and that historians, community organisations and local councils are well poised to respond to the challenges, opportunities and responsibilities presented by the Uluru Statement.

This vein of new scholarship is the legacy of the pioneering historians of the 1970s and ’80s who helped bring Aboriginal history into Australian consciousness. Archaeologists, too, were at the vanguard of this shift, extending our understanding of the depth and variety of human experience on this continent. A few months after anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner coined the phrase “the Great Australian Silence” in November 1968, archaeologist John Mulvaney published his first attempt to chronicle the deep Aboriginal history of this continent. We are still coming to terms with the opening sentence of that landmark book: “The discoverers, explorers and colonists of the three million square miles which are Australia, were its Aborigines.”

Over the past half-century we have seen a shift in focus in the disciplines of history and archaeology, from stories of the nation to histories with a more regional and local lens. McKenna’s own career has followed a similar trajectory, and he enjoys moving back and forth between modes. The historical vignettes he offers in Moment of Truth show how place can serve as an anchor for complex, and often competing, cross-cultural narratives. And as with the #changethedate campaign, which is being led by local councils, he observes that changes in history-making are occurring at the community level. “The Kurnell and Cooktown communities’ willingness to rethink the way they commemorate Cook’s landing shows how productive acknowledging the past can be.”

McKenna still sees Cook – and all that he has come to represent – as being at the heart of the truth-telling process. He reflects that Cook can never be banished from Australia’s historical consciousness: “We stand forever on the beach with him.” These words are a powerful reminder that Australian history will always be cross-cultural. But Cook need not remain at the centre of our historical vision. We should look forward from that beach, as Paul Irish has done with the Aboriginal communities in Sydney, and listen to stories that have been “hidden in plain view”; we must also look back and journey into the deep past. Australia has been home to thousands of generations of Indigenous men and women. Their ancestors voyaged to this continent some 65,000 years ago and made this land their own through language, song, story and fire. Their societies endured the extreme aridity of the last Ice Age, adapted to millennia-long floods and survived the rupture of invasion. They left their mark on every region of Australia: this landscape is as much cultural as it is natural. It is only by digging into deep time that we can come to terms with the magnitude of dispossession.

In her attempt to understand this “moment of moments,” Silcox sought out and interviewed the editors of Australia’s leading cultural magazines: those who commission essays such as McKenna’s, who seek to escape the pressure of immediacy and ask their writers to reflect on where our country is going and what we believe in. A common theme emerged from her interviews. “The hope that burns brightest – echoed by every editor – is that Australia will be brave or humble enough to face its history,” Silcox reports. “It is the ultimate antithesis to moment-by-moment thinking – letting our drop of time loose in the grand river of history.”

McKenna shares this hope, as do I and many others in the history profession. In January 2018, the president of the Australian Historical Association signed a letter to the prime minister urging him to respond to the Uluru Statement:

There has been a long history of Indigenous advocacy and forbearance in this country – more than two hundred years of patient petitioning to colonial, state and federal politicians and their institutions by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Tragically, those statements and processes of consultation have too often been betrayed or undermined by government, as if our politicians are uncomfortable with Indigenous strength and success. Historical research in recent decades has revealed the depth and pain of this lamentable failure. The Uluru Statement, which is the result of a decade of consultation initiated by the federal government, presents you with a vital opportunity to take a significant constitutional step forward.

McKenna’s essay takes another step again, reimagining the republic in the light of the profound call for Indigenous constitutional recognition. I welcome this agenda and strongly support the crucial role of history in our national life envisaged by the Uluru Statement from the Heart.

Billy Griffiths

MOMENT OF TRUTH

Correspondence

Alan Atkinson

The Uluru Statement from the Heart centres on the business of speaking and listening. It states the need for a “First Nations Voice enshrined in the Constitution,” and it includes the declaration that “in 1967 we were counted, in 2017 we seek to be heard.” In Moment of Truth, Mark McKenna has given a typically lucid and hard-hitting account of the obstacles and opportunities on the way to making that possible at last, one of the main obstacles being the chronic deafness of the federal authorities.

I’ll never stop learning from Mark. The most interesting thing about his essay is the way it focuses on acknowledgment, or in other words the business of entering into a shared knowledge. This is an exercise at the heart of any good democratic and governance process, and it is shaped generation by generation by the technology of communications. It goes a long way beyond inserting recognition of the First Nations in the federal constitution. It depends on deep structure, and yet the forms of governance created by the constitution militate against any such in-depth, continent-wide listening. The federal constitution might rightly be called racist, but there is surely more to it than that. The constitution is not designed to nourish moral will on a continental scale – imagery and identity, yes, but not will.

How else to explain the way Australia’s 16 million typically decent voting citizens have condoned the brutality of Nauru and Manus? Who could imagine that a government responsible for that sort of brutality would have the sensibility and the listening capacity to do much with the declaration from Uluru?

It is true that the federal government has not always failed this way, but where it has succeeded it has surely done so against the grain. The Uluru Statement points to “the structural nature of our problem,” and that is right. The problem is structural. It is the processes built into the federal system at the start that make the problem so hard to engage with, let alone solve.

McKenna notes three basic aims in the Uluru Statement: (1) the recognition of some form of Indigenous sovereignty as a fundamental aspect of nationhood, (2) a process of truth-telling, so that the violence and dispossession suffered by Indigenous people in the past becomes part of official and general understanding, and (3) ongoing inclusion of Indigenous people, as such, in the federal governing process. The first two feature especially in McKenna’s discussion. But I wonder whether the third is even more fundamental. It’s certainly the one that drew most objections last year.

Those objections carry a certain interesting though superficial logic. In Australia, unlike, say, Canada, pluralism in a governmental sense – even the term “First Nations” – constitutes a sort of heresy. Giving the Indigenous peoples, however they might be termed, a specific role in governance offends Australians’ sense of national unity, though why that sense of unity should be so much more fragile than Canada’s, and so easily infringed, it is hard to say.

Before and after 1901, during the Federation period, the question of genuine democratic process and of active listening was raised many times. It was understood on all sides that the key to successful Federation was that in the two-level government thus created, the higher level would have an inspiriting and coordinating purpose, and that listening and responding to everyday questions would happen at the lower, colonial/state level, as previously. Everything to do with families and social welfare, including education, marriage and property rights, was to remain at the state level, close to the people it affected. The same logic applied to the administration of Aboriginal affairs, although it might have been obvious that in this respect at least the colonial governments had failed. In the United States, another life-and-death issue of racial difference – slavery – had lately been taken out of the hands of the states, as a result of the Civil War.

Some saw danger in this separation of purpose, and in the creation of a government supreme in many things but not designed for listening. Disconnected from the old centres of civility and intellect, the colonial capitals, the federal authorities would be morally adrift, and prey to abstraction, militarism, big-noting and bigotry.

The angriest proponent of this way of thinking was the New South Wales feminist Rose Scott. Scott had an instinctive loathing of the habits of men en masse, and of bullying, whether physical, emotional or intellectual. She saw Federation as an effort by men to create a platform above the issues and influences of daily life, including the issues where the voices of women were particularly relevant. Scott believed that the new Australian nationalism would draw moral energy and therefore the will to listen from the older governments, where a deep sense of direction had already gathered, thanks to years of social networking and highly skilled public persuasion. The question affected women especially. In those days women’s influence was essentially local (for instance, through the ingenious grassroots network of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union), whereas Federation was a form of government designed to stretch over vast distances. So, during World War I, the Department of Defence engaged fairly well with the problems of soldiers and their families, and yet it was frequently outstripped by the Red Cross, a women’s organisation better structured for effective listening. I suggest that this deficiency has created a problem wherever the federal government has ultimate responsibility for intricate social problems, as in refugee camps and in the Northern Territory.

McKenna links listening and violence. He refers to listening as a means of reconciliation after violence. Conversely, listening can also be stopped by violence, and by the bullying Rose Scott spoke of. McKenna places considerable emphasis on “the imprint of violence in [Indigenous Australians’] history on a national scale,” and yet that imprint is not just historical. Violence, compounded by distance, now suppresses voices, especially among Aboriginal people, in what is surely a drastic failure of governance and citizenship. A study completed as a master’s thesis at Cambridge by Jeanette Kerr, then Assistant Commissioner of Police in the Northern Territory and now Acting Deputy Chief Executive Officer, Operations for Territory Families, uses detailed statistical evidence to conclude that “Aboriginal women, children and men of the Northern Territory of Australia … [are] the most victimised people in our country” and that “Aboriginal women in the NT are among the most victimised by intimate partners in the world.” This horror belongs ultimately to the federal government.

This is violence destructive of citizenship because it cancels the power to speak, especially in women. I quote a lawyer who has dealt with issues of domestic violence recently in Alice Springs (my daughter, Elizabeth Atkinson): “In controlling another person you silence them. Your victim’s voice is neatly or not so neatly removed, so as to leave one voice and one narrative, which is your own … The inherently private nature of domestic violence means that silencing can work well enough without others being aware that the victim’s voice is smothered. As with the right to sexual access, women’s voices are not equal to men’s. It is that understanding that has allowed domestic violence to continue unchallenged for so long.”

Any great wrong that goes unchallenged for a long time among a civilised people has to be a result of faulty processes – “the structural nature of our problem,” as the Uluru Statement puts it. My own listening experience has been unadventurous – typical for an ageing white male academic – but ordinary common sense suggests a large hole in the way the federal government operates, a hole in which the impact of voices fails. “The structural nature of our problem” goes from top to bottom. The extent of acknowledgment and truth-telling needed is vast, but so is the extent of necessary restructuring and re-gearing – the systematic (not one-off) opening of ears. Federation was a brilliant experiment in the creation of a coordinating power extending across vast distances, but on the whole it has coped badly with the accumulating demands placed on it. Remoteness (of Central Australia, of Nauru and Manus) is used to cover its failures. Note too how many of those demands have been only lately handed over to Peter Dutton, as Minister for Home Affairs, whose instinct for turning a deaf ear is almost sublime. However, in principle, if the commonwealth can be reconfigured against listening then surely, as McKenna suggests, the opposite might be possible when the time is right.

McKenna concentrates on the will to listen. Obviously, will is crucial. So is the capacity to listen. Will is pointless without capacity. Capacity is unsustainable without will. Somehow or other we have to reinvent both.

Alan Atkinson

DEAD RIGHT

Correspondence

Michael Cooney

I liked a lot about Mark McKenna’s essay – he knows plenty more about Indigenous history than me, so there was plenty to learn; and I was flying into Sydney airport while reading the comical and poignant history of Kurnell’s street signage, so craning my neck through the window was more than usually fun – but I was left unsatisfied by one key point and uneasy about another.

Unsatisfied, because thinking simply as an Australian who’s not Indigenous and who cares about all this, I’m still not sure that this essay came to grips with what I think is the core paradox of reconciliation (and of Makarrata): that the project is predicated on us all being “after struggle.”

I know Mark gets this, but I’m not sure he gets to this. Are we really post-conflict? Not just can we come together, but are we after struggle yet? I’m up for it, but how honestly sure am I that white Australia is done with doing things that will need to be apologised for and for which it will need to make amends? Would anyone consider Don Dale, deaths in custody and child removal historical wrongs?

And maybe even trickier – who answers this? On the one hand, it’s non-Indigenous Australia that needs to decide to make its confession, yes; but it’s only Indigenous Australia that can offer forgiveness and that can assess the white desire for amendment and judge if satisfaction has been or will be made. We should be prepared to wait.

There’s a great force of sentiment to be forgiven, a force felt in a really large and consequential part of non-Indigenous Australia. I feel it. But I’m not sure there’s as great a sensitivity to the gradations of meaning between asking to be forgiven (yes, good), expecting to be absolved (wait, tricky), and an unconscious wish for a new “cult of forgetfulness” in place of the old (stop, bad).

I get that some of us feel the mark of Cain upon us. The hard question is this: are we entitled to ask that it be removed? Because we cannot un-spill our brother’s blood.

(There’s an analogy here with the desperately sincere but unfortunately double-helixed desires of many non-Indigenous Australians that we both abolish an old national day that gives offence to Indigenous people and create a new national day that doesn’t cause discomfort to non-Indigenous people. There’s a lot to be said for the first. But the second – I’m not sure we will ever get there, and I’m not sure we should, and I’m definitely sure we’re not there now. Can we have – and should we seek – a national day which is unproblematic? On one reading, only when we are a nation that is unproblematic.)

This dissatisfaction I felt goes to the paradox of truth-telling and reconciliation about violence and dispossession, and to the paradox of changing the date without forgetting the day. It goes to the paradox of resolving sovereignty, too. Mark argues for the “spiritual notion” of Indigenous sovereignty to “explicitly coexist with the sovereignty of the Australian people in a future republican constitution.”

Okay. How?

I don’t mean through what form of words and force of law (although also how in that sense?). And I don’t mean I’m not sure whether Mark’s argument is that these Indigenous questions have to be dealt with “before” the republic or “with” the republic, although that too.

I mean: how do you get agreement to Mark’s goal?

Do Indigenous Australians want a constitutional settlement that the substantial sovereignty over these waters and lands is that of “the Australian people” (in place of the Crown), while their own “shines through as a fuller expression of Australia’s nationhood”?

Do they want political support for “Voice, Treaty and Truth” to entail political support for an Australian republic – and in turn, are they really offering to bet all their own hopes on a double-or-nothing deal with the public at large?

Should progress on Voice, Treaty and Truth really require not only a successful referendum for an Australian to be our head of state but in turn a successful resolution – which must surely only mean abandonment – of substantive claims against the Crown?

Yes, clearly all that could be consistent with one reading of Uluru and how it would relate to the establishment of an Australian head of state, and I don’t suggest Mark has made this up out of whole cloth, of course not. But I do think we need to ask – and I think we need to listen for a good amount of time.

First, because from my professional political perspective, my head tells me that forcing this kind of very strong legal connection of the question of Indigenous sovereignty to the question of an Australian head of state asks a great deal of a nascent, vital, perhaps even fragile, certainly not inevitable Indigenous project, and it largely asks that to the benefit of someone and something else. Precisely because of the importance of this campaign to Indigenous Australia and to every Australian, I am most reluctant to see miscalculations made in goodwill hitch the weight of the republican wagon to this bright southern star.

And second, because from my suburban vantage point, my heart insists that what’s most important about the project of Voice, Treaty and Truth is that it is Indigenous-led, Indigenous-defined. It’s obviously not the only thing to be done, in Indigenous affairs or in national life, and no one says it is. And what I hear Indigenous people saying to me is that what gives the Uluru Statement meaning, perhaps above all else, is that it presents as a black solution to a black problem.

Since taking up the republic campaign in May last year, I have done a lot more listening than speaking or writing about Indigenous politics. That approach will continue – I come with my ears on – and our campaign will certainly not speak over Indigenous voices or force ourselves onto this vital cause.

So this is the second point – the one about which I’m uneasy.

I’m uneasy when Mark says, “The only republic worth having is a reconciled republic.” I don’t exactly disagree, and I’ll offer something more specific about what that means for the Australian Republic Movement in a moment. But first up, I don’t think that is fair to the idea of reconciliation. Because I don’t think the purpose of the Uluru process was to give my life meaning and I know it was not to give my campaign meaning. I am not asking Indigenous Australia to do the spiritual labour for the nation. And I don’t think this version of the argument helps the campaign for Voice, Treaty and Truth.

This is why I don’t think it makes sense – not only because I don’t think it’s prudent, but because I don’t think it’s even good, really – to insist that these issues are more than just related, more than just connected, but that they have to have a concrete constitutional integration as part of a sequence (much less a cognate set) of constitutional changes set out years in advance.

Quite the contrary. In my opinion, when it comes to thinking about Voice, Treaty and Truth and about the republic, the question isn’t who goes first, it’s what happens when.

I propose holding a national vote in 2020 on the in-principle question (Do you want an Australian as Australia’s head of state?) and the model question (Should an Australian head of state be elected by the voters or by the Parliament?). I argue this should lead to a republic referendum in 2022. I support having a national vote on the Indigenous questions on the date and in the form that Indigenous leadership and community want it held. It is as simple and as complicated as that.

The role of the Crown in Australian life is just not acceptable. And the moment we can cut it out, we should do so. In an hour, if we get the chance. The absence of Indigenous sovereignty in Australian law is calamitous and absurd. Name the date and I’ll vote yes pre-poll so I can help out driving people to the polls on the day.

Let’s get on with it together.

Michael Cooney

WITHOUT AMERICA

Response to Correspondence

Hugh White

It is possible that the core argument of Without America will turn out to be wrong. Instead of withdrawing strategically from Asia, as I predict, America might remain the region’s leading power, or at least retain enough weight and influence to block China’s ambitions to take its place. Like the great majority of Australians, I very much hope that this is what happens, because it would so plainly be the best outcome for us. But hoping for the best is not a policy. Our policy-makers have a responsibility to think clearly about the risk that things don’t turn out so well, and what we should be doing about it.

How big is that risk? How likely is it that America will still be the, or even a, major power in Asia in twenty years’ time? That depends, among other things, on the Asia experts in Washington who formulate and implement US policy. If America is to maintain a strong leadership role in our region, these are the people who will make it happen. There is no doubt that the vast majority of them are convinced that America can, will and must remain the leading power in Asia. But how clearly do they see what that will involve?

How well do they understand the task that America faces? How clearly do they assess China’s power and resolve? How seriously have they considered what America will have to do to respond effectively? How carefully have they calculated what that would cost? How honestly have they weighed those costs against the fundamental interests and imperatives that US leadership in Asia is supposed to serve? How frankly have they explained all this to the American people? And how confident can they be, and can we be, that America’s political leadership, and the American people, agree with their assumption that defeating China’s challenge is worth what it will cost?

We have a useful opportunity to consider these questions, because four of the commentaries presented here come from the heart of Washington’s Asia policy establishment.

Ely Ratner, Mike Green, Evan S. Medeiros, Andrew Shearer and David Shambaugh are all very serious players, and it is hard to imagine a group that better represents the state of thinking among the people in Washington whose ideas will shape America’s response to China’s power and ambition. What they say matters.

I appreciate it that such respected and authoritative figures have taken the trouble to respond in such detail to the essay. It shows the generous willingness to engage and debate which remains such an attractive feature of American intellectual life. It also offers us in Australia a chance to hear directly from them about how they see the task they face, and to judge for ourselves how well they understand what they are up against, and what it will require of them and of their country. And that in turn helps us understand how likely it is that they can steer America to preserve a leading role in Asia.

While there are important differences of tone and emphasis among these four commentaries, they all convey a strikingly consistent basic message. Some suggest that American policy today is just fine, others that adjustments are needed, but all agree that nothing fundamental has to change. To remain the leading power in Asia, America just has to keep on doing what it has done for so long. The nature of the task, and the demands it will make of America, will be much the same as they were back in the days when US leadership in Asia was uncontested.

This is the first major point on which we disagree. One key element of my argument about America’s future in Asia is that America faces, in China, an entirely new kind of challenge, from an entirely new kind of challenger – one that is both more powerful and more resolved than any it has faced before – and that as a result the old policies and postures will no longer work. Over coming decades America will need to create a whole new policy to meet this new challenge. My Washington critics don’t think China is a very serious challenger, so they don’t think America has to do anything very different, or more demanding, to resist it. Indeed, under Obama, as Ely Ratner makes clear, they were not even sure that China was challenging America at all. Now they all agree that it is, in line with the new US National Security Strategy’s identification of China as a rival. They just think that it will prove an easy rival to defeat.

Who is right? Much depends on how one judges China’s power relative to America’s. They argue that I overestimate China’s power and underestimate America’s. But none of them addresses the single biggest factor in this whole debate: the shift in relative economic weight in China’s favour. They do not acknowledge the central, simple, brutal fact that China’s economy is set to overtake America’s to become the largest in the world, on any measure. Listing America’s economic strengths and China’s economic weaknesses does nothing to dispel the significance of this shift.

Just how far and fast this shift is happening has been made clear in the Australian government’s foreign policy white paper, published at the same time Without America was released. It presented a chart setting out the Treasury’s estimates of the relative size of key economies in 2030, twelve years from now. It predicted that America’s GDP will be $24 trillion and China’s $42 trillion – not far from double America’s. Of course, that prediction could be wrong, but it is very unlikely to be wrong by a large enough margin to justify Washington’s complacency. It is not credible or responsible for American policy-makers to ignore the truly tectonic shift in the distribution of economic weight between America and China, the implications of that shift for their relative power, and the consequences of that for America’s future in Asia.

Nor do they acknowledge that China’s military capacities, though still behind America’s in many ways, are far, far more potent today than they were even a decade ago, and that this has huge implications for the way a military clash with China would play out, how much it would cost America in blood and treasure, and how it could end. Nothing the Trump administration is doing to bolster US military capability will reverse this trend, or even do much to slow it.

And they do not see how far China has already changed the regional strategic landscape as its power and influence has grown. They are right to say that few, if any, countries in Asia want to live under China’s shadow, but they are quite wrong to assume that China’s neighbours are therefore willing to sacrifice their relationships with China to support America’s ambitions to resist it.

Finally, they do not address the central question of the balance of resolve between the rivals. Each of these four commentaries reaffirms the orthodox Washington view that America is determined to preserve its leading role in Asia. None of them explores the Chinese side of this equation – the possibility that China is even more determined to take its place and become the leading power in East Asia. They fail, therefore, to engage with the key point that I tried to illuminate in the Situation Room scenario in the essay: that as the balance of power between the rivals becomes more equal, the advantage increasingly shifts to the side that has, and is seen to have, the greater resolve. And nothing my Washington critics say detracts from the simple, geographical fact that what happens in Asia matters more to China than it does to the United States. They too readily assume that they can set the tempo and intensity of the contest with China, and frame it in terms which they can win easily. The Chinese clearly have other views.

None of this necessarily means that America cannot maintain a leadership role in Asia. But it does mean that it would have to make an extraordinary effort to do so. Things have changed fundamentally since 1972, when US primacy became uncontested. Now it faces a determined contest from a rival that is far more powerful economically, and therefore strategically, than any it has ever faced before. To prevail, it would need to create a very new and different model of engagement with Asia, and accept a burden of costs and risks far greater than any it has borne in many decades. But there is no sign, from their critiques of my essay, that the key people in Washington who would have to design and develop this new policy understand the nature or the scale of the task.

And then, of course, there is Trump. My Washington critics all, in different ways, urge Australians to ignore the Trump phenomenon, and to have faith that they and people like them – the US foreign and strategic policy establishment – can corral Trump’s America First instincts and persuade him, or his successors, to do what is needed to keep America strong in Asia. That seems to reflect a complacent assumption that Trump’s election was a complete aberration, rather than a result of powerful and persistent currents in US national life, including in America’s attitude to its role in the world. They take it for granted that Americans under Trump or his successors are willing to make the sacrifices needed to lead in Asia.

They cite the language on China as a rival in the new National Security Strategy, and Trump’s willingness to travel to Asia last year. But there is no reason to think that Trump really believes what the National Security Strategy said, nor that the strategy itself embodies any serious idea of what to do about China. And the suggestion that a twelve-day presidential trip to Asia constitutes a serious demonstration of US resolve shows how little those who make this suggestion understand the scale of the task America faces – even leaving aside the fact that Trump’s conduct on the trip sent precisely the opposite message. The weight of evidence suggests that Trump is as committed to his America First vision as he ever was.

That makes it very unlikely that Trump would commit himself to an effective policy in Asia, even if it were as cheap and easy as my Washington critics assume, or that he could convince Americans to support him if he did. It is even less plausible that Americans could be convinced to pay the far higher price that would really be involved. I would feel much more confident that my gloomy predictions about America’s future in Asia will turn out to be wrong if my Washington critics showed more awareness of the need to persuade Americans that US national interests in Asia justify the real costs and risks of an intense strategic contest with China. 

All this offers an important lesson for Australians. What my Washington critics’ comments tell us is that the mainstream of the US foreign policy establishment remains in denial about the scale and seriousness of China’s challenge. They ask us to trust them to manage China, and to support them in doing so. But they have no idea how to respond to it effectively, nor how to persuade American voters to support an effective response. That must, regrettably, increase the chances that the gloomy prediction embodied in the title of Without America turns out to be right.

Patrick Lawrence’s intriguing comment strikes a very different note, and reminds us how diverse and rich the US debate on these questions is once one moves outside the policy establishment. There is much to explore here, but I’ll just touch on two points. One is the key question of the nature of the US–China contest, which depends among other things, on what China wants. Patrick asks whether it is, or need be, a zero-sum game. Does China necessarily want America out of the Western Pacific, or does it just want America to “move over” and make some space for China at a top table that they might share?

I too have wondered this, and in some earlier work – my first Quarterly Essay, Power Shift, and my book The China Choice – I argued that America and China could reach a new modus vivendi, in which they shared power in East Asia. But it seemed to me unlikely that China would settle for that, rather than assert its own regional hegemony, unless America made it clear that there would be big costs and risks to China in trying to exclude America completely. That would, of course, require America to accept big costs and risks too. Back then I hoped America might find a way to do that: now I am much less sure that it can or will. Likewise, a power-sharing order in Asia could only emerge if America were willing to accept the complex give and take that it would require – instead, America could simply choose to withdraw once its own leadership became unsustainable. Alas, it seems that the latter is the case. Power-sharing takes two to tango, and I don’t think America is up for it.

The second point is what this means for Australia. Patrick is quite right to detect a severe bout of stage fright over how we conduct ourselves in an Asia without America. How frightened we are was neatly shown in the government’s 2017 Foreign Policy White Paper. Amid all the bureaucratic boilerplate, the key message was stark, and starkly incoherent. After acknowledging the profound shift in relative power, the force of China’s ambitions and the uncertainties of America’s response, the white paper nonetheless concluded that Australia could and should continue to rely on America to manage China for us and preserve the rules-based order which we depend on to shield us from China’s power. Future historians will puzzle over this, but I think stage fright is the explanation. One only has to watch Malcolm Turnbull and Julie Bishop – or their Labor counterparts – tiptoe round the issue to see how scared of it they are.

My colleague Merriden Varrall has taught me a great deal about China, and the sketch she offers of the distinctive elements of the Chinese worldview is really important and helpful. I’m therefore rather relieved to find that our conclusions about what China wants are perhaps not as far apart as she may think. I do not really see myself as quite the rock-eating realist she suggests, in that I think the sources and motives of states’ strategic actions are more complex than the classic realists allow. But I do think that states end up distilling the multiple forces acting within them into clear, if not always coherent, strategic agendas. And it does seem to me that, from all the complex factors that feed into it, we can see distilled in China today a perfectly clear and coherent agenda whose primary focus is to establish its strategic leadership in East Asia.

How far this amounts to an us-or-them zero-sum rivalry with America depends, among other things, on how America responds. If America’s response to China’s ambitions is – as the Washington establishment argues – simply to insist on the preservation of the US order, then the Beijing leadership is left with no choice but to either abandon its ambitions altogether, or to push back hard. If Beijing did not start off with a realist us-or-them agenda, Washington has pushed them towards it.

There is a broader point about the issues raised by Merriden and Patrick Lawrence concerning how we assess China’s actions and motives. Those who know China well tend to focus on ways in which China is different from other countries. They see its unique culture, history and vision of itself as driving equally unique forms of international conduct. I’m sure that is true, but only up to a point. China today works as a state in a system of states, and it has little choice but to operate within that system, even as it seeks to change the way it works. I therefore think increasingly we need to recognise that China acts a lot like other states, and that it is therefore, for example, compelled to play power politics to assert its ambitions for more influence in the system just as other countries have done, because that is the way the system is built. And it seems to be very good at doing this.

What China will do with the power and influence it is winning through successful power politics is, of course, a separate but critical question. John Fitzgerald is in little doubt that it intends to throw its weight around in ways that fundamentally undermine our interests and even our sovereignty. I’m not sure it is quite that bad. Sovereignty is too slippery and emotive a concept to be much use to us here. Protecting sovereignty is seen as an absolute imperative, so when we regard any pressure from abroad concerning any national policy as an attack on our sovereignty, we have no choice but to resist that pressure, whatever the cost. But this way of thinking about sovereignty is fanciful. Countries adjust their policies under pressure from others all the time – it is what international relations is all about. Sovereignty consists in the power to choose how to respond to such pressure, not in the fact of responding at all.

So far, at least, I see no signs that China really threatens our sovereignty. What it is plainly doing – and John was among the first to draw attention to this – is putting more and more pressure on Australia to adjust our policies to suit its interests. But it remains up to how to respond. We can still decide whether to go along, or to pay the costs that China can impose should we resist. These are the choices we have to learn to make in a much more nuanced and sophisticated way than we have so far done. Events over the past few months, since Without America was published, do not suggest we are making much progress in learning how to do this. The Sam Dastyari affair showed how easily this really vital question can become subsumed by political point-scoring tinged with a hint of jingoism.

It is clear that Chinese influence is very real problem, but it is also clear that the government was happy late last year to use it for its own political purposes. It not only sought to embarrass Labor over Dastyari’s conduct, but also to conjure threatening images of China in the hope of encouraging people to buy its argument that we can and must rely on America to shield us from it. On this point I disagree with John when he says that it doesn’t matter much whether China has won its strategic contest with America. It makes all the difference. The ill-judged excesses of late last year show very plainly that we will never learn how to manage our relations with China until we understand that we will not be able to rely on America to manage them for us, because it is losing that contest.

And anyone who is inclined to see last December’s events as signalling the start of a new policy of tough-minded resistance to Chinese pressure from Canberra should look at what the government has been saying this year. Visiting Tokyo in January, Malcolm Turnbull went out of his way to say nice things about Beijing, and both he and Julie Bishop very pointedly distanced themselves from the Trump administration’s declaration that China is a strategic rival – even though they had said very much the same thing themselves last year. Have they caved to Chinese pressure to change their tune, or was the mere fear that such pressure might be applied enough?

Which brings us finally to Kim Beazley’s generous and challenging comments. No one today has thought more deeply about the US–Australia alliance, or has more experience of how it works, and his remarks here show this to full advantage. He knows the working of the Obama administration well, and his analysis of the debates within it that determined the fate of the Pivot is compelling. But while he finds cause for encouragement in that analysis, I do not. As he tells it, the debates were won by those who believed that it was more important for America to get on well with China than to preserve its leadership role in Asia.

He paints that, in a memorable phrase, as “a product not of weakness, but of hope.” But the hope was that America could have both: that it could get on well with China and retain regional strategic primacy. It was the hope that China would accept that, because it was not in the end serious about taking America’s place. But that hope has been proved wrong. China is very serious about leading in East Asia, and it is powerful enough now to force America to choose one or the other. So America’s predicament is a product of China’s strength and America’s relative weakness. It is hard to see that Kim really believes Trump makes this any better.

So I found Kim’s fascinating argument doing more to support my pessimism than his optimism about America’s future in Asia. He concludes by suggesting that even if my pessimism proves justified, America in retreat from Asia would still look to Australia as a “last bastion” in the Western Pacific, as it did in World War II, so that we could rely on it to look after us. But that is also, I think, too optimistic. In 1942, America needed a last bastion here because it was determined to reassert the position it had lost to Japan. An America which seeks no major strategic role in Asia needs no bastions on this side of the Pacific. And even if it did, what future would we have, as an American outpost in a Chinese-dominated East Asia? If Australia is to flourish, it has to flourish as part of our region, and we have to find a way to engage with that region, including its leading powers, on our own terms, when we no longer have a great and powerful friend to do it for us.

Hugh White

WITHOUT AMERICA

Correspondence

Andrew Shearer

In the decade or so that Hugh White has been peddling variants of his “China Choice,” I have frequently joined other commentators in crediting him for stimulating debate even while disagreeing with his analytical judgments and his policy prescriptions (to the extent he specifies them). It is tempting to greet Without America in that spirit.

To do so here would be a cop-out, however. The subject of White’s latest essay – the strategic competition between the United States and China, and its implications for the regional order and Australia in particular – is too important. When someone has been writing and advocating on one topic for as long and as prominently as White, we are entitled to expect analytical rigour and useful policy recommendations. Unfortunately, Without America disappoints on both counts. It remains much more a gauzy adumbration than an actionable blueprint to help policy-makers navigate an increasingly challenging strategic environment.

In Does America Need a Foreign Policy? (2001), Henry Kissinger remarked that, “the successful conduct of foreign policy demands, above all, the intuitive ability to sense the future and thereby to master it.” Without America is certainly an ambitious attempt to sense Asia’s future. But it falls down not least because it misreads transitory events and ephemeral noise for consequential signals about the long-term direction of US policy. In an almost hypnotic chain of seriatim assertions, White’s argument reaches his climactic judgment: “America will lose, and China will win. America will cease to play a major strategic role in Asia, and China will take its place as the dominant power.” In White’s interpretation of developments – particularly the advent of the Trump administration – America is already withdrawing from the region. Yet many of the analytical judgments leading to his sweeping conclusions have already been overtaken by events since he wrote his essay. 

Under President Trump, White claims, “America seems to have abandoned the objective of resisting China’s challenge in Asia” and “the trend in Washington seems clear. Trump is not committed to maintaining US leadership in Asia. He is content to see America’s influence in the region wane while China’s grows.” As evidence for this proposition, White points to: Trump being “conciliatory and accommodating” towards China in office; the sidelining of “China hawks,” a softening in US rhetoric towards China, and the new administration going “out of its way to emphasise cooperation with Beijing”; Washington no longer promoting “its own vision of Asia’s future, in opposition to China’s”; the South China Sea slipping down Washington’s agenda; and the administration scarcely acknowledging that America faces a strategic contest with China in Asia.

Now let’s consider what has actually been happening.

It’s true that Trump fell for traditional Chinese diplomatic flattery when his hosts rolled out the red carpet on his premature first visit to Beijing last November and did not push hard enough on key issues. Trump also had a friendly but insubstantial summit with President Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago and, at least initially, Beijing believed it had established a special channel through presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner. There will continue to be issues where the two powers’ interests overlap and they agree to work pragmatically together; China has acquiesced in new UN sanctions on Pyongyang, for example. But since he was elected, President Trump has in fact criticised China on a range of issues, particularly not going far enough to pressure North Korea, but also its trade practices. With the partial exception of North Korea, it is difficult to identify prominent areas of cooperation (such as climate change under the Obama administration).

On the contrary, the balance in the relationship has continued to shift further under Trump from engagement towards overt competition. Far from standing back and giving China a free hand to carve out a sphere of influence across Asia, as White asserts, the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy documents go further than any predecessor’s in identifying China (along with Russia) as a revisionist power and strategic challenger. The National Security Strategy declares the failure of the bipartisan commitment to engagement that has framed the United States’ China policy for several decades, and explicitly accuses China of attempting to reorder the region and erode American security and prosperity using a combination of economic coercion, military power and information warfare. The Strategy labels China “a strategic competitor using predatory economics to intimidate its neighbors while militarizing features in the South China Sea.” In a significant shift, it declares inter-state strategic competition (including with China) the primary concern in US national security, formally supplanting terrorism.

White and other critics may dismiss both documents as the delusional bluster of a fading superpower, but prudence and decades of mistaken prophecies of American decline suggest it would be a mistake to ignore the administration’s undertaking that the United States “will raise our competitive game to meet that challenge.” So do a number of the administration’s actions to date. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has laid out the administration’s vision of a “free and open Indo-Pacific” in direct response to China’s regional power play. As well as moving to reverse the Obama administration’s cuts to defence spending and rebuild US military readiness, the administration has resumed routine freedom of navigation patrols close to contested features in the South China Sea. The administration and Congress are starting to focus on Chinese efforts to influence domestic politics in the United States (reportedly in light of recent Australian experience).

The administration is also pushing back against Beijing’s mercantile economic policies. Congress is moving to tighten US foreign investment rules to clamp down on intellectual-property theft by China. The United States Trade Representative flatly rejects China’s market economy status, and trade experts are in accord that the recently announced measures against Chinese imports of solar panels are just the start of a concerted campaign using many of the trade levers Washington employed during the US–Japan trade spats of the 1980s and 1990s.

My point here is not to endorse the administration’s policies. Tariffs are bad for consumers, inimical to growth, likely to trigger Chinese retaliation, and in the worst case could lead to a mutually destructive trade war. The decision to withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership – once acknowledged by Hillary Clinton as a “gold standard” trade agreement – was a damaging self-inflicted wound. No one serious – senior administration officials included – would assert that the Trump administration yet has a fully developed, comprehensive Asia strategy. The “free and open Indo-Pacific” is a useful conceptual framework. It could be given real substance as the administration finally starts to fill senior Asia policy roles but for now is little more than a bumper sticker. Clear and consistent public messaging hasn’t been one of President Trump’s hallmarks, and he and his administration have at different times sent wildly varying signals on relations with China (not to mention on North Korea and a raft of other foreign policy issues). There are legitimate concerns about the president’s temperament and command of foreign policy.

A certain amount of cognitive dissonance is therefore excusable when it comes to analysing this highly unconventional, disruptive and not infrequently dysfunctional presidency. Indeed, there are signs that the political leadership in Beijing misread Trump too and has been thrown somewhat off-balance: recent visitors there confirm that officialdom remains in denial about the seriousness of US resolve on trade, for example. Even Bob Carr – another prominent advocate of an accommodationist policy towards China – is discombobulated. In May 2017, the former Labor foreign minister and diarist wrote a column for the Sydney Morning Herald trumpeting that the new American administration had stopped US freedom of navigation patrols in the South China, and that Australia would have been left “stranded” if it had conducted its own patrols as advocated by several commentators (including this writer). Carr isn’t one to be daunted by facts, but even he must have been mildly embarrassed when the USS Dewey steamed within twelve nautical miles of Mischief Reef in the Spratly Islands the same day that his misconceived article appeared.

But this doesn’t let more serious commentators off the hook, and it makes it even more important they resist the easy temptation to substitute modish indiscriminate Trump-bashing for sober assessment. Too often White’s Quarterly Essay succumbs. As a result, it miscomprehends the United States, the Trump administration and the direction of US policy towards China and the region. It underestimates the United States, its trajectory, its enduring interests in the region, and the costs and risks it is prepared to bear to protect them and retain a strong – albeit not necessarily predominant – position in Asia. Moreover, the judgments in the two strategy documents cited earlier above do not represent the aberrant views of a handful of “China hawks” but reflect an increasingly broad consensus across the executive arm of the US government, both sides of Congress, the wider American foreign policy establishment and even many in the business sector.

Without America is likewise too dismissive of other major powers in the region and their potential to counterbalance China’s growing power, in different combinations – as highlighted by the recent re-establishment of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue between the United States, Japan, India and Australia. Under Prime Minister Shinzo¯ Abe, Japan has a clear-eyed appreciation of challenges to the regional order and is stepping up its security contribution in ways few experts predicted even a decade ago. Far from the impression of brittleness White conveys, senior Japanese and American policy-makers and experts consistently tell me that the US–Japan alliance has never been stronger. Abe is serious about strengthening strategic ties with India and Australia. There may be a hedging aspect to this, but Abe’s commitment to the US alliance is genuine and he clearly sees these relationships as augmenting rather than supplanting it, and contributing to a critical mass of like-minded powers capable of providing a counterbalance to China. Likewise India, whose geography and strategic interests, threat perceptions and values similarly point to continuing convergence among the region’s major maritime democracies. Neither Japan nor India is likely to settle meekly for the circumscribed roles assigned to them in White’s putative China-dominated Asia. Neither should Australia.

When he turns to Australia’s role, White is unduly critical of Australian policy-makers. Australian regional diplomacy since 2000 has not been without blemish (and as someone closely involved in Australian foreign policy over for much of this period I should probably declare an interest). As historian Hal Brands observes in What Good is Grand Strategy?: Power and Purpose in American Statecraft from Harry S. Truman to George W. Bush (2014), “Devising a coherent, purposeful approach to international politics is hard enough, given the limits of human wisdom and the chaotic nature of global affairs. Implementing it can be harder still.” Yet Australia’s recent track record is hardly the failure White asserts. On the contrary, Australia has pursued – not without occasional departures and interruptions – a broadly effective balancing strategy, moving over time (in response to China’s increasing power and assertiveness) along the spectrum from “softer” to “harder” forms of balancing. Working to encourage sustained US engagement in the region has been a centrepiece of strategy under Australian governments from both sides of politics for over seventy years, notwithstanding occasional differences of emphasis and tactics.

John Howard laid a firm strategic foundation. As early as 1996 he told the visiting US secretaries of state and defense that as the balance of power started to shift in the region, “new geopolitical forces and pressures emerge. These forces require careful channeling, management or offsetting. And we have no reason to believe that countries will start behaving radically different from how they have behaved for the past few thousand years.” Alliances were “perhaps even more important in times of flux, and an alliance commitment is not a surrender of independence.” More than twenty years ago, Howard saw that the coming challenge was “how can we encourage China – and if necessary constrain it – to behave in positive and co-operative ways as its international role grows.” Over more than a decade in office Howard rebuilt Australia’s defence capabilities (explicitly linking this to his government’s economic growth agenda); strengthened the US alliance; signed Australia up to the Australia-Japan-US Trilateral Strategic Dialogue, the East Asia Summit and the first iteration of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue; made the first moves to establish a serious bilateral strategic partnership with Japan; and committed – despite trenchant opposition from Labor and his own non-proliferation officials – to establish strategic trust with India by lifting the ban on uranium exports. 

Kevin Rudd was the only prime minister during this period to pursue (at least initially) an accommodationist China policy, and it went badly. Hoping to curry favour in Beijing, Rudd withdrew Australia from the Quadrilateral Dialogue. He undermined trust in Tokyo by taking Japan to the International Court of Justice over whaling and let bilateral free trade negotiations drift. His quixotic Asia Pacific Community initiative went nowhere. And he overturned Howard’s commitment to lifting the counterproductive ban on exporting uranium to India. These steps might have been defensible if they had ushered in a new golden age in Australian relations with China. On the contrary, they reached a new low when a frustrated prime minister lashed out famously about his Chinese counterparts (in rodent-related terms) at the Copenhagen climate talks. The Rudd government’s 2009 Defence White Paper represented something of a course correction, flagging the need for a naval build-up in response to China. After replacing Rudd, Julia Gillard subsequently undid some of the damage with Japan, particularly when she was the first foreign leader to visit after the Fukushima disaster, and boosted the US alliance when she agreed to the US Force Posture Initiatives in Australia, but Labor continued to support the India uranium ban and drag its feet on free trade negotiations.

The Abbott government took the Howard framework as its template, initiating a comprehensive defence white paper and increased defence spending, strengthening the US alliance by contributing forces to the coalition military operation that recently defeated ISIL in Iraq and Syria, strengthening defence ties and concluding a free trade agreement with Japan, finally lifting the India uranium export ban and pursuing closer naval cooperation, hosting a leader-level meeting of the Trilateral Strategic Dialogue, and taking a firm position on Chinese moves that undermined the status quo in the East China Sea and the South China Sea. At the same time it maintained a pragmatic relationship with China, concluding the most comprehensive free trade agreement with that country of any major developed economy and signing on to Beijing’s Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (in the process deftly managing resistance from Washington and Tokyo and extracting substantial Chinese concessions to make its governance more transparent – a textbook piece of Australian diplomacy).

The Turnbull government has consolidated some of these successes. It has sustained the commitment to spending two per cent of GDP on defence, and the 2017 Foreign Policy White Paper went further than previous governments to articulate a credible framework for a continued Australian balancing strategy. During his recent visit to Tokyo, Prime Minister Turnbull announced with his counterpart Abe that the two countries are close to finalising a legal agreement that will facilitate more ambitious combined military exercises. In a forthright speech at the 2017 Shangri-la Dialogue in Singapore, Turnbull pointed to the risks to regional stability and prosperity posed by a coercive China; while it has refrained from authorising the Royal Australian Navy to conduct freedom of navigation operations, his government has spoken out consistently against China’s efforts to change the status quo in the East and South China Seas. The government supported the re-establishment of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue; it responded cautiously to China’s Belt and Road Initiative; and it is legislating in response to revelations of covert Chinese influence operations in Australia. Labor under Bill Shorten’s leadership has pursued broad bipartisanship on national security including the US alliance – although some Labor figures have used President Trump’s unpopularity to call for a “more independent” Australian foreign policy (longstanding code on the Australian Left for weaker ties with the United States), and whether a Labor government would deliver, particularly on defence spending, remains to be seen.

Allowing for the difficulties inherent in strategic planning and implementation, the pace of change and increasing complexity in the region, and an unedifying period of instability in Australian politics, this is a pretty good track record. Many other countries can only envy the prosperity and relative security Australia enjoys today. There is always room for improvement, and White is right to warn Australians against complacency: the balancing task is becoming significantly more challenging, for some of the reasons outlined in Quarterly Essay 68. But it seems churlish not to give our political leaders, on both sides of politics, some credit.

Hugh White paints in broad, vibrantly hued brushstrokes daubed one on top of the other, like Vincent van Gogh. The result is vivid and striking but often lacks verisimilitude. What is needed now is realism, not impressionism. Australia is indisputably moving into a more difficult strategic era, which will test our policy-makers and demand steady, purposeful statecraft. But it is time to end the phony China Choice debate, which has been consistently rejected by both major political parties and has few if any adherents in Australia’s national security community and among other serious commentators. We need to move beyond “admiring the problem” and bemoaning the lack of a strategy. Together, the defence and foreign policy white papers provide a sound conceptual framework. But they need to be implemented with greater vigour and urgency.

Andrew Shearer

WITHOUT AMERICA

Correspondence

John Fitzgerald

People in China who follow Chinese-language news sites in Australia would have been alarmed by warnings that started flashing on their touch screens late last year. “We remind all Chinese overseas students in Australia to be wary of possible safety risks in Australia,” China’s embassy and consulates cautioned in an official alert on 20 December. “Attacks and insults targeting Chinese students have been taking place around Australia.” The warning was repeated locally between music breaks on PRC-funded Chinese-language radio stations and websites such as Melbourne’s 3CW, in endless loops, along with a recitation of phone numbers for presumably distressed students who needed to contact their local consulates.

The warning came less than a fortnight after the Chinese embassy in Canberra issued a strongly worded statement in Chinese and English condemning Australian media for “repeatedly fabricating news stories about the so-called Chinese influence and infiltration in Australia,” making “unjustifiable accusations against the Chinese government” and “unscrupulously vilifying Chinese students as well as the Chinese community in Australia with racial prejudice.”

As if that were not enough, Australia came in for a hiding on Chinese-language community and commercial media in Australia and on local social media platforms tied to Beijing. Popular Chinese-language digital news services, including Queensland Today and Melbourne Today, carried stories about duty-free stores in Australia singling out tourists from China to diddle them, and about the children of students who had come to Australia to study who were suiciding in despair when they found they could not fit into Australian society.

The timing of these pointed messages could have been coincidental. The conjunction of official warnings and popular bad-news stories on Beijing-friendly media in Australia offers a timely reminder, nevertheless, of the tools the Chinese government has at its disposal should it ever wish to launch a Chinese consumer boycott of Australian tourism and education. Authorities in China would only need to signal to their Australia-based consular services and PRC-friendly media platforms that it was game on, and it could well be game over for many Australian universities and regional communities.

Why would Beijing want to do such a thing?

The latest instalment in Hugh White’s strategic tour de force helps explain why. Without America commands attention as an up-to-date elaboration of White’s longstanding projections on the massive geostrategic shifts underway in our region. In this latest iteration, the contest between the United States and China for regional supremacy is over, bar the shouting. Australia has to start learning to live without America and, by implication, with China.

This is where things get interesting. On top of its geopolitical forecasts, Without America merits attention for probing what lies beyond American hegemony and asking what kind of state China is likely to be, how it is likely to behave, what kinds of values it is likely to profess, and what kinds of threats it could pose to Australia’s own values, interests and institutions over time as we try to get along with it.

In posing these questions, the willingness White showed in earlier volumes to accede to China’s demands, and make allowance for its expanding role as a regional actor, has diminished as that country’s triumph looms into view. There is probably little point proposing that this or that concession should be made to China when Beijing is prepared to take whatever you are prepared to concede without bothering to ask. In Without America, White sensibly shifts from asking what should be conceded to China, whatever the cost, to asking what it is that Australia and other countries should not concede to China at any price.

This is the question of the moment. Rather than answer it himself, White puts the question out there for public discussion.

In fact, this is pretty close to where we are already sitting in the current national debate on Chinese-influence operations in Australia. We got here not because we were thinking about grand strategy but because China’s unrelenting influence operations in Australian infrastructure, business circles, community and mainstream media, political parties, universities and community organisations have captured attention over a number of years and forced the question upon us. Australians are now being asked whether they are prepared to yield to the incremental challenges China presents to their sovereignty, integrity, cohesion and security, and invited to think about the balance they are prepared to strike between their economic interests and their sense of self-worth.

As far as foreign-influence operations are concerned, Australia is on its own. It does not matter greatly whether China has or has not won in its grand strategic competition with America. What matters is the extent of Australian dependence on Chinese markets and, should it come to that, the degree of pain Australians are prepared to endure to defend their sovereignty and integrity. Dependence on Chinese markets does not compel Australians to overlook Chinese government interference operations, but it does require them to weigh the cost of any action to put an end to them. The greater its economic dependence, the more vulnerable Australia becomes to China’s political and strategic leverage.

China already has the capacity to impose heavy costs on Australia for not complying with its wishes. It is not entirely clear where China’s wishes start and end, but a few of them are sufficiently well known to help clarify when and how we might be transgressing them.

Some items on China’s wish list are the same as those of any great power: for example, the expectation that it should be consulted and taken into consideration in any major geostrategic developments in the region. Others are peculiar to the arcane political culture and ethno-nationalism of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the post-communist era.

The party wants to harness the sixty million–strong Chinese diaspora to Xi Jinping’s China Dream, irrespective of nationality, and to silence the CCP’s critics among them, particularly those who publish online overseas in the Chinese language. Several of China’s influence operations in Australia are framed with Chinese Australians in mind and are defended in Beijing on national security grounds, which is no trivial matter.

Others relate to the overt conduct of foreign governments, best captured in a negative wish list of what they should refrain from doing in public: not engage in official conduct that could harm the interests, the standing or the “face” of the CCP or government, not act or speak in open defiance of Chinese policy or behaviour, not challenge China’s “core” interests, not collaborate with other countries in ways that might appear to threaten China’s security.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s comments introducing the National Security Legislation Amendment Bill to parliament on 7 December 2017 touched on a number of these sensitivities at once. Among other things, he referred to press reports of Chinese government interference operations in Australia and indicated Australia would “stand up” to defend its sovereignty in the face of China’s challenges. The speech appears to have triggered the warnings and messages issuing from China’s representatives and friendly media platforms in Australia around the turn of the year.

The sombre tones of those official consular warnings broadcast over and again on Chinese community radio sounded to all appearances like a tsunami alert. But this was a cautioning of a different kind. The government of China is warning the government of Australia that it is prepared to teach Australia a lesson for stepping out of line.

And so we have a foretaste of life with China. Discussion of Beijing’s “soft power” operations in Australia to date has focused on their intended impact on Australian policies and behaviours through donations towards political parties, funding for university centres, equity holdings in local community media and the like. But these investments are also about China influencing China.

Foreign messaging in the Chinese language is widely read throughout China, and local social media messaging in Australia has instant global reach. Beijing has the intent and the capacity to target WeChat readers and online audiences in China from within its Australia-based media operations. When Beijing really decides to mobilise its capacity within Australia to influence the consumer choices people make in China, Australians will have to start thinking very hard indeed about how they will live with China and still retain control over their own destiny.

We count for very little in China’s grand strategy. The first lesson on living with China in a world without America is that China is all about China and not at all about us.

John Fitzgerald

WITHOUT AMERICA

Correspondence

Patrick Lawrence

What a level, clear-eyed assessment Hugh White has written as China emerges, the United States dithers in clouds of nostalgia, and Australians must determine how to proceed amid these momentous transformations. I privilege this as my opening remark on White’s intricately reasoned essay because, as an American watching Washington closely as a matter of my profession, “level” and “clear-eyed” are not terms I am accustomed to typing. White comes out right: here is what the twenty-first century looks like; take it, because there is no leaving it. “Let’s get on with it,” as his last sentence puts the point.

In truth, I did not begin White’s piece so approvingly. I expected to read another connoisseur of the exquisite circularity of Western-centric strategic reasoning, if this is the word. The early signals were many: “America will lose, and China will win,” “how the contest will proceed,” “a new, China-led order,” “an Asia dominated by China,” “a country’s willingness to go to war . . . determines its place in the international system,” and so on. This is the zero-sum myopia that afflicts Washington: what China gains is our loss. It is an adjunct of the “indispensable nation” routine – which, in turn, gives rise to the with-us-or-against-us bit. George W. Bush made this explicit after the September 11 tragedies; but, as White reminds us, Barack Obama treated Australia to a full-dress rendering when he addressed parliament a decade and two months later.

America has the frame wrong, as White notes with a splendid bluntness. This seems to be a realisation that arrives bitterly among Australians, and one understands: it rather cancels many decades of assumptions. White walks through and out of these – the virtue of his piece. China’s rise does not imply a contest. In that speech Obama delivered in Canberra in November 2011, he announced that the United States had decided to turn it into one – a very different thing. This is the frame, and it has proven the fatal flaw in American thinking ever since.

The emergence of China as a regional and global power is neither more nor less than history’s wheel turning. It is a challenge, certainly – no surprise, as history is never short of these – but it is not a challenge to confront, or to turn back. That is sheer folly, as White remarks in so many words. The challenge is to find opportunities in the soil of an unfamiliar landscape. It is to advance imaginatively into a new time, confident of one’s competence to do so. It is to remain game, in a word: aware of the past but never its prisoner.

White writes quite a lot about “great-power politics,” hegemony, the ambitions of powerful nations. He refers severally to the nineteenth-century conduct of the European powers. Good enough to have a sound grounding in history, something we Americans flatly decline to cultivate.

But I urge White to dilate the lens still further. Parity between West and non-West, in one or another manifestation, is in my view the twenty-first century’s single most momentous imperative. Humanity has known nothing like this for at least half a millennium (taking my date from da Gama’s 1498 arrival in Calicut). The past is not going to be so reliable a guide, precedent not so strict a professor – this for the simple reason that non-Western nations are going to do things differently. Empire-building, to make the most obvious of many distinctions, will not figure among their priorities.

How does a nation’s intent come to be as it is? Or its ambitions? What gives rise to them, and why? History, culture, traditions, long-embedded values – these, the soil of politics, are my answers. If we think about China in this way, what might we surmise?

Anyone who has walked to and fro on the mainland understands that the Opium Wars were the day before yesterday to the Chinese sensibility. So there is the question of humiliation and its overcoming – redress. The Western powers walked all over the Chinese by way of territorial integrity, but let us not stop there: pile a set of historical maps atop one another and leaf through them – what makes China China has been a question requiring careful management as long as there has been a China. Closer to our time, it is worth considering the Five Principles of Peaceful Co-Existence Zhou Enlai articulated at Bandung in 1955, when the People’s Republic was a struggling six-year-old. Four had to do with mutual respect – territorial integrity, non-interference, recognition of equality, and so on.

The Cold War being as it was, China’s record in these regards is other than spotless. But vastly on the whole, it indicates that Zhou, fifty-seven when he went to Bandung, was not a mere spouter of platitudes. There is a thread of continuity in China’s conduct, then to now. It dropped no bombs last year and sent no drones into civilian populations in other nations. It has no record of fomenting coups, fixing elections, or, as White points out, insisting that others adhere to its political and social ideologies.

I read Xi Jinping’s monumentally sweeping speech at the Nineteenth Party Congress last October against this background. It is clear to me that China sees its best interests – stability (another long preoccupation in Beijing) and prosperity for its 1.3 billion people – as lying in the cultivation of these very things as far as it can go from Shanghai to Lisbon. The American dailies groused endlessly about self-interest when Xi celebrated his Belt and Road Initiative at a quite well-attended forum in Beijing last spring. This is what I mean by the opportunities that are there to be exploited but overlooked when the frame is threat and rivalry. I read the list of the 1700 BRI projects already on the books and thought, “With enemies like this, who needs friends?”

One of the decisive passages in White’s piece comes after he ticks off all the worst outcomes now laid out in situation rooms in Canberra (and of course Washington). “Beijing could one day try to impose its brand of authoritarian politics, dictate national policies and control our economy to its advantage,” he writes. “At worst it could invade the country and subject it to direct rule from Beijing.” I had not thought our American brand of paranoia had spread so far. But then:

There is no evidence that this is how China’s leaders see things today. Their territorial ambitions seem limited to the lands that China already occupies or claims . . . They show no desire to proselytise an ideology or export a political system. Nor do they want radical change in the regional or global economic order.

My first thought on reading this was that White would have a tough time finding a professorship in the US if he insists on tossing this kind of thing around, but that is another conversation. This is the kind of clear sight Australia needs to rely upon – a starting point, no more – as it decides how to locate itself as a Pacific nation in the twenty-first century. As to the rivalry theme, I propose to dispose of it this way: America has a lot of frontage on the Pacific lake, and no one wishes it were otherwise – not even the Chinese. They are not saying, “Go, your time is over.” They are saying only, “Move over.” But as White points out, the American diplomatic tradition is far too underdeveloped – we have no gift for it because sheer power has left us with no need of it – to manage even this easily achievable subtlety.

White protests repeatedly against the common theme in Australia of recent years, “We don’t have to choose.” I agree it is wrong, a weak-minded flinch, but I do not agree on the choice as White describes it. Australia does have a choice to make, but it does not lie between Beijing and Washington in some contrived either/or fashion. Tipping towards paradox, Australia has to decide if it accepts the choice the US presents it with: us or them, Aussies, choose. I urge Australians to recognise this as a monumentally inconsiderate proposition on America’s part, one in which Australia would do well to detect a fundamental indifference to its own interests at the core of American policy. The latter has long begun and ended with the preservation of primacy, all else judged as serving it or not. This, along with the nostalgic folly of American strategy in the Pacific, ought to make Australia’s true choice a lot easier, I would think. It is the choice of refusing the choice. The truly consequential choice is America’s: it lies between past and future.

I conclude with two final remarks: one has to do with global order and the other with the independence of nations within, broadly speaking, the Western alliance.

White refers often to the post-1945 order, or “the region’s ‘rules-based order’ – by which they [the optimists in Canberra] mean the US-led status quo,” as something many Australians consider the grail to be preserved as they consider their future. Fair enough. Many people in many places think this way. But I think nations such as Australia would do well to reconsider the record, as this, too, would make their deliberations easier. There are too many truisms and gloss-overs inscribed in the orthodoxy on this point. There has been an awful lot of disorder in the Western Pacific in the decades of American primacy (and indeed long before, if we go back to the war in the Philippines). It is off the point, but I must respectfully take issue with White’s remark that Latin America, with its decades of dictators, civil wars, endemic poverty and violence, has by and large done well under American dominance. We – all of us, with more voices at the table and less hegemonic ambition – can do better by way of a global order worthy of the term.

“Australia is going to have a more independent foreign policy in the new Asia – more independent of Washington, that is – whether it likes it or not.” So White writes midway in his essay. I do not quite comprehend the whiff of stage fright. One has long understood Australia’s place as Washington’s “most obliging ally,” as White puts it. But for me, at least, there has always been an assumption of some . . . what? . . . some faint ignominy attaching to this position. Taking possession of a voice of its own will certainly bring Australia challenges and responsibilities. But how salutary a prospect nonetheless. Taking the point further, I would say even the challenges and responsibilities will do the nation a power of good.

I have wondered for decades when in hell the Europeans will learn to stand up and speak for themselves instead of dutifully yes-ing Washington even when it is diametrically against their interests to do so. They have their own perspectives, their own view of diplomacy as against conflict, much that is evolved in their address of the non-Western Other. They mutter of these things among themselves but then resume the forced march. The world would be better for this balancing voice to articulate clearly, especially as it would come from within the old Atlantic alliance.

The Europeans will soon face a series of important decisions. Do they conduct themselves as part of the Eurasian landmass as this draws together in one of the truly historic motions of our time, or stay loyal to the alliance in a way wholly lacking in imagination and confidence? White’s very thoughtful essay moves me to suggest that on its side of the world – different topography, a sea and not a landmass – Australia faces a version of the very same question.

One of the truths I learnt when reporting on Indonesia during the first post-Suharto years, when various provinces were fighting for autonomy, was that to stay together it would be necessary for the Republic of Indonesia to come partially apart. Reading Hugh White’s essay, I wonder if the same may now prove so of the West and all who identify as belonging to it.

Patrick Lawrence

WITHOUT AMERICA

Correspondence

Ely Ratner

It’s tempting to caricature Hugh White. When you’re mapping the contours of the China debate, who better to hold up as an exemplar of accommodation? And yet, having read his analyses closely, and having had the privilege of discussing Asia’s future with him in person, I’ll say again what I’ve said before: Hugh is right.

He’s right that the United States and China are in an epochal competition for the heart and soul of the twenty-first century. He’s right that Washington and the American people have yet to grapple with this reality in any meaningful way, much less respond accordingly. He’s right that the United States is losing badly right now. And he’s right that, if current trends continue, the result will be a whitewash in China’s favour, leaving Australia with exceedingly difficult decisions about the direction of its foreign alignments and policies in a China-dominated Asia.

But this is where Hugh and I diverge, because I just don’t think the contest is over. Nor is China’s victory as inevitable as Hugh portrays. With a smart, focused strategy, the United States can staunch Beijing’s momentum towards a China-led order in the region – and it can do so in ways that don’t do violence to the US–Australia alliance or Australia’s foreign-policy fundamentals.

If Hugh and I are fellow travellers in our depictions of current trends in Asia, what accounts for our starkly differing conclusions about where this all ends up? I see three core issues upon which Hugh and I disagree.

First, Hugh describes the purpose of the Obama administration’s Pivot, or Rebalance, to Asia as an attempt to “deter Beijing from challenging US leadership by affirming America’s determination to remain Asia’s primary power.” Later, he describes Obama’s policy as a failed effort to “resist and contain China’s challenge.” Here, I have to say, Hugh is wrong. Having spent countless hours in the White House Situation Room in National Security Council meetings with President Obama and his national security team, I can safely say that the Obama

administration’s Asia policy was not focused on containing China’s rise or deterring a challenge to US leadership. Geopolitical competition in Asia was not a central focus. Instead, US policy was based on the notion that China’s expanding power and influence were natural, manageable and, on balance, beneficial to enhancing cooperation on global issues. (I’ll admit the messaging wasn’t great – another thing on which Hugh and I agree.)

This matters a great deal because it determines whether the story of the last decade is that the United States intended, attempted, but ultimately failed to resist China’s rise; or, alternatively, that the United States hasn’t actually tried in any meaningful way yet to apply significant counterpressure on Beijing’s burgeoning influence. Hugh argues the former, I’d argue the latter. He thinks the gig is up; I think we haven’t tested the proposition.

I also take issue with Hugh’s characterisation that “disappointment” with Australia’s approach to China was a critical factor shaping Washington’s attitude towards Canberra. This is a significant misreading insofar as China was a distant priority in the Obama administration’s Australia policy – certainly compared to the importance of working with Canberra on climate change, refugees and counter-ISIS campaigns in Syria and Iraq. Bottom line: Hugh overstates Washington’s focus on resisting the China challenge, which leads him to see decisive failure where I still see latent potential.

Second, and relatedly, Hugh bases much of his argument on what he perceives to be an imbalance of resolve: China cares more, is more willing to go to war, and will therefore prevail in any game of chicken or brinksmanship. I agree with Hugh that Washington has been unduly risk-averse, thereby creating a permissive environment for Chinese assertiveness. But that can surely change; the United States could take a firmer line in defending its interests in Asia. In fact, I think this is more likely than not.

What would happen then? In Hugh’s telling, China will stand firm and Washington will blink. Good as a theory, but also inaccurate as a depiction of recent events. It’s true that Washington has exhibited significant risk aversion – but so has Beijing. Look at the record: in instances where the Obama (and now Trump) administration outlined clear and credible consequences for China’s bad behaviour – including on cyber-espionage, UN sanctions on North Korea, and its Air Defense Identification Zone in the East China Sea – Beijing quickly folded and reversed course. In fact, it’s hard to think of a single case where China escalated in the face of concentrated, principled American power. Contrary to Hugh’s predictions, this suggests that when the United States chooses to push back, Beijing isn’t quite so willing after all to lower its shoulder at the risk of confrontation.

Third, Hugh ascribes limited and minimal aims to China’s leaders, noting that “they will seek no more influence in East Asia, and over Australia, than they need to achieve their key objectives.” This sounds fairly benign, and it is a point often made by those in Washington who argue that US policy in Asia is basically on the right course. I’m less confident, and further troubled by descriptions of geopolitics in Asia suggesting that all that’s really happening is one balloon is getting bigger and one balloon is getting smaller. For me, this kind of normative relativism – or at least normative agnosticism – elides just how different China’s control of Asia could be. It’s worth thinking critically about an illiberal world in which the Chinese Communist Party has dominant sway over the norms, rules and institutions that govern international relations. Admittedly, neither politicians nor experts in Washington have made this case clearly or effectively, but that doesn’t mean the consequences will be small and acceptable if Beijing consolidates a China-led order. I see sky-high stakes for the United States.

In the final analysis, Hugh’s essay is exceedingly important as a clarion call – I wish every senior US policy-maker would take the time not only to read it, but to internalise the profundity of the challenge facing the United States. That said, the United States is not as weak nor is China as strong as Hugh’s readers might be led to believe. To friends in Australia, let me conclude with this: America is down but not out. Stick with us. Ride out Donald Trump. Our alliance can still help preserve a future for Asia that is open and free. It’s not yet time, as Hugh suggests, to submit to a region without America.

Ely Ratner

THE LONG GOODBYE

Correspondence

David Ritter

“I thought a lot about the crown-of-thorns starfish while driving through the Bowen Basin,” Anna Krien remarks about halfway into her exegesis of Australia’s deepening climate debacle. “I am not sure what plan B is for the starfish if they eat all the coral. I am not sure starfish think that far ahead.” It is a telling metaphor. Krien’s essay forces deep reflection on the state of our nation, an Australia whose political leaders have been transmogrified into short-sighted starfish by the corrupting alchemy of the coal industry.

Always with an eye to character and context, Krien charts the malignant effect of coal on Australia’s natural and political ecology. The Great Barrier Reef, our precious fresh water and our natural wildlife are sacrifices to coal. Budgets are built around coal’s voodoo economics. Politicians become enslaved to the vested interest of coal. Systems of patrimony and political favour built around coal function out in the open, not necessarily illegal, but at odds with the common good. Indigenous communities are divided by coal’s false promise, and desperate rural towns led down the mining path by patently inaccurate jobs figures. The policy debates remain crippled.

Krien challenges a wilful blindness afflicting Australia’s climate vision. Australian coal exports are already by far our largest contribution to global climate change – yet we don’t even keep track of the carbon cost of our coal when burned in Asian power stations. So it is that Matt Canavan, when Minister for Resources, could tell the Q&A audience that it is okay to open up the vast coal reserves of Queensland’s Galilee Basin, because, “We’re not burning the coal here, it’s being exported to other countries.” If the world is to have any chance of meeting the 2°C target of the Paris Agreement, Australia’s coal industry simply can’t be allowed to expand any further. What is needed is a legislated ban on new coal, followed by an orderly phase-out of existing operations, accompanied by a comprehensive and just transition plan for affected workers and communities. 

Inevitably, Krien’s essay leaves some important actors off-screen. She doesn’t give much space to the dedicated opponents of the coal industry. Organisations like my own, Greenpeace, along with GetUp, the Australian Conservation Foundation and many others – all of which give vocal expression to the determined mass resistance of citizens to the coal industry – are referred to only sparingly. This is not intended as a criticism of Krien’s essay, because her focus is elsewhere, but the presence of an effective opposition to big business’s vested interests cannot be taken for granted. Indeed, attempting to silence democratic challenge is clearly part of the coal industry’s strategy.

In his end-of-mission statement delivered in October last year, Michel Forst, the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders, said he was “astonished” and “astounded” by what he had observed on his trip to Australia. One particular passage is worth quoting at length:

In recent years, state and federal governments attempted to undermine the ability of human rights defenders to protect environment through political advocacy and litigation. The targeting of advocacy by environmental organisations could be seen as part of broader intent by the Government to stifle criticism by community organisations. However, it can also be closely linked to government lobbying by the fossil fuel industry, which vehemently opposes the use of strategic litigation by environmental activists. The opposition to environmental defenders have taken the form of funding cuts, threats to the deductible gift recipient status of environmental organisations and efforts to vilify advocacy by environmental organisations.

The price of liberty is eternal vigilance, and the democratic space can never be taken for granted, even in Australia.

David Ritter