THE END OF CERTAINTY

Response to Correspondence

THE END OF CERTAINTY

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THE END OF CERTAINTY

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THE END OF CERTAINTY

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THE END OF CERTAINTY

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THE COAL CURSE

Response to Correspondence

THE COAL CURSE

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THE COAL CURSE

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THE COAL CURSE

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CRY ME A RIVER

Response to Correspondence

CRY ME A RIVER

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CRY ME A RIVER

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CRY ME A RIVER

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CRY ME A RIVER

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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

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THE PROSPERITY GOSPEL

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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

THE LONG GOODBYE

Correspondence

Geoff Russell

The corpus of the written word is like a patchwork quilt. The fictional patches are typically dominated by characters and their experiences: of love, lust, courage, betrayal and greed, for example. Mysteries can elevate plot above all else.

Scientists can forgive writing that is duller than dominoes, along with a total lack of plot, action or character. It’s all about being right. In science, truth is the target, and evidence and rational argument are the only weapons with standing. Nowhere has the battle between mumbo-jumbo and evidence raged more ferociously in recent times than in the debate between climate-change deniers and climate scientists.

The non-fiction patches in this quilt, like Anna Krien’s Quarterly Essay The Long Goodbye, are strange hybrids. We desperately need them to be right. Advocacy should be seen as perhaps a duty, but crossing the sometimes fine line to propaganda must be resisted. Beautiful prose, by itself, isn’t enough, despite being deliciously welcome.

Anecdotes can illustrate, but also mislead. Consider Krien’s treatment of the impact of 60 million extra tonnes of Australian coal per year in India. She begins by citing an article by Michael McKenna, picking out an anecdote about fifty-five villagers who, so far, have missed out on electricity, and another story from a single villager. These anecdotes are about as relevant as a climate-change denier pointing to record cold temperatures somewhere or other.

The statistics on India’s electricity transformation aren’t hard to find. The state of Kerala has 34 million people; 80 per cent of households had electricity in 2001, and it’s 100 per cent now. Tamil Nadu’s 74 million people went from a household connectivity rate of 78 per cent to 98 per cent in the same period. I could go on, and on, and on. India’s electricity rollout has been spectacular. In a country of 1.3 billion, there will always be thousands of failures, screw-ups and scams, but the trend is clear. The technical term for Krien’s kind of argument is cherry-picking. A bad argument is bad regardless of who uses it or why.

Those of us who have experienced over a decade of climate science denial propaganda have become obsessive about fact-checking and learnt to spot dodgy arguments from a long distance; not just in climate-change deniers, but in ourselves also.

UK journalist and left-wing activist George Monbiot made the mother of all mea culpas in 2011 when covering the crisis at the Fukushima nuclear reactors in Japan. He started off realising that the so-called disaster didn’t rank in a world threatened by a changing climate. He then ploughed through all the evidence that had made him anti-nuclear in the first place, and realised it had much more in common with climate denialist arguments than real science. His later writing on self-styled anti-nuclear guru Helen Caldicott is one of the great digital demolitions.

Realising a core belief is utterly without foundation has a profound impact on how you view all the other non-fiction (non-science) patches in the quilt of the written word. Legendary NASA climate scientist James Hansen, sometimes called the father of climate-change awareness, went so far as take a little time off climate science to estimate the number of lives saved in recent decades by replacing coal with nuclear. It comes to some 1.8 million, and that’s a very conservative estimate. He also wrote a small non-fiction article likening renewable energy to Jim Jones’s poison-laced Kool-Aid.

Hansen and other climate scientists lobbied at the Paris COP21 climate talks in favour of nuclear power. Hansen isn’t alone. I don’t know of any poll data, but there seems to be a disconnect between environmentalists and environmental scientists on the issue, with many of the latter wanting nuclear as a part of our energy mix, not just because they doubt we can prevent further climate destabilisation without it, but also because it is cleaner and greener than the combined alternative of wind, solar, hydro and biofuels.

The Long Goodbye is an impassioned plea to leave our coal in the ground and act to prevent further climate destabilisation. But it doesn’t appear that Krien has a deep knowledge of the science, unlike Hansen. She simply accepts it. Why? Probably because people she trusts also accept it. Such a position is hard to distinguish from one where the science isn’t relevant at all. Naomi Klein, for example, figures that climate science is a great tool with which to batter capitalism. It’s not obvious to me that she cares one way or the other about the truth of her beliefs. Contrast her with Monbiot. Monbiot loathes large multinationals with a passion, including those who build nuclear power stations, but recognises that science is a job lot. If you believe in truth, you have to take it as it comes. If saving the planet means getting into bed with bastards, then so be it.

Krien is a compassionate person and clearly understands India’s pressing need for energy. But her argument that solar will be a viable alternative is not well supported. She resorts to a description of the rapid construction of India’s largest solar plant at Kamuthi, without any attempt to compare it to the energy that the 60 million tonnes of Carmichael coal could deliver annually.

Here are a few relevant numbers. To produce the same amount of electricity that the Carmichael coal could produce, you’d need to build 133 Kamuthi-sized solar farms. And what if you wanted electricity on cloudy days or during the evening or at night-time? Solar farms without storage can’t replace 24/7 coal plants. Krien mentioned molten salt as a means of storing energy but ignored the details – and the details matter. Climate-change deniers are fond of telling people that climate models are faulty, but they are characteristically thin on detail or they’ll resort to false analogies like arguing that failures to predict the weather constitute evidence that climate models are junk. What are the relevant details of molten salt storage? First, the “salt” referred to is actually fertiliser: typically, a mix of potassium and sodium nitrate. To provide fifteen hours of storage for your 133 Kamuthi-sized solar farms, you will need 36.6 million tonnes of fertiliser. The current annual global production of these chemicals is about 3 million tonnes, and almost all of it is already earmarked . . . for producing food. Scaling up the mining of the necessary raw materials and building the chemical-processing plants required is probably possible, if it were just India and just 133 Kamuthis. But we have to power the entire planet, not just little bits of it. And would we really want this? And how fast could we build these plants? These are tough questions and I won’t attempt to answer them here.

Before reading on, ask yourself whether there are more big lithium-ion batteries than molten salt batteries.

Krien mentions the South Australian battery-farm announcement, while again ignoring the details. But, as with molten salt storage, the details matter. A lithium-ion battery contains eight times more cobalt than lithium. And where does cobalt come from? Half the world’s output comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo. You may know something about blood diamonds, thanks to Leonardo DiCaprio’s film, but his next blockbuster could well be Blood Battery. And then there’s graphite, most of which comes from filthy factories and mines in China. The thing about so-called “big” batteries is that they are only big if you have no idea of relative sizes. If you think bicycles can carry big loads, then you don’t understand the relative capacity of trucks and ships. If you add together the capacity of all the “big” lithium-ion batteries on the planet, it comes to about three gigawatt hours, which would provide about 4.6 hours of storage for a single Kamuthi-sized solar plant.

Krien mentions her phone’s satnav when describing her road trip through the coal regions of Queensland. Given their ubiquity, it’s strange how few people understand how these work. They don’t use anything analogous to an emissions trading scheme or a clean energy target, otherwise we’d see our roads littered with lost and confused users.

Suppose you are in Adelaide and want to go to Canberra. Canberra is pretty much due east, so does your satnav simply pick the most easterly road it can find? Does it reward easterly roads and punish westerly roads in some internal market? After all, any road heading east will get you closer to Canberra than you already are. That’s not how it works, because of the risk that your easterly road might turn north, or south, or end up in a dead end.

The details of the shortest path algorithm are less important for us than the basic fact that if you don’t know how to finish the trip, your first turn might take you to a dead-end and require backtracking. So your satnav calculates the full path before proceeding.

It’s the same for a clean electricity system: we need to know the end-game before beginning, to avoid expensive backtracking.

Consider those who call natural gas a “transitional fuel.” We know that a gas-based electricity system will never give us the level of decarbonisation we require. Similarly for biofuels. Why bother with the time and expense of shifting from coal to gas when we know we’ll have to throw out those gas plants anyway? Similarly, biofuels are a total waste of time and energy. We know that the kinds of reductions in emissions that biofuels can deliver aren’t enough.

Now let’s consider wind farms. They are clean enough but have other problems that make the end-game extremely difficult. If a wind farm’s power rating is 100 megawatts, then this is the power it produces when the wind is blowing hard. One hundred megawatts is the maximum output, not the average. So how much electricity will it produce when it’s windy 24/7 for a full year?

The answer is to multiply everything to find the number of hours. The maximum we can get would be 100 x 24 x 365 = 876,000 megawatt hours of electricity each year. Except that it’s never windy all year. Typically, in most places, a wind farm will produce about a third of that theoretical maximum. That fraction, usually close to one-third, has a name; it’s called the capacity factor. If the capacity factor of a wind farm in your area is 40 per cent, it means you live in a really windy place. If it is 15 per cent, then you won’t have any local wind farms, because you live somewhere where nobody is going to build one. 

Think what happens as you expand your wind power, gradually adding more and more turbines. Initially, all the electricity gets sold. But what happens when you have enough turbines to supply 100 per cent of the electricity demand when it is really windy?

The capacity factor is what it is. It doesn’t change much as you add turbines. So when you have enough turbines to supply the total demand at some times, you will be supplying about a third of the average annual demand.

So now double the number of wind farms. How much electricity will you be getting when it is windy? You’ll be getting double the demand and throwing away half of what you generate. Suddenly the income to each wind farm drops. And what happens when the wind isn’t blowing? When it isn’t blowing, you will be getting nothing, and you’d better have plenty of back-up power somewhere. But surely it’s always windy somewhere? Yes, but maybe you didn’t build any wind farms there. Or maybe your transmission lines don’t have sufficient capacity to get the power from where it is to where you need it.

When Krien discussed the quantity of electricity South Australia got from renewables, she omitted to mention these little problems: the worst-case scenarios and the diminishing returns on each wind farm you build. So how much of South Australia’s electricity did wind farms provide in 2016? If you didn’t know, you can probably guess: very close to the capacity factor. They supplied 34.7 per cent. This is exactly the point at which things get interesting. Meaning we are at the point where profits for wind farms will start to fall.

Adding a few renewables into a working grid is easy. That’s like employing a few narcoleptic casuals in a lunch bar where you have a team of reliable permanent staff. But trying to run your lunch bar with narcoleptic casuals gets harder and harder as you dump your reliable permanent staff in favour of them.

Unlike driving from Adelaide to Canberra, nobody has ever built a 100 per cent renewable electricity supply for a large industrial region. It’s not just a question of picking roads, but building them. Climate modellers test their models by running them backwards against the paleoclimate record, but what kind of testing can modellers who model a 100 per cent renewable energy electricity system do? And don’t forget we need to get rid of all fossil fuels, not just electricity.

A recent scientific paper examined twenty-four scientific studies purporting to demonstrate the feasibility of a 100 per cent renewable system. They all failed to meet basic feasibility criteria. Many, for example, assumed that the transmission grid was a perfect copper plate, meaning that the grid could always get energy from where it was produced to where it was required. European modelling focused on just this detail estimates that we need grids with seven times the capacity of current grids. That’s like fourteen interconnectors between South Australia and the rest of the National Electricity Market, instead of two. The models all assumed large amounts of dispatchable energy, typically biomass or hydroelectricity. But biomass isn’t clean or green; it’s burning crops or forests, or turning forests into crops. Some of us see forests as part of what we want to save, not as grist for big logging machines and furnaces. Also common in the models were failures to consider worst-case scenarios: a week of windless cold or hot cloudy weather.

Electricity consumption in India is about 800 kilowatt hours per person per year, after transmission losses. This is rather less than the 10,000 kilowatt hours per person per year that Australians use. Australian coal would support further reductions in poverty. Since 2000, the Indian infant mortality rate has dropped from sixty-eight to thirty-eight deaths per 1000 live births. It’s hard to quantify the role of electricity in this reduction, but it would be substantial.

Krien’s attempt to predict a low human cost to India of leaving our coal in the ground is seriously flawed. We need to acknowledge that satisfying India’s urgent needs for increased electricity while simultaneously decarbonising is a diabolically hard problem. Is there a way forward that satisfies both demands? We could, for example, halve our own coal use, thus freeing up an amount close to 60 million tonnes to export to India while leaving global coal emissions unchanged. That would leave the Carmichael coal in the ground and be morally defensible.

But I believe that before we can formulate a plan, we need to go back and look at how we got into our current mess and fix the fundamental problems. We have an example of a large industrial country that successfully decarbonised its electricity system, and did so in about fifteen years: France. It did so with nuclear power, as a response to high oil prices. Wind and solar power were contemporaneously rolled out in many countries and failed. So why the current love of renewables? And why is the nuclear industry in such trouble and having a tough time replicating the spectacular successes of those early decades? Only in China is it thriving. How much of the nuclear industry trouble is down to the mumbo-jumbo non-science of anti-nuclear fear-mongers? The anti-nuclear movement was our first major science denial movement, and we failed to confront it and deal with it. Mea culpa. Happily, we are tackling the anti-vaxxers head on, so maybe we are learning. But will we extend our defence of science far enough and fast enough?

Geoff Russell

THE LONG GOODBYE

Correspondence

John Quiggin

Anna Krien has written a marvellous, nuanced account of the cross-cutting debates around proposals to mine coal in the Galilee Basin. The conclusion would seem to be that in Australian politics the fate of the planet will never outweigh more immediate concerns about jobs and electricity prices, especially when these concerns are intertwined with the symbolic concerns of right-wing culture warriors.

The good news is that despite Adani’s legal and political victories, neither the Carmichael mine nor the GVK Hancock project is ever likely to proceed. In economic terms, the project is simply not viable. As Krien notes, the Queensland Treasury advised the incoming Palaszczuk government in 2015 that the project was “unbankable,” and the situation has only got worse since. Even back then, many banks had taken the unusual step of saying they would not finance the project, and the list has grown longer in the last two years, with the Commonwealth Bank the latest addition.

These public announcements reflect the reputational risk of being associated with such a project. But tobacco companies, casinos and arms merchants find banks willing to finance their socially harmful activities. If there were substantial money to be made, one of the big banks would brave the opprobrium and take the profits. The simple fact is that the Galilee Basin is too remote and its coal too low in quality to be profitable at the prices prevailing now, or likely in the future.

Developments in India make the case for Adani even worse. Adani has always claimed that its integrated structure means there is no need to worry about world coal prices. But a series of developments over the last couple of years have rendered this assertion untenable.

Krien mentions the desire of energy minister Piyush Goyal to push India in the direction of renewables. Of more immediate concern for the Carmichael proposal is the push for energy independence, reflected in Goyal’s stated objective of eliminating coal imports by 2020. The government-owned utility NTPC looks likely to reach this goal ahead of time, in 2018.

Even more important has been the dramatic decline in the cost of renewable-energy technologies, particularly solar photovoltaics, which has been particularly marked in India. Tenders to supply electricity to meet growing demand are now routinely won by solar PV firms, at prices that new coal-fired power stations cannot possibly match. As a result, grandiose plans, redolent of Soviet central planning, for the development of dozens of coal-fired four-gigawatt “Ultra Mega Power Plants” have been abandoned. Only a couple were actually constructed, one of which, at Mundra, is owned by Adani Power.

Finally, the idea that Adani could source coal from its own mines and pass the cost on to Indian consumers has been rejected by the Indian courts.

All these developments have been reflected in a series of corporate structures, which have broken up the once-monolithic Adani group into a tangled network of subsidiaries and affiliates. The Carmichael mine is now to be developed by Adani Mining, owned by an Adani company in Singapore, which in turn is owned by another in Mauritius. The proposed railway line is owned by another company, controlled through the Cayman Islands, while the Abbot Point port is controlled by Adani Ports and is a Special Economic Zone.

Even more significantly, on the very day that Gautam Adani announced the go-ahead for the Carmichael project, Adani Power, the putative buyer for the coal, announced it was spinning off the Mundra UMPP into a subsidiary, with the idea of selling down to a minority interest. Without Mundra, Adani Power’s remaining plants could not provide a sufficient market for the coal supposedly coming from the Galilee Basin.

If the project is a mirage, as most serious analysts agree, why does it appear to be going ahead? There are various hypotheses, but the one that seems most plausible to me is as follows.

Adani has spent approximately $1.8 billion on the Carmichael mine site and early works, as well as a similar sum on the Abbot Point terminal (which remains a valuable asset). The money spent on the mine is gone, but as long as the asset remains on Adani’s books at cost, the precarious financial position of the Adani Group looks better. So the sensible thing is to keep the project ticking along, while finding excuses not to spend much Adani money on it. That means setting up a modestly staffed head office, doing some “pre-construction” land clearing and so on.

But at some point real money will have to be spent. The obvious plan would be to start on the rail line, using the $900 million proposed to be borrowed from the Northern Australia Infrastructure Fund. If, at the end of a year or so, the price of coal suddenly rose, the whole project could be revived. If not, the Cayman Islands rail company could be liquidated, and the Australian public would be the proud owners of a half-built railway to nowhere. The rest of the Adani Group would be financially unscathed by the failure, and would have bought time to manage the write-off of the Carmichael mine, as well as accelerating the group’s shift towards renewables.

If the prospects for the Carmichael mine are limited, those for the other big project, GVK Hancock, are virtually non-existent. Three years ago, GVK missed a $500-million payment owed to Hancock for its acquisition of majority control of the project. The GVK group has been losing money ever since and now appears to be facing bankruptcy.

Anna Krien asks: “Does it matter what Australia does?” In this case, the answer is, fortunately, not as much as it might. Despite the best efforts of governments at all levels to expand our exports of fossil fuels, the world has moved on. Coal-fired electricity generation is on the way out all around the world, and nothing our government can do will change that. The most we can do is throw a lot of public money into projects that will almost certainly end up as stranded assets.

But if Adani is a mirage, what can be done for cities like Townsville, faced with high unemployment and the collapse of what seemed like a permanent boom? For many years, the official answer was “nothing”: the impersonal forces of the market must be allowed to have their way. That was the position of the current government when it gleefully pulled the plug on the car industry a few years ago.

But such neoliberal purity is now obsolete. If Adani does not get its $900 million loan, the money will still be there in the Northern Australia Infrastructure Fund, allocated to support investment projects that are not commercially viable otherwise. There are plenty of alternative uses of such a huge sum, which would create more – and more long-term – jobs than the relative handful likely with the Adani project. We could, for example, return to building public housing, for which there is a crying need in North Queensland. Or we could accept that the climatic disasters of the last decade are the new normal and set up a permanent workforce dedicated to preparing infrastructure for coming disasters and rebuilding afterwards.

Adani’s promise of 10,000 jobs is a cruel hoax, promoted by politicians and commentators who are well aware of that fact. We can and should do better.

John Quiggin

THE LONG GOODBYE

Correspondence

Matt Canavan

I sometimes feel very humbled that so many southern Australians care so much for a quaint little coalmine in the wilds of central Queensland, near where I, and my wife and five children live.

Adani has at least put us on the map. I don’t think many Mexicans would have heard of towns like Clermont, Alpha or even Bowen, the location of Baz Luhrmann’s Australia movie, before Adani. And that is not even to mention the Doongmabulla Springs, or the Wangan and Jagalingou peoples. They have now, thanks to Adani’s proposed Carmichael mine.

After my central Queensland chest pumps with pride, I do then get confused: why do people thousands kilometres away care? It can’t be the size of the mine: at 25 million tonnes per year, it would account for just 0.4 per cent of world production. It can’t be the Great Barrier Reef. The mine is 400 kilometres from the reef and will have no material impact on the number of ships travelling there. It can’t be the Caley Valley wetlands. These are an artificial formation created to attract ducks for shooting. Surely the list of environmental issues that needs fixing is not down to protecting manufactured duck ponds (and the rights of shooters that rely on them). It can’t be Aborigines. They voted 293 to one recently in favour of the mine.

So it is with a great sense of gratitude that I thank Anna Krien for her evocative travelogue, The Long Goodbye, which reads like a modern reworking of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

Like Conrad’s protagonist, Marlow, Anna Krien journeys into the tropics and discovers a world alien and hostile, at least to her Melbourne sensibilities. I commend her for venturing north of the Tropic of Capricorn and her piece is well written, yet it ultimately reveals more about the author than her subject.

She reveals that this southern rebellion against northern wishes is not based on the facts above but a much more understandable, earthy and human trait: prejudice. When a local expresses his support for the opening of a new coalmine, Ms Krien “struggle[s] to compose the thing inside me that wants to leap over the desk and throttle him.” When that is your philosophical starting point, well, the endpoint is all too predictable.

Yet this prejudice appears to extend beyond just a little black rock to other things of colour. The Galilee has been explored by, shock horror, “Indians and Chinese.” Fruit-picking in Bowen is done by “Pacific Islanders.” And, according to Ms Krien, a recent Adani television ad is voiced by a lady with a “warm European” voice. Why is any of this relevant?

Ms Krien really doesn’t like small country towns either. Townsville is described as a crime-ridden, tumbleweed-infested, unruly suburban “spaghetti western” town – again with the ethnic jibes. Bowen is a “457-visa” town – I have no idea what misguided fact that is even based on. And to top off the unfolding nightmare that is regional Queensland for Ms Krien, a local hotel has only air-conditioning for keeping cool, not her preferred method of fly-screens and a fan!

Yet Ms Krien’s greatest sin of prejudice is not the depiction of small towns or the unhealthy obsession with race. All of that is nothing compared with the patronising way Ms Krien treats our first Australians. Ms Krien admits that, at a recent meeting of the Wangan and Jagalingou peoples, the vote came back 293 to one in favour of the Carmichael mine. Yet she then implies that this vote was because “Adani had organised three days of accommodation, food and travel for 150 people.”

The meeting had taken place in Maryborough, a lovely small country town north of the Sunshine Coast. As beautiful as Maryborough is (it has some great coffee), it is not Honolulu. Yet Ms Krien gives credence to the view that 150 Aboriginals sold out their heritage for three nights’ accommodation at the Best Western Maryborough – perhaps the movie channel was on Adani!

Could you get more insulting if you tried? This attitude lends extra credibility to Marcia Langton’s view that the stance of activists like Ms Krien is the second coming of terra nullius. Apparently the wishes of traditional landowners can never be accepted at face value. Better that more intelligent and educated peoples make decisions for them. So much for native title!

I would add that this form of global environmentalism has more to do with Rudyard Kipling’s “white man’s burden” than St Francis of Assisi’s love of nature. Warren Mundine is right. The Carmichael mine involves an Indian infrastructure company proposing to build a mine on Aboriginal land. The white people involved are the environmental activists opposed to it.

If the Aboriginal population of north Australia ever do achieve real self-determination, I predict that Ms Krien’s piece, like Joseph Conrad’s novels, will be required reading in a left-wing English discourse subject at the University of Weipa.

So what of the Indians that Ms Krien identifies? There remain around 300 million Indians without access to reliable electricity. Life remains dark, short and often nasty for these poor people, at least in comparison with the modern luxuries we all enjoy.

Understandably one of the greatest desires of the Indian people is for electricity. India’s current prime minister, Narendra Modi, has made electrifying towns a centrepiece of his government’s policy.

Prime Minister Modi does have an ambitious goal to boost renewable energy in India, by 175 gigawatts. That would make India the largest producer of renewable energy in the world, but the Indian government has not yet been hypnotised by the fairy tales of the global environmental movement. Greenpeace is banned there. India knows that it needs other forms of power too.

So India plans to build 50 gigawatts of modern high efficiency, low emission (HELE) coal-fired power stations over the next five years. This amounts to the energy equivalent of thirty Hazelwood coal-fired power stations. Adani is the largest private provider of power in India, but its plans extend to building just seven of thirty power stations, in energy-equivalent terms.

The greatest thing that has happened in the world since the Berlin Wall fell is that hundreds of millions of people have emerged from crushing poverty in our region. India is following the path taken by China and other Asian countries. India now has the fastest-growing major economy in the world.

We sometimes fall into the lazy complacency of believing we have a strong relationship with India. We have the three Cs of cricket, Commonwealth and curry. Yet compared with our relationships with Japan, China and Korea, our links to India are immature. The gap we need to close is about a fourth “C”: commerce. And, just like our first steps in trade with those three other Asian nations, coal is opening the doors to a world of greater economic opportunities.

Coking coal (used in steel production) is already our biggest export to India by far. But it is hoped that we will now build on this to expand our second biggest export to India: education services. By contrast, we are a small supplier of thermal coal to the Indian market. Indian coal imports are dominated by Indonesian and South African coal.

The coal-fired power stations that India is constructing will boost India’s demand for thermal coal by 300 million tonnes per year over the next decade. Australia produces just 250 million tonnes of thermal coal every year and it is our second biggest export. We have some of the world’s best coal. 

The latest coal-fired power stations use advanced metals and welding techniques to generate power at higher temperatures and pressures, and thus increase their efficiency. Older technologies generate electricity from around 35 per cent of the energy embodied in coal. The latest HELE plants can achieve efficiencies of 45 per cent or higher. Higher efficiency means more electricity from less coal with lower emissions.

This is good news for the world and good news for Australia too, because these latest coal-fired power stations work best using high-quality coals. As Morgan Stanley recently concluded in its analysis of coal markets: “Indonesia and Australia are the two largest exporters of thermal coal, but Australian export coal typically is higher energy and lower moisture, although it often contains more ash. Overall, it is better suited for use in HELE power stations.”

That will mean thousands more jobs for people in Australia. I am often asked to pinpoint the precise number of jobs that Adani will create. These are not my estimates, they are those of the Queensland government’s Coordinator-General. The Adani Carmichael coalmine will generate 2,475 jobs in construction, and 3,920 jobs in operation.

But that is not all. The Carmichael mine is just one of six mines in the Galilee Basin at various stages of approval. Altogether, according to the Coordinator-General, these mines will generate 16,000 direct ongoing jobs. When unemployment is 11 per cent in Townsville – and, according to Ms Krien, the place is “crime-ridden” – wouldn’t we want an opportunity like this for our fellow Australians, including our Indigenous Australians? So much for the left being on the side of the worker!

One focus of criticism is the possibility of Adani receiving a loan (not a grant) from the Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility to help build an open-access rail line from the Galilee Basin to the port of Abbot Point. Opening up a new coal basin requires substantial investment in rail and ports to bring the resource to market. Every coal basin in Australia has been opened up through federal and state government investment in rail and ports.

In the case of the Hunter Valley in New South Wales, the Australian government still owns the rail network. As recently as 2008, the Rudd government decided to invest more than $1 billion upgrading the rail lines of the Hunter Valley. Kevin Rudd at the time trumpeted the announcement, saying that: “This $1 billion project will more than double the amount of coal being transported to export markets from 97 to 200 million tonnes a year.”

Fifty years ago, Australian governments had to make a choice about whether they would support the development of the Bowen Basin and the expansion of coal exports in the Hunter Valley. At the time, the CSIRO advised the government that Australia did not have sufficient coal reserves to justify exports.

Fortunately, the government, led by visionary ministers like William Spooner, ignored that advice and did invest in the rail lines and ports that created a new coal-export industry, which, in turn, created enormous wealth for Australia and helped develop central Queensland.

If governments do not show similar vision and bravery today, we stand to lose this latest opportunity for Australia to create jobs and wealth and to further develop frontier areas of our nation.

I remain proud that Queensland’s coal industry can have such a disproportionate impact on global thinking. We have great coal and a great industry full of great people. I knew we had made it when a few years ago one of the world’s largest multinational food companies, Unilever, through one of its brands (Ben & Jerry’s), launched a “Scoop ice-cream instead of the reef” campaign.

The campaign was too good to be true, a biting satire of the misguided priorities of the modern world worthy of a contemporary Evelyn Waugh. Here we had an ice-cream company lecturing on morals and ethics. An ice-cream company!

I love ice-cream, but until I discovered this campaign I had never really thought of its moral implications. On reflection, though, I concluded that the moral purpose of ice-cream was to make rich people fat.

Let us make the comparison then to coal. Coal makes poor people warm. Coal remains the cheapest way of producing electricity on a large scale. There remain more than one billion people around the world without access to electricity. The cheapest way of producing electricity for them will also be the quickest.

Bring on the morality challenge, because I will be backing Australian thermal coal over chocolate-chip, cookie-dough ice-cream any day of the week!

Matt Canavan

ENEMY WITHIN

Response to Correspondence

Don Watson

The enemy of Enemy Within is not Donald Trump, but the fear and rancour at work in the United States, and the deep fractures that this election campaign has exposed. It’s the “malaise” besetting the country: its roots are too old and deep to say with any confidence that we’re really speaking of decline. I set out with no clear idea, except to avoid the Clintonite liberal orthodoxy of New York or a rust-belt town where anti-Clintonism – or anti-nearly-everybody – prevails. I chose to go to Wisconsin because it had a reputation for progressive politics, and Bernie Sanders’ success in the Democratic primary there seemed to say it was enduring. At the same time, I knew that Wisconsin’s governor was an archetype of the modern Republican who, through re-districting, voter registration and anti-union measures, had transformed a state once famous for its “across the aisle” cohesion. I fancied I might learn more about what was going on in the election from exposure to this polarised opinion.

I found the old Wisconsin overlaid with the new: the new being Scott Walker’s brand of reactionary politics, fuelled by the Koch brothers, talkback radio, the Tea Party, Christian evangelism and a reflexive and venomous hostility to anything that can be called liberal. Wisconsin, as a former state congressman told me – and Gary Werskey in this issue movingly affirms – is not the tolerant, temperate and progressive place it once was. And the change in Wisconsin is very like the change occurring across the country.

It is a massive conceit to write about a country, a state and an election on the strength of a fifteen-day visit. The generous responses to this essay therefore came first as a relief, and second as enlightenment. Naturally, I will not be taking issue with people who have not taken issue with me. Where they have added further evidence or argument in support of my general case, as Patrick McCaughey, David Goodman and Bruce Wolpe have, I can only be grateful. The same goes for their corrections. I think Goodman is right to say that Americans are no more divided on party lines than they have been throughout their history: though it is true that fewer voters now inhabit the unaligned middle, and that it has been the Republicans’ malevolent strategy for more than two decades to reject all compromise and obstruct democratic ambitions, even if it means closing down the government, the Supreme Court or the economy.

I would rather Patrick Lawrence had not embarrassed me with the news that the remark about coffee and killing oneself cannot be attributed to Albert Camus (I feel like I have known all my life that he said it), but I am glad to know better; and gladder still for his gritty discourse on Tocqueville and the “soft despotism” of the neoliberal consensus. I had not made the connection before, but it is a near-perfect designation for the assumptions of the elites, not least the doctrinaire political correctness that Tea Partiers and Trump supporters find oppressive. So-called liberals for whom globalisation has been a liberating and enriching force live in a universe so distant from the millions for whom it has been a disaster, they seem incapable of understanding them, or of extending to them the tolerance that at other times they hold up as their defining value. If tolerance depends in some measure on empathy, the Democrats should have it in abundance: yet they have little apparent capacity to put themselves in the shoes of those who see them as smug, corrupt, self-serving and deeply favoured by the system – and even less capacity, of course, to recognise their own failings. Give the Democrats the equivalent of the Clinton emails and they would be ruthless. Give them the Podesta emails and the tapes that indicate calculated and systemic disruption of Trump rallies and which received about a minute’s media coverage, while Trump’s eleven-year-old “sex tape” dominated the news for a week or more, and their outrage would be deafening. And yet, to listen sometimes, one would think they cast stones only after an internal audit has assured them that they are without sin. 

Dennis Altman, I take it, would have had me write more – and more favourably – about Hillary Clinton; and less – and less favourably – about Bernie Sanders. More as well about why millions of Americans, including black Americans, like her so much. On that score I will excuse myself on the grounds that this support of the candidate is a given, and the essay is more concerned with what’s at issue. However unfair the reasons might be, Hillary Clinton is one of the reasons the election has been so bitter. She’s been part of the problem. That’s why Sanders won Wisconsin and why he did well enough elsewhere to drag Clinton and the Democrats towards his more radical positions. It’s why Trump was still doing so well deep into the campaign. As for my “bromance” with Bernie, like my “desperately” wanting to believe in the United States, I was not aware that my feelings ran so deep. Sometimes it’s like that, I guess. Still, of all the candidates on both sides, Sanders did strike me as the most authentic, the most grounded, the most concrete in his speech and the one trying to make the electorate face up to some of the realities that are corroding the country (and helping Trump succeed), when Clinton was passing over them with “pragmatic progressive” bromides. 

Thomas Jefferson thought a “temperate” mind was essential to democracy: his own (even at home on a plantation worked by slaves – with one of whom Thomas fathered six children) gave glorious expression to the idea that “all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights …” etc. Jefferson was a wonder of a human being and one of mighty contradictions. And so is the United States a wonder and full of contradictions – some of them, as H.L. Mencken insisted, are a consequence of Jeffersonian doctrine. Jefferson conceived of liberty, Mencken said, as freedom from the tyranny of a monarch. What he failed to recognise, but his rival Alexander Hamilton saw clearly, was the other necessary guarantee of democracy, namely freedom from the tyranny of the majority. So savage is this election, it seems possible that the people contesting it believe it will decide which majority can tyrannise the other for the next four years. Perhaps that’s the case with all US elections, but surely the sense of it is more profound this year.

Jefferson would have loathed Donald Trump, of course. Trump is intemperate. Worse, he is vulgar. No breeding, manners or enlightened reasoning restrain him. There are no contradictions in Trump. He is all id, as some elements of the country are, as we all are now and then. Trump is the unrestrained part of the United States. In worshipping him, the unrestrained – or those who would be – are worshipping themselves, within the cult of freedom and ignorance of which they are honorary members. The rest are merely obsessed with him. In morbid fascination Americans now watch his fall as they did his rise, with barely a thought for the content of his policies. It’s not his critique, but the manner of it that is so … seductive.

His opponents, perhaps mindful of Jefferson, might like to pretend there’s something un-American about Trump, but he’s as apple-pie as any on either side of politics. He’s the unapologetic go-getter; the Yankee bounder; the chancer; the champion of the deal; the great manipulator. He’s the populist; the anti-intellectual, the rugged individualist; the people’s friend; and the enemy of the elites. He’s Barry Goldwater (for his racism) and LBJ (for his vulgarity) in one; he’s Dr Strangelove and General MacArthur; P.T. Barnum, Ed Sullivan and Hugh Hefner. He’s the ringmaster of celebrity, sex and fame. He takes what is his: and his is whatever he can take. In the lost world he promises to restore, this is the code they lived by. What in some places is now called “inappropriate” behaviour was then called doing what comes naturally, and in Trumpland it still is. The intemperate Trump is no less the genuine American article than the temperate Clinton is. 

As Nicole Hemmer amply demonstrates in her comment on the essay, not the least of Trump’s Americanness is his anti-democratic tendency. She quotes the example of the Roosevelts, and of the populists Coughlin and Long, but we might add dozens of congressmen and senators, state governors, mayors, military men, sheriffs and small-town bosses – of varying degrees of corruption (which, if it is ever proved against Trump, will also be nothing new). To these, we could add any number of characters in popular culture. The anti-democratic thread in American life is as old as the democracy itself. And so is the corruption.

Hillary Clinton may lack her husband’s political genius, but she could hardly have done better in this campaign. Her courage may one day become legendary. In those dreadful debates she returned Trump’s brutal attacks on her character with much deadlier attacks on his, and deployed her temperate mind to beckon wavering voters with flawlessly marshalled facts and arguments. Not that the media or those who watch are judging the quality of her arguments, much less the content. In keeping with media practice, that she remains in charge of herself is enough: the products of that mind, such solutions to the country’s problems as she might suggest, the policies she offers, are of no great interest. 

If you think this overstates the case, just tune in to any of the networks (and dare to wonder if this might be the future in Australia). And if you will forgive such a crude conspiracy theory, the failure of the media networks to bring temperate minds to bear on policy and the rise and seeming fall of Donald Trump have the same cause – ratings, or, if you like, commerce. At a Kennedy School forum on 19 October, the NBC pollster Peter Hart was asked, “How do you understand the role of the media in this election cycle?” He replied: 

I think the one thing we can all agree on is, ratings have driven this. I mean, Donald Trump has been a magnet, I mean, in that you can put him on anytime, anywhere and bingo. I love sort of the “Morning Joe” element. You know, they created him, and then essentially, he turned on them, and they turned on him, and you know, you have all of this. 

If Donald Trump is a squalid reminder of the dark side in American life, the country’s media cannot escape the same judgment. If he’s a joke and an embarrassment to the democracy conceived in liberty and defended in blood, ditto. And if the substance of the policy choices has drawn minimal focus on any of the networks, ditto again. But if media ratings reflect public demand, most responsibility has to fall on the audience. 

That was the point Richard Ford was making when he wrote about the malaise. John Updike’s observations twenty years before him, Jimmy Carter’s a decade or so before that, and the fascist United States Philip Roth imagined in 2004 conceived of the malaise in different ways, but all of them plant responsibility at the door of the democracy itself. Blame materialism, greed, cartels, intrigues, indifference, ignorance, xenophobia, fear, religious manias, unlikely sexual pathologies or intemperate minds – the country has flaws and lunacy in abundance: they are always there, waiting for a demagogue to stir them into something dire. It is the remarkable achievement of the United States that the democracy has never succumbed, and continues to be, if only after a fashion, the one revolution that ever worked. So far, that is.

Don Watson

Don Watson is the author of many acclaimed books, including Caledonia Australis, Recollections of a Bleeding Heart, American Journeys and The Bush.

ENEMY WITHIN

Correspondence

Patrick McCaughey

Don Watson is good at skewering American embarrassments, most notably “American exceptionalism” and the “American Dream.” For the past three decades I have lived in the US and still cringe when I hear the political classes call America “the greatest nation on earth.” This is even more awful when one is confronted with the spectacle of American inequality, persistent discrimination against minorities and women, and endemic gun violence. The American Dream seems an unbreakable bubble. The belief that everybody can rise and become rich if they simply “play by the rules, work hard and pay their taxes” is like a divine mantra. How can any politician say such things when the administration struggles to establish a minimum wage of $15 per hour? If you do the math, that would barely bring you over the poverty line if you worked a forty-hour week. 

Cognate to these embarrassments is the persistent belief that a failure in “leadership” has robbed America of its greatness, its exceptionalism, and denied its struggling citizenry the fulfilment of the Dream. The weakness of Barack Obama and the need for a strong leader became the rallying cry of the Republicans in 2016. To their horror, Donald Trump emerged in that role. Hillary Clinton was denied it because she is a woman and a self-serving career politician. 

The left like to throw the word “fascist” around on such occasions. Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich, fascists? Hardly. Trump comes closer to wearing that Halloween costume. Watson is rightly measured on the topic, but the following words and actions would make the most moderate pause:

• Discredit the judiciary: Trump has claimed and never revoked the statement that the Mexican parentage of the federal judge hearing the case against Trump University should disqualify him.
• Muzzle the press: Watson’s vignette of the Republican campaign corralling the press at Trump’s rallies at the back of the room to make them a clear object of mockery to the crowd smacks of more than intimidation. Trump banned journalists from the Washington Post from travelling in his official press entourage. 
• Deploy the state against the individual: Trump has threatened to use the engines of the state to intimidate and harm individuals who oppose him. The most obvious case is that of Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and proprietor of the Washington Post. Life would not be so easy for Amazon if I became president, so Trump mused to the press.
• Persecute a minority: Trump has overtly threatened a minority by claiming he’ll deport undocumented Latinos and their children, and also threatened to isolate Muslims in American society, who are portrayed as a perpetual threat from within.
• Demonise foreign powers: The threat from without is a common thread in totalitarian ideology and behaviour. Trump has demonised “Jina”, as he calls the People’s Republic. Once again, only the Strong Leader can prevail against such powers.
• Prey on women: The revelations following the release of the Access Hollywood tape about Trump’s sexual mores and behaviour strongly support the claim of his belief in the superiority of man, the Übermensch, now as reality TV star, who must have his way with women.

The drive and effect of these elements in Trump’s campaign have created the fearful electorate. Watson is very good on this: “Americans, who once admired courage above all human qualities, now seem to get high on fear. Not that we see them trembling; but we see and hear fear’s most common disguise, belligerence.”

Fear is contagious. African American communities are more deeply fearful of the police – of the forces of law and order in general – than ever in the post–Martin Luther King world, even when there are many African American cops on duty in the inner precincts of America’s troubled cities. Every month, unarmed black men are shot and killed by police. It’s as though the police can’t help themselves, knowing full well the dire consequences of such shootings – from triggering major communal riots to instigating federal investigations by the Department of Justice, to say nothing of individual prosecutions for manslaughter, and even murder. Trump promises to encourage “stop and frisk” policies, even though they have been ruled unconstitutional. Such a policy is rightly seen as the perfect way of intimidating African Americans. Any black man in a car driving through a white suburb or area is liable to be stopped, told to get out of the car, and shaken down by a police officer ostensibly looking for drugs or illegal handguns. The numbers of white men who are subject to such treatment could be counted on an abacus.

Fear spread to the liberal Democratic side of the table from time to time when Hillary had a bad week and Trump a good one – happily, a diminishing feature of the race. The question surfaced: what would be the consequences if he actually won the presidency? 

Here psephology – lovely word and action: the science of elections – and dark forebodings confront each other. Psephologically, Trump cannot win on white voters. There are not enough of them on the shaky Republican side to carry it off. He has made little headway with Latino and none with African American voters. He is widely disliked by white women, a key and reliable voting group. It would take an unprecedented wave of new voters to sweep him into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Thankfully, Trump believes in the Great Man Theory of History and refuses to prepare for debates, and disputes with those who try to prepare him. “Let Trump be Trump” is the best news for the Democrats.

If, however, the election outcome is close and Hillary emerges as the victor with a slender majority in the Electoral College, then Trump, always a sore loser and in this case a “yooge” one, would certainly resort to the courts to have the result overturned, and the rigged system that put Crooked Hillary in the White House exposed. It could be long, drawn-out, an ugly spectacle and damaging to the Republic.

Patrick McCaughey

Patrick McCaughey, a former director of the National Gallery of Victoria, has lived and worked in the United States since 1988. He has published widely on modern and contemporary art.

ENEMY WITHIN

Correspondence

Dennis Altman

I am writing this in the aftermath of the first presidential debate, which common sense suggests Hillary won convincingly. But as we know, rationality no longer plays much part in elections, and the incessant news cycle means my comments will inevitably be out of date when you read them. Anything I might say about Enemy Within will either seem naive or prescient, depending on the outcome of the election.

Like Hillary Clinton, Don Watson desperately wants to believe in America: it is, he tells us, “a miracle of an ever-evolving pluralist democracy and … the last great hope of humankind. It is a wonderland of invention, a marvel of freedom and tolerance, and by most measures the greatest country on earth.” 

Like Bernie Sanders, he then itemises all the problems and defects that undermine these claims, especially massive inequality – four times the incarceration rate of China – and the overwhelming impact of money in politics. He doesn’t discuss the recent “evolution” of the political system, which has led to systematic gerrymandering of elections to the House of Representatives and could ensure Republican control even in the face of a major Democratic vote this November.

The emphasis of the subtitle of this essay is revealing: “American politics in the time of Trump.” Hillary Clinton remains the more likely future president, but she receives little attention in this essay, which is concerned with explaining the unlikely appeal of Trump, who both appals and fascinates us all. Like others caught up in a bromance with Bernie Sanders, Don’s support for Clinton is at best grudging – her election is necessary to block Trump – and ignores that millions of Democrats backed her in the primary because they actually want her as president.

Don explains that he focused his essay on Wisconsin to avoid the clichéd bastions of either the liberal coastal cities or the redneck Deep South: “a normal sort of place.” His description of Wisconsin rightly includes the poor and largely African American centre of Milwaukee, but he hardly lingers there, and the bulk of the essay reflects an America that is overwhelmingly white and torn between progressive and conservative traditions.

By largely ignoring non-white Americans, Don fails to convey the strong support for Hillary, and why Bill Clinton was regarded by many as “the first black president.” There are good reasons for progressives to criticise Hillary: her closeness to major corporate interests and her record on foreign interventions among them. But there are also positives in her record, largely overlooked by those who look back longingly at the quixotic hopes of Bernie Sanders to capture a nomination he was never seriously likely to win.

Don ends his essay by describing Hillary as “a foreign policy hawk with no demonstrated ability to think beyond the doctrine of exceptionalism.” It is true that as Secretary of State Clinton is known to have favoured a more interventionist position on several crucial issues than did President Obama. But two questions arise: was she always wrong? And has she learnt from those areas where intervention proved disastrous? Maybe Clinton was right to push for stronger US involvement in Syria, to have wanted the United States to impose a no-fly zone before Russian and Turkish involvement made this impractical? 

Whether she realises that much American intervention in the Middle East has been, at best, counterproductive is hard to assess, as it is hardly the stuff of campaign oratory. Both Trump and Sanders played on the weariness that most Americans feel after almost two decades of military interventions – Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya – that have only fuelled instability and disaster. Let’s hope that Clinton shares some of this scepticism and is willing to learn from past mistakes.

Dennis Altman

Dennis Altman is a professorial fellow in human security at La Trobe University. His most recent books are Queer Wars (with Jon Symons) and How to Vote Progressive in Australia (edited with Sean Scalmer). 

ENEMY WITHIN

Correspondence

Patrick Lawrence

Like most writers with too much to do and insufficient time, I set out to skim Don Watson’s essay on the American political scene, seeking its gist and leaving it at that. I soon gave up: there is too much to be missed in Watson’s piece. This is always the mark of excellent eyes and ears – these being the sine qua non of first-rate writing.

I wish more Americans might see Watson’s elegantly wrought rumination. It is nearly always arriving foreigners who get to the pith of a people. Tocqueville, who filled two volumes on America with exceptional insight after nine months’ travel, is the best-known example. The only Americans able to see as Americans and also as others see them are returning expatriates, and, as Joyce more than once noted, the exile gone home is punished savagely for all he sees and says. 

Watson went after something deep and difficult during his time among Americans last summer, it seems to me. We are in crisis, let there be no doubt, but this is far more profound than mere politics. One cannot possibly grasp the American condition as we have it in the reports carried in the Sydney Morning Herald or the Australian – or, still less likely, any American newspaper. They are not the right technology, for we – we Americans – are amid a crisis in consciousness, to bring it to a single word. The questions we face are psychological, having to do with identity and who we think we are, as against what we have actually made of ourselves. One must learn from Tocqueville, as Watson plainly has, and then set out for that high, thinly populated ground where journalism and literature meet. People such as Ryszard Kapus´cin´ski dwell there. It is where work that matters gets done when the project is to capture a people and their society as in an immense, panoramic Polaroid. 

One way to get to the bottom of a place, paradoxically, is resolutely to explore its surfaces and signifiers, and Watson has this, the semiologist’s method, down to an art. The mall-ified landscapes, the clapboard-and-green-shutters houses that seem lost to the lives lived amid them, the downtowns that are “not entirely deserted but it feels that way,” the beer-and-burger bars that seem like re-enactments, for Americans do not authentically gather anymore: perfect. In such evocations one grasps the vacancy of our public space and the emptied-out lives we live in consequence – we who bay incessantly about “community.” Watson quotes Richard Ford to good effect: “It’s really we who’re threatened with not quite fully existing. It’s we who’re guilty of not having something better on our minds. It’s our national malaise.”

“We” is a fraught word among Americans. Nobody wants to own up to the mess we have made of ourselves and our country. It is always their fault – somebody else’s, that “enemy within” in Watson’s title. What passes for political process has been reduced to sheer spectacle in the way Guy Debord used this term. “We don’t have politics in America,” Gore Vidal once wrote. “We have elections.” It is essential not to miss this: were Tocqueville writing today, he would have to choose another title: there is no democracy in America, and we, all of us, are responsible for this tragedy. This, it seems to me, is Watson’s quarry.

Consider the evolution of mainstream reactions to Donald Trump’s rise. When he first announced his candidacy, in mid-2015, he was dismissed as an entertainer. Then he was marked down as a passing political oddity, and then a kind of suicide bomber who would destroy the Republican Party from within but was of no interest to anyone else. 

Things changed as the opinion polls began to indicate a very close contest between Trump and Hillary Clinton. Suddenly Trump is a threat to our national security and our very existence. Every derogatory descriptive in Webster’s Third is hauled out and hurled Trump’s way, usually more than once. It is all Trump, all horror, all the time. It grows tedious, to be honest. 

There is something obsessive-compulsive in this. At writing (early October) it has come to resemble a Salem witch-hunt conducted – supreme irony – in the name of our liberal values. Supposedly liberal, I should say. I see two explanations, as follows. 

One, few Americans – drifting as they do in the mainstream of opinion – want to see the “we” in the Trump phenomenon. Most of us are desperate to avoid admitting that the political culture that pushed Trump to the fore belongs to all of us and that many of us benefit from it just as it is. No, the Donald must be cast as some kind of “other” – along with his followers, of course. 

The second point has to do with the matter of despotism. Watson dwells eruditely on fascism and those of its characteristics one may find in the Trump phenom. He is correct to do so – and correct again to dismiss the thought of a fascist order arising were Trump to be elected president. But he barely flicks at a political current that is just as pronounced, harder to see because it is everywhere, and arguably more pernicious. Tocqueville, in the second of his America books, calls it soft despotism. So can we.

American conservatives sometimes deploy Tocqueville’s views on the “species of oppression” he so defined, so as to rip into the welfare state, federal regulation and other such right-wing obsessions. This is not my meaning. (And I question whether Tocqueville would accept it as his, either.) I refer to the oppression of the neoliberal order as consolidated in the post–Cold War period, notably during the triumphalist 1990s. 

No threat of cataclysm in this, no Trump-ite catastrophe. “It would have a different character,” as Tocqueville wrote presciently of this democratic despotism. “It would be more extensive and gentler or softer, and it would degrade men without tormenting them.” This is the project of the end-of-history crowd: we are correct about everything, no need to think about it, and if you do manage to think a thought for yourself, it had better match ours. This is what I mean by perniciously dangerous, or vice versa.

As just implied, one of the most powerful features of neoliberal ideology is its intolerance of all deviation and difference. Abroad, one finds this at the root of our reigning Russophobia. At home, I see intolerance, various forms of prejudice, demonisation and the exploitation of fear – the last like shooting at the side of a barn, in the American context – at work in our Trumpophobia. This is the soft despotism of the American neoliberal. Hillary Clinton, to state the obvious, is the faith’s high priestess. 

Some mainstream Americans – meaning all who accept neoliberal thinking as a given, in no need of inquiry – prefer to pretend that the people Trump claims to speak for do not exist. It is easy enough, since mainstream-dwelling Americans rarely see them. Most, safe to say, are probably aware of their presence but find the thought that they should have a voice in the national conversation wildly unacceptable. Those people are to be confined to their “basket of deplorables,” as Clinton artlessly but very succinctly put it this autumn. Among the most interesting questions posed late-ish in the campaign season is whether Trumpism will go away if he is defeated in November. Translation: can we resume ignoring them? 

It is hard, honestly, to know how to apportion one’s contempt in late 2016 America. 

Return to Watson’s blighted landscapes, desiccated towns and communities of the stupefied. All this we must lay nowhere but at neoliberalism’s door. I see no alternative explanation of our fate. It is what a nation gets when it elevates market value to the only value – so surrendering to the corporatisation, commodification and marketisation of more or less everything. 

Watson writes extensively of “malaise” in this context but never mentions “decline.” This is another charged term in the American vocabulary. To be a declinist is quite unpatriotic. It puts one outside the tent urinating in, as L. B. J. would have put it. While many of our torments are mere indulgences, Americans’ fear of decline is perfectly legitimate. This fear is the source of our malaise. Depression, I have long thought, arises out of feelings of powerlessness, and many of us understand that our corrupted political process renders us so. 

I am not a declinist if this means I view the prospect as inevitable. The decline of America is possible, which is a very different thing. And it is a choice, even though most of us do not recognise it as one. Americans face many choices, and one might logically expect their magnitude to prod us into action. Just the opposite is the case: we have drifted so far from anything like an authentic political life, let so much go slack for so long, and so left ourselves with so much to do that the choices before us leave us paralysed. Which is to say the sensation of powerlessness is prevalent. The grim reality around the next corner, or the next, is that flinching from our choices in this way will amount to our choice, and decline will then await us: we will have chosen it. 

Watson quotes Camus as wondering, “Shall I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?” The attribution is common but mistaken, but we can leave this aside: Watson is wise to pose the question in his essay’s context. To my mind we Americans have but one way forward. Let us begin with a good strong cup – our first order of business being, as Watson suggests, to awaken from our long, troubled sleep.

Patrick Lawrence

Patrick Lawrence is foreign affairs columnist at the Nation. He was a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the Far Eastern Economic Review, the International Herald Tribune and the New Yorker. His most recent book is Time No Longer: Americans after the American Century (Yale). 

FIRING LINE

Response to Correspondence

James Brown

By the start of the next decade Australia will commence acquiring armed drones. That fact alone is prompting a rethink of how we might go to war, and the systems required to ensure elected representatives exercise effective control over the military. Imagine, if you will, Helen Mirren’s Eye in the Sky played out with Australian faces around the table. We have, I am sure, considerable work yet to do on the institutions that might support such real-time decision-making. 

I wrote Firing Line intending it to be the first word, rather than the last, in a new conversation. If the correspondence on the essay is indicative of the prospects for reinvigorating the national conversation on Australia’s place in the world, the role of our military and the essential elements of national security, then I am very pleased and look forward to the conversation yet to unfold. There is much more to say. I said little on the role of international law in making decisions to go to war – a topic I think already receives a rare degree of nuanced coverage in our public debates. Nor, as several correspondents elsewhere have pointed out, did I discuss at all the ethics of going to war. I made almost no mention of terrorism and a range of other national security threats, such as cybersecurity. Discussing a topic as expansive as war in 25,000 words means moving quickly and making hard decisions on what to leave out. I wanted the essay to range broadly from the personal and tactical, through the military and political, all the way to grand and regional strategy, because all of these considerations are necessary to inform a decision to go to war. As Andrew Carr said to me, “What the ordinary soldier goes through and what Xi Jinping wants both matter in this discussion.”

The responses to Firing Line show a consensus that our public debate on defence and national security is underdone. Henry Reynolds notes we have just passed through a federal election in which defence and national security policy barely rated a mention. Indeed, the most prominent defence discussion during the campaign was on whether retired military officers running for office should be allowed to post photos of their previous uniformed career or not (for the record, they should, and I would be surprised if the defence department’s judgment on this passes legal review). Senator Whish-Wilson sees bipartisan consensus on defence as the major problem here, as well as misplaced parliamentary priorities: “Parliament dedicates an inordinate amount of time to scrutinising the details of where defence money is being spent,” he writes, but “Next to no time is given to examining whether this spending serves the aims of a particular strategy.” He worries, too, about “silent running” politicians who are “fearful of speaking out on defence issues” lest they be seen as uninformed. Rory Medcalf, head of the National Security College in Canberra, confirms this impression of a “troubling lack of awareness of security issues among politicians.” Malcolm Garcia identifies one impediment to a more informed public and parliamentary debate: the instinctively secretive culture of the Australian Defence Organisation. Let me note another, articulated by Michael Ware during a discussion of the essay in Brisbane: there will only be a better public debate on security issues when the public demands one.

In the meantime, though, plenty of steps can be taken to improve the capacity of parliament to debate these matters. In addition to the measures I have suggested, Peter Leahy suggests a two-week course on strategic thinking for all parliamentarians. Given the newly elected parliament only gets two days to grapple with a century of parliamentary history and systems, two weeks is a big ask. But the idea of shorter sessions aimed at lifting strategic and defence knowledge among parliamentary staffers is worth pursuing. 

Three weeks after Firing Line was published, the Chilcot Inquiry handed down its report. From predictable Australian corners came calls for our own round of war-crimes trials: witch-hunts which would neither help Australia make decisions on war, nor for that matter be likely to succeed in their cause of putting decision-makers in jail. As the Chilcot report makes clear in its 2.6 million words, mistakes were made, rather than deliberate deceptions contrived. Senator Whish-Wilson would like a full and independent inquiry to be held in Australia, but I don’t think that’s likely. I would like to see more on the public record, though, particularly on two issues considered in depth by Chilcot. The first is the effectiveness of Australia’s military strategy in Iraq between 2003 and 2008–09. It was chilling to read of the lack of clarity about the United Kingdom’s military objectives for the Basra-based Multinational Division Southeast, whose headquarters controlled the movements of my unit deployed there in 2005. It was useful to read the analysis of the impact on the British Armed Forces of splitting focus between Afghanistan and Iraq from 2005–06. I have not yet seen a good analysis of how Australia managed the interaction of these two proximate but distinct military theatres. And finally, the examination of the United Kingdom’s ability to influence the United States during a time of crisis is the most illuminating part of the Chilcot report, in my view, with echoes for Australia then and now. 

I grappled with how best to incorporate Iraq into my essay, not wanting simply to rehash the debates of the last decade, but keen to acknowledge how large the decision to go to Baghdad looms in the Australian psyche, and also wanting to be upfront about the personal biases inherent in the way I look at that conflict. My shorthand for the impact of Iraq on Australian thinking about war – the Iraq template – clearly needs further elucidation. James Curran’s critique of this is like so many winter mornings spent at the Singleton military range: bracing, but useful. He rightly points out that the Australian government was not “‘coy’ about either the strategic environment or its objectives, especially regarding the implications of the commitment for the US alliance.” I have acknowledged elsewhere the extent of John Howard’s efforts to make the public case for war in Iraq, in the parliament and outside it, including an extensive speech with questions at the National Press Club. I was thinking more of the period after 2003, particularly the difficulty the Rudd and Gillard governments had in discussing Australian deployments to the Middle East, and the deferment of commissioning official histories of recent conflicts. And I acknowledge that alliance considerations were to the fore in calculations then of national interest. In 2016 we run the risk of forgetting the immense pressure that was brought to bear on alliance interests in 2003, and it is important to recall that such considerations led the Japanese prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, and the Japanese parliament to vote to deploy troops to Iraq – overturning seven decades of pacifism.

Chilcot has led to renewed calls here for parliament to take a greater role in decisions on war, and the Greens have committed to reintroduce their War Powers Bill when the new parliament convenes. I remain unconvinced that a vote before any military deployment is the right course of action, for reasons of both principle and practicality. The executive must preserve the freedom to respond to events, or shape events, with the mandate handed to it by the electorate and should not be excessively hobbled from doing so. Some security crises require a response within days, if not hours – recalling parliament and briefing it on the case for and against deployments would often prove impractical. Judy Betts usefully points out that greater parliamentary involvement in 2003 would not have changed Australia’s response to Iraq, given that the government controlled the lower house of parliament. A joint sitting of the House and Senate, beyond increasing the logistical complexity of a vote on military deployments, would also seem to contravene an elected government’s mandate, and is only to be used on rare occasions to resolve impasse and deadlock. 

But the trend in New Zealand, Canada and particularly the United Kingdom is towards greater involvement of parliament in military deployments. There remains a need for a greater systemic role for parliament in decisions to go to war. James Curran asks what point a ninety-day parliamentary committee review of military deployments would serve, given the decision to send troops has already been made. It is a “cumbersome new process” full of red tape, he suggests. Parliamentary review would serve four purposes. First, it would make the review of military deployment automatic and certain: regularising close consideration of military issues and the alignment of military objectives with political strategy. Second, it would increase transparency of decision-making and likely increase confidence and trust among the public. Third, it would allow consideration of views on the deployment from experts and members of the public outside parliament. Last, there is the purpose of broadening an appreciation of what’s at stake in any deployment, and potentially sharpening military strategy through more extensive parliamentary consideration. In arguing for congressional approval of military action in the United States, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, Senator Tim Kaine, goes further: “It would be the height of public immorality to order service members to risk their lives when the nation’s political leadership has not done the work to reach a consensus about the value of a mission.” Australia is out of step with other democracies on this issue. As Peter Leahy notes, even President Putin is required by law to consult the State Duma when he wishes to deploy the military overseas (though presumably not when little green men are deployed).

The idea of a more integrated national security secretariat, in the form of a national security council (or office of national strategy, as some have suggested), has received a surprising degree of support in my discussions since Firing Line was published. Naturally, there has been some pushback in Canberra, with concerns voiced that current coordination efforts are not being appreciated, or that a new organisation might marginalise existing departments and agencies. Recent developments in Australia’s relationship with China, including the blocked sale of Ausgrid, make even more apparent the need for a better-coordinated approach to national security. It is odd that the necessarily reactive Foreign Investment Review Board has become the default body to meld security and economic assessments of the national interest. James Curran is concerned that a national security secretariat might become an echo chamber for the prime minister. Perhaps, but it is no more or less likely to become an echo chamber than a prime ministerial intelligence agency like the Office of National Assessments. Far more pressing is the question of where the strategists to staff this new office might come from: Malcolm Garcia suspects from the military, others have concluded from DFAT. For the most part, we will have to train them anew: policy expertise runs deep within government, strategy expertise less so. As Kim Beazley notes, “we have got out of the habit of this thinking.” The need to get back in the habit is pressing. 

It is a ticklish matter for me to assess the national security leadership of Tony Abbott, who was replaced as prime minister by my father-in-law. But I think the Abbott example is an important one and worth examining in detail. James Curran criticises my “sensational claims” that “the former prime minister suggested the dispatch of 1000 Australian troops to Ukraine in the wake of the shooting down of MH17, and that he wanted to send 3500 diggers into Iraq to combat ISIS,” and concludes that, “The most respected political journalists in the country have debunked both claims.” 

That is wrong. On the Ukraine deployment, Paul Kelly wrote: “Abbott’s every instinct is to deploy Australian military and police assets and he needs to be persuaded by his advisers from such options … In the early days of the crisis several weeks ago Abbott wanted to put 1000 Australian troops onto the crash site in conjunction with 1000 Dutch troops. Nothing better testifies to his outrage at the event and his keenness to deploy Australian assets in a cause that affected Australians. This option remained on the table for a few days.” 

Chris Uhlmann wrote: “Last August no one in the hierarchy rushed to deny a report in the Australian that said Mr Abbott wanted to put 1,000 troops into Ukraine, following the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17. That was because everyone agreed it was true.”

Abbott himself confirmed this in parliament in February 2015: “There was talk with the Dutch about a joint operation … This arose out of the most important and the most necessary discussions between the Dutch military and our own to uphold and defend our vital national interests and to do the right thing by the people of our country.”

The Iraq report is more contested. Prime Minister Abbott, along with defence chiefs, carefully refuted the notion that Australia was informally or formally planning unilateral action in Iraq, and reiterated that there were “no plans to put Australian combat troops on the ground.” Notably, though, the Australian did not issue a retraction of the story and Chris Uhlmann concluded that the possibility remained that “the idea of sending troops to Iraq was raised inside the bunker of the Prime Minister’s office.”

Since Firing Line was published, the Australian’s Cameron Stewart and Paul Maley have published a series of articles illuminating the Abbott cabinet’s deliberations on deploying the military to fight against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. One of their insights is that in the latter half of 2014, just before the above refutations were being issued, Abbott was actively exploring military options to send further teams of special forces into Iraq. Stewart and Maley report:

Attorney-General George Brandis said Abbott was “almost visibly frustrated” at the limits of Australian power … Abbott’s defence minister David Johnston said the prime minister’s frustration sometimes bordered on a desire for unilateralism. “He was quite unilateral in his proposition of what we could do and what we should do,” Johnston said. “I just kept right away from it. Whenever we had an NSC meeting I used to say, ‘We need to be very careful about doing things unilaterally.’”

The substantive issue here is what these episodes reveal about our national decision-making when it comes to military force, in particular the role of the prime minister. Curran concludes that this period shows the system works: the checks and balances of the national security committee of cabinet kept Abbott’s eagerness in check. I instead see this as the equivalent of an aviation near-miss. The conclusion Abbott voiced in parliament that Ukraine was a “vital national interest” of Australia is concerning, and the quantity of military (as well as intelligence) resources devoted was problematic. Curran is more sanguine about this than me: “After all, only a small number of special forces soldiers were sent to support police investigators in the Ukraine, and 200 were sent to Iraq.” But this misses the point. When you have only a small defence force, deploying such numbers is a risky overcommitment that leaves you exposed elsewhere. Roughly a third of Australia’s special forces were deployed to Iraq. Considering the numbers in training or on standby for domestic counter-terrorism, this left precious few to respond to any other crises. It’s one thing for a prime minister privately to canvass a range of military options behind doors; it’s another for the options canvassed to be outside the realms of reasonableness. And these crises unfolded over months in countries in which our vital national interests were not engaged. What would it have looked like were the issues to have played out over days, in parts of the world where our national interests were vitally engaged? Or in a strategic environment involving newer and more complex forms of warfare? Curran is satisfied that prime ministers and the national security system are up to the challenge. I hope he is right. 

There is another important factor here. Kim Beazley refers to Australia as having conducted “demonstrations” with its military. That’s an important military term; a demonstration does not rely on having a detailed plan – mission success is just showing up. There is an element of this in Australia’s deployments to the Middle East that Malcolm Garcia charts. It is intrinsic in the set-and-forget political culture around some of the ADF’s missions in the past decade. Operational and strategic considerations converge in Australian military decision-making: indeed, in a military of the size of Australia’s, it is debatable whether you can have an operational level where politics doesn’t matter and military commanders are left to make decisions freely. But it is clear that the Australian Defence Force being built right now is intended to do more than just conduct military demonstrations, and that is a step-change our political leaders will need to adjust to. 

The Permanent Court of Arbitration ruling of early July has brought some of the security issues in Australia’s region to the fore with more force than expected. As I travelled around Australia speaking to audiences about this Quarterly Essay, I was surprised at how many were completely unaware of developments in the South China Sea before the PCA’s judgment. Kim Beazley has made, as you would expect, a sophisticated argument about how Australia should decide what to do next in the South China Sea, and has reminded us of our longstanding interests and presence in maritime Southeast Asia. Freedom-of-navigation operations in the South China Sea are certainly an option to be kept in our security toolkit, but it is hard to see how an Australian frigate steaming within twelve nautical miles of Fiery Cross Reef would change the Chinese calculus on the costs of island-building and militarisation right now. It seems likely that these regional issues of maritime assertiveness will increasingly leach into the US–China strategic relationship, although in the long term both China and the United States are motivated to stabilise the relationship and avoid conflict. Australia has a part to play in resisting any move to assert an air defence identification zone in the South China Sea, and in encouraging peaceful resolution of overlapping territorial claims. But this is about more than freedom-of-navigation operations. The Australian public is getting wise to the issues at play in the South China Sea, and the wider strategic competition in Asia. The responses to Olympian Mack Horton’s comments, and to the Chinese newspaper Global Times urging “revenge” on Australia (“an ideal target for China to warn and strike”), have sharpened appreciated of some of the less palatable trends apparent in China’s rise. “Australia’s power means nothing compared to the security of China,” the Global Times warned. 

Henry Reynolds is more concerned with the power imbalance between the United States and Australia, and considers my reference to the alliance as a marriage as “a strange and troubling description.” He needn’t be concerned that I am a soppy alliance sentimentalist, but it is important to acknowledge that beyond the general alignment of Australian and American national interests, our two countries share social capital that should not be underestimated and which remains important to our foreign and defence policy. I am realistic about our ability to influence the course of affairs in Washington. I reject Reynolds’ slippery syllogism that “alliance means war – and wars that Australia would otherwise have avoided.” It’s true that one of Australia’s chief talking points in the alliance to date has been our reliability when it comes to fighting with America around the globe, but the path forward for Australia and America’s alliance involves more than “incessant military engagement.” I’m struck by the fact that Reynolds deems me a militarist too dismissive of the “other people’s wars” thesis, while James Curran suggests I’m an old-left radical nationalist who is embracing this notion. The contrast suggests Firing Line is on the right path to what Rory Medcalf has suggested could be a more inclusive conversation about security.

James Brown

James Brown is a former Australian Army officer, who commanded a cavalry troop in southern Iraq, served at the Australian taskforce headquarters in Baghdad and was attached to Special Forces in Afghanistan. He is the research director and an adjunct associate professor at the US Studies Centre, University of Sydney. He is the author of Anzac’s Long Shadow.

FIRING LINE

Correspondence

Malcolm Garcia

In his timely and important Quarterly Essay, James Brown states that there are few things more important for a nation to decide than what it is willing to fight for. I would contend that in Australia, in the absence of public interest in the study of conflict (due to a combination of Anzac-fixated neglect and a peculiar concern, identified by Brown, that to talk about war is somehow to make it more likely), our national security establishment has made a determination on our behalf. In their minds, what we are willing to fight for is maintenance of the Australia–America alliance.

Freed from the need to explain to a largely uninterested Australian public why the government has, since 1999, almost continuously been sending soldiers, sailors and airmen into harm’s way, the Canberra establishment has been able to act more deftly than its foreign equivalents. Through skill and intelligence, and some luck, it has contributed to American-led military operations, demonstrating a desire to shoulder some of the burden of the Australia–America alliance. It has also been able to minimise the likelihood of casualties which would cause public questioning of what our military is doing, and, by extension, of the value of the alliance.

Like Brown, I find it difficult to place my experience of the Iraq War in the national political discourse. In mid-2003, I had the first of several deployments to the Middle East as part of an RAAF AP-3C Orion detachment. Soon after my arrival, the mission of this detachment experienced a major change. Until then the Orions had almost exclusively been conducting patrols of the Arabian Gulf and the Arabian Sea. But now the detachment was to conduct missions over Iraq. The Orion crews were largely untrained for these overland flights and the aircraft themselves had only recently been fitted with new equipment to conduct the task. Each with their complement of ten aircrew, the Orions proceeded to inspect the electricity powerlines of Iraq. The reason for the task was that former regime elements (FREs, just one of the acronyms used over the years to describe enemies of the Coalition) were powerlines to cripple the country.

Each sortie lasted upwards of eight hours, and the video collected was painstakingly examined by analysts for evidence of damaged powerlines. Reports and images were then dispatched to military headquarters in Bahrain, Qatar and Baghdad. After several weeks, staff from the Orion detachment inquired about the result of the missions and the usefulness of the reporting. The response from headquarters was that while the information produced was greatly appreciated, this task should ideally have been assigned to unmanned aerial vehicles, not to the Orions. Subsequently, the powerline reconnaissance task stopped.

To the national security establishment the Orion detachment was a neat response to American requests for a contribution. The aircraft and crews had trained with their American counterparts; the air threat environment was relatively benign; and the missions conducted provided a possibly useful, but not critical, contribution – they showed we were “doing something.” But the “set-and-forget” nature of Australian military contributions, as discussed by Brown, raises the question: if Orion detachment staff had not inquired about the result, how much longer would these aircraft and crews have been conducting the mission?

It was not only in the Iraq War that we made low-risk, nominal contributions to the Australia–America alliance. Canberra’s response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 – which was only repulsed after a massive campaign of air strikes and assault by armoured vehicles – was to send three RAN ships. And in the aftermath of 9/11, a detachment of RAAF F/A-18 Hornets was sent not to the battlefields of Afghanistan, but to the isolated atoll of Diego Garcia, 1800 kilometres south of the subcontinent, to conduct uneventful patrols over the American base there for six months. Both of these contributions fit the template of a cost-effective alliance, even though they were unlikely to fit public perceptions of contributing in a valuable way to something Australia has decided it is willing to fight for.

Brown also highlights the difference between Australia and the United States when it comes to open discussion of military matters, pointing out the Australian government’s desire to portray the basing of American marines in Darwin as nothing special and its reflexive denial of possible deployment of American bombers to Australia. This difference is also seen in the ways America and Australia have publicised their military presence in the South China Sea. While a US Navy Poseidon aircraft invited a CNN news crew aboard for a sortie (accompanied by the commander of American maritime patrol aircraft in the Pacific) to show the encroach of China, an Australian Orion patrol was only accidentally discovered to be in the area by a news crew from the BBC. The response from Canberra to this was that the Orion patrol was routine and that challenges from the Chinese military were not unique.

It is because military decision-making is in the hands of our national security establishment that there is an instinctive culture of secrecy. The members of this establishment have dealt with classified material for hours of every day over several years of their careers, with little requirement to explain what they do to the public, or even to the country’s elected representatives. The longevity of tenure in the national security establishment probably also helps explain why there is not the same tradition of selected leaking as in America, as well as why there is a dearth of retired senior officers offering opinions on military issues.

What can be done to improve the situation? I disagree with Brown’s suggestion to establish a national security council with a new national security adviser (NSA). Such an organisation would almost certainly be filled with longstanding members of the national security establishment, with an NSA who would likely have senior officer experience in the SASR (Special Air Services Regiment), which is coincidentally one of the most secretive parts of the ADF.

Brown points out that compared to other nations the decision to go to war in Australia lacks substantial political oversight. Perhaps if prime ministers were required to secure the approval of both houses of parliament before deploying troops overseas – for any deployment longer than ninety days, so as to allow for rapid response to a crisis – the public would be better informed about the goal of the mission and when it will likely end. Parliamentarians from both sides of the aisle should be considered mature enough to be entrusted with information that can make our elected representatives part of the important discussion of determining what our nation is willing to fight for.

Malcolm Garcia

Malcolm Garcia is a former officer in the Royal Australian Air Force who served in tactical, operational and strategic positions. He is the author of several novels, the latest being Kill-Capture.

FIRING LINE

Correspondence

Peter Whish-Wilson

A government faces few bigger decisions than whether to commit young Australians to war. So it is striking how rarely questions about defence spending and national security policy figure in Australia’s public and political discourse, especially in parliament.

Firing Line is an important contribution to what passes as debate on Australia’s security interests and priorities. As in Anzac’s Long Shadow, James Brown isn’t afraid to challenge taboos. It is always encouraging when insight and critique are provided by someone of Brown’s military and professional standing, as they are less easy to dismiss.

There is much to respond to in Firing Line, but I will limit my comments to two areas. First, James Brown notes that our country’s national security apparatus is “entirely underscrutinised, and it shows.” Based on my experience as a senator, I agree. “It is extraordinary,” Brown writes, “that so little infrastructure is dedicated to parsing the issues of war.” In the last parliament, I sat on both the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties and the Senate Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade. I understand full well what Brown means when he says that our oversight of defence matters is both “underdone and weak.”

Following the release of the 2016 Defence White Paper in February, I bantered with a few well-known journalists at Aussies Café in Parliament House. “What’s wrong with you, Whish-Wilson, are you un-Australian? Where’s your patriotism?” they chided, smiling.

As the Greens spokesperson for Defence, I had been outspoken that week, questioning the need to increase defence spending to an arbitrary 2 per cent of GDP when there had been no escalation in Australia’s overall security threat, and when such an increase ran the risk of dragging the nation into an arms race in the Asia-Pacific region. I also noted that the white paper had been repeatedly delayed, seemingly to coincide with an election year. This risked politicising defence procurement programs and dressing up industry policy as defence policy.

I also warned that without scrutiny and oversight, this increase in defence spending, the biggest outside wartime, brought with it enormous opportunity costs and risk of waste. Every extra dollar spent on defence equipment could potentially be better spent on foreign aid, infrastructure or climate change adaptation, without detracting from both the overt and implicit aims of the white paper.

These seemed reasonable concerns. But my Greens colleagues and I were the only ones in the Senate to raise them, and among very few in the wider parliamentary circles to do so publicly.

It is the job of a parliamentarian, especially in Opposition, to ask hard questions and scrutinise government decisions. But in recent years, Liberal and Labor have been in on virtually all matters of defence and national security – in furious agreement on recent Iraqi and Syrian deployments, draconian new intelligence laws, the machinations of the secretive Operation Sovereign Borders, and now the decision to ramp up defence spending with record-breaking procurement programs.

To many Australians, this unity ticket seems odd. Parliament dedicates an inordinate amount of time to scrutinising the details of where and how defence money is being spent. This gives the appearance of an Opposition doing its job and occupies a lot of time in Senate Estimates. In reality there is little scrutiny of substance on the public record. Next to no time is given to examining whether this spending serves a particular strategy, let alone whether the strategy is the right one in the first place.

In politics, decisions are based on both party policy and the political realities and practicalities of the day. The reality in this country is that we have an aggressive and belligerent right-wing media promoting conservative agendas, especially in defence and national security. Some elements of the Murdoch press, first and foremost, are only too keen to attack and ridicule politicians who don’t support certain agendas. I have been on the receiving end of such attacks. They are designed to belittle the individual, and to undermine or silence proper debate. And they work. I know from conversations with parliamentarians across the political spectrum that there is deep fear of repercussions for speaking out on defence procurement, national security or our participation in foreign conflicts.

The risk of losing political skin is a disincentive to asking too many questions or rocking the boat. Politicians fear being seen to be not “across your brief” – in what are often highly detailed and complex matters. At a more basic level, they fear being accused of not supporting the troops or undermining a strong national defence. This “silent running” acts as a significant and dangerous barrier to transparency and scrutiny.

I’m glad that James Brown has highlighted particular issues that arose during Tony Abbott’s time as prime minister and the pressure Abbott put on our national security apparatus and defence personnel. But Captain Brown was being diplomatic. As I see it, Abbott repeatedly politicised national security issues – especially the threat of violent extremism within Australian borders – for political gain. While instances of extremism are real and need to be taken seriously, the politicisation of this issue was both counter-productive and dangerous. This has noticeably cooled since Malcolm Turnbull became prime minister, although the popular and divisive political rhetoric of One Nation threatens to revive the national security dog-whistle.

Given the recent social media frenzy on the national security threat posed by Islamic extremism, I am inclined to disagree with Brown’s assertion that “for much of the Australian public, Australia’s strategic environment has become somewhat safer” and that “war has largely ceased to be a threat.” In an age of global media providing saturation coverage of acts of violence and terror, I believe that we have rarely felt more unsafe or more under siege. In recent surveys such as the Lowy Institute Poll, the threat of violent extremism ranks as this nation’s biggest insecurity. 

This brings me to my second issue with Firing Line: the idea that we need to move beyond the legacy of the Iraq War and seek new “templates” under which to consider the path to war – or its avoidance.

This is unlikely while the conflict in Iraq remains ongoing and unexamined. Only a full and independent inquiry into Australia’s contribution to the 2003 invasion of Iraq and its aftermath will suffice if we are to learn from our mistakes and recast the debate. This examination is long overdue.

We are also unlikely to move on from the Iraq War while the larger political and media context of this conflict is what journalist Peter Greste calls the “appallingly named War on Terror.”

When discussing the changing nature of war and how Australians perceive conflict, Brown acknowledges “that mental line has moved further and further outwards, pushed by myriad factors since 1945.” Brown suggests that following the invasion of Iraq, there has been public confusion over current or future paths to war, and consequently disengagement. This is perfectly understandable, reflecting the fact that many Australians feel they are in a perpetual state of war – the “long war” promised by Dick Cheney. 

I would argue that as a nation we perceive ourselves to be – and in reality are – less safe now because of the so-called “War on Terror.” Australians rightly question the necessity of foreign deployments and are sceptical of the need to ramp up military spending.

However, this will not be enough to prevent future catastrophes such as Australia’s participation in the unilateral invasion of Iraq as it doesn’t address the core issue that this decision was not made by the entire parliament, but rather by one or a handful of politicians within the executive.

The Chilcot Inquiry has provided us with a chilling indictment of the flawed processes that allowed a few ideologically motivated individuals to lead us into a catastrophic war in Iraq. James Brown also acknowledges that “the way a country prepares for war, the assessment it makes of possible threats, is a deeply human process, prone to bias and instinct.” It is therefore surprising that he doesn’t support giving war powers to parliament, rather than to members of our nation’s executive, who are more often than not motivated by their own narrow political and ideological objectives.

I disagree with Brown that giving parliament war powers would inhibit any “effective response to a crisis.” Any legislation would be structured so that parliament makes the initial decision to go to war, but does not make the operating decisions during the conduct of any conflict. Most importantly, participation must be decided by a conscience vote. Given the gravity of war and the risks posed to the lives and wellbeing of those who serve, each and every parliamentarian should have this decision on their conscience.

Brown feels that Australians are making broader national security decisions based on “instincts, not insights.” That may be true, but when the available insights are often heavily politicised by the Murdoch tabloids, and the bipartisan political interests of the two major parties and other vested interests, the public’s tendency to be deceived, to fail to trust or to disengage entirely, is perfectly understandable.

It is critical that trust be restored. At a recent lecture I attended during the Tamar Peace Festival, Julian Burnside QC stated that “the path to peace starts with honesty.” We can start being honest by holding an open and independent inquiry into Australia’s role in the Iraq War, introducing new legislation to give parliament a conscience vote on future deployments, and adopting new ways to scrutinise defence spending and matters of national security.

Peter Whish-Wilson 

Peter Whish-Wilson was elected a Greens senator for Tasmania in 2012. He is a graduate of the Australian Defence Force Academy and pursued a career in international finance before moving to Tasmania, where he was a lecturer in economics and finance at the University of Tasmania, a wine-maker and an activist.

FIRING LINE

Correspondence

Peter Leahy

As a veteran, James Brown knows the consequences of war and the impact it can have on individuals and communities. He is correct to write, in his Quarterly Essay, that today, in Australia, we rarely think about war. He is also correct to say that we need to think more closely about decisions to go to war. With Australian forces deployed to Afghanistan since 2001 and Iraq since 2003, and now operating in the sky over Syria, we should also deliberate on the decision made every day to remain at war.

The Roman philosopher Cicero told us that we go to war so that we may live in peace. Today conflict seems to be everywhere and it is hard to distinguish between war and peace. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have lasted longer than the two world wars combined. Yet our troops continue to go, many of them for multiple deployments, with the ever-present risk of being killed or wounded, both physically and psychologically. But we have not declared war on anyone and we hear precious little about what the troops are doing in our name. Do we even have an answer to the question, what does victory look like?

As a nation, we let our troops down if we don’t think about how they are equipped, trained and led, and how well prepared they are for today’s wars and the contingencies of the future. Other important questions include: what national interests are served by our involvement? is it legal? what is our strategy? what is our mission? and what tasks do we give deployed forces? At the moment, in both Afghanistan and Iraq, the answers to nearly all of these questions are unclear. As tensions in the South China Sea mount, we need to ask such questions as we contemplate what to do there.

There have been no recent debates in parliament about our war aims and how we are going to achieve them. One obvious problem is that the political parties have decided defence and security matters are to be handled on a bipartisan basis. While comfortable for politicians, this serves to stifle debate on the most important responsibility of the parliament: sending our sons and daughters to war. 

There is nothing in the Australian constitution or legislation that requires the government to gain parliamentary approval before deploying military forces or declaring war. This leaves Australia very much on its own in reserving to the prime minister the decision to commit armed forces. Both President Obama and Prime Minister David Cameron saw fit to engage their legislatures over recent deployments to Iraq and Syria. Their subsequent deployments were constrained by the response they received. Even President Putin is obliged by Russian law to seek approval to use military force abroad. It has been granted twice in recent years – for Ukraine and Syria. Not so in Australia.

Following the UK’s Chilcot Inquiry, there are suggestions to introduce a bill proposing that the decision to deploy members of the Australian Defence Force be made not by the executive alone, but by the Australian parliament. An earlier version of this bill was rejected in 2010. However, in its consideration of that bill the relevant senate committee stated that it was not against the involvement of both houses of parliament in open and public debate about the deployment of Australian service personnel to warlike operations or potential hostilities. The committee further stated that it agreed with the views of most submitters that the Australian people, through their elected representatives, have a right to be informed and heard on these important matters. The committee saw the 2010 bill as a step along the way to a more mature debate in Australia. It is time for that debate and it is time for a bill to be enacted requiring parliamentary approval before the ADF is deployed.

While addressing a group of retired parliamentarians, I came across a deeply concerning reason why some are reluctant to open the matter to debate and decision in parliament. One retired politician strongly suggested the responsibility must remain with the prime minister as we could not trust the parliament to make such an important decision. We trust it with a whole range of important economic, health and social policy issues – why not the decision to go to war? 

Wisely, James Brown discusses the current ill-preparedness of politicians to make important decisions involving defence and security. He notes that few prime ministers and members of the National Security Committee come to the role with an understanding of military matters. He also notes that there are few trained strategic analysts and all of them are distracted by short-term issues at the expense of longer-term policy development. His proposals to reinvigorate the country’s national security apparatus are sensible, as are the proposals to expand the range of supervisory committees within the parliament.

He could also have added the need to prepare parliamentarians and their staff, at all levels, to meet the weighty responsibilities they face in considering the path to war. Strategic thinking does not come naturally to many, and given the often catastrophic results of strategic miscalculation, a better way of preparing parliamentarians for their duties is warranted. In Canberra there are two excellent national institutions that could be brought into play to prepare parliamentarians and then support them through their careers. They are the National Security College at the Australian National University and the Centre for Defence and Strategic Studies at the Australian Defence College. Both could arrange an introductory course of around two weeks, which would help equip our parliamentarians to discharge their duties properly. All parliamentarians should attend these courses early in their careers.

War is no longer exclusively large and episodic. Instead it tends to be small, persistent and pervasive. Of the major armed conflicts in the world today, few are between states. In this environment it is difficult for governments to understand the implications of their decisions on the path to war and build a narrative that engages the people and convinces them of the need for war and then for its continuation over an extended period of time. War has become confused. Some wars are seen as wars of choice, others as wars of necessity. Often what starts out as something other than a war ends up looking a lot like a war. Events can quickly change and escalate, so that we are at war before we realise it and unable to extricate ourselves.

Peter Leahy

Peter Leahy is Director of the National Security Institute at the University of Canberra. He was Chief of Army from 2002 to 2008.

FIRING LINE

Correspondence

James Curran

James Brown’s essay poses a number of important questions for Australia’s strategic future and how the country thinks about going to war. He asks on what issues a government would not fight, whether the nation’s political leaders have learnt the lessons from the 2003 decision to join the US-led Coalition of the Willing in Iraq, and if there is sufficient debate about the foundations of closer Australia–US military integration. We are, he notes, at the point of a “more sophisticated and pragmatic” alliance with America – one that can handle a greater degree of disagreement and divergence – although Brown worries about its prospects in a Trump White House. The essay sketches the rise of China, calls for deeper thinking on defence and strategic policy and is pessimistic about whether the bureaucracy and the political executive have the right skills to navigate the fractious world ahead.

But there are a number of problems with the argument and its execution. The first and most critical is the claim that an “Iraq template” hovers above the country’s political elites, a spectre haunting the corridors of power. Brown is right to join what is virtually a chorus line of lament concerning the lack of planning for the post-invasion phase. But it is passing strange that he devotes precious little analytical energy to unravelling this “template.” We are told that it amounts, in essence, to a “government coy to discuss the strategic environment, its alliance activities and its objectives,” and one where the “national interest” case was insufficiently made. 

Since the claim here is that Canberra remains in thrall to it, this “template” requires closer scrutiny. While it is broadly accepted that the flawed arguments and faulty intelligence marshalled by the Howard government did not differ from those used by George W. Bush and Tony Blair, it does not necessarily follow that the Australian government was “coy” about either the strategic environment or its objectives, especially regarding the implications of the commitment for the US alliance. One can disagree with Howard’s analysis of the strategic environment: after all, the tried and tested policy of containing Saddam Hussein was, in essence, working. But on the relevance of the American alliance, Howard was clear. Indeed, the only distinctive argument he used to justify Australia’s participation in the Iraq War was the relationship with the United States. This tapped deep wellsprings in John Howard’s worldview, his understanding of war and its connection to Australia’s history, and his memory of the alliance as it functioned during World War II and the Cold War. Howard often referred to the relationship with the United States as a “two-way street,” believed it would get “more, not less” important as the years went by, and argued that Americans would not quickly forget Australia’s contribution in Iraq. 

Brown’s unwillingness to examine the motivations of the key figures in that decision is curious. The explanation for this lacuna? As he states in this essay and during a recent interview on ABC radio, he is a “personal friend” of the former prime minister and therefore feels unable to discuss the political context of the decision. This analytical free pass means that an opportunity is missed to account for the tectonic forces that help to explain why Howard took Australia to war in 2003. As historian David McLean has recently argued, only by looking at the “sense of cultural and ideological affinity” that Howard felt with the United States, by exploring his “quest for personal and political recognition and standing through close association with America,” can we start to understand the totality of that crucial decision. These cultural values and beliefs will continue to be part of the calculus in debates over Australia’s foreign and defence policy – and indeed in any decision to take the country to war – in the years ahead.

Brown wants instead to focus on the mistakes at the operational level in Iraq. That’s fair enough, but to divorce this aspect of the war from the strategic mindset that put Australia in Iraq in the first place represents a major weakness in the argument. Ironically, far more attention is devoted to Tony Abbott’s role as a national security leader, with Brown focusing on the sensational claims that the former prime minister suggested the dispatch of 1000 Australian troops to Ukraine in the wake of the shooting down of MH17, and that he wanted to send 3500 diggers into Iraq to combat ISIS. The most respected political journalists in the country have debunked both claims. On Ukraine, the Australian’s Paul Kelly argued that the option for troops was “never going to be viable” and that Abbott was “talked around and decided it was too dangerous and inappropriate.” And on Iraq, the ABC’s Chris Uhlmann was unable to find anyone in the defence department to give the claim a shred of credibility. Even if these ideas were floated or gamed out at some of the countless meetings held to discuss these crises, surely the key point is that the system of checks and balances in Canberra’s current national security framework actually performed its function. After all, only a small number of special-forces soldiers were sent to support police investigators in Ukraine, and 200 were sent to Iraq.

This conceptual confusion becomes even more acute when Brown applies the “Iraq template” to the rise of China, and in particular Beijing’s growing assertiveness in the South China Sea. The argument here is tenuous, to say the least. Brown does not venture a position, much less an opinion, on how the Australian government should respond to the increasing calls – privately from Washington, publicly from past and present Labor luminaries – for Australia to emulate the United States by conducting freedom-of-navigation operations through the disputed twelve-nautical-mile zone around the contested territories. How, too, does Brown deal with the point that the architect of his Iraq template, John Howard, is now advocating moderation, caution and prudence on the question of possible conflict with China? Brown does not wish the freedom-of-navigation issue to be seen as “emblematic” of the entire US–China relationship, but he surely cannot ignore that the issue is becoming the focal point for what China’s rise means for the region and American staying power. Neither Washington nor any of its regional allies has been able thus far to impose any kind of serious cost on Chinese activity.

Closer to home, Brown claims that there was a “degree of blowback” to the announcement in November 2011 of US marine rotations through Darwin. Yet the decision was notable for the broad political consensus it attracted. While there were colourful expressions of outrage from some seemingly aggrieved members of the business community, the only voices of political dissent came from the then leader of the Greens, and former Labor prime minister Paul Keating. Brown argues that the presence of US troops here was first raised in 2003 – but the option of offering the American military training facilities in Australia and even the pre-positioning of equipment was part of the platform the Coalition took to the 1996 federal election.

Perhaps the more notable aspect of the essay, however, is its overwhelming concentration on recent events. It brings to mind Tony Judt’s observation that “the twentieth century is hardly behind us but already its quarrels and its achievements, its ideals and its fears are slipping into the obscurity of mis-memory.” There remains a “perverse contemporary insistence,” Judt added, “on not understanding the context of our present dilemmas, at home and abroad; on not listening … to some of the wiser heads of earlier decades; on seeking actively to forget rather than remember, to deny continuity and proclaim novelty on every possible occasion.”

It is therefore striking that in an essay devoted to the study of how a government makes the decision to go to war, Brown barely glances at how national leaders in the past have acted or spoken when confronted with similar dilemmas. While the first Gulf War is mentioned briefly, the examination of the Hawke government’s decision-making processes and, indeed, the case made by the prime minister to justify Australian participation is cursory. Vietnam rates no mention at all, and Australia’s involvement in World Wars I and II attracts a solitary sentence. Even then, it is only to make the point that the “thresholds for war” in those conflicts “were set beyond our shores,” as if Australia had no distinctive interests of its own in joining those conflicts. The colonies and later the Australian Commonwealth, Brown contends, “did not have the authority to decide on war,” since that was “vested … in the hands of the colonial redcoat governors and successive British governments.” 

Such a view is reminiscent of an old-left “radical nationalist” reading of Australia’s military past, namely that we fight “other people’s wars.” But it is a long time since anyone with genuine standing on Australian military history has made that argument. And it fails to take into account the best recent scholarship in the field, which shows Australia’s Pacific-centred interests were paramount in the actions and decisions of leaders in both major conflicts of the twentieth century.

To oversee a more rigorous preparation for the future and the kinds of conflicts it might engender, Brown has several recommendations. The first is the creation of a stand-alone, American-style national security council, staffed with the “best and brightest” – a phrase of which he is particularly fond. But in the United States that has often meant the marginalising of the state department and the Pentagon – sometimes with disastrous consequences – and there is no reason to think that the same will not happen here. Whatever Brown’s reservations concerning the prime minister’s department, Defence and DFAT, they are nevertheless the custodians of the official memory of all the problems the government of the day is called upon to address. And it is their job to warn the government dispassionately about the possible adverse consequences of politically preferred policies. One potential problem with a national security council is that it risks becoming an echo chamber for the incumbent prime minister.

In addition, Brown wants the freshly elected parliament to create a whole suite of committees – four in total – to keep watch on the conduct of Australia’s defence, strategic and foreign policy. A new parliamentary defence office would “improve the security debate,” although it is not clear how. And he advocates for the federal parliament to be given new powers to subject any military deployment to a “national interest” test – and that it should be given the extraordinary period of ninety days to do so. Such proposals, while earnest and well intentioned, do not take into account the way decisions are made about committing soldiers to war. Brown recognises that the requirement for “full parliamentary approval” would hamper any “effective response to a crisis,” but he still wants to give both houses almost three months to “review” whether any military commitment is in the national interest. Yet typically it is the executive leadership of the day that shapes the content and character of the national interest. What point, then, a debate in the parliament on this question when the decision to commit has already been taken? If a vote was taken that chose not to support the government’s definition of the national interest, how would that alter tactics or strategy? Many of the questions Brown wants discussed before troops are committed – on costs, public support, the position of the Opposition, new dangers arising from military action – are by their very nature fluid and uncertain. It is asking the impossible. For all its occasional theatrics and vaudeville, Question Time and Senate Estimates remain probably the best forums in which governments can be tested and held to account.

Furthermore, Brown presents no evidence to show how these new layers of oversight – others would call them red tape – would have averted the decision to invade Iraq. Nor, crucially, how they might deal with a scenario in which the United States is pressing Australia to do more in Asia to counter the rise of China – especially if a crisis broke out unexpectedly. Nor, in this dark new world of which Brown speaks – in which “warfare is rapidly evolving” and where “technology is fast running ahead of policy” – is it entirely clear that an avalanche of cumbersome new process is what the national security system needs. 

Brown would do well to recall that, thanks to David Halberstam, the phrase “best and brightest” has come to have something of a pejorative connotation in the annals of American national security. These “wise men and whiz kids,” as historian Neville Meaney once observed, did not prevent America from sinking into the quagmire of Vietnam: the documents which emerged from the Pentagon papers made a mockery of the Kennedy men’s professed claims to “cool realism and liberal humanism.” Brown worries that the current generation of strategic analysts in Canberra may not be equipped to think through the complex and complicated challenges ahead. But whence this new generation of Australia’s “best and brightest” might emerge is not altogether clear. Certainly not from the universities, as Brown believes they “still view war as a morally tainted activity,” a sweeping generalisation that ignores the many courses on campuses that drill deeply into Australia’s defence and strategic past. 

It is not simply the bureaucracy that is being challenged here: Brown believes that Australian prime ministers over the past few decades have not been well grounded in military matters or well prepared for the art of foreign policy decision-making. Again, however, this is highly debatable. Even if it were conceded that neither Julia Gillard nor Tony Abbott brought to office a depth of experience in strategic policy or foreign affairs, the evidence suggests both learnt quickly on the job. More to the point, both leaders notched up significant wins on the diplomatic stage: Gillard in cementing Australia’s place in the US “pivot” and launching the Asian Century White Paper; Abbott in securing a number of free-trade agreements in the region.

Going back further, there is even less to support Brown’s claim that the national leaders have been inadequately prepared for this aspect of the job. Gough Whitlam came to office perhaps the most well-informed on international relations of all Australian prime ministers; Malcolm Fraser had been Minister for the Army and indeed defence minister before moving into the Lodge; Bob Hawke had extensive experience abroad as a trade union leader (particularly with the International Labour Organization) and gave thoughtful and reflective speeches on foreign policy in the 1970s, including in his Boyer Lectures of 1979; Paul Keating was the engineer of Australia’s embrace of globalisation; John Howard spoke regularly on foreign affairs as Opposition leader in the 1980s and arguably came of age as a national-security leader during the 1999 East Timor crisis; and Kevin Rudd was a former diplomat and China specialist. It can hardly be said, therefore, that these leaders did not bring a depth of experience of the wider world and Australia’s role in it to the top job. 

Closer attention to the past, of course, will not provide all the solutions, and historians themselves must beware the trap of claiming pompous omniscience in a kaleidoscopic present. But if Brown is looking for a skill set that might help the discussion of these critical issues in the years ahead, he could do far worse than start with a greater sense of history. 

James Curran

James Curran is Professor of History at the University of Sydney and a research associate at the US Studies Centre. His most recent book is Unholy Fury: Whitlam and Nixon at War.

BALANCING ACT

Correspondence

Verity Firth

On 22 June 1944 President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act into law. The G.I. Bill, as it became known, was the greatest infrastructure investment in America’s history. It provided returning veterans with tuition and living expenses to attend university, secondary school or vocational education. It also provided them with low-income mortgages and low-interest loans to start a business. As Stewart Brand concludes in The Clock of the Long Now, “The GI Bill’s cost of $14.5 billion was paid back eightfold in taxes in the next twenty years, it jump-started the boom years of the 1950s, it built the world’s largest middle class, and it set the nation decades ahead as the world moved into a knowledge economy.”

The horrors of World War II created a sense of generational responsibility in governments and citizens alike that not only led to an economic boom, helped along by public investment in education and infrastructure, but also caused the only recorded period in human history where economic inequality was noticeably reduced. 

We live in very different times. The victory of neoliberalism has allowed for an all-consuming belief that economies are best left to run by themselves. We have witnessed a hollowing out of public investment and a subsequent and related decline in public trust in government and institutions. 

George Megalogenis makes a good case for intervention – he writes about Sydney, and more recently Melbourne, choking from the lack of public transport infrastructure; he offers a powerful comparison of percentages of GDP spent on public infrastructure compared with private investment in the residential property market; and he denounces the increasingly self-interested role of business in Australia in urging short-term goals against the longer-term good of the nation.

Megalogenis outlines the impact of the Rudd–Gillard government’s stimulus package, delivered during the global financial crisis, and in particular the success of the Building the Education Revolution (BER) program. Despite the BER’s obviously positive effect on the economy, Megalogenis notes with dismay that “Labor could not make that case to the electorate.” Megalogenis links this failure to “sell” the BER to the decline in confidence among the political class that they should be interfering in the economy at all. Even with the obvious successes of the GFC stimulus package, he says, the Rudd–Gillard government couldn’t wait to get out of there. Today’s politicians have convinced themselves that a nation’s budget is “out of their hands,” that only two years’ intervention was needed before the budget could revert to “neutral gear, neither slowing nor speeding up the economy” and the market could be allowed to return to doing what it does so well: running the economy. Megalogenis writes: “Governments forgot that markets and central banks can fail just as spectacularly as interventionist politicians.”

While I agree with Megalogenis about the existence of a general ideological reticence to intervene, it is important to remember the circumstances surrounding the stimulus package and the reasons the Labor government had trouble “selling” it. The essence of any stimulus package is speed. You need to deliver the stimulus quickly and to the right sectors of the economy so as to maintain confidence and activity over time. As the economist Joseph Stiglitz noted, in many other countries the stimulus was too small and arrived too late, after jobs and confidence had already been lost. Premiums are to be expected in programs that are rolled out rapidly. In the BER program in New South Wales, managing contractors had hard deadlines for commencement of building works and for the completion of those works; the NSW Auditor-General later costed this premium at around 5 per cent on top of business as usual. However, media responses were rarely balanced enough to compare the costs of the package with its objects or outcomes, which included the maintenance of the building and trades sector and the safeguarding of 200,000 jobs Australia-wide. One newspaper mounted a daily crusade against the very concept of a stimulus package, and the BER in particular. This, combined with an extremely partisan (and effective) Opposition, created a hostile environment for a government pursuing a bold economic intervention.

Despite being the envy of the rest of the world, the Labor government suffered political fallout in the pursuit of economic stimulus. Opponents were well resourced and well coordinated. The “debt and deficit” narrative, however misplaced in the context of the GFC, haunts Labor to this day.

The lack of an evidence-based approach to the role of government investment in the economy is profoundly depressing, as is the fact that the Australian media are so willing to become political players and arbitrators of the public good while adopting the short game of analysis rather than the long view.

However, there is no time for recriminations. Megalogenis highlights research by Professor Bob Gregory that shows that migrants account for virtually all the full-time jobs created in Australia since 2007. “They didn’t displace the local-born; they just took the cream of what was on offer, most notably in the professions.” To avoid the political upheavals occurring in Trump’s America or the UKIP’s Britain, Australian governments must invest to ensure local-born young people have the skills needed to succeed in today’s knowledge economy and obtain the high-end jobs the new economy provides. In Sydney and Melbourne, where housing prices and government policies are pushing working-class residents from the inner city out to cheaper housing on the urban fringe, we see access to these new-economy jobs becoming increasingly remote for the local-born.

Investing in education at this time makes sense. For the individual, the benefits are substantial in terms of employability and income; for the government, early investment in education reduces the longer-term costs of social services and welfare; and for the nation, such investment will allow us to adapt as the minerals boom subsides and ensure that Australians are equally equipped to seize the opportunities of the new global economy. And yet, at the time of writing, the federal government still won’t commit to the additional years of the Gonski funding, and it still plans to proceed with significant cuts to the higher education budget. Hoisted on its own petard regarding “debt and deficit,” it is striving to be seen to be reining in the budget and making promised cuts.

So how do you break this impasse? How do you give governments the courage to pursue bold initiatives? How do you re-create Megalogenis’s “strong bonds of trust [that] existed between politics, bureaucracy and the press, and between the representatives of labour, capital and welfare” on the other occasions when Australia reinvented itself – in the 1940s and 1980s? Surely economic crisis and major war are not the only mechanisms to precipitate such policy intervention? If that is the case, we will be on course to fulfil the second of Megalogenis’s predictions: “We will either catch the next wave of prosperity, or finally succumb to the great recession.”

Verity Firth

Verity Firth is the Executive Director, Social Justice at the University of Technology, Sydney. Before this she was chief executive of the Public Education Foundation and NSW Minister for Education and Training.

BALANCING ACT

Correspondence

Elizabeth Humphrys and Tad Tietze

Like Paul Kelly, George Megalogenis is one of those rare journalists who integrates economic, social and cultural developments into his political narrative and policy proposals. His writing is among the most insightful and empirically substantiated of its kind, superior to both the efforts of fellow journalists and much of the recent academic literature on Australian politics. He gets beyond personality-based non-explanations of political success and failure to arrive at deeper structural causes.

But one issue undermines the agenda he spells out in Balancing Act. Do politicians and governments any longer have the capacity to carry through a serious socio-economic reform program of any kind?

Megalogenis contrasts today’s political malaise with the Curtin and Hawke reform periods:

On the previous two occasions when Australia reinvented itself, in the 1940s and 1980s, it was taken for granted that the project would be collaborative. Strong bonds of trust existed between politics, bureaucracy and the press, and between the representatives of labour, capital and welfare. Those connections have been broken by a culture that favours the attention-seeker over the expert, and the bully over the consensus-builder. 

In doing so he provides an explanation of reform success that relies on somewhat ill-defined cultural concepts – “bonds of trust,” “expertise” and “consensus-building” – without asking what material foundations these were built on and whether they still exist. Indeed, those two previous “reinventions” were marked by something that has been missing in recent decades: the organised social bases of the political system, and in particular labourism’s mass trade union base.

The relationship between a powerful but conservative trade union bureaucracy and the ALP was the fulcrum of Australian politics from the early years of the twentieth century. In simple terms, the unions formed the ALP to have representation in the political sphere, and conservative parties united in opposition to that. It is no coincidence that serious reform was often the work of Labor governments: their close connection to unions of key industries meant that organised workers could at times play a consensual role in economic change, even though at other times they locked horns with employers and governments. The conservative side of politics, allied to business interests, tended to operate more as an antagonist to labour’s power than an agenda-setting force of its own.

But the effect of the 1980s reforms was to hollow out the ALP–union link and, more importantly, to disorganise the working-class base of the unions. These changes have greatly undermined the ability of politicians to implement far-reaching national economic reforms – simply because they no longer have institutional partners with a serious social base in civil society with whom to develop trust, mobilise expertise and build consensus.

Crucially, Hawke and Keating’s key macro-economic policy tool was a corporatist contract between unions and government (with only informal business support). The Accord – initially laced with the promise of price controls to restrain runaway inflation, industry restructuring in the interests of job creation and dramatic increases in social spending – rapidly became little more than a blunt instrument for the infliction of centralised real wage cuts. With the enthusiastic participation in the Accord of (previously) militant unions like the AMWU, workers were persuaded to accept large sacrifices “in the national interest” in what was almost certainly the biggest consciously implemented upward redistribution of wealth in Australian history. Organised labour – and its ability to increase its exploitation by accepting “wage restraint” on a national basis – was offered up as the critical tool of macro-economic policy. 

One obvious consequence was a fall in rates of unionisation, which declined from over 50 per cent in 1983 to just 31 per cent after Keating lost office in 1996, and continued to fall to a derisory 15 per cent in 2014. While this fall is not solely attributable to the Accord, the widespread suppression of wages and industrial action saw the ALP and ACTU disorganise their own base. The centralised nature of the unions’ compact with the government required that the ACTU and union leaders quell workplace disputes, police those unions that threatened the deal’s stability, and shift the locus of union activity from workplace organisation to high-level negotiations with government and legal argument in the Industrial Relations Commission (IRC). At ground level the effect was devastating: rapid erosion of rank-and-file participation in union activity, and a consequent weakening of the social weight and power of unions themselves. Archived minutes from local AMWU groups disclose a tragic tale of proud members watching in pain as the union they had built up systematically wound down its basic rank-and-file structures.

The unions tried to cover over this loss of power, first with a series of mergers and then with a campaign to replace centralised wage fixing with enterprise bargaining. Megalogenis assigns responsibility for enterprise bargaining to Keating, but the unions were the ones to demand it – desperate for a way to recover the drastic wage cuts of the 1980s. The new bargaining system was initially opposed by the IRC and key employers because of fear of revived militancy, but they needn’t have worried: by the early 1990s unions were so weak that they were forced to accept a legal framework that effectively confined better organised workers’ gains to single workplaces (with a paltry safety net for weaker groups of workers). Wages rose again in the Howard years, driven not by industrial militancy or government policy but by labour shortages in a booming economy, and they have stalled now that the economy has slowed.

Accompanying this, the social bases of both sides of politics, employer peak bodies and the non-government sector also faded. The leaderships of these organisations have become increasingly isolated and detached from their constituencies, just as civic participation in politics has withered on the vine. Labor Party angst that working-class voters can no longer be relied upon is paralleled by Liberal Party exasperation that employers don’t go into bat for it when it pushes aggressively pro-business policies.

All this helps explain why periodic calls for new national-level cooperation among governments, employers, unions and other interest groups never get very far. This is not a matter of absent political will, or some “cultural” failure of the system. Rather, no section of the political class can claim to be practically tied to an organised bloc of civil society – certainly not one as economically crucial as organised labour – and so have the clout to make an impact on the political economy on a national scale. Further, it is not just that governments have allowed markets too much power in economic life, but that the changes of the last thirty-five years have left governments with ever-fewer levers with which to subvert blind market logic. Instead, we see at most a nebulous hope that infrastructure spending (that is, a sophisticated form of the state throwing money at economic processes beyond its control) can address the problems we face as a society.

We believe that no matter how brilliant and balanced a reform program is concocted by the best minds in the country, the coming years will be characterised by the persistence of a mostly reactive approach by governments to economic developments, and the inability of any section of the political class to develop an agenda that might consistently carry a majority of voters, let alone reshape society in line with this. The deeper structural factors we have outlined mean that pragmatic twists and turns, incoherent policy-making and political chaos are not about to exit the national stage.

Elizabeth Humphrys and Tad Tietze

Elizabeth Humphrys is a political economist at the University of Technology, Sydney. In 2016 she completed her PhD thesis on The Corporatist Origins of Neoliberalism: Australia’s Accord, the Labour Movement and the Neoliberal Project.

Tad Tietze is a Sydney psychiatrist who co-runs the political blog Left Flank. 

BALANCING ACT

Correspondence

Saul Eslake

George Megalogenis writes about today’s economy with a grasp of the broad sweep of Australian history and an awareness of the social consequences of economic performance and policy – attributes which have been all too rare among economic commentators of the past two decades. He is thus able to diagnose aspects of Australia’s economic performance – and the strengths and weaknesses of Australian economic policy-making – which elude many others.

In Balancing Act, Megalogenis draws attention to what he sees as the shortcomings of Australian economic management during and after the China-driven “commodities boom,” which, together with the global financial crisis of 2008–09 and its aftermath, has been the most important phenomenon shaping Australia’s economic experience thus far in the twenty-first century.

There is much to admire in Megalogenis’s analysis of this period. But his prognosis – that Australia has entered a “danger zone,” where “a recession of some kind will be difficult to avoid” – does not follow ineluctably from that analysis. And his proposed course of treatment hardly amounts to the radical surgery that he suggests it does.

With the exception of China itself, probably no other country benefited as much from China’s rapid economic growth, industrialisation and urbanisation as Australia. This was because Australia’s resource endowment was uniquely suited to China’s needs. Of the four commodities at the heart of China’s transformation – iron ore, coal, oil and LNG – Australia, alone among the world’s major commodity exporters, possessed three in ample quantities. Moreover, Australia also benefited from China’s emergence as a major manufacturing exporter, so that we paid lower prices for imported manufactured goods. 

Australia’s terms of trade – the ratio of the prices received for our exports to the prices paid for our imports – improved by 97 per cent between 2000 and their peak in 2011. No other commodity-exporting nation gained as much: over the same interval, Canada’s terms of trade improved by 18 per cent, New Zealand’s by 26 per cent, Norway’s and Brazil’s by 39 and 40 per cent respectively, and South Africa’s by 42 per cent. Only Russia and Chile came close to recording terms of trade gains close to Australia’s, but even they fell around 10 percentage points short of our gains. And of course for most of Australia’s peers among the advanced economies, this rise in the prices of commodities and fall in the prices of manufactures represented a loss of income, rather than a gain as it did for Australia.

Megalogenis is right to point out that during this period, Australia’s (public) finances “suddenly assumed the character of a magic pudding.” As the Parliamentary Budget Office has recently calculated, between 2002–03 and 2008–09 “parameter variations” (that is, unexpected windfalls) boosted revenues by a minimum of $222 billion. Yet, rather than save the bulk of this in a form of “sovereign wealth fund” – as Ross Garnaut, Chris Richardson and I advocated at the time – to be drawn down in order to cushion the inevitable downturn after commodity prices peaked at some (then unknowable) point in the future – the Howard government (in its last five years in office) and the Rudd government (in its first year) spent the lot, and more – giving away, according to the PBO’s calculations, $89 billion in tax cuts and deliberately increasing spending by $175 billion.

This was when the “age of entitlement” which Joe Hockey bemoaned in 2012 was created. And it was then that the seeds of Australia’s present budgetary difficulties were sown – although they were subsequently well watered by the Gillard government’s inability to reverse the spending increases undertaken during the financial crisis, and its insistence on yet more discretionary increases in entitlement spending. As Megalogenis concludes, “we … failed to live up to our own previous high standard of prudence.”

Precisely because Australia benefited so much from the “up” phase of the commodities boom, it was almost inevitable that we would find the subsequent “down” phase difficult – especially since we did so little to prepare for it. Since 2011 Australia’s terms of trade have deteriorated by 29 per cent. Apart from Russia, whose terms of trade have fallen by 30 per cent over this period, no other commodity-exporting nation has seen a similar decline: Brazil’s have fallen by 18 per cent, Norway’s by 14 per cent, Chile’s by 12 per cent, Canada’s by 10 per cent, and South Africa’s by 9 per cent, while New Zealand’s terms of trade have actually risen by 3 per cent over this period (though they have declined from a somewhat later peak in 2014). And of course most other advanced economies’ terms of trade have improved since 2011.

The remarkable thing, therefore, is not that Australia’s economic performance has deteriorated since the peak in commodity prices in 2011 – which, of course, it has – but rather that Australia has thus far managed this challenging period better than virtually all of the other countries which gained much less than us from the “up” phase of the commodities boom, and thus prima facie had less to fear during the “down” phase.

Australia has not experienced a recession, in the widely used sense of that term, as Canada and (more dramatically) Brazil and Russia have. Australia’s growth rate has slowed, to be sure – to 2.5 per cent in 2015 – but not as much as Chile’s (2.1 per cent), Norway’s (1.7 per cent) or South Africa’s (1.3 per cent). Our unemployment rate is higher than at the peak of the boom, but it has risen by less than in South Africa, Brazil and Norway, and remains lower than in Canada. Of the commodity-exporters with which it is legitimate to compare Australia, only New Zealand has weathered the “down” phase of the boom better than Australia – and, as noted earlier, the “down” phase for New Zealand has been both more recent and milder than for hard-commodity exporters like Australia.

Far from demonstrating the limitations of Australia’s “open model,” as Megalogenis calls it, Australia’s comparative resilience is, arguably, a vindication of it. An open door to (authorised) migration (giving Australia a faster rate of population growth than most other commodity-exporting, or “advanced,” economies), a capacity and willingness to cut interest rates to record lows, a flexible exchange rate, a more flexible labour market than most conservative critics are prepared to acknowledge, and a willingness to eschew the more dramatic forms of fiscal austerity pursued in most other advanced economies – all these things together have served Australia very well.

Megalogenis’s more telling observation is that we could have done even better – had, as he cogently and persuasively argues, Australian governments (federal and state) been willing to spend significantly more on infrastructure. Not only would our economy have been stronger, but so would the quality of life in our cities – and maybe in some of our regions – have improved too.

Australia would have been better placed to spend more on much-needed infrastructure if we hadn’t frittered away so many – indeed, more than all – of the gains that accrued to governments during the “up” phase of the boom. As the Reserve Bank Governor, Glenn Stevens, has pointed out, albeit subtly, on several occasions, we could have done this had governments been more willing to borrow at the record-low long-term interest rates available to them in recent years. The appetite for Australian government debt suggests that both local and foreign investors would have financed infrastructure spending equivalent to at least one, and possibly more than two, percentage points of GDP – provided that the infrastructure projects were demonstrably well chosen, and especially if successive (federal) governments had sought to improve their “operating” budget positions over this period.

But even if, as Megalogenis advocates, infrastructure spending “should probably return to the levels of the 1960s, when it was closer to 10 per cent of GDP,” this hardly amounts to a repudiation of the “open model,” where “four key prices – the currency, interest rates, tariffs and wages” are “removed … from political control.” On the contrary – as Megalogenis acknowledges at one point – it represents an “augmentation” of that model. We now have what Megalogenis calls for – “a Reserve Bank–style model … to identify and rank projects on economic and social grounds, and to recommend timelines for implementation” – in the form of Infrastructure Australia. We simply need to provide stronger guarantees of its independence from governments, and more powerful incentives for them to follow its recommendations.

Much the same is true of Megalogenis’s other suggestions. He’s right to draw attention to the risks associated with Australia’s love affair with property investment, and the role that Australia’s tax system has played in promoting that form of infatuation. And, yes, it would have been better if negative gearing had been curtailed during the global financial crisis – a suggestion which Wayne Swan repudiated upon belatedly releasing the Henry Review in May 2010, even though the Henry Review hadn’t actually recommended it – or, indeed, at any time in the past three decades. But that’s no reason to cavil at doing so now. Indeed, as Megalogenis says elsewhere, “the political dialogue about tax has to change”: but with the exception of superannuation, he doesn’t say where, or how.

Similarly, he’s right to draw attention to Australia’s below-average rate of female workforce participation, especially compared to Canada or New Zealand. However, Megalogenis’s recommendation amounts to a plea for prime ministers to follow Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau’s example in allocating Cabinet positions among men and women – sound advice, to be sure, but hardly a radical expansion of the role of government in the economy.

Megalogenis’s essay doesn’t really amount to an argument for much bigger government – such as Jeff Madrick, who at one time held a similar role at the New York Times to the one Megalogenis held at the Australian, sought to make in the aptly titled The Case for Big Government (2009). Rather, it is a plea for better government – government which looks, thinks and plans ahead, which does what governments are supposed to do and does it well, which is willing and able to “lean against” the “irrational exuberance” to which markets are from time to time inclined, and which is concerned about issues like fairness and opportunity. As such, it’s both well-argued and timely.

Saul Eslake

Saul Eslake is a vice-chancellor’s fellow at the University of Tasmania and an independent consulting economist. He has previously been chief economist at ANZ, chief economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch Australia, and director of the Productivity Growth Program at the Grattan Institute.

BALANCING ACT

Correspondence

Tom Bentley and Jonathan West

“Will we have to wait for another crash before we find the model that restores stability to our twenty-first century?” In the last line of his Quarterly Essay, George Megalogenis asks exactly the right question for the situation Australia now faces. Our economy is out of kilter with global conditions and public expectations. Since the financial crisis of 2008, our political system has been spinning its wheels trying to gain traction on the big challenges – how to maintain prosperity, meet the needs of a changing, growing population and respond to destabilising global risks. 

The central proposition of Balancing Act – that Australia should debate “a permanent change in the relationship between the state and the market” – is right. But to succeed, that debate needs to question the deeper assumptions and relationships underpinning the dominant policy consensus. Only then will we unlock the ideas that can shape another generation of inclusive growth. In Time for a New Consensus, an essay published concurrently with Balancing Act, we argue that Australia’s policy elites are trapped within the narrow bounds of a consensus that has outlived its usefulness. That consensus, described in Balancing Act as the “open model,” was constructed in the 1980s through collaborative, experimental leadership and dialogue across politics, the public service, the media, business and civil society. It was driven by the need to ensure all citizens would benefit from economic modernisation, when global stagnation forced a reconsideration of Australia’s “federation” model, which itself had prevailed through most of the twentieth century. 

The 1980s consensus fused neoliberal economic reforms with social insurance – Medicare, superannuation, HECS and now the National Disability Insurance Scheme. It underpinned economic growth for a quarter of a century and became globally influential. But its most productive and fruitful reforms were enacted twenty years ago. Now, the rising financial and political cost of extending economic deregulation and social insurance helps to explain the recent turbulence and rancour of federal politics. Since 2008, both sides of politics have struggled to reconcile conflicting expectations of economic growth, social investment and a balanced budget, amid increasingly shrill and antagonistic public debate. In a world where interest rates are at their lowest for five centuries, nation-states are going bankrupt, and climate change and inequality threaten global stability, the policy repertoire of the 1980s simply does not achieve traction. 

Like any other nation, Australia cannot expect to maintain inclusive growth by default, or assume that a policy mix it helped to invent three decades ago will remain relevant or superior. So Megalogenis is right that a re-scoped economic policy agenda should include a much more active role for government in improving education and infrastructure, because the open model has not and cannot generate adequate solutions. He is also correct to point to low interest rates and public borrowing power as an opportunity to do this. But the issues he highlights – gridlocked cities, too-hot housing markets and growing educational inequality – are not the causes of our current situation, but symptoms of a deeper problem that must also be addressed.

In fact, the workings of the “open model” have transformed the structure of Australia’s economy in ways that are now impeding adaptation and renewal. Amazingly, Australians emerged from a once-in-a-century resources boom more indebted than when we entered it. Bank lending increased between 1985 and 2015 from just above 20 per cent of GDP to almost 130 per cent. The main focus of this ballooning debt is housing. Australia has the world’s highest ratio of housing debt to total lending (54 per cent compared to, for example, 16 per cent in the United States, 20 per cent in France, 40 per cent in the UK and 14 per cent in Hong Kong), and the world’s second-highest ratio of mortgage debt to GDP (at 99 per cent, behind only Switzerland). As Megalogenis points out, housing is one of the least productive ways to invest. Lopsided lending for private housing has diverted finance away from business investment, which should be developing new products, services, infrastructure and jobs in non-mining sectors. Housing finance increased from less than 25 per cent of credit outstanding in 1990 to more than 60 per cent today; business lending declined from almost 65 per cent to less than 35 per cent over the same period. (Finance for new houses declined from 35 per cent of new commitments to 15 per cent today.) As a proportion of the economy, finance and real estate have soared from 7 per cent in 1975 to 12 per cent in 2015, while mining grew from 6 to 9 per cent, and manufacturing declined from almost 20 per cent to 7 per cent. Finance-sector profits increased from less than 1 per cent of GDP in 1985 to more than 5 per cent in 2015. The finance sector now makes up almost half (47.5 per cent) of the ASX200’s total market value.

Australia’s productive base beyond mining has actually narrowed or declined over this period. Minerals alone accounted for 59 per cent of merchandise exports in 2015. Rising wages and a high dollar have hollowed out domestic industry. For two decades, the impact has been masked by mining investment, rising house prices and escalating government expenditure.

In an economy that was adapting well to changing conditions, capital and knowledge would be invested in a wide range of activities and infrastructure, creating new products, services, technology applications and business processes. But this is not what the spectacular growth of private debt and financial transactions has been used for over the last generation. 

In fact, the emphasis placed by the 1980s consensus on the importance of markets in allocating resources has helped to blind us to the risks of an economy over-concentrated in specific sectors and over-dependent on private debt and consumption. While market liberalisation created real gains, aided by an aggressive privatisation program, they were essentially one-offs. So too with free trade: despite the rapid growth of new markets in the Asia-Pacific region, the World Bank estimates that recently signed free-trade agreements will produce no GDP growth for Australia.

Deeper thought about the sources of productive growth is needed. As we discuss in detail in Time for a New Consensus, it is not markets that take decisions or invest resources – it is groups of people operating through institutions and networks. Global markets are a permanent feature of our landscape, but building the capabilities to thrive amid such competition is a matter of human effort – by businesses, communities, governments and civil society.

Building these dynamic capabilities should be the task of the next consensus. Focusing on comparative advantage – on those sectors capable of punching above their weight in global markets – will guide allocation of the nation’s resources. It will also defend against the tendency within government towards administrative centralisation.

To do this successfully we must move beyond the static conception of the 1980s consensus, in which comparative advantage is assumed to arise simply from applying the discipline of market competition. This snapshot view fits neatly with a relentless emphasis on free trade and domestic competition. Not surprisingly, it ends up favouring those forms of advantage that are natural, geographically fixed and inherited – such as mineral resources. Over time, it ignores three crucial dimensions of economic development: differential industry growth, technological improvement and the divergent social impacts of different industries. 

First, industries grow at very different rates as societies mature and develop. As nations emerge from poverty, demand for meat grows faster than for rice; it then tapers off once citizens can afford to eat their fill. Similarly, demand for automobiles at first grows faster than for bicycles, then tapers off, before (in the richest countries) reversing, as citizens place a premium on fitness. These differentials can create big problems for nations that specialise only in their field of natural comparative advantage. The East Asian nations that have improved so dramatically in recent decades have chosen to specialise in fast-growing manufacturing sectors, not slow-growing traditional parts of the economy.

Second, industries show very different technological potentials over time. England’s textile producers spectacularly increased their output during the Industrial Revolution by introducing new machines and new techniques, driving productivity to unimagined heights; Portugal’s winemakers, by contrast, were forced to continue growing grapes and pressing juice from them, with only marginal increases in output over time. This effect is even more marked today, with huge disparities in technology-driven productivity growth among industries, especially those close to the twin revolutions of information technology and biotechnology.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, different industries bring about divergent social consequences. Some generate more equality and greater opportunity for workers by relying far more on labour than machines or software. These usually drive higher skills and learning and allow wages to capture a much greater share output. In precision engineering and specialty chemicals, wages account for two-thirds output, and the operating surplus (from which equity holders draw their return) accounts for a mere 6 per cent. Others bifurcate into a small number of high-wage employees and a great amount of technology. In computers and life sciences, wages account for only 11 per cent and 7 per cent respectively of output.

These three characteristics make any policy effort to create comparative advantage a complex challenge. They demand a shift from one-off static advantage to cumulative, dynamic advantage, and they help to explain why the “open model” cannot cope with the transition to a post-mining-boom economy.

Market forces alone will not maintain both economic vitality and high social investment. And while governments should be more willing to use public borrowing and investment to counteract market failures, this is not enough. The new consensus must focus on how private enterprise and public policy can combine to create economic capability through investment, innovation and learning.

This will not be easy, but the three factors outlined above give an important clue about how it can be done. Comparative advantage in the twenty-first century demands geographic and sectoral decentralisation. Where past reformers sought to create seamless national and international markets, the next generation must focus on specialised sectors of the economy, which cluster differently from region to region. 

This is a big shift, away from remote federal rule-making institutions and towards more dynamic, partnership-based efforts in city-regions. Because the old consensus sees the role of government as limited to neutral rule-maker and enforcer, diligently hunting down and eliminating sources of “rent-seeking,” Australian political institutions and policy-makers have largely shed the ability to design and implement strategies at this level. But there are signs that the change is beginning, as state and city governments, universities and industry groups pursue a new agenda. 

The 1980s consensus was not a set of timeless truths uncovered by Milton Friedman and Bob Hawke, but a specific set of propositions developed through persistent, collaborative effort. An equivalent process is needed today. It will not be easy, but Australia has succeeded before. Balancing Act is helping to open up the conversation we need to have.

Tom Bentley and Jonathan West

Tom Bentley is a writer and policy adviser. He was the director of Demos, a London-based think-tank, and deputy chief of staff to Prime Minister Julia Gillard. He is the co-author, with Jonathan West, of the Griffith REVIEW ebook Time for a New Consensus.

Jonathan West founded and directed Harvard’s Life Sciences Project and the Australian Innovation Research Centre. He is the co-author, with Tom Bentley, of the Griffith REVIEW ebook Time for a New Consensus.

BALANCING ACT

Correspondence

Clare O’Neil

One fascination of economics is watching how trends in thinking ebb and flow. In the 1970s economic nationalism reigned. By the 1990s you were an economic rationalist or an economic illiterate. During the global financial crisis we were all Keynesians. 

Today, Australia’s economy faces obvious, urgent problems that none of these approaches will help us solve. Australians are not getting better at thinking, building and creating fast enough. For many, wages are growing slowly or not at all, and living standards in Australia have not improved for five years. The mining construction boom is drawing to a close, and the global economy is dominated by uncertainty and unease.

The old thinking isn’t working anymore, here or overseas. We’re not merely observing our economy in transition; there is a transition underway in how we think about government’s role in helping Australia out of the mire.

Enter George Megalogenis, whose essay offers a clear-sighted perspective on how the toxicity of politics is contributing to our economic malaise, and a thoughtful, evidence-based argument about stronger government intervention in infrastructure and cities policy in particular. Balancing Act is not, and is not meant to be, a coherent new philosophy of how government and the economy ought to interact. 

Politics is suffering due to a lack of agreement on this point. Much of our current economic debate feels as if it has no anchor, no shared starting point. One minute the scourge is budget deficit, the next the tax mix, then the tax burden on the middle class, then on companies. While we debate tax policy as though it is the only economic issue that matters, economic problems of vast national importance are being largely ignored. 

In searching for a new way to think about government’s role in the economy, it’s worth noting that what Megalogenis describes as the “open economy” model has been deeply rooted in the minds of Australian politicians and the public for almost thirty years. If the resident galah knew anything, it was that the best thing government could do for the economy was get out of the way. But suddenly, evidence is everywhere that the time for this idea has come and gone.

Today, there is broad recognition on both sides of politics that government shapes and influences our economy: it cannot avoid doing so. Government spending in Australia is 37 per cent of GDP. Some government interventions are very direct, such as removing support to the car industry, or signing a free-trade agreement that privileges one industry over another. Some are less direct: how much funding we provide to the CSIRO, how many young people we train in metallurgy or medical science, whether we build a new freight link in Penrith or Perth.

The bipartisan engagement on innovation policy demonstrates this shift in thinking. Today, it is accepted that innovation matters to economic growth, and that governments drive innovation through regulation, universities policy and other means, such as investment in science and research. This flies in the face of traditional economic thinking, but it has been adopted by Australian politicians with very little comment, because the evidence that it works is so strong.

The shift away from dogma is a global phenomenon. In Europe and the United States, economic decision-makers are busily enacting policies (for example, trying to drive growth by printing more money) which would have been sacrilegious a decade ago. There is global interest in the work on inequality of Thomas Piketty and organisations like the IMF and the OECD. All are arguing that without government intervention capitalist economies will create unequal societies, and that over time this will slow growth. Social policy is back in vogue, for economic reasons as much as any others.

Academic economics, too, is throwing off the shackles of textbook thinking. The exciting field of behavioural economics argues that some of the foundation principles of the science are, when tested in the real world, utterly wrong. 

These shifts have a common thread: pragmatism over philosophy, real-world thinking over textbook, evidence over theory. We may not be looking at a new economic orthodoxy, but rather a shift away from orthodoxy altogether. The guiding principle for government intervention might therefore be this: governments should engage where the evidence shows they can make a difference.

If we used this thinking to build an economic agenda for the nation, I think we would find there is plenty for Australian governments to do that is urgent, obvious and the subject of wide consensus.

If we asked most decision-makers and economists what the evidence tells us matters most to Australia’s prosperity, and what government can influence, I think they would agree on five big challenges. Our education system, so important to underpinning today’s prosperous Australia, is fast falling behind that of our peers. The sluggish engagement with Asia by Australian business and governments is seeing other countries sweep up export and partnership opportunities that Australians have long regarded as fait accomplis. Climate change has become an undeniable reality, and the chance to become a global renewables powerhouse is slipping from our grasp. We are lagging behind in big infrastructure investments (broadband, public transport) with huge potential to drive growth. And there are concerns about whether Australia could weather another financial crisis, due to the growing debt of Australian governments and households.

Not everyone will agree on how to order these issues, and some will add one or two to the list. But any government looking for an economic agenda can find plenty to get on with here, purely on problems that virtually everyone agrees are critical. 

Yet we spend disappointingly little time in politics talking about these, the most important economic issues facing our nation. Why this is so has plagued me since being elected to parliament almost three years ago. As a journalist, Megalogenis evidently finds it frustrating to comment on. As a politician, it can feel enraging to participate in.

One part of the problem that I see up close is that our political culture is addicted to conflict. Question Time, the centre stage of our democracy, is dominated by aggressive posturing and tit-for-tat point-scoring – an abominable way to conduct a deliberative process and, on many days, a total waste of time. Some politicians feel that focusing on areas of consensus is a missed opportunity to highlight political differences between the parties. From a policy perspective, this kind of thinking is starting to hurt Australia badly. And politically, I think it misreads the desires of the electorate.

The idea of a less hateful political culture isn’t a fantasy, because we’ve enjoyed it before. Our last great consensus leader, Bob Hawke, was not elected with a mandate to open up the Australian economy. But he was able to do so because he first brought the country together. Then, like now, what mattered most was finding an economic direction for the country that was broadly shared – by many, if not by all. Of course, politics had conflict back then. But today governments seek out policies specifically because they know they will be opposed. Past governments – better governments – strove for the middle ground. 

The role of government in a transitioning economy is to do what evidence shows us works. If we took that approach, we’d find the answers – and consensus about them – much more quickly than we are doing at the moment. In time, those interventions may come to be described as a coherent ideology. The neat way of describing the Hawke–Keating modernisation project didn’t emerge until it was underway. In the meantime, we politicians have plenty to get on with – even if we don’t yet know exactly how to define what we’re doing.

Clare O’Neil

Clare O’Neil is a federal Labor MP. She studied economics at Harvard as a Fulbright Scholar and was Australia’s youngest female mayor. She is the co-author, with Tim Watts, of Two Futures.

POLITICAL AMNESIA

Correspondence

Michael Keating and Stephen Sedgwick

We agree with much of Laura Tingle’s perceptive analysis. We question, however, whether advice from the public service is now devalued because of its loss of institutional memory. We also question her conclusion that this memory loss stems from excessive staff mobility between agencies and too much contracting out, which necessarily reduce specialist skills and knowledge. 

The number of separations from the Australian Public Service has remained pretty constant for a long time. Retrenchments are up but resignations are down in recent years, for example. As regards mobility between agencies, the overall rate is 1.6 per cent, which is neither high nor much changed in more than fifteen years. Moreover, among senior staff mobility seems to have fallen. Arguably it ought to be higher, since too many public servants can become stuck in their and their employer’s comfort zone. Shifting between similar agencies can be a learning experience that challenges preconceptions, improves self-knowledge and encourages innovation. Indeed, Tingle approvingly cites the performance of the Department of Finance in the 1980s and 1990s, which pursued a policy of recruiting from other agencies – the average time spent in Finance by most of the subject matter experts was about two years. 

When considering the impact of contracting out on institutional memory, Tingle cites the school-building and home-insulation programs. First, even those who criticise elements of their implementation need to acknowledge that both of these programs supported a lot of employment across the nation, arguably the key objective, and that the improvements in school infrastructure and energy savings are enduring and worthwhile. Second, it is not clear what actual experience of delivery the Australian government was meant to draw on, as it had never been directly engaged in these activities. (It needs to be remembered that the states, not the federal government, deliver the main public services, such as education, health, transport, building and construction and policing.) In the case of pink batts, the environment department acknowledged its lack of expertise and recommended that states or nationally operating contractors deliver the program. It was overruled in favour of delivery by “blokes in utes” – a government decision. Moreover, evidence was tendered to the royal commission that the government was advised (unfortunately not in writing) to delay implementation because of risks. 

Finally, Treasury had advised the government to favour responses to the global financial crisis that could be rolled out quickly (“go hard, go early, go households”) because it had examined what went wrong with the response to the 1990–91 recession. Back then emphasis was given to major infrastructure projects, which state premiers declared to be “shovel-ready”, but in practice about two years elapsed before expenditure fully geared up, which was too late. In 2008–09, smaller projects spread across the country offered a much better chance of forestalling a feared recession.

Frankly we think Tingle very much overstates the role of contracting out in eroding institutional memory. What matters is that governance is designed to maximise the incentives for good performance; that agencies have access to relevant data so that they can evaluate performance; and how curious advisers are to understand their environment and how best to meet policy objectives. When employment services were outsourced in 1998, for example, great care was taken to capture performance information, which was intended to inform both policy and the allocation of future business among the private providers. 

Ultimately, these are issues of organisational capability and culture, which in our experience can be undervalued even when the agency is directly responsible for delivery. Capability of this kind can be built in many ways. For example, in the 1980s and 1990s independent evaluation of all federal government programs was made mandatory. This was intended to force policy-makers to consider what does and doesn’t work, and why. Unfortunately, independent evaluations are much less frequent these days, which may suggest that politicians or senior public servants don’t want to risk receipt of information that reflects badly on their programs. Such attitudes can persist whether or not a program is outsourced.

Notwithstanding these qualifications, we do agree with Tingle that the role of the APS in giving policy advice (and especially unsolicited advice) has been diminished. So too has its capacity to engage in forward-looking strategic thinking. The critical issue is why such a gap exists. Is it, as some have argued, that successive governments have told senior managers that their job is “to do, not to think”? Is it because politics has become more polarised and personalised, with fewer continuous positions across governments? Is it that senior managers give priority to “the relationship” with the minister or the office over “speaking truth to power” and have lost the ability to have difficult conversations? Or is there a failure of communication – in one reviewed case, the senior managers of an agency argued that what the government wanted of them was, in effect, issues management, whereas current and previous ministers expressed concern about the same agency’s lack of strategic focus. Or is the APS culture now so heavily task-focused (and, as some have argued, slimmed down) that there is little time for critical thinking or innovation, which undermines a culture of curiosity and engagement with ideas? This list of suggestions is far from exhaustive – but it has little to do with staff mobility or outsourcing. 

We believe that public servants should be responsive to the government of the day, but they should be able to combine this with a capacity to warn and to suggest alternatives where necessary. Reforms in the 1980s were, inter alia, intended to make the APS more responsive, but unfortunately the pendulum now seems to have swung too far in that direction. Successive governments and the public service leadership probably share responsibility for this. As Tingle comments, “It is not just about politicisation. It is a result of politicians failing to value and preserve institutions.”

Michael Keating and Stephen Sedgwick

POLITICAL AMNESIA

Correspondence

John Quiggin

Laura Tingle is right to suggest that memory is a problem in Australian politics. But, for most of the Australian political class, the problem is not amnesia. Rather, like the Bourbons, they have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.

The key word here is “reform.” As Tingle observes, “reform” remains a fetish word, at least for the political class. Its continuing magical power can be seen in the recent National Reform Summit, jointly sponsored by our rival national dailies, the Australian and the Australian Financial Review, along with the inevitable participation of consulting firm KPMG (which helpfully notes its affiliation with KPMG International, “a Swiss entity”).

The content of “reform” is generally taken to be self-explanatory. Obviously, for example, anyone who suggested a tax reform that would require higher income earners to pay more income tax, or a productivity reform that involved more leisure, would not have been welcome.

As Tingle observes, “reform” has become “a hollowed-out word which you attach to anything voters won’t like in the hope that it will make you appear a strong and decisive government.” The problem lies in her implicit contrast with an earlier era in which there was consensus around a reform agenda based on an “obligation to explain and advocate.”

The memory of this golden era is what gives the word “reform” its continuing magical power, at least among the political class. But it is largely mythical. Reform has been a top-down process, imposed without any serious attempt at persuasion, from the very beginning. The floating of the dollar, generally seen as the starting point of the microeconomic reform era, was announced following late-night meetings between Treasurer Keating and senior Treasury officials, the content of which is still disputed.

By the early 1990s, the term “economic rationalism” had entered the public lexicon, thanks to Michael Pusey’s book Economic Rationalism in Canberra. The era of explanation and advocacy was well and truly over, replaced by a sharp divide between the political class and the public. As Tingle observes (with implicit reference to the political class), to argue against economic rationalism was to invite “ridicule or contempt.” By contrast, among the public at large “economic rationalist” became, and remains, a term of abuse.

The results were seen in the National Competition Policy (NCP), a deliberate and successful attempt to institutionalise economic reform by means of an end-run around the political process. A carefully selected committee, appointed to analyse an obscure area of commercial law, produced recommendations which turned into an intergovernmental agreement, backed with huge and financial incentives and penalties. By the time NCP came to the attention of the ordinary voter (through, for example, the contracting out of local government services), it was a fait accompli, impossible to challenge through any democratic process. 

The upsurge of support for Pauline Hanson was not only due to John Howard’s dog-whistle attacks on “political correctness.” It owed at least as much to the (correct) perception that ordinary people no longer had any say in the crucial issues of economic policy. Tingle recognises this, but, like the rest of the political class, treats it as an unalterable fact about the world rather than the result of specific (and misguided) policy choices.

John Quiggin

POLITICAL AMNESIA

Correspondence

Anne Tiernan

Hugh Heclo describes government agencies as “bundles of memory and practices that are inherited from a particular past and carried forward.” Laura Tingle’s Quarterly Essay confirms this: an institution’s memory lies partly in its traditions – in its processes of socialisation and the stories that are told and retold from one generation to the next. Seldom is such knowledge written down. Much of it is tacit, known informally and passed on verbally. It is learnt through apprenticeship and refined through practice and experience.

Many observers (including the chiefs of staff and senior officials I have interviewed) believe that institutional memory is now under threat. In Westminster systems, the bureaucracy’s rationale is to provide continuity of administration and institutional memory for governments, whatever their political hue. Instead we have what British political scientist Christopher Pollitt describes as “organisational forgetting.” Of course, as we have seen, there is nothing neutral about institutional memory; politics is inherent to judgments about what to remember and what to forget – hence the ferocity of the history wars that were once waged between the political parties, but now rage within them – including, as we have seen since 2010, and as Malcolm Turnbull is learning to his chagrin, within incumbent governments.

Laura has taken what was until now an academic and insider debate and made it accessible to an informed readership. She builds a compelling and mostly persuasive case. Our political institutions and policy processes have become debased to the point where a large proportion of Australia’s citizens, its business and community leaders now seriously doubts their capacity to address current and future challenges. I strongly concur with her diagnosis that this is the unintended consequence of more than forty years of almost continuous “reform.” She is so right when she observes that, “we have not at any point stopped to look back and frankly assess what has been good and what has been bad, and whether we need to change not just policy but the way we think about entire issues, and how we think about the role of the public sector.” 

I am less convinced that problems delivering the Rudd government’s stimulus programs in response to the global financial crisis were attributable to a lack of memory within the Commonwealth public service about how to implement large capital programs. I contend that this exposed a quite different kind of forgetting – one that is much more pervasive and troubling. It seems to me Australia’s political class and the press gallery no longer remembers what constitutes an appropriate role for the federal government. Successive reviews and inquiries have shown that much of the necessary expertise was available at the state level. As with so many recent Commonwealth forays into areas of state responsibility, this expertise was neither sought nor heard. The issue, then, was less one of institutional memory than of habit and culture among Commonwealth ministers and their departments in their dealings with their sub-national counterparts; and a lack of respect for the “rules of the game” about who can and should do what within Australia’s federal system. 

Laura’s provocative questions are “Can we fix it?” and “Where does it lead us if we don’t?” I have argued elsewhere that ministers are the missing link in public sector reform. We have a structural problem that, in many ways, ministers have brought on themselves. The hybrid model that emphasised responsiveness, that has led to centralisation, small group decision-making and a tendency to focus on the short term, has begun to fray and show its limits. Political leaders are failing to learn the lessons of experience – theirs and others – and it is costing them.

The question is how to build a plank of continuity into the arrangements of government. The United States has been grappling with this dilemma for sixty years. It is a fruitful source of ideas for mechanisms to enhance institutional memory. In the American parlance, the goal of every new administration is to “hit the ground running.” Yet few incoming presidents have been able to make the most of the opportunities that present briefly at their transition to government. What Terry Sullivan has called the “triple curses of arrogance, adrenaline and naiveté” can afflict electoral winners, making it difficult fbor them to absorb the lessons of past experience. Yet learning is crucial, to facilitate a smooth and successful transition and to avoid repeating mistakes that can have long-term consequences for a new administration. 

In the United States, scholars and practitioners have made two major efforts to address the problem of institutional memory in the White House. The first are studies of the president’s chief of staff, where former occupants of the position, from both sides of politics, come together to share insights and lessons from their time in office. The published outcomes of such projects provide “primers” for current and prospective White House staff. The second is an ongoing research collaboration, the White House Transition Project, which provides non-partisan advice and information intended to support an incoming administration to make a smooth transition to government. Its findings are available on a dedicated website: whitehousetransitionproject.org.

Such detailed empirical work into the roles and functions of the Australian prime minister’s office and the offices of senior ministers and other key office holders is perhaps less necessary here than in the American context, where many thousands of positions are filled by political appointees at the start of a new administration. Even if diminished, a professional and impartial career public service remains a potential source of institutional memory – available to all leaders, should they choose to engage it. But, as Laura has shown, this will require significant renovation, including the fashioning of a new narrative tradition that would enable the public service to transcend the serious damage wrought by the disruptive changes of recent years and the behaviour of political and some bureaucratic leaders.

A generation of public servants no longer knows or understands the “rules of the game” because these rules have been violated or dismantled. In the words of the legendary mandarin Sir Arthur Tange, the “symmetry” of the Westminster model has been fractured and not replaced. We know from research that there is no agreement on either the stewardship role of the public service or what now constitutes a “proper” relationship between ministers and public servants. This is a live debate in the UK, where civil servants have identified the relationship with ministers as the “unresolved constitutional question.”

Focused effort is needed to recover the craft of public administration. We need, too, to broker a new bargain between ministers, their staff and public servants, where the default is trust, mutual respect and a commitment to work together in the public interest.

In Australia, Rod Rhodes and I have suggested that the search to preserve institutional memory could begin with a review of the arrangements for ministerial staffers. This hybrid system has evolved through accretion rather than design. We might consider other models which ensure that prime ministers get the mix of responsive and neutral competence that they need to discharge their complex obligations. We could ask, for example, whether a politically appointed Senior Executive Service, in preference to ministerial staffers, could help to improve links between ministers and the public service. Other systems cope with politicised public service appointments by requiring candidates to be subject to confirmation processes, for example.

Other options might include considering whether Australian prime ministers might be better served by longer, more formal transition periods. In the US, the period between the election and Inauguration Day is seventy-five days. It’s unlikely so long a period would be required (or tolerated by our hyper-partisans), but something a bit longer than the current “morning after the night before” might be worth contemplating – not least because, as we know from Kevin Rudd’s experience, and perhaps too from Tony Abbott’s, exhausted people taking the reins after a frenetic and bitter election campaign may not make the best decisions. It may be worth considering, too, formal support for transition planning, as has been the case in the United States since 1963.

There remains a fundamental dilemma about how to reconcile responsiveness and agility with experience and institutional memory. Laura has made the case for why we need a wide-ranging debate about how we can learn to remember. So urgent has the loss of institutional memory become that Rod Rhodes and I have argued that the next wave of public-sector reforms should focus on ways of preserving it. 

Anne Tiernan

POLITICAL AMNESIA

Correspondence

Allan Behm

Like the Quarterly Essay, papal encyclicals deal with matters of contemporary moment. In 1958, Pius XII issued Meminisse iuvat (“It Helps to Remember”), addressing the plight of the Church in Eastern Europe. No doubt he was channelling Ovid, just as Laura Tingle has in the dedication appended to her excellent and very sobering encyclical. But while the Pope employed the consoling language of prayer and the imagery of an ancient iconography, Tingle has delivered a much more forensic and mordant account of the dysfunctional nature of modern Australian government.

For those of us who cannot remember whether we have amnesia or not, it is confronting to have the trite and ephemeral character of our national politics so ruthlessly flensed and filleted. It is as though we are doomed to live in a Kafkaesque present that comes from nowhere and goes to the same place. And for someone like me, who spent three decades grappling with the major themes of foreign, defence and national security policy, not to mention a subsequent four years wrestling with climate change policy as a chief of staff in the Rudd and Gillard governments, it forces the unanswerable question, “Why did I waste my life like that?”

Yet political amnesia is not new. We simply do not care to remember it, thereby permitting its constant repetition. Just three years before the Anschluss that helped to set Europe on its path to hell, in a famous speech attacking German rearmament, Churchill commented on the futile Stresa agreement between Britain, France and Italy.

When the situation was manageable it was neglected, and now that it is thoroughly out of hand we apply too late the remedies which then might have effected a cure. There is nothing new in the story. It is as old as the sibylline books. It falls into that long, dismal catalogue of the fruitlessness of experience and the confirmed unteachability of mankind. Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong – these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history.

He could have been talking about Australia’s experience.

If one cannot trace the lineage of a policy, placing it in the broader narrative of history, then it will lack relevance and durability. The troubled story of Australia’s climate change policy offers a poignant example of this. It was not so much the inability of the Gillard government adequately to explain its policy as it was Abbott’s refusal to countenance Howard’s slow but steady journey to the Damascus of a price on carbon that destroyed a market-based approach to tackling global warming. The inane repetition of “Axe the tax” failed to distinguish between a tax and a price. More importantly, the trashing of the Clean Energy Future package both deprived Australia of an economically efficient means of reducing the atmospheric carbon burden and destroyed our reputation as a progressive and constructive member of a community of like-minded nations intent upon creating a global solution to “the greatest moral challenge of our generation” – and all this for a short-term political victory that was inevitable. It is a delicious irony that the victor is now himself vanquished, joining his soulmate, Canada’s recently repudiated prime minister, Stephen Harper, in the pit that is amnesia’s doppelganger – oblivion. 

But the etiology of Australia’s governmental paralysis does not depend on amnesia alone. Tingle weaves at least three other symptoms of dysfunction into her lament for a broken system. 

First, the hollowing out of the public service, with the consequent loss of institutional memory, has contributed enormously to our political amnesia.

Second, the rise of the political class has effectively promoted personal political preferment over the national interest, or even the interests of the party. While Labor boasts a greater collection of dunderheads (especially in the Senate) who have arm-wrestled their way through the union movement, the Liberal and National parties are not immune from the careerists and crazy-braves unable to distinguish between pragmatism and principle. For the political class, the tide of history is no help in surfing the wave of the moment.

And third, the arrival of the political staffer – reflecting the need of many politicians to surround themselves with adolescent claqueurs rather than experienced counsellors – reinforces the triumph of evanescence over substance. The half-life of the average political staffer is about two years, with changes in ministerial appointment and, more particularly, changes in government precipitating major clean-outs. As Tingle reflects throughout her essay, churn is the enemy of continuity. It, too, causes political amnesia.

This amnesia, however, is reinforced by a number of equally pernicious developments that could be added to Tingle’s list.

Chief among these, at least until Turnbull’s resurrection as prime minister, has been the absence of any articulated vision for Australia, or even for the government of the day. The electorate simply has no idea what the government aspires to, what it stands for or what its values might be. The recurrent slogans of “queue jumpers,” “they’re coming to get us,” “the economy’s a wreck,” “we pay too much tax” and “small government” betray a craven inability to imagine a future that improves upon the past. This is not just amnesia – it is cynicism.

Second, leadership is the vehicle that delivers vision. That, too, is in deficit. The sight of prime ministers lurching from one self-generated crisis to another serves both to undermine the confidence of the electorate and to reinforce the popular view that we are governed by hollow men and women. One of Howard’s strengths was to manage the news cycle, rather than being managed by it. Rudd, Gillard and Abbott all failed to assert the authority of their office, preferring to start at shadows or manufacture “announcements” that were little more than a recycling program to an electorate that couldn’t be bothered remembering what might have been said yesterday.

A third factor that contributes to Australia’s political malaise is a rejection of reform, less a result of reform fatigue (the past decade has not seen enough reform to tire anyone) than of reform phobia. And where reform has been attempted, such as the Clean Energy Future package managed through the parliament by Greg Combet (more an economic reform than an environmental one, it should be noted), it has been unceremoniously dumped by fear-mongering ideologues.

A final and even more cynical contribution to the mess that is contemporary Australian government is the disdain for effective accountability. A procession of ministers, for instance, has hidden behind the fiction of “operational security” in refusing to comment on so-called “on-water matters” when questioned about the plight of refugees and detainees.

The Abbott government’s draconian Border Force Act made it a criminal offence for anyone working for or contracted to the Department of Immigration and Border Protection to reveal anything that happens at the offshore detention centres. This effectively removes an element of public administration costing over $1 billion per annum from parliamentary and media scrutiny, morphing it into a quasi-security operation. The black uniforms and martial tone sit oddly with Turnbull’s new emphasis on reconciliation, inclusiveness and engagement.

And the security organisations, never especially accountable, have themselves become even less accountable for the actions of their employees, who are now indemnified against prosecution if they commit a crime in the course of a “special security operation.”

The 2001 Children Overboard affair and the subsequent parliamentary inquiries showed that ministerial staffers are not accountable. While public servants are subject to a biannual pummelling at the hands of inquisitorial senators, ministerial advisors are not answerable for their actions or for the policy advice they provide to their ministers. This is symptomatic of the pathology modern governments have towards any form of accountability, whether it is media scrutiny or parliamentary review. Yet accountability is central to a vibrant and robust democracy. It is also a powerful stimulant to memory.

In 1979, John Paul II issued his first encyclical, Redemptor hominis (“Mankind’s Redeemer”), offering the promise of redemption as the solution to the doubt, crisis and collapse affecting the contemporary church. We should all look forward to Tingle’s third encyclical in the hope that it will inspire confidence and optimism that our governmental system is on the mend. To that end, Cicero’s De Officiis (“Concerning Responsibilities,” often mistranslated as “On Duties”) may be a more instructive text than the Annales of Tacitus.

Allan Behm

POLITICAL AMNESIA

Correspondence

Amanda Walsh

Laura Tingle’s autopsy of policy-making in the Australian Public Service is accurate and revealing. I write as one of the Class of ’96, that generation of public servants reared entirely in the Howard era, when policy-making disappeared from APS departments. Tingle notes that the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade was spared the worst of the policy vacuuming – but it didn’t seem that way to me, as a fresh-faced newcomer. While DFAT is renowned as one of a handful of “elite” agencies in the APS, it was clear throughout the Howard years that policy-making was simply not in its remit.

I vividly recall sitting in a large function room in Canberra in 1995, preparing to sit one of the many DFAT entrance exams. With a twinkle in his eye, the official administering the exam provided some advice on the recruitment process: “Don’t tell us you want to join up for the policy work – we know it’s all about the overseas postings!” This was met with hearty laughter from the assembled university students, but it triggered a small alarm in my brain. “But I am in it for the policy work,” I thought, and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one. 

My subsequent career in DFAT presented me with many unique opportunities and lots of fun – but no policy work, not really. My overseas posting at least gave me the opportunity to write reporting cables – but I was not in an “important” part of the world, so my reports disappeared into the encryption system and landed in front of an invisible, mute audience. In three years, only one reader ever piped up to begin a dialogue about my policy analysis. (That person is now a senior public servant in the Department of the Prime Minister & Cabinet – so perhaps there is hope!) 

With the notable exception of the highly technical work of our negotiators in the World Trade Organization’s Doha Round, DFAT simply didn’t “do” policy in the late 1990s and the early years of the new millennium. The centralisation of policy work in ministerial offices – combined with foreign minister Alexander Downer’s open loathing of the APS – created an environment in which DFAT jumped when asked, but otherwise stood still. There was no culture of inquiry, let alone policy debate. Junior staff (many with qualifications in international relations and experience working overseas) prepared meeting agendas and ferried visiting dignitaries to expensive restaurants and outback tourist haunts. Hey, it’s a living.

It dawned on me gradually that policy-making wasn’t going to be part of my career. This was more than a little deflating. So I started a postgraduate research degree in my spare time. I worked at DFAT by day and analysed policy by night. The irony was not lost on me. I can reel off a list of former colleagues – all stunningly bright and personable – who left DFAT around the time I did. Without exception, they beat a path to policy-based work: in academia, think-tanks or politics. 

I should emphasise that the problem of failing policy nous in the APS (as ably described by Tingle) is not confined to DFAT. I did try my hand at a designated “policy” job in the public service a few years later. This was in a portfolio closely related to my PhD studies, and I was hopeful of making a proper contribution there. The work quickly revealed itself to be mostly administrative – until the day a very senior executive phoned me in a flap to say that the newly minted minister wanted “some ideas for new policies.” I was given two days to throw together a list of proposals. There was no input from seasoned policy experts in the department – because they didn’t exist. Two days later, the senior executive professed herself delighted with my bare-boned list, which was duly despatched to the minister’s office. We didn’t hear back. Well, I don’t think we did – I quietly resigned a few weeks later. The APS is just no place for policy-making anymore.

Amanda Walsh

FACTION MAN

Response to Correspondence

David Marr

We were making good time through the mountains at the head of the Manning Valley when the radio cut to Malcolm Turnbull in Canberra. Reception was terrible. Through bursts of static Turnbull could be heard taking his leader apart. He was not making Julia Gillard’s mistake. Nothing was wrapped in euphemism. We sat in the car in Walcha fielding calls from the ABC and listening to the challenge unfold. And all I could think was: what about my Quarterly Essay?

I’ve had the ground shift under an essay before. My 2010 attempt to explain the strange ways of Kevin Rudd had been in the shops for only a few weeks when a message reached me in London to say the prime minister was gone. That essay was read as an explanation for Labor’s sudden decision to push Rudd out the window. Sales were strong. But the triumph of Turnbull in September meant one of the chief reasons to be curious about Bill Shorten vanished. I had written Faction Man with this question in mind: how could such a leader take the recently thrashed Labor Party back to power? In the opening pages of the essay I’d remarked that a “hard rule of the last half-century has been that only larger-than-life leaders bring Labor in from Opposition. Whitlam, Hawke and Rudd were such men. Shorten isn’t.” And I’d added: “But neither is Abbott.” Say what you like about the new prime minister, Turnbull is larger-than-life.

The trucks were backed up to the warehouse the afternoon of the leadership challenge to take 23,000 copies of Faction Man to the nation. We halted the trucks for a couple of days before deciding to press ahead: only a few paragraphs at the top and bottom of the 100-page text addressed the contest between Shorten and Abbott. The political landscape had changed, but not my subject: Faction Man is about Bill Shorten. In a press release I spruiked the essay as an extended examination of the strengths and weaknesses of the Labor leader as he faces a new and more formidable opponent. “He is not to be dismissed. A hidden man in so many ways, Bill Shorten remains a contender.”

I’m not so sure now of that verdict. Only a month has passed but Australian politics has been transformed. Abbott’s time in office seems so far away that children might be studying it in school. His devoted followers are dealing with their grief for the most part behind closed doors. Only Andrew Bolt is still mourning in the Murdoch tabloids. Voters have forgotten the man who didn’t make much impression as leader of the Opposition: wordy Malcolm, arrogant Malcolm and silly Malcolm. Instead they see a figure in whom they can invest their best hopes: a big, intelligent man free of Abbott’s un-Australian horror of the future. They told pollsters immediately they preferred Turnbull to Shorten as their prime minister, and overwhelmingly so. But for a while Australians remained sceptical of his government, even a government where a woman ran the armed forces. Too much had gone wrong, it seemed, to be too easily forgiven. While that lasted, Shorten was still a strong contender. But the mood shifted. By mid-October, he was standing on the wrong side of a crevasse opening up between Labor and the Coalition.

He began to pump out policies. The Year of Ideas he promised for 2015 began as the year was drawing to an end. He became more combative. His tone darkened. In all this he was at his most impressive since winning the leadership. But as he lifted his game, his shortcomings became more apparent. He’s tough and he’s a clever strategist and he’s used to winning. But against Turnbull he seems a little figure. That may not be fair. Turnbull’s frailties as well as his strengths have yet to be tested in office. Anything can happen between now and the uncertain date at which Australia will go to an election. But Bill Shorten, after twenty years in the unions and the factions and a mere seven in parliament, doesn’t seem to be built to take the weight of the nation on his shoulders.

David Marr
19 October 2015

BLOOD YEAR

Correspondence

James Brown

I left Baghdad seven years ago, but the city Blood Year takes me back to seems more distant than the moon. How quick and easy to forget the desperate reality of everyday life in that place – a city in which dumped children, “eyes gouged out, ears, little limbs and genitals hacked off,” are the literal embodiment of cruel political calculus. In which the needs of al-Qaeda in Iraq prompted a macabre secondary market to procure kidnapped children to be dumped.

Once again, David Kilcullen has become our avatar navigating that netherworld, forcing us to negotiate our own sensibilities in order to understand the rationale that drives the Islamic State. It’s no easy task: he punctuates an Australian political debate on terrorism dumbed down by prime ministerial invocations of the death cult and its deranged diaspora of foreign fighters and remotely radicalised youth.

For all the talk of Australia’s political and security leaders in the year since Mosul fell, little insight has been provided into the motivations of ISIS. Kilcullen’s essay sheds much-needed light on its origins, tracing its lineage from both Iraq and al-Qaeda and explaining its resurgence through the sanctuary provided by a chaotic Syrian civil war. ISIS’s leaders are focused on their own political survival first and foremost, Kilcullen reminds us, and willing to commit atrocities against their own people if that’s what it takes to solidify and strengthen their position. But these are not capricious barbarians: al-Baghdadi himself is a scholar – he and his followers were schooled through the terrorist universities that US prisons like Camp Bucca became.

By any measure Islamic State has been wildly successful, sometimes in spite of its own strategies, policies and military tactics. As Kilcullen notes, it is now a state-like entity, controlling more territory than Israel and with a larger population than New Zealand. This success, I suspect, has surprised even the most committed of ISIS commanders. A senior military commander within Islamic State interviewed last year concluded that their campaign “got bigger than any of us. This can’t be stopped now. This is out of the control of any man. Not Baghdadi, or anyone else in his circle.” An anonymous NATO official writing in the New York Review of Books conceded glumly in August that “Nothing since the triumph of the Vandals in Roman North Africa has seemed so sudden, incomprehensible, and difficult to reverse as the rise of ISIS. None of our analysts, soldiers, diplomats, intelligence officers, politicians, or journalists has yet produced an explanation rich enough – even in hindsight – to have predicted the movement’s rise.” Islamic State has become a viral political campaign, fuelled by actual and perceived conventional military victories.

The IRA had Gerry Adams to carry forth its message, drive recruitment and secure funding from the diaspora. ISIS has tens of thousands of Twitter accounts, professionally produced snuff films and communications experts producing a stream of media missives. (Our political leaders should be able to understand this campaign better than most.) And here, I think, is the fertile ground on which the counterstrategy against ISIS will be found. I agree with Kilcullen that the United States and its allies and partners (both in the West and the Middle East) could do more to contain the advance of ISIS on the ground (although I don’t necessarily think that this translates to a larger role for the Australian Defence Force). It is far more difficult to contain ISIS in the arena of public perception.

But countering the ISIS narrative is not impossible. The group’s need to stay connected is its vulnerability. In June, coalition aircraft destroyed an ISIS command-and-control building after a foreign fighter accidentally provided the building’s coordinates in a boastful selfie posted to Twitter. And Islamic State’s politico-media operatives can be targeted in Special Forces operations in the same way. Like any Western political party, ISIS values leaders who can shape their political communications campaigns. Such skills are in shorter supply than the ability to operate heavy weapons and manage fighters on the battlefield. Attrite enough of Islamic State’s media commanders (the nodes in their political communications networks) and we will start to see the group’s momentum falter. Consider, for example, the impact on Columbia’s FARC movement after its spokesman was killed in 2008.

Destroying the ISIS narrative does need actual tactical wins on the ground, and they are in short supply at the moment. US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter was scathing in his assessment of the Iraqi Security Forces in Ramadi, who “vastly outnumbered the opposing force, and yet they failed to fight.” That’s not to say the Iraqis have lost all will to fight – ISIS recently executed several of its commanders for fleeing Iraqi security forces tenaciously defending the Baiji oil refinery. But the campaign to re-take Mosul is some way off and efforts to re-train the Iraqi Army look to be a matter of years, not months.

Australia has not even begun its national effort in the battle of ideas – the counter-messaging war. The statements of our political leaders remain stilted; efforts to engage Muslim communities have too often been haphazard and hasty. An $18-million centre for counter-narratives is still just an announcement. The real question is why this critical component of the fight has received such limited funding. If it was worth spending $3 million to advertise the Australian government’s Intergenerational Report, surely it is worth spending much more than $18 million on a campaign to destroy a threat the foreign minister judges to be the most challenging for Australia since the Cold War. This is an effort on which our best advertising agencies and our brightest scholars should be engaged. And as Kilcullen rightly points out, it will need to be a continuous campaign in a world of persistent conflict.

The most important contribution of Blood Year, though, is to the debate on the balance between national security and freedom currently underway in Australia, thanks to the misguided attempts to strip citizenship rights without trial from those the immigration minister suspects of having been involved with ISIS. Kilcullen identifies the impossible task that voters set for leaders – guarantee us perfect safety from terrorism, but within the constraints of a liberal democracy governed by the rule of law. Little has changed in this regard since the attacks in New York of 2001. Governments cannot inoculate us against every ill, nor stop every terrorist madly committed to the destruction of an Australian target. But our rule of law is precious, worth defending, and even worth risking our lives for. Someday the seemingly unstoppable momentum of ISIS will abate. We must be careful that we don’t spend too much of what we truly value in order to bring ISIS down.

James Brown

BLOOD YEAR

Correspondence

Audrey Kurth Cronin

Dave Kilcullen and I met in late 2005, when I came to Washington briefly for meetings and he was working at the US Department of State for Ambassador Hank Crumpton, the Counterterrorism Coordinator. In those days I was Director of Studies for the Changing Character of War Programme at Oxford University. In 2006–07, Dave occasionally stopped by Oxford on his way to or from Iraq. We’d test out ideas, debate or brainstorm about counterterrorism – in formal seminars or over beers at a local pub. I greatly respected Dave’s insight, dedication and experience. We agreed most of the time, and I always came away enriched.

Not having had the pleasure of his stimulating conversation lately, I read Dave’s essay with keen interest. It is a heartfelt piece, written with characteristic acumen. His distress at the 2014 rise of ISIS and effective dismantling of the state of Iraq comes through, as does his personal sense of duty. He argues that for ten years the United States has followed essentially the same counterterrorism strategy, which Dave calls “Disaggregation,” and that it has failed. He writes, “I know this strategy intimately, because I helped devise it. So its failure is in part my failure too.” I live in Washington now. It’s refreshing to hear such clear acceptance of responsibility. Bravo to a man of integrity.

But Dave is assuming too much burden. First, Disaggregation was a brilliant approach, but it was never an overarching logic for all US policy. If only it had been. The purpose of Disaggregation was to keep our enemies divided, manage down the problem and avoid strategic overreach. Thus, it sought to emphasise distinctions between groups, many of whom had local grievances predating al-Qaeda (and now the so-called Islamic State), so as to break connections, highlight in-fighting, confront local groups through local partners, and reduce terrorism to a manageable level. Tactically, we did a lot of those things – not least through the tireless work of Dave and Hank, who travelled all over the world building vital counterterrorism partnerships. But strategically, the “Global War on Terror” prevailed.

From the outset there was a contradiction at the heart of Disaggregation. Especially after the misguided invasion of Iraq, generalisations about the seamless, global jihadist movement predominated in the White House, Congress and even the Department of Defense. One of the things Dave and I debated a decade ago was the wisdom of using the related phrase “global insurgency” (for which he is even better known than Disaggregation) as a unifying strategic concept for the war. I worried that this framing would mash disparate groups together and hand the initiative to the jihadists. The United States would be forced into a reactive mode, compelled to respond directly to jihadists not just where there was an imminent threat or serious risk to our national interests, but everywhere – a classic recipe for overstretch. Dave’s connotation for the phrase was more nuanced, but in practice “global insurgency” became the opposite of Disaggregation. Beginning under the Bush administration and even more so under Obama, the United States built up Special Operations and CIA paramilitary forces, engaging directly in a shadow campaign against this “global insurgency,” frequently without the knowledge of local partners. 

In his essay, Dave argues that two factors undermined Disaggregation, and that but for these two problems it might have worked. “The first,” he writes, “was Iraq.” He calls the 2003 invasion of Iraq “the greatest strategic screw-up since Hitler’s invasion of Russia” and argues it became “a hole in the heart of Western strategy: the cost, in human life, credibility, money and time, of extracting ourselves from the unforced error weakened the impact of Disaggregation.”

Dave is right about the blunder of invading Iraq. There was widespread opposition to the invasion at the time, including from eminent Americans such as former national security advisor Brent Scowcroft, retired marine general Anthony Zinni, and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff William Crowe. Especially as Iraq became increasingly violent, the occupation sucked up US defence and foreign policy resources, distracting us from what we should have been doing in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere. 

I’m confused about the order of things here. The invasion of Iraq (in 2003) occurred more than two years before, according to Dave, Disaggregation became central to Western strategy (after 2005). Those of us pleading in 2002 that the invasion was a boneheaded counterterrorism move, that it would unite our enemies and alter the regional balance in favour of Iran, were basically stuck with it afterwards. A strategy must take current facts into account and proceed from there.

Having argued that Iraq undermined Disaggregation, Dave contends that we ended the occupation too soon: “you either leave well, or you leave quickly.” Perhaps the US occupation should have gone on longer: I didn’t take part in the status of forces agreement (SOFA) negotiations and cannot judge whether the Americans or the Iraqis bear the greater responsibility for precisely when and how the occupation ended.

But it was not “quick.” That’s a false dichotomy. If anything, we left slowly and badly. The occupation lasted almost nine years, and the costs were terrible. Almost 4500 Americans and an estimated 100,000 Iraqis died. Conservatively, it cost the United States about US$815 billion in direct costs, and a lot more if you include indirect costs (such as support for injured service members and interest on the debt). To put this into perspective, according to World Bank figures, that’s more than the annual GDP of most countries (all but seventeen countries have a GDP less than $815 billion). Indeed, it’s more than half the annual GDP of Australia. Remember, the Bush administration’s original request for war funding was US$21 billion, on the promise that the cost of rebuilding Iraq would be mainly borne by grateful Iraqis. That didn’t happen. We will be paying these costs for decades, some of them forever. Ultimately the occupation ended because the willingness of the American people to continue to support the costs of the war had ended.

It didn’t take long for simmering sectarian tensions in Iraq to re-emerge. Less than twenty-four hours after the United States pulled out of Iraq, the Shi’a-dominated Maliki government went after its Sunni rivals, methodically removing all trace of Sunni power and influence. Defying a 2008 statute, Maliki developed a federal police force with powers greatly exceeding those of local police. Death squads hunted down prominent Sunnis, killing them or forcing them into exile. Set off by threats of arrest against Finance Minister Rafia al-Issawi, tens of thousands of Iraqi Sunnis came out in peaceful protests in 2012 and 2013. The Shi’a-dominated Iraqi government crushed them, killing at least forty unarmed protesters.

Dave argues that the Maliki government crushed Iraqi Sunnis because the United States had lost its leverage through lack of presidential engagement, the drawdown of troops, spending cuts and a flawed SOFA. “Maliki may have been acting defensively, protecting himself against threats from the military and the Sunnis as American influence waned. But his measures looked offensive to Sunnis, who began to protect themselves against the risk of Shi’a oppression.” At what point is a sovereign government responsible for its own policies?

The second factor Dave argues undermined Disaggregation was transformation of the Arab region, triggered by three events: “the death of bin Laden, the failure of the Arab Spring and the rebirth of ISIS.” Within that political tsunami, the bloody Syrian civil war both attracted and created Islamist extremists, who joined the most successful anti-Assad faction and gained power, leading directly to the military conquest of ISIS.

When ISIS swept across Iraq in summer 2014, most US military analysts predicted that the US-trained Iraqi security forces would contain it. The United States had spent US$26 billion on the Iraqi security forces alone during almost a decade of occupation. Iraq should have had an army able to turn back the advance of ISIS and a police force willing and able to protect the rights and interests of the Sunni minority. It did not.

Instead, the advance was met with mass desertions from the Iraqi Army. With the Maliki government carrying out brutal sectarian policies, the Sunnis had nowhere else to turn. Secular Iraqi military officers and Iraqi Sunni tribal leaders who had formerly been aligned with the 2006 “Surge” abandoned the Iraqi state and aligned themselves with ISIS. Now ISIS’s military operations are led by capable former Iraqi military leaders who know US techniques and have US-supplied equipment, including American tanks, artillery, armoured humvees and mine-resistant vehicles. 

The rise of ISIS and the establishment of the “Islamic State” has been disastrous for Iraq, which no longer functions as a nation-state. Many indigenous Iraqis have fled, resulting in the worst displacement crisis since World War II. Meanwhile, some 1000 foreign fighters a month, including fighters from the United Kingdom, the United States, Europe and Australia, have flocked to the Islamic State. And ISIS has developed global, 24-hour online operations and a cadre of trained social media recruiters, who draw vulnerable teenagers and disaffected Muslims to the “caliphate” or goad them to carry out terrorist attacks against “infidels” at home.

The Islamic State will be defeated, but not directly by the democratic powers using their own conventional forces. A core part of the myth of the Islamic State is its claim to be a caliphate. If we flood the region with troops, we will supply the pretext for the theological nonsense its spokespeople spout. They tell their followers the caliphate will soon face what they call the army of “Rome,” meaning Christian-majority states, who will confront them in towns like Dabiq in northern Syria and initiate a countdown to the apocalypse. It would be foolish to play into that narrative. They would use it to mobilise or inspire additional supporters in the region, and the threat of homegrown attacks would grow.

But that does not mean we should be passive. We must attack this threat with sustainable policies that can achieve our political objectives. These include bearing down with punishing airstrikes on ISIS targets, supporting the Iraqis and the Kurds as they fight, continuing arms embargos and sanctions, and choking off ISIS smuggling routes. While containing them militarily, we should greatly increase aid to civilians fleeing the fighting. Moreover, we must recognise that ISIS is not merely an American or Western coalition problem. The wars in Iraq and Syria involve not only regional players but also major global actors such as Russia, Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states. Dave fears that regional and world powers will be drawn in; I argue that they are already there.

The United States cannot single-handedly defend the region and the world from an aggressive, revisionist, theocratic state – nor should it. The major powers must develop a common diplomatic, economic and military approach to ensure that this pseudo-state is tightly contained and treated as a global pariah. In short, we should “aggregate.” The good news is that no government supports ISIS. It is an enemy of every state in the region – and indeed the world. To capitalise on this, Washington and its allies should pursue a more aggressive diplomatic agenda with major powers and regional players. NATO’s declaration of support for Turkey’s anti-ISIS campaign is a step in the right direction.

Dave ends his essay maintaining that the most important thing is “the centrality of political will.” I agree. But in Iraq, the political will of Western societies is secondary to the political will of the Iraqis. I sincerely hope that the new Iraqi government will be able to rally its inhabitants – Shi’a and Sunni alike – to support and fight for it, especially with the help of aggressive American and Australian air power. But no matter how much equipment or how many embedded advisers we provide, external powers will never be able to force them to do so. War is, and always has been, a matter of clashing wills. 

Audrey Kurth Cronin

BLOOD YEAR

Correspondence

Waleed Aly

As I write this, Australia is considering an American request to undertake an expanded military campaign against ISIS in Syria. Actually, let’s be more accurate: we’re considering our own request, made formally by America after we pushed for it to do so. If that sounds unusual, perhaps the Abbott government’s determination – revealed by Laura Tingle – to find a national security announcement every week until the election might help explain it. As you read this, the “decision” has probably been made.

Which doesn’t necessarily make it entirely baseless. Truth be told, it never made any sense to confine airstrikes to Iraq. For as long as Australia wasn’t asked, it could avoid Syria under American camouflage. But ISIS has completely dissolved the Iraq–Syria border as a matter of practical reality. It exists now only as a political fiction, and Tony Abbott is undoubtedly correct to suggest that our adherence to that fiction can only help ISIS. Indeed, as David Kilcullen has shown, it is precisely this fiction that allowed ISIS to develop in the first place: to regroup in Syria after failure in Iraq, and return as a more hardened and formidable fighting outfit. It remains the case, as Kilcullen notes, that “the Islamic State can always use its sanctuary in Syria to recover from defeat in Iraq.”

So we’ll go. But what we almost certainly won’t do is anything resembling what Kilcullen suggests in Blood Year. No “radically increased weight of air power” and certainly no “larger number of ground troops than at present – but under very different rules of engagement.” Kilcullen is clearly as sceptical about this as I am, pointing to President Obama’s foreign policy instinct to resist anything hawkish that isn’t executed by remote control. The other widely acknowledged factor is simply that, for better or worse, we’re over this stuff. Western nations are drained of the political will that would see them make a new blood sacrifice. Hence the reflex rejection of “ground troops” in favour of more managerial terms like “advisers.”

Our present strategy of airstrikes coupled with training of local groups (including the Iraqi Army) to fight ISIS is only the strategy because we don’t really have one. In fact, it is surely the opposite of a strategy, since we’ve been following it – with an unblemished record of failure – for over a decade. And not just us: NATO, Jordan, South Korea, Romania – even Iran – have attempted the same thing. America blew something in the order of $40 billion trying to train these groups. Then, at the first sign of ISIS, they buckled or fled.

So Kilcullen is plainly right in saying that if we’re serious about stopping ISIS – by which he means removing its state-like properties – our “advisers will have to be able to accompany their supported units into battle.” But there is something telling about our reason for not doing this. Our inaction is not typically explained as a strategic decision. It is not sold to us as a matter of careful restraint. We aren’t withholding ground troops because we feel that our military absence is a prerequisite for success; that our presence is so politically toxic that it will only strengthen ISIS’s hand. Rather, the aversion to sacrifice seems to be the point. We’re scared of ISIS. We’ll talk them up as a “death cult” that is “coming after us.” But we’re clearly not concerned enough to risk anything serious.

Which is why I had a deeply impolitic thought: what if, for all the huffing and hyperventilating, no one really – really – cares about ISIS? Not just us in the West, but anyone in a position to do anything about it. Because we’re far from alone in our unwillingness to risk soldiers’ lives. The Iraqi military cannot avoid confrontation, but it is perfectly happy for Shi’a militias to carry the load. Those militias, of course, are backed by Iran, but are most often local fighters. Iran is happy to be a patron, but scarcely more. Its clear preference is to keep its military at a distance, with senior officials occasionally touring the frontlines for photo opportunities and morale-boosting. It is the Iraqi Shi’a poor who do the dying.

The reasons for this, it turns out, aren’t vastly different from those prevailing in the West: the Iranian people are queasy about sending their own soldiers to die. They don’t like ISIS. Like us, they fear them to a point – no doubt more than we do, given their closer proximity to ISIS’s lands. But not enough to reconcile them to anything more than a training-and-support strategy in Iraq and Syria – even as it becomes clear that this won’t be sufficient. So when Bashar al-Assad admits his army is depleted and has lost territory, and while Iran’s Revolutionary Guard chief Qasem Soleimani makes interventionist noises in the wake of a series of Syrian government losses, nothing seems to change. The strategy – for all its lack of success – remains: local militias in Iraq, and Hezbollah in Syria.

But then, success is relative. It is largely a matter of what you’re happy to accept. By that measure, perhaps the strategy has succeeded. It’s true ISIS continues to exist. But it’s also true that the Kurds have recaptured most of the lands they’d lost, and that, for now at least, thanks to the US-led air campaign and the Shi’a militias, ISIS is contained. And then there’s life in Baghdad, which, if you believe Nicolas Pelham’s recent account in the New York Review of Books, is returning to something strangely mundane: “less of a failed state than normally depicted … uncannily lacking in trauma.” Pelham notes the minutiae. Police fining drivers whose paperwork isn’t up to scratch. Courts sentencing those who don’t pay. People talking about ISIS in the past tense, while young men blast ISIS-mocking pop songs from their car stereos. Bars and nightclubs open. Literary festivals. Museums re-opening and high-school students touring them for the first time in nearly twenty-five years. New trains. Businesspeople investing their money locally. Suicide bombings down to roughly one a week. Normality, I suppose, is relative too.

The north really is another country. The militias provide a degree of security in the south, but they can’t penetrate ISIS’s northern heartlands. Meanwhile, the Sunnis trapped in ISIS’s régime de la terreur are rapidly growing to detest their brutal overlords, but might just fear the Shi’a to the south even more. This, as Kilcullen notes, is the consequence of Nouri al-Maliki’s disastrously sectarian rule, and it is not easily unwound. All of which raises an obvious question: if life in the south is approaching some version of normal, if ISIS is contained, and if the Sunnis in the north and the Shi’a in the south are so divided and mutually hostile, then why would the Iraqi state bother any longer? Why not say goodbye to the north, and stay resolute in defending the south from any ISIS advance? 

To be sure, that outcome would trouble the West. If Baghdad relies on Tehran-backed militias for its security, then the Iraqi state is beholden to Iran. No doubt Iraq’s prime minister knows this. But it is less clear how Western intervention of the kind Kilcullen proposes would change that. Perhaps he is right to suggest Iraq would rather have American help than Iranian, but that help is clearly not urgently needed in the south. It would make much more difference in the north, but there the Iranians are hardly competing for influence with unbridled vigour. 

A more muscular intervention of the kind Kilcullen advocates would likely prevent Iranian domination of a huge swathe of the region, running from Iran itself right through to Syria. That would no doubt please the Sunni powers like Saudi Arabia and Turkey, as well as Israel and America. But sadly, the politics of the region are never so neat. What, for example, would be the political aftermath? Who would rule the north? Baghdad? The nation formerly known as Iraq is now so deeply rent that any strategy for stronger intervention must surely include a strategy to convince the Sunnis that in spite of everything they’ve suffered at the hands of the recent Iraqi state, things will be different this time. Maybe Prime Minister Abadi can win such an argument. But we would want to be confident before intervening, because it’s unlikely the Sunnis will be in much of a mood to listen to the same Western forces whose invasion took away the dominance they enjoyed under Saddam Hussein. The perception of American–Shi’a collaboration runs deep in Sunni Iraq. And if the Sunni tribes detest the Shi’a enough to put up with ISIS, they might not think much of us, either.

And this, of course, is to say nothing of Syria, which, by consensus, simply must be solved politically should any response to ISIS be successful. Indeed, Kilcullen has as a condition of his military proposal that Assad agree to a political settlement. That much is utterly essential. But it has thus far also proven to be utterly fanciful. The UN is incapable of enforcing anything, thanks to Russian obstruction, and Assad shows no sign of agreeing to a settlement. In any event, such a settlement would need to identify who would control the Sunni parts of Syria – and with all the Sunni turmoil in the region, who could take on this mantle without immediately being besieged by forces as bad as ISIS?

There may be answers to these questions. And if there are, I’d certainly trust Kilcullen to guide me to them. But call me pessimistic. Pessimistic that the noxious politics of the region, which we helped stir up by invading Iraq, will somehow become less noxious with the application of greater military force. Pessimistic about our capacity to navigate these fault-lines, given the trust and political capital we’ve shredded so far. Pessimistic because the relatively successful intervention in the Balkans provides no model for a region as wrecked as this one.

Right now, I can imagine a long-term outcome that leaves a reconfigured Middle East: a Shi’a state in southern Iraq, an Alawite one in what remains of Syria, and a contained ISIS no one is particularly desperate to dislodge as long as the atrocities are confined to those unfortunate enough to be ruled by it. Such reconfigurations are always extremely bloody, and this one would leave in its wake two profoundly evil regimes – maybe three, if Iran gets hold of Baghdad. The human cost will be catastrophic. But the world has shown impeccable form when it comes to ignoring such catastrophes. Assad has been banking on it for years.

I’d like to avoid that. So, in my helplessness, I’m open to being convinced on military intervention. To be sure, we’ve shown we’re not terribly good at it in the Middle East. But there is at least the logical possibility that we’ll do it well the next time. For that, though, we’ll need every question answered. We’ll need to show not merely that a desperate situation exists – that we have to do something – but also that we’re on top of the politics, and that the cure we’re offering won’t end up worse than the disease.

Waleed Aly

BLOOD YEAR

Correspondence

Hugh White

Quarterly Essay 58 tells an interesting story about the War on Terror, exploring how it has been conducted, how it has evolved and why it has failed so far, all illuminated by David Kilcullen’s colourful accounts of his own role in it. But it also presents a policy argument about what should be done next. Like Tony Abbott, though apparently for different reasons, David sees ISIS as a deadly threat that must be eliminated, and like Abbott he argues that the West, including Australia, should commit armed forces to do this. The difference is that David thinks we need to be doing much more in Iraq than Abbott has so far signed up to. David argues for this by explaining why he thinks ISIS poses a threat to us, and why he thinks a bigger Western military intervention would remove that threat. Alas, I’m not sure either element of this argument is compelling.

Let’s start by asking how ISIS threatens the West, and Australia specifically. David offers four answers (in the passage starting on page 69). First he mentions remote radicalisation – the danger that ISIS’s example will inspire acts of terrorism at home. But as he says, this is not really a strategic threat to our societies, because the numbers killed are quite low. Of course it is a problem that needs to be taken seriously, but I think David agrees that it is best dealt with by good intelligence, policing and outreach here at home rather than by trying to fight ISIS in Iraq and Syria.

Second, he mentions the foreign fighter issue – the relatively large numbers of Westerners who have joined ISIS. It is not completely clear to me how David sees this as a threat to Australia or the West, though presumably his main concern, like Tony Abbott’s, is that they will return with the skills and motivation to amplify the terrorist threat here at home. In this context David presents what he calls “the most persuasive reason for a forward strategy,” which is that if we do not fight ISIS in the Middle East, then the measures to contain the consequent terrorist threat at home will turn our societies into police states. This argument is compelling only if we accept that the terrorist threat would otherwise be serious enough to warrant the kind of draconian measures he goes on to describe. But that has not been established. As so often since 2001, the potential for terrorism to pose an existential threat is assumed, when it needs to be demonstrated. Of course David might be suggesting that we are in danger of turning our nation into a police state even if the threat does not warrant it. That is indeed a risk, but the best way to avoid that risk is to have a more responsible, better-informed and less politically opportunistic debate at home, not to go off to fight more wars abroad.

Third, David mentions the potential for ISIS to inspire and support Islamist insurgencies elsewhere around the world. This too is a legitimate concern, but is it a big enough problem to warrant a large-scale military intervention in Iraq and Syria? That depends on how seriously these other insurgencies affect our interests, and how much difference ISIS support makes to them. The answers to these questions cannot be taken for granted.

Fourth, David argues that ISIS must be defeated to remove the threat of a general collapse of the Middle East regional order, including the real risk of full-scale war between the region’s larger powers. This is indeed a major concern, and raises much more significant issues globally and for the West specifically than the other reasons David offers for another military intervention in the Middle East. But we need to be careful about assuming that ISIS is the cause of this problem and that destroying ISIS would remove it. ISIS itself is only a symptom and a consequence of bigger trends that are destroying the old post-Ottoman regional order in the Middle East, and there is no reason at all to believe that removing ISIS will restore that order, or prevent further instability and conflict.

The other question we have to consider is how likely it is that the military intervention David advocates would succeed in destroying ISIS. He is careful to argue that this would not be another counterinsurgency campaign like that in Afghanistan. That’s because, he says, ISIS is not an insurgency but a state, and needs to be fought like a state. Nor does he argue that the West should deploy its own armies to defeat ISIS themselves. Instead it should do more – much more – of what it is already doing in Iraq: providing air support and training, advice and assistance to Iraqi forces so they can do the job themselves. In particular, he thinks Western military advisers need to accompany Iraqi forces into the fighting on the front-line.

But how likely is any of this to make a real difference in Iraq? For a long time now, people have assumed that Western training and example can turn ill-trained, under-motivated and unpaid soldiers into war winners. It very rarely works. Moreover, as David himself acknowledges, security assistance alone makes no difference without wider social, political and economic reforms, and what chance is there of those in Iraq today? No better than in Afghanistan five or ten years ago. So it is very unlikely that a larger Western intervention would do any good, and quite likely that it would do real harm, making the situation even worse. It would not be the first time that has happened, after all.

Better, then, to leave the Iraqis and their neighbours to sort this one out without our help. That does not mean sitting back while ISIS takes over the Middle East, of course, because ISIS is already contained by the powers it has come up against – Turkey, the Kurds, Iraqi Shi’as and of course Iran, as well as Sunni rivals and adversaries inside and outside Iraq and Syria. These are the forces that will determine the shape of the new Middle East and ISIS’s role in it, and there is not much that we in the West can do to shape the outcome, so we should not try unless the imperative is much more compelling, and the means much more effective, than David’s arguments suggest.

Of course this is an uncomfortable conclusion for those who believe in America’s and the West’s power to shape the world. That idea is being challenged today in the Middle East, as well as in Eastern Europe and East Asia. I suspect that this is the real reason why so many in the West find what is happening there so disconcerting. ISIS does not really threaten Australia or the West strategically in any substantial way, but it does threaten our assumption that the West can and should control what happens in the region.

That is why the most telling passage in David’s Quarterly Essay is the one in which he warns that a US decision not to intervene against ISIS threatens the whole post-1945 global order. David worries that if America doesn’t step in to defeat ISIS in the Middle East it will mark the end of this whole era in which America’s ability and willingness to use its preponderant power has kept the world safe and stable. David’s essay is infused with his confidence that the West, led by Washington, can still do this. But all the evidence, from Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Lebanon – as well as Iran, Ukraine, Georgia, North Korea and the South China Sea – shows that this era has already passed. Another sad and costly failure in Iraq would not bring it back. 

Hugh White

“KANGAROO COURT”

Correspondence

Diana Bryant

Despite the length of John Hirst’s essay, my response will be brief but not because I accept the author’s criticisms as valid. I do not.

I will make no comment on the many invectives in the essay as I am sure they will be understood by readers as a headline-grabbing device, rather than a contribution to the substance of his arguments.

I intend to treat the author’s criticisms of the Court as falling into three distinct categories although the author himself does not always make appropriate distinctions.

First, the writer criticises many aspects of the current law including High Court decisions the Court must apply. For example, he questions whether the “best interests of the child” principle in the Family Law Act should be modified in some categories of cases; if the “unacceptable risk” test is appropriate; whether it is fair that the government provides a mechanism for payment of child support to be enforced while contact enforcement is left to the individual; if the current penalties in the Act for contravening orders are sufficiently strong; and even whether fault should be reintroduced in some form.

These are all matters for which there may be different views held by members of the community, or even individual judges, but it would be totally inappropriate for the Court to express a view in a public forum about legislation and decisions of a superior court which it is bound by law to apply in individual cases.

Secondly, the author criticises independent academic family law research. Although there are many issues I have with the argument he makes, I do not see it as the Court’s role to defend attacks on research published by independent academics.

Thirdly, based on several stories of individuals whose versions of events he accepts as complete and accurate, the author expresses opinions as to how the Court operates unfairly.

In my view, just as it is inappropriate for a court to express views about the law it is bound to apply, it is equally inappropriate for a court through its representative to engage in a public debate with anyone who expresses a personal opinion, whether or not that opinion is expressed in a forum such as Quarterly Essay or simply in a letter to the daily newspaper or some other media outlet.

The role of courts, and the Family Court of Australia is no exception, is to hear and determine cases that people bring before it. Most importantly that means hearing evidence and submissions from both sides – not just one – assessing all of the evidence from the parties, lay witnesses and expert witnesses, making findings of fact when necessary where facts are in dispute and deciding the case according to law.

In the case of the Family Court, such decisions must be consistent with the provisions of the Family Law Act and any relevant Full Court or High Court authority, which would be binding on the trial judge. Finally a judge is required to deliver a judgment explaining why certain findings of fact have been made and why the ultimate decision was reached.

The difficulties and complexities of making a decision in an individual case, for example the need to protect children from harm where allegations have been made against a parent versus the continuation of an existing regime of contact, will be understood by reading the judgment. Indeed it is by reading judgments that the difficult issues judges have to decide and how they go about decision-making can be best appreciated.

I invite those who have read John Hirst’s essay and who wish to know how the Court does explain its decisions, to inform themselves by reading the judgments on the internet or, as the Court is open to members of the public, by coming and listening to how cases are presented.

Diana Bryant

“KANGAROO COURT”

Correspondence

Liz Olle et al.

We feel compelled to respond to the inaccurate claims about violence and family law made by John Hirst in the most recent edition of Quarterly Essay. The evidence relating to the practice, procedures and outcomes of Family Court hearings is vastly divergent from Hirst’s assertions and claims.

First, women and children do not routinely make up allegations about child abuse or domestic violence, and the court does not routinely deprive men of contact with their children without credible evidence. The vast majority of the allegations are heartfelt pleas for protection from genuine experiences of violence and abuse. Secondly, and of most concern to us, the myths that this essay perpetuates endanger women and children who are victims of domestic violence. These two points are supported by extensive contemporary research. This response explores just some of that research and evidence.

Given the levels of child abuse in the general community, one would expect a significant portion of Family Court cases to involve allegations of abuse, but in fact such allegations are relatively rare. The evidence from all four Australian studies on this issue shows that among those allegations actually raised in court, “false” allegations are rare and they are made by fathers and mothers at equal rates. Residence and contact disputes involving allegations of child abuse represent 5 to 7 per cent of all disputes in children’s matters before the Family Court of Australia, according to a study of disputes in 1995–96. In another Western Australian study of all cases in 1993 where children’s residence or parental contact were in dispute, only 1 to 2 per cent involved allegations of child abuse. Cases in which child abuse or domestic violence are alleged without foundation do occur. Hirst provides detailed anecdotes regarding individual cases fitting this bill, but he neglects the wider evidence that such cases are rare. Allegations of child abuse rarely result in the denial of parental contact.

It is simply false to claim, as Hirst does, that women routinely, arbitrarily and maliciously use allegations of violence to deny men contact with their children. His claim that it is quite clear that women are keeping children away from their fathers is not, and cannot be, supported by evidence. No credible research in Australia or elsewhere has demonstrated anything of the sort. To the contrary, many women go to great lengths to encourage and maintain father–child contact, even when their own personal safety is at risk.

On all the available evidence, the Australian Family Court does not pander to the whims of women, to the deliberate or even unintended detriment of fathers. In fact the converse is more accurate. The inherent problems in demonstrating to a court’s satisfaction that violence and abuse exist are legion. The standards of evidence employed by the Family Court deter mothers from raising the issue with their own lawyers, or in court. Women report being pressured into arrangements they don’t believe provide for the safety of their children in order to satisfy the Court’s need for “reasonableness”. Even where the Court accepts that violence has occurred, it still may award contact between children and the father on the dangerous assumption that a violent father is better than no father at all.

The Family Court already makes decisions that compromise the “best interests of the child”; facilitation of contact is often given priority over safety concerns. The regressive changes to family law advocated by Hirst can only make this situation worse. The federal government’s proposed family law reforms recommend that where allegations of abuse are not able to be substantiated, residency may be awarded to the other party and costs will go against the party raising the allegations. This will further deter women from speaking out about violence and deny them opportunities to protect their children.

The best interests of children must begin from a position of safety. Any right to contact must not override the right of a child to be safe from abuse, or from witnessing violence against their mother. When Jayson Dalton applied for interim custody of his two young children, Justice Jordan of the Family Court said, “You’ve told me that he’s been violent to his wife, but you haven’t really told me … He’s been a hard father, OK, but he hasn’t really been violent to his children. They stay with him until she is well.” (Liz Jackson, “Losing the Children”, Four Corners, August 2004). There were at least two domestic violence orders against Jayson. Within two months he had killed his children.

Hirst’s assertion that it is non-biological fathers who are violent or abusive to children is incorrect. Research, nationally and internationally, consistently identifies the biological father as the most likely offender in intra-familial sexual abuse. There have been many other child-murder cases, both in Australia and internationally, where children have been murdered by their (predominantly) biological fathers after a court failed to recognise the violence against their mothers as a relevant factor in determining contact arrangements. In many of the cases where the children were murdered, there was no violence directed at the children prior to separation or residency and contact negotiations, but substantial evidence of a history of violence used by their father against their mother.

While Hirst acknowledges that parents who have used violence towards children should be prevented from gaining “access” to them, he repeatedly discounts the rate, level and impact of violence within families. Ample research demonstrates that witnessing violence by one parent against another has lifelong impacts on children’s health and wellbeing. Research also shows that the parenting style of fathers who use violence or abuse against their partners can be harmful, as these fathers tend to be more authoritarian, inconsistent and critical towards their children. There is no recognition of this in Hirst’s discussion.

“Kangaroo Court” is not supported by evidence. It contributes to myths that already harm families; myths that gain credibility and durability by constant reiteration. The wide coverage of these assertions (nationwide press and radio coverage, etc.) means that Hirst’s message will have reached into the homes of many of the women and children whose rights and safety he so blithely denigrates, contributing to a perception that the community does not take seriously the experience of violence and abuse.

Hirst minimises the effects and extent of violence, and advocates for retrograde and punitive procedures – for example that makers of ‘malicious allegations’ should be charged with perjury – which reflect precisely those behaviours – for example the threat of heavy-handedness – shown to exacerbate violence, abuse and relationship breakdown.

Furthermore, his essay reinforces a populist discourse broadcast by fathers’ rights groups that denies the rights of children and women and feeds into irresponsible chatter about maligned fathers and myths about vindictive mothers. His claims are wrong: not supported by the evidence and based on anecdote rather than analysis.

Liz Olle, Allie Bailey, Mandy McKenzie and Margot Scott, Domestic Violence and Incest Resource Centre (Vic.); Dr Michael Flood, Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society, La Trobe University; Dr S. Caroline Taylor, University of Ballarat, Research Fellow; Julia Tolmie, University of Auckland, Senior Lecturer in Law; Danny Blay, “No To Violence”, the Male Family Violence Prevention Association, Manager; Marg D’Arcy, Centre against Sexual Assault, Royal Women’s Hospital, Victoria, Program Manager

“KANGAROO COURT”

Correspondence

Joanna Fletcher & Allyson Foster

John Hirst introduces his Quarterly Essay by saying, “Until recently I knew only as much or as little about the Family Court as anyone who follows current affairs.” This becomes more and more evident as one reads his essay rather offensively titled “Kangaroo Court”.

To correct all of Hirst’s legal errors and misleading statements would make for dull reading. We will therefore restrict ourselves to just one matter: Hirst’s implication that women get it all when they separate while men just get pursued by the “ruthless and relentless” Child Support Agency. On the contrary, many resident parents and their children live in poverty after separation, and inaction by the Child Support Agency compounds this problem.

Australian Institute of Family Studies research shows that women are more likely to suffer financial disadvantage after divorce than men. Department of Family and Community Services data shows that 74 per cent of people entitled to child support (91 per cent of whom are women) raise their children on incomes below $20,000, with the average payment of child support being just $57.23 per week, while the average cost of raising just one child on an average income was calculated by the National Centre for Social and Economic Modeling as being $183 per week.

Far from the Child Support Agency being “ruthless and relentless” in its pursuit of child-support payments from non-resident parents, 41 per cent of resident parents receive no child support. In 2001 some $670 million had not been collected or passed on to children and $74 million was written off, not to be collected.

Individual anecdotes can be powerful but we don’t want to trade heart-rending stories (although we have many to tell) because we believe that public debate and law reform should be informed by proper research and empirical evidence.

Joanna Fletcher & Allyson Foster, Women’s Legal Service Victoria

“KANGAROO COURT”

Correspondence

Alastair Nicholson

It is not my intention to reply in detail to the polemic written by John Hirst on the Family Court of Australia. It is so riddled with factual inaccuracies, misunderstandings of the law and the Australian court system, and so affected by actual bias and prejudice, that it is not worthy of a detailed reply to the whole of it.

It is also a debate upon grounds chosen by himself, in relation to which he appears to have made little attempt to check the accuracy of his assertions. I am quite happy to let my record as Chief Justice of the Family Court of Australia speak for itself without seeking to defend it from an attack such as this.

I do however propose to take up several matters that he raised which are of public interest and have a particular bearing on the Court’s handling of issues that affect children.

The enforcement of contact orders

I think it important to discuss the enforcement of contact orders, if only to clarify and highlight some of the difficulties that do arise in the enforcement of contact orders, not only in this country but in all countries where a family jurisdiction exists, difficulties which have largely escaped Hirst.

Hirst asserts that the “disobeying of a court order is known as a contempt of court and is the offence that threatens the foundations of our society. We are governed by the rule of law and once courts have settled the law, it has to be obeyed by governments and citizens alike. To ensure that these orders are obeyed, courts have large, discretionary powers to fine and imprison those who defy them. Though it was to be a court of a new sort, the Family Court has been equipped with these powers.”

This passage confuses two concepts, namely the role of courts in stating the law and their role in making orders. It also elevates court orders to a position that they have never occupied by suggesting that a breach of them threatens the foundations of our society. Many court orders, including most Family Court orders, are made by consent in terms drafted by the parties or their lawyers. Very often they contain unenforceable sections or their application covers situations that the parties never envisaged. In many cases circumstances have radically changed between the time of the making of the order and its proposed enforcement. To ascribe to them the force and status that Hirst seeks to do is misleading and wrong.

The fact is that the courts have and must have powers to enforce their orders. However this has always been a discretionary power that the court is not obliged to enforce if it considers that the particular circumstances do not require it. It also has a further discretion as to the type of enforcement or sanction, if any, that will be applied.

The Family Court, like all other courts, routinely does make orders for enforcement of orders. For example, orders for the payment of money, the transfer of property or directing that a child reside with a particular person are frequently made and where necessary enforced, usually without difficulty. Similarly, injunctions restraining a person from doing a certain act or more rarely requiring that something positive be done are frequently made and enforced. The situation in these cases is not very different from other civil courts. Like all other civil courts the Court does not of its own initiative enforce orders and enforcement only occurs at the instance of the person seeking to enforce the order.

The position of contact orders is somewhat different. Of course most people do comply with these orders and the more sensible agree to de facto modifications as time goes by to suit changing circumstances. The Court when called upon to do so enforces these orders also, but often that process is not as simple as Hirst attempts to portray.

An ordinary court order made by a civil court such as a Supreme Court usually arises out of a finding of a court as to the commission of a wrongful act by the defendant which the order seeks to redress. It is normally directed against a person who has been directly involved in the commission of the wrongful act or who has received property as a result of it. Often the order is made by default, but it may also follow the court having made a final adjudication as to the dispute, which is embodied in the order.

By contrast, a Family Court order for contact is not the result of the commission of a civil wrong. The parents of the child or children concerned have simply separated, and where they are unable to agree the Court is called upon to adjudicate as to the parent with whom the child should reside (if that is in dispute) and more commonly the amount and nature of the contact that should take place between the non-resident parent and the child. Before the Court is called upon to make that decision, there will have been an exhaustive attempt to mediate the dispute, which usually results in the making of consent orders.

A very distinctive feature of contact orders is that their primary effect is upon a person who is not only not party to the dispute, but has no voice in its resolution, namely the child (or children) concerned.

The orders, as Hirst concedes, are intended to operate over a lengthy period. This in itself gives rise to particular problems. Even if the initial arrangement between the parents is satisfactory to themselves and the child, other factors may quickly intervene such as re-partnering by one or both parents, often to partners who have their own children, and geographical and employment changes. The needs and requirements of children change as they grow older and circumstances change and these are often not envisaged by the order.

Even in the absence of such factors, it must be remembered that the contact order by its very nature imposes very significant obligations, not only upon the resident parent but upon the child. By contrast, no obligation whatever is imposed upon the non-resident parent. They can choose to avail themselves of the order or not as they see fit. They are free to move away, even to another country, and they can arrive to exercise their rights of contact when it suits them. There is usually no obligation upon them even to be punctual.

The extent of interference with the lifestyle of the resident parent is not often appreciated. Effectively they are required to remain in the one place and to produce the child when required by the order. Further, they must do this regardless of the wishes of the child.

That approach may be defensible in relation to very young children, but as children become older they very often develop strong views as to whether they wish contact to proceed or not. They may have good reason for this. There may be difficult relationships with the non-resident parent’s new partner or siblings. They may have developed interests and activities that are seriously disrupted by the effect of the contact order. They may develop a very difficult relationship with the non-resident parent. The non-resident parent may be using contact entitlements as a means of controlling or punishing the resident parent. In worst-case scenarios, the non-resident parent may be physically, sexually or psychologically abusing one or more of the children.

It follows that the automatic enforcement of orders of this nature, as envisaged by Hirst, would be potentially disastrous. There are many instances where the making of the enforcement application highlights the unsuitability of the original order and the need to change it. Enforcement applications are frequently made for purely tactical reasons or with the intention to harass the other partner and put them to expense.

None of this means that contact orders need not be enforced in appropriate cases, but it does mean that the sort of simplistic approach advocated by Hirst concerning the enforcement of court orders is quite inappropriate. The child may be endangered by the enforcement of the orders, and the imprisonment or other punishment of the resident parent may not only be unjust but entirely counter-productive to the preservation of the relationship between the child and the non-resident parent.

The issue of enforcement of this type of order must be approached in the sensitive manner that I believe the Court has done.

In his essay, Hirst is highly critical of the Court for finding that as a matter of law, the right to contact is one of the child and not of the parent. That happens to represent the law as stated in the Family Law Act, but the reality is that he is tilting at a straw man in any case. The overall approach of the Court from its inception has favoured the preservation of contact with both parents and it is only in the rarest of cases that an order refusing contact is made. Indeed I think that a respectable argument could be mounted that the Court has been over-zealous in requiring contact, particularly in cases where there are serious allegations of violence or child abuse.

Hirst also suggests that despite the government’s legislation providing for a three-stage enforcement regime, the Court somehow refused to comply with it. If he had done his homework, which he failed to do in so many areas, he would have found that the Court welcomed this legislation but complained bitterly to government that it had introduced this legislation but had failed to fund the organisations designated to provide services under it. It seems that only now has the government belatedly recognised this problem in the context of the 2005 Budget. Following the introduction of this legislation, I received many complaints from judges and had the experience myself of being unable to find any organisation able or willing to provide the services envisaged by it, simply because they had not been funded by the government to do so.

The one area that does cause me concern in relation to enforcement is the matter of how to deal with cases where there is a persistent and unjustified defiance of court orders for contact. These cases are very few but are troublesome. As Hirst correctly points out, the responsibility for bringing enforcement proceedings lies with the person seeking to enforce the order. Given the legal aid policies of this and previous governments, this can impose an impossible financial burden upon some people. Hirst is critical of the Court for requiring strict proof of breach of orders, but in this regard it is simply following the practice of other courts and in my view rightly so, given that the penalties for breach can include imprisonment. However it does mean that when people attempt to enforce orders without legal advice, there are often technical deficiencies in their applications.

The Court has been aware of this problem for some time, as is evidenced by the fact that in its 1991 submissions to the McKiernan Committee it urged that the Director of Public Prosecutions or some other Commonwealth agency accept responsibility for the enforcement of persistent breach of court orders. Similar suggestions have been made since, without result. As I see it, this is the only solution to this problem. It would be contrary to the principles of independence of courts for it to act as a prosecutor, and it therefore seems that this represents the only real alternative, other than a significant relaxation of legal aid guidelines.

Allegations of child sexual abuse

A further area that is worthy of comment is the issue of handling allegations of child sexual abuse. Hirst demonstrates a considerable ignorance of the law and practice in this area and the effect of the decided cases. Much of his criticism of the Family Court in this area relates to the decision of the High Court of Australia in M and M, for which the Family Court bears no responsibility and the principles of which bind its decisions in this area. He suggests that the proper test should be that the Court should be satisfied that abuse has occurred before taking it into account as a factor in determining contact and residence issues.

Such a test would in my view provide a charter for the abuse of children and particularly the very young. While I took a slightly more restrictive view than that taken by the High Court in M and M, it is obvious that a court exercising family jurisdiction bears a heavy responsibility to protect children. In many cases, the age of the child and the circumstances alleged make it impossible for the court to make a definite finding that abuse has occurred. It is for this reason that there are very few successful prosecutions of abusers of very young children. On the other hand, the court may be left with a very firm view that it would be unsafe to leave the child in the care of the alleged abuser. In my view it would be unthinkable to do so in such circumstances. The detrimental effects of child sexual abuse on children are well documented and no child should be left at risk of being subjected to this treatment.

Hirst is correct in his assertion that the Court’s task in this area is rendered more difficult by the unsatisfactory nature of the investigations carried out by state and territory child welfare departments in relation to children who are the subject of family law proceedings. In effect it has been the approach of such departments to abandon the investigation to the Family Court, usually because of insufficient funding. At the same time the Court does not have an investigative arm. This is an unsatisfactory situation for both children and those accused of abusing them.

However it is also fair to say that the Court has been active in its attempts to overcome this problem, as the Magellan Project indicates. Its success has been very dependent upon the Court receiving the co-operation of the respective state and territory departments, which in the case of Victoria was forthcoming and very much contributed to the success of the project. Incidentally, like most of Hirst’s work, his account of the naming of the Magellan Project is mythical.

As Hirst points out, the Family Law Council has proposed the setting up of a federal agency to investigate these allegations. I should have thought that a better solution would be for the federal government to properly fund the relevant state and territory departments to carry out these functions.

In my view, however, contrary to the view expressed by Hirst, these difficulties have led the court to adopt what some might regard as an overly restrictive approach to child sexual abuse allegations, as is evidenced by the decisions of the Full Court of the Family Court in N and S and the Separate Representative (1996) FLC 92-655, Re W (2004) FLC 93-192 (which was an appeal from one of my own decisions at first instance) and V and V (unreported delivered 25 November 2004). These decisions suggest that the Court has (probably impermissibly) adopted a much more restrictive approach than that prescribed by the High Court in M and M.

I consider that far from making biased decisions against fathers accused of abuse, a case could be made that the Family Court has not been protective enough of children in these cases.

It is nonsense to suggest, as Hirst does, that the mere making of an allegation of sexual abuse leads to an assumption by the Court that it is correct. It is true that the Court Rules prescribe that where such an allegation is made that notice of it be given to the Court and to the other party. This is no more than the provision of procedural fairness and also enables the Court to discharge the mandatory statutory requirement on it to notify relevant state and territory departments of allegations of child abuse.

However, beyond this the Court takes no action on such allegations unless an application is made supported by evidence on oath to restrict or end contact. When that happens and the allegations are serious, the Court has little choice but to either suspend contact or provide that it be strictly supervised until the allegations can be properly tested. To do otherwise would be to place the children in question at serious risk.

It is here that the Magellan Project has proved its worth, for it involves the case being promptly referred to a judge who will co-ordinate appropriate investigations by the state or territory department or other experts and ensure that the allegations are dealt with speedily. It was found that this led to much earlier determination of these cases and fewer of them going to court. When they do go to trial, the allegations are fully tested.

At trial, the judge is of course bound to apply the principles set out by the High Court in M and M as further expounded by the Full Court in subsequent cases. If a change in the law is considered appropriate, the Australian Parliament has had every opportunity to make it since 1988 and has not done so.

However, I think that there are grave dangers to children in making the test more restrictive as Hirst urges.

In conclusion, I consider that Hirst does a grave disservice to Australians and particularly to Australian women and children. The attacks made are emotional, far from child-focused and contain a surprising degree of misogyny. It is more than time that the family law debate was returned to objective ground where arguments are based upon evidence rather than myth.

One would expect, at least, that any critique purporting to be academically founded, like Hirst’s, should emanate from someone whose research track record has at least touched upon the topic of family law in the past.

Alastair Nicholson

“KANGAROO COURT”

Correspondence

Elizabeth Evatt & Richard Chisholm

John Hirst’s essay, though flawed by errors and by ill-concealed bias, raises some important issues about family law. There are three main components of Hirst’s essay: the invective, the case summaries and the proposals for law reform.

By invective, the sort of thing we have in mind is the use of “kangaroo court”, references to judges not caring about injustice, the court abusing children, and – most memorably – the suggestion that judges are like Nazis (because they followed the High Court’s ruling about the approach to be taken in child abuse cases – more of this later). While such comments may grab headline attention, they do little to advance debate on serious issues.

The second component is the case summaries, mainly the stories of three fathers, called in the essay Paul Walton, Graham Sweetland and Julian Aston. These histories form a considerable part of the basis for the discussion and proposals, so they need consideration.

Graham Sweetland

Graham Sweetland failed in his attempt to gain residence of a baby boy: the outcome of the case was that he had contact every second weekend and half school holidays. John Hirst seems to agree with Graham’s view that the Family Court will “treat him for a time as a pariah” and with his bitterness over the money he spent and “what happened to his reputation”. He refers to “the static of false allegations” and asks, “Who knows how much notice the court takes of allegations?” Certainly Hirst’s readers don’t, because we do not know what allegations were made at the trial, or whose evidence the Court accepted, or about either party’s ability to care for the child. It is not clear whether Hirst even asked Graham to see a copy of the judgment.

The chapter ends with Hirst saying how much better it will all be when the adversary system is replaced by the inquisitorial method, referring with approval to the Family Court’s Children’s Cases Project. We agree that these initiatives are promising. But even if they succeed in eliminating irrelevant material and streamlining the proceedings, the Court (or any decision-making body) will still have to deal with allegations relevant to children’s safety and wellbeing in the care of those competing to have the children live with them.

Paul Walton

After separation, Paul had an “argument” with one of his two daughters, after which his contact tailed off. Paul’s wife accused him of being “verbally abusive and physically intimidating”; and the children themselves wrote to say, “You are not our Dad and we don’t want anything to do with you.” After attempts to reestablish contact with the children Paul decided not to make an application to the courts. The only involvement of the Family Court is at the end when a counsellor helps the parties resolve a question about supplying school reports to Paul (who was “highly complimentary” about the Court’s counsellor).

Hirst seems to accept Paul’s view that this is an example of the “Parent Alienation Syndrome”. The reader cannot possibly know whether to agree, since we only have Paul’s side of the story, and much is omitted. We are told something about Paul’s feelings of impotence and distress at having the children “stolen” from him. But we never learn why, if Paul was the “primary parent”, the parties agreed that the children would live mostly with their mother. We are not told the nature of the “argument” that led to the visits tailing off. We never learn how Paul’s bipolar disorder affected his behaviour, or what was the “disturbing history about the difficulties over the years relevant to contact” that the wife’s solicitor wrote about.

Hirst seems content to rely on what others told Paul about the Family Court. For example, Paul’s doctor told him that medical records could be used selectively against him, and that legal aid would not assist. In fact, it is not possible for one side to put before the Court only restricted parts of medical reports: the Court would want to see the whole of each relevant report. As for legal aid, there seems no reason to think that if Paul passed the needs test he would not have got legal aid for a contact application, and in a case like this there would almost certainly be a separate legal representative for the children.

There are many cases where parents give up in the face of opposition to contact, and we could learn a lot from them and perhaps find ways of helping to maintain positive relationships between the parents themselves and the parents and their children. Unfortunately, Hirst’s account is too partisan to be a useful contribution on this subject. He can only see Paul’s point of view: not that of the wife, not that of the children.

The denigration of the Court becomes farcical at the end of this chapter, where Hirst says that this is “a standard Family Court procedure: the excluded parent indicates that they will abandon attempts to see the child in return for receiving news of them.” There is of course no such procedure. The court does not choose the terms on which parties negotiate, or the outcome of the negotiations. Here, the Court did the only thing it was asked, namely to help the parties resolve a question about school reports, the only issue they chose to raise. Paul’s story does not in any way support Hirst’s denigration of the Family Court or his proposals for law reform.

Julian Aston

Julian Aston’s story is a desperate saga involving a mother who persistently made false allegations of sexual abuse, avoided court orders and poisoned the child against the father over a six-year period of investigations and hearings by a range of courts and child welfare authorities. The courts consistently accepted the truth of the father’s evidence, and consistently disbelieved the mother, and found that the father had not abused the child and that there was no risk of abuse. Nevertheless, at the end of it all the father had lost contact with the daughter, and can only hope she seeks him out in years to come. It must have been a devastating and destructive experience for both father and daughter: a tragic outcome, and a horrible process.

Hirst’s conclusion is that the Family Court is “a child abuser”. A more accepted term for Hirst’s point is “systems abuse”, on which there is a large international literature. It is well known that tragically in some situations the interventions of child protection agencies, and various courts, can themselves make things worse for the child.

Identifying occurrences of systems abuse is important, and this case might well merit a thorough examination. Identifying the problem, of course, is easier than solving it. Nobody would say that all child abuse allegations should be disregarded; but as soon as one starts to investigate, there is the potential for the investigative processes to have an adverse impact. Hirst, with the benefit of hindsight, is critical of a number of decisions made in the course of this saga. He may be right. But his account underplays some of the difficulties.

For example, he seems to argue that after the first court finding favouring the father, all further allegations should have been dismissed “as coming from a totally unreliable source”. He is referring here to the mother. But it seems from his account that the child herself was making the allegations. By the end of the dreadful period, it had become apparent that there was no truth in them; but this may not have been so obvious in the earlier stages. Hirst seems to argue that any fresh allegation of sexual assault by the young child should have been disregarded, and not investigated at all. But that conclusion could only be responsibly reached by carefully considering the evidence that was available at the time.

Penalising breach of contact orders

Hirst correctly identifies an imbalance between enforcing child support and contact: those seeking to enforce child-support orders (mainly mothers) have the benefit of a public agency, while those seeking to enforce contact orders (mainly fathers) have to bring proceedings themselves. As legal aid is often not available for these cases, bringing numerous applications to deal with successive incidents can easily run up legal bills that the fathers cannot meet, and indeed may lead them to give up in despair, as it is difficult to succeed in these proceedings without legal representation. Courts cannot assist here: they can only adjudicate on applications, in this case applications by the contact parent to penalise the other parent for breach of the order. There may well be a need to allocate additional resources for the specific task of dealing with problems of non-compliance constructively at an early stage, treating the implementation of the Court’s orders as requiring a public response, rather than being a burden on the other parent.

In other respects, however, the discussion is less helpful. The argument seems to be that the Family Court should enforce its orders more vigorously. Hirst refers to the Court’s “poor record”, says the Court has not been concerned about upholding its authority, says that its orders are “a joke”, and so on. But despite the vehemence of these comments, it is difficult to identify just what Hirst proposes. He notes, without apparently disagreeing, that none of the various bodies that have conducted inquiries into the problem favoured “sharp punitive methods, that is, to lock up a few offenders in the hope that the rest would fall into line”.

Part of the difficulty may be that Hirst seems to believe, wrongly, that the courts treat the child’s best interests as paramount in these cases; in fact, the well-known “paramount consideration” principle has never applied to proceedings for penalties.¹ The law requires the Court to weigh up in each case the often-competing considerations of upholding the court’s authority (by penalising breaches) and having regard to the child’s interests. If Hirst concedes that some such balancing process is appropriate, then his criticism would require him to show that the Court has got the balance wrong in particular cases, a task that would require a more thorough analysis than could be attempted in an essay of this kind.

Hirst’s colourfully expressed conclusion, that the Court does not care about maintaining the relationship between fathers and children, no doubt reflects the views of the men he spoke to, who were understandably frustrated at being separated from their children notwithstanding court orders for contact. But we think it is mistaken, because it underestimates the difficulties of fostering these relationships in the midst of family conflict, difficulties which have been the reason why the series of reviews and inquiries Hirst refers to have not led to recommendations, or legislation, creating a more punitive system.

There are, perhaps, three main problems. The first is that in many cases the fathers have been unable to establish that there has been a breach (perhaps a Contact Compliance Service would ease this problem). The second is that in some situations the penalty may cause the child to suffer: financial penalties may have an adverse impact on a low-income household, and imprisoning the mother might harm the child, especially if there are no other suitable people to care for the child while the mother is in prison. There is no doubt room for argument about how these factors should be balanced in each case: but to reach a conclusion, we would need to know all the facts.

The third problem is perhaps the most important of all. A breakdown in the children’s relationship with the father in these cases is a tragic outcome for the children, as well as deeply distressing for the fathers. But because of the complex dynamics of the relationships, penalties, even if initially successful in having the child physically transferred to the father for contact, may escalate the level of conflict and bitterness, and bring about a situation which damages, rather than improves, the father–child relationship, to the detriment of both. It is naive to suggest that taking a tougher line on defaulting mothers will necessarily have the desired result, as Hirst appears to do when he says that by not pressuring a mother who is uncooperative about contact, the Court “has left large numbers of children without an effective father”.

Hirst does not identify precisely what he would like the law to say, but it seems that he would want the Court to emphasise punishment of those who breach orders, if necessary at the expense of the children. But it is by no means clear that this approach would usually lead to better outcomes, either for the fathers or the children. The Court cannot transform people who are unreasonable and vindictive into responsible and reasonable adults. Its power to punish is a blunt weapon, which could do as much or more damage than it cures. Any chance there may have been of gradually building working relationships between the parents may well be shattered, and children caught up in the parental conflict may suffer great distress. Often a “least worst” solution is all that can be offered.

Obstructing contact ordered by the Court without a reasonable excuse is wrong, and it is easy to say that punishment is warranted. But preserving and enhancing a positive relationship between the father and the child in these situations can be acutely difficult, and often requires a far more subtle and understanding response. Enforcing contact in a situation where the parent or children suffer severe stress and anxiety is of little benefit to anyone. That is why the effort is made, through counselling, to help the parties to deal with each other civilly at the earliest possible opportunity, and to work out a solution to meet their needs. The best way to ensure effective involvement of both parents in the ongoing care of their children is to foster a working relationship between those parents (excluding cases where violence or other danger is involved).

When Hirst says it would be better for the Court to “work for a settlement which as far as possible kept both parents involved in the lives of their children”, he is echoing the Act, which gives parents the obligation to agree about the future parenting of their children after separation. The Act aims to encourage parents to take responsibility for parenting arrangements, to use the legal system as a last resort and to regard the best interests of their children as the paramount consideration. That is why counselling services are provided as part of the family law system.

One feature of the law, particularly in the recent reforms to which Hirst refers, is to ensure that the contact orders themselves can be re-examined. Perhaps there has developed an arbitrary formula of alternate weekends and half the holidays, and it can be very helpful to explore alternatives, especially if the parents and those advising them are able to think creatively about an arrangement that will help each parent in their future parenting roles. We are increasingly realising that in some situations, especially with skilled and sensitive assistance, the children themselves can contribute to finding a solution. The Court knows that it is far better for a solution to be worked out by the parties than to be dictated by a court order prescribing the times, places and dates for delivery and collection of children. Such orders impose a rigid legal framework on the pattern of family life, remote from the realities of unexpected change, and adjusted timetables which are the common experience of us all. Many responsible parents make flexible arrangements for sharing the future care of their children, arrangements which suit their particular needs and which can be varied readily as the situation changes.

Child sexual abuse

Another concern of Hirst is the denial or restriction of contact by a parent against whom allegations of sexual abuse have been made. He argues that the Family Court should make a definitive finding one way or the other about the allegations of abuse – the person accused must be judged guilty or innocent.

Even if this were a good idea, the Family Court could not do it. Its present approach is required by law: the Family Law Act, as interpreted by the High Court in the M and M case, which he discusses. If there is to be a change, it is necessary for parliament to amend the Act.

Should there be a change? Opinions will no doubt differ, and the High Court ruling has its critics. But we think Hirst underestimates the difficulties with his proposal. The High Court pointed out that there will be very many cases where the court cannot confidently make a finding that sexual abuse has taken place. “And there are strong practical family reasons why the court should refrain from making a positive finding that sexual abuse has taken place unless it is impelled by the particular circumstances to do so.” The Court’s task, it held, is to determine the magnitude of the risk: “the test is best expressed by saying that a court will not grant custody or contact to a parent if that custody or contact would expose the child to an unacceptable risk of sexual abuse.” The Family Court is bound by this High Court decision.

In these distressing cases the evidence is often ambiguous, the allegations strongly denied, and the experts divided or uncertain, both about whether the abuse has occurred and about what should be done (not all cases are like that of Julian Aston). In these proceedings, the Court is usually assisted by hearing from the child’s representative and independent experts such as child psychiatrists. In such cases judges sometimes conclude that the protection of the child against risk of abuse must prevail over the distress to the person against whom the allegations are made. Would Hirst want the courts to ignore such a risk in the many cases where the evidence does not permit a firm finding that abuse has taken place?

The distress of a father whose contact is restricted or denied in these circumstances is understandable, even tragic. But we do not think that this problem can be resolved by requiring the Court to order contact where it is satisfied that doing so would expose the child to an unacceptable risk of abuse. Such an adult-centred approach would displace proper concern for the child.

There is no space to deal with the passage at the end of this chapter, in which Hirst offers a “summary” of the Family Court’s approach. We simply note that this summary misrepresents the situation, and fails to address the crucial issue, namely what action the Court should take when the evidence leads to the conclusion that there is an unacceptable risk of abuse.

Other proposals

Another of Hirst’s proposals is that the law should recognise the legal right of a parent to see his or her children, unless likely to do them harm. In this, as in some other respects, he takes an adult-centred approach, whereas the Family Law Act is child-centred. It recognises not the rights of parents, but their shared duties and responsibilities, including the obligation to agree about future parenting. The Act also recognises the right of children to know and be cared for by both parents, and to have contact with both parents, unless this would be contrary to their best interests. The Family Court is required to consider the individual feelings, thoughts and wishes of the children, the nature of their relationship with each parent, and other factors, in determining their best interests. We cannot share Hirst’s desire to turn away from these matters and enforce a parental right regardless of the child’s best interests, excepting only the situation of likely harm.

Hirst would also like the law to be changed to relieve a parent of his child-support payments if court-ordered contact is denied. But this would lead to two wrongs instead of one: denial of contact ordered by the Court is wrong, and so is failure to pay child support. Withholding child support is not a valid means of enforcing contact, since children must still be fed, clothed and sheltered.

Another of Hirst’s proposals is that refusal of contact ordered by the Court should result in the transfer of custodial care, if the other parent is adequate to the task, regardless of the child’s wishes or feelings. We doubt that this formula would be likely to promote either successful contact, or stability and security in relationships, which children of broken relationships deserve. In this as in some other recommendations, Hirst argues for an adult-centred rather than a child-centred approach to family law.

Back to absolutism?

The key underlying theme of Hirst’s approach is that the “best interests of the child” principle should be replaced by a set of absolutist rules, which must be applied even if the Court believes the application of such rules would not be in the best interests of the child. For our part, we are not persuaded that Australia should abandon the principle that the best interests of children should be determined on a case-by-case basis. Children, who are too often the silent witnesses to the destructive behaviour of their parents, deserve better than a change that would take us back to the nineteenth century, and would, incidentally, be difficult to reconcile with Australia’s obligations under the international Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Elizabeth Evatt & Richard Chisholm

1. Section 70NJ; compare s 65E, applying the “paramount consideration” principle to parenting orders (residence, contact, etc).

BREACH OF TRUST

Correspondence

Alex Miller

I felt heartened and enormously stimulated by Raimond Gaita’s words, as much by the extraordinary eloquence and clarity of the argument – which was beautiful to read, and which left me with a sense of a great humanistic and poetic sensibility behind the writing – as I was by the revolutionary nature of what I took to be the main point: namely, that we are, as a culture and therefore as individuals, being asked for the first time whether we are willing to consent to the use of torture, and therefore to become complicit in the practice of evil on our behalf, and that to consent even to a discussion of the pros and cons of such a proposition is already to accept an invitation to enter the arena of the damned.

Unless we are members of an extreme religious sect, we know ourselves to be part of an evil world and that good, such as it is, is not exclusive either to our own actions or those of our culture, but never before have we, as Gaita says, been openly asked to consider whether or not we should be party to something that we know to be evil. There are three possibilities: we say no, or we remain silent – in which case complicit – or we say yes and damn ourselves outright. And no doubt we qualify all these responses, even the firm no, and in doing so qualify the nature of our response.

When my friend Max Blatt told me it was not being tortured that broke his heart – he was tortured by Nazi experts for months and eventually thrown onto the street and left for dead – but the eventual realisation that his torturers were his brothers and that their roles may in other circumstances have been reversed, I didn’t question the validity of what he was saying. I still don’t. I respect his conclusion. I find it shocking, of course, but I believe it has been amply demonstrated that given the right conditions we are all capable of torturing our fellow human beings. People didn’t feel comfortable with Max’s conclusion at the time. Twenty years ago we all found it too shocking to imagine that Jews might themselves become the torturers, so Max was dismissed – as was usually the case with nearly everything he said – but now it is common knowledge that the Israeli forces torture prisoners – often they don’t even bother with an elaborate denial of it any more.

What is shocking is that torture has at last come out into the open among us under its own name. The Chinese used to call it re-education, the Russians brainwashing, and in America it has had any number of elegant names – Australians, of course (I speak ironically), don’t torture people, so we have no other name for it than torture. B. F. Skinner respectably imagined a landscape of human society beyond the, until then, sacred notions of individual freedom and dignity and condoned experiments in the name of psychology quite as extreme as torture. John Cowper Powys in his wonderful 1934 novel Weymouth Sands made vivisection, or live animal experimentation, the central evil in the world he created. We all know such things are torture for the victims, no matter what they are called by the people who justify their practice. And 3000 years ago Homer wrote a great book on the tragic futility of war and saw then that massacre and torture are commonplace in human societies. But what is it that has changed for us today that we are now calling torture by its real name and are no longer attempting to disguise it with some other, more seemingly respectable, word and are asking ourselves if after all it may be permissible among a civilised people?

Is it, as I think Raimond Gaita is saying, that our culture is on a slippery slope towards a condition of deep moral decay, even a kind of eventual spiritual demise, or is it that we have reached a point where it has become possible for us to acknowledge openly the awful truth about ourselves? I read Jacob Rosenberg’s profoundly moving new book, East of Time, about the Lodz ghetto, in proof last week and went for a long walk afterwards feeling depressed. It had convinced me (once again) of evil. Which will sound naive, but I have always resisted accepting the idea of evil and have often let myself forget that it exists. I need to be reminded. And certainly I have no experience of torture, either of being tortured myself or, I hope, of torturing someone or something other than myself. But I may have tortured, under another name no doubt. But in order to determine this we would have to ask the person or animal which had felt tortured by me. I’m not really capable of answering that question objectively. As when someone from overseas asks me if Australia is still racist, I say, “I don’t feel it, I’m part of the ruling culture, you will need to ask an Aborigine or a Chinese.”

Does the torturer have to know what he or she is doing by the name torture in order to be committing an evil act? Skinner’s students went on administering increasingly agonising electric shocks to their fellow students in the name of science even after some of the students had screamed and passed out a number of times. The torturers in that case saw themselves as members of a team engaged on a difficult and demanding behavioural experiment, without realising it was their own behaviour that was being scrutinised. Some people would say they had been brainwashed. But we are all brainwashed. We believe in our own realities. Can we say they were doing evil? Or being assiduous in the pursuit of truth? Jacob Rosenberg says truth is always sad. Our illusions concerning good and evil are deep and obscure and impossible to separate from the hypnotic realities of our situation; they are, I believe, subjective. We have to ask the other how we behave. That’s why it’s so easy, I believe, for us to judge the behaviour of others.

But the question, Will you do evil with me by letting me do evil in your name? is so direct. It is Miltonic and Dantesque and approximates the voice of the Satanic in our real public life. There is nowhere for us to hide from such a question. How can people even ask such things? What is the world coming to, for goodness’ sake? It is, as Gaita shockingly points out to us, so new, so unexpected, so direct, and its implications so profound that we really can’t see them all yet. It isn’t, I imagine, whether this question asked in such a way will actually increase the practice of torture, but that it will corrupt us in ways that we have not been corrupt before. I hope I’m not misreading Gaita in this. He has opened this discussion with such force that I’m sure I’m still confused about a lot of things. I feel very grateful to him for not offering us a simplified address, and for offering us the question in all its complexity, its endless ambiguities and deep variations of tone and areas of shadow and shadows of shadows, cast and reflected and uplit from other structures that could easily confuse the mind. Wonderful! I couldn’t help thinking of Plato’s cave and the play of shadows on the walls. And that he maintained through this a calm sense of clarity and order in his prose amazed me. It is what the best philosophers have always done: to speak to the non-professional with clarity about complex moral questions on which they themselves have yet to reach a final position. Plato, and in more recent time Georges Bataille.

Alex Miller

BREACH OF TRUST

Correspondence

Mungo MacCallum

In a moment of cynicism I once defined a politician as “a man or woman who honestly and sincerely believes that the worst thing that could happen to the country is for him or her to be voted out of office”.

This is, of course, an unfair and exaggerated generalisation: self-belief does not always translate into megalomania. But it is a rare politician who does not have the conviction, held honestly and sincerely, that his or her own interest happily coincides with the public good: l’état, c’est moi. Indeed, in some cases it becomes almost a matter of divine right; President Nixon is reported to have said something to the effect that any act performed by himself as president could not, by definition, be deemed a crime.

Faced with this kind of certainty, any normal person’s attempt to apply normal standards of morality is, inevitably, doomed to failure. It is not simply a matter of ends and means. Rather, retention of power by this peerless individual is so overwhelmingly desirable that it justifies any amount of skulduggery in the process – whatever it takes, in the words of Labor’s arch-manipulator Graham Richardson. The underlying premise is that the removal of the said individual would in itself constitute a great wrong – a sin against the public weal. The avoidance of this evil is in itself the overriding moral imperative.

It is an idea that John Howard has sold to the electorate with considerable success. Last year I was interviewed on ABC radio about my book Run, Johnny, Run which is highly critical of Howard’s regime. A number of listeners rang the studio to voice their disapproval and in the process to accuse me of treason. L’état, c’est Johnny.

But while Howard’s actions make it clear that he is at one with Richardson that the acquisition and retention of power transcends all ethical considerations, he still understands the need to pay lip-service to conventional morality. Thus he sets up a code of conduct for his ministers, even if he has not actually enforced it for many years. He constructs a firewall of unaccountable advisers between himself and the public service so that he can plausibly deny knowledge of any information which could cast doubt on his own integrity.

His statements are hedged around with lawyer’s fine print, or even a highly idiosyncratic interpretation of language: thus the promise that there would “never, ever” be a GST should be understood to mean “not in this term of government” – although in fact it meant “not until I think I can get away with it”.

The fact that any reasonable person would take his words at face value is irrelevant; as with Humpty Dumpty, Howard’s words mean what he wants them to mean, no more and no less. Mendacity is, then, not really possible.

Howard has tried to live down the ironic nickname Honest John to the extent that he now cherishes it as a compliment: John Howard is the man the voters can (and, it appears, do) trust. He may even believe this himself. If he does, then while one may accuse him of self-delusion, it becomes more problematic to say that he is actively immoral.

In the old days, in opposition, Howard espoused (or at least pretended to espouse) a truly ruthless standard of political morality. Here he is on telling the truth to parliament:

Gough Whitlam had the guts to sack Rex Connor because he inadvertently misled parliament. He had the guts to sack Jim Cairns because he inadvertently misled parliament and his Prime Minister. We want to know if Paul Keating has the guts to sack Senator (Graham) Richardson because he misled the Senate. The supreme test of the courage and probity of the Prime Minister is whether he insists on ministers observing the basic requirements of a minister; that is, that they tell parliament the truth.

No ifs, no buts, and inadvertence is not a defence.

On that basis the present front bench would be very sparse indeed and Howard himself would be long gone. But of course, Howard’s departure would be a far worse evil. The greater good supersedes the lesser. This, I fear, is the new political and ethical reality which Howard’s critics (among whom I include Raimond Gaita) have failed to grasp.

In a famous exchange, the American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald remarked to his friend Ernest Hemingway: “The rich are different from us.” “Yes,” replied the down-to-earth Hemingway, “they have more money.” But that was not what Fitzgerald meant.

Similarly, politicians are different from us. It’s not that they are more (or less) moral; it’s just that they are different.

Mungo MacCallum

BREACH OF TRUST

Correspondence

Paul Kelly

No Australian prime minister within my experience has been “pervasively” or “systematically mendacious” (Billy McMahon excepted). Raimond Gaita makes this claim against John Howard, but, as far as I know, he has never established the evidence to sustain his proposition. It is an extraordinary claim – that Howard’s mendacity is integral to his conduct of the office. I believe that Gaita misunderstands Howard, misunderstands how prime ministers operate and misunderstands politics in Australia.

There is no doubt, however, that he reflects and contributes to a view held either with world-weary cynicism or passionate intensity by many Australians and many influential Australians. In the process he assists neither Howard’s critics (still clueless about how to beat him) nor the wider debate about politics and ethics.

No competent PM will lie on a regular or capricious basis. This is not just because it is unnecessary and politically dangerous to do so, but because a political system built on falsehood will risk internal collapse as well as external hostility. The first problem with Gaita’s essay is the faulty empirical analysis upon which his argument rests. The purpose of my article (The Weekend Australian, 28–29 August 2004) that Gaita criticises was not to excuse Howard but to try to put his lies into historical context.

My argument was that lies – and big lies – have been a reality of prime ministerial power and that Howard has no unique status on this measure compared with his predecessors; that lies and deception, from war to the economy, tend to be driven by policy failures or political failures (that is, the lies are symptoms of a deeper problem); and that truth in politics is important but not an absolute.

Policy results are usually more important in moral terms than assessments of whether or not a government has been mendacious. Let me elaborate – how should one judge the morality of a government that never lied but whose economic failures were directly responsible for a recession that left a million people unemployed or whose national security ineptitude resulted in the death and injury of a number of its citizens? I am sure the Australian people would form a harsh moral judgement about such a government, and treat with derision any moral self-justification it offered based upon its honesty and its avoidance of “pervasive mendacity”.

It is a neat polemic that Howard lied on both children overboard and Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. But these are quite different situations and each needs to be assessed on merit. At this point we don’t know whether the Prime Minister lied about the children overboard, but the circumstantial evidence against him is strong. The evidence on Iraq is that Howard believed what he said about the weapons of mass destruction; that is, he did not use as a justification for war claims that he knew were wrong or that he suspected were wrong. (Of course, further disclosures might alter such assessments.) In both cases the public has been misled.

I believe the “breach of trust” campaign, despite its elements of validity and the intensity with which it is waged, is weak overall and is really the search for an organising moral principle to condemn and de-legitimise the Howard prime ministership across the board. Seen in this way, its defect is obvious – it is asked to carry too much. The claim of “pervasive mendacity” is an exaggeration and the idea that the immorality it represents should be the sufficient ground for the people to vote Howard out is a judgement devoid of any balance. Howard’s election counter-attack, based on the notion of trust, exposed the weakness of Gaita’s position. Trust is a more complex concept than his essay encompasses, a point he recognises yet resists.

In particular, trust is tied irrevocably to outcomes – whether in economic, social or military policies. Gaita’s position – if I understand him correctly – is that the Iraq war is morally wrong and, as a result, even if much good resulted from the war, that fact could never redeem its immorality. He argues that because the intervention is wrong, the coalition can take no credit for the good consequences but must accept responsibility for the bad consequences. My own view is that the morality of public policy cannot be so divorced from its consequences. A smooth transition to democracy in Iraq would have helped the moral legitimacy of George Bush’s position just as the deterioration over the past eighteen months has undermined it.

I say this neither to exonerate Howard nor to justify any lies or distortions. Gaita says he expects me to explain what could have justified Howard’s lies, but I don’t seek or need to justify these at all. My view that Gaita has misread the Howard government and has a flawed analysis of morality in politics does not mean that one is defending Howard’s lies.

The problem for Gaita is that, having depicted Howard as a moral reprobate, he has also to explain his re-election by an increased majority. The trap for the moralists is that they might blame the people. The alternative is to offer rationalisations for the vote. But they avoid the obvious – the fact that their depiction of Howard as a moral reprobate and their insistence that the election be seen in these terms was a mistake. History will show that this interpretation of Howard by his influential critics has helped him, and that it has undermined the formulation of an effective, realistic and broad-based line of attack against Howard on the issues that are important to the people and in a language they find acceptable.

Gaita argues that war should only be a last resort and I agree. This is the reason I declined to support the war on strategic grounds. Iraq was a war of choice and the absence of any weapons of mass destruction suggests that the choice was an unnecessary one. It is a strategic folly to think that every genocidal dictator should be eliminated by regime change.

However, I remain unconvinced by many of the moral arguments. There was, for me, something disconcerting about the worldwide demonstrations two years ago when the middle classes of the rich democracies marched for the moral cause of keeping the Iraqi people enslaved under a tyrant, with many demonstrators dishonestly claiming to speak on behalf of the Iraqis.

I also have trouble with the moral tests that Gaita applies – notably his claim that no person should ever be treated as a means to an end and that evil (presumably killing) cannot be justified for a good end. These are excellent in the abstract, but what are the consequences of their literal application in the war against Islamic extremism? Given that Osama bin Laden has formally declared that the murder of any American anywhere on earth is the “individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it” and that his terrorist organisation seeks a weapons of mass destruction capability to use against the American people, it seems to me that Gaita has taken a moral stance doomed to be unsustainable in this conflict. The war against terrorism remains in its early phase and much of the debate revolves around the subject of Bush’s incompetence. However, the grave risk for the liberal left lies in its embrace of a moral principle that is untenable – given that democratic leaders have a political and moral obligation to safeguard their peoples.

It seems to me that the Australian people bring their sense of realism and scepticism to these issues and this is typified by their response to the Iraq war.

The people knew we went to war because of the US alliance, a point that Howard fudged. From the start they had no appetite for this war and, if Australia had to be involved, they preferred a very limited role (something that Howard ensured). They knew when Howard ordered the military deployment but pretended no decision had been taken on war, that, in effect, he was lying. They knew that Saddam Hussein, with or without his weapons of mass destruction, was no threat to us, but they accepted the world was likely to be a better place without him. They knew the exercise was a calculated risk in strategic terms and that its moral justification would depend upon creating a better Iraq. They know that Iraq has turned out a lot worse than Howard suspected and they know that Bush has severely miscalculated. I think, overall, the people are suspicious of the extreme claims advanced by both Bush and his moralistic critics and that these are healthy responses.

Finally, and in a wider sense, I fear the morality that Gaita wants to impose upon political leaders is simplistic in the extreme. At times he seems in denial about the compact of democratic governance. Governments have a responsibility to govern and that often requires inflicting hurt upon people (higher taxes, lower benefits) that would be unacceptable in the moral relations between two individuals. Political leaders have multiple responsibilities to their party, their supporters, the public and the national interest, and such responsibilities are often in conflict. Their job is to construct policies, to sell them and to persuade. Leaders select the advice they want; they operate as advocates; they are agents of partisanship.

Yet Gaita argues that “mendacity” captures many forms of untruthfulness and “more insidious forms of dishonesty than lying does”. He tells us that a mendacious person “might lie, he might evade, he might intentionally muddy the waters and he might do any of these things sincerely …” and, as I understand him, he wants to apply these standards to politics. Yet in politics the waters are muddied to begin with – political judgements, usually, are imprecise and uncertain and often made in the face of uncertainty as to the facts and the truth.

Let’s take a famous example. In 1996 Howard won an election after saying he would never have a GST. Using Gaita’s test Howard should have said something like this: “As you know, I have long supported an indirect tax. My pledge means that I won’t introduce the tax this term but, depending upon circumstances, I may try to introduce the tax in a later term.” This would not have been a responsible political statement. It would have been a disservice to Howard, to his party and to the community. (A similar argument can be mounted with respect to Keating’s income tax commitment at the 1993 election.) I see no other way to interpret Gaita’s argument than that this is exactly what he thinks Howard should have said. Yet this denies the essential craft of politics and its partisan nature.

I accept the sincerity of Gaita’s position. But the more I read him the less I am convinced that under his rules our politics would be enhanced either in practical results or moral quality.

Paul Kelly

LATHAM’S WORLD

Correspondence

Irving Saulwick

I found Margaret Simons’s journey around Mark Latham both interesting and informative, particularly so because I had not taken the bother to read his books. Although I lament the lack of intellectual life in our politics, and indeed in the Australian culture more generally, when something did emerge to fill the gap, as in Latham’s case, I neglected it.

Having indulged in a little self-criticism, let me move on in a less self indulgent way. While it was useful, Simons’s summary of Latham’s ideas was also rather frustrating. It was so dense, so abridged, that in many cases I found it hard to understand what Latham was saying. I would have liked a more extended exploration – a spreading out of the ideas and then a critical appraisal of them – even if this was at the expense of some of the space devoted to the Liverpool story. This latter analysis was interesting, and in part gave us a picture of Latham the man, but in my view it did not need to be so detailed.

Latham’s defined dichotomy between the insiders and the outsiders – or the Tourists and the Residents – is, in my view, a useful one. But it can be overstated – it does not allow one to differentiate between the conservative and the nonconservative insiders, and to this extent its use as an analytical tool is limited. Simons seems to acknowledge this point, but does not take it anywhere.

Perhaps more importantly, one is tempted, with the benefit of hindsight, to ask why Labor failed so miserably on 9 October, and whether Latham’s World and Latham’s views provide any clues to understanding this failure.

It is old hat to say that there have been profound changes in Australian society in the last thirty or forty years. Immigration has changed the face of Australia. So has prosperity. So too has the nature of work. Let us concentrate on this latter point for a moment.

The years between the end of World War II and the election of the Whitlam government saw an expansion of Australian industry and its blue-collar workforce. Jobs, which had been scarce in the ’30s, became plentiful. In this situation blue-collar workers, many of whom had had collectivist experiences in the armed forces, used their industrial muscle to advance their economic interests. They elected communist trade union officials to lead and help them – not because they were communists themselves, but because they saw these capable men as best able to help them secure what they wanted and what they believed was their right. The communist leaders in turn encouraged them to strengthen their collectivist approach. They used their publications and their prestige to argue that unity was strength. Their members bought this message, even if, at the same time, they remained loyal to their traditional party, the Labor Party.

Those days are long since past. The bulk of the blue-collar jobs have disappeared, together with the collectivist traditions and the communist leaders associated with them. Only remnants persist, among building workers, for instance, and perhaps some miners.

Today individualism is paramount. But it is a fragile individualism. It is based on the assumption that in a competitive society one must look after oneself and one’s own because the devil will take the hindmost. It is also based on the idea that happiness and conspicuous consumption are almost, if not exactly, synonymous.

In a paper I gave recently to an Equal Opportunity Commission of Victoria forum on “Human Rights and the Australian Way of Life”, I argued that the Australian socio-political climate has significantly changed over recent years. I argued that the relevant large-scale trends included:

1. An apparent loss of sovereignty and control over our economic future as a consequence of the policies of economic rationalism and tariff reduction.
2. A corresponding loss of access to and control over large institutions in Australia such as banks, large businesses, large trade unions and large bureaucracies. Thus a growing sense of alienation and powerlessness.
3. A perception, particularly post-September 11 and post-Bali, that the world is a dangerous place and that terrorism could strike anywhere at any time.
4. A perception that politics is “managed”, that politicians use “spin”, tell lies and cannot be trusted, have little contact with or knowledge of the lives of ordinary people and are only marginally concerned with ordinary people’s real interests.
5. A culture that puts a premium on acquisitiveness, competition, consumption and personal gratification.
6. A growing feeling that one must look after number one because no one else will. And even a feeling that others should not get benefits which are denied to you, even if they are more needy than you are.
7. A turn inwards, towards the self and away from concern for others, and a preference for acting individually rather than collectively.
8. Finally, I argued that in the past Australian culture has included a healthy streak of larrikinism. I said that this was increasingly being replaced by pressures towards conformity.

These generalisations clearly do not apply in all cases. Many contemporary examples can be given of collective action and concern for others, including environmental groups such as Landcare, trade unions, Rotary and fire-fighting and emergency services volunteers. Nevertheless the large-scale trends have influenced the broader culture and led to a loss of concern for others in our society.

In my paper to the Equal Opportunity Commission, I sought to be more explicit about the chain of emotive reasoning that lies behind these attitudes. The first link in the chain is the sense of insecurity induced by financial deregulation, the infamous and discredited “level playing field”, tariff reduction and the export of semi-skilled and unskilled jobs. This is linked to a sense of disenfranchisement in the hearts and minds of those who have borne the brunt of economic and social change (in many cases those with scant personal, educational or financial resources with which to cope). A general loss of faith in institutions then develops.

In circumstances of personal insecurity and disenfranchisement, people appear to have little inclination to feel sympathy for others and little ability to imagine that others are worse off than themselves. They need scapegoats, who are easily made out of the desperately unfortunate, because these are the ones who are seen to receive special assistance from government, paid for with taxpayers’ money, or to represent yet more competition for scarce jobs. Either way, Aborigines and refugees are easy targets.

Since these groups are the most vulnerable in the community, the way their human rights are protected is the real test of our society. I concluded this part of my paper by suggesting that there was scant evidence from my research that the electorate is in the mood to hear this.

When he was elected as leader of the Labor Party, as Margaret Simons points out, Latham toured the country, meeting, talking with and, in particular, listening to voters in halls and other venues. In this he was sensibly replicating the approach of his Liverpool days. He must have heard many of the sentiments I have listed above. He must have heard again of people’s distrust of politicians and of the way elections are “managed”. And yet, when it came to the crunch, the Labor Party used the same election format, with the same management by “spin doctors”, as it and its main rival had used in the immediate past. I know it is not easy to break this mould, particularly with the pressure that the media applies, but at some stage one of the parties may have to find the strength to do so.

As I have suggested, people in general do not trust politicians and are cynical about them. Many voters during the campaign seemed not to want to listen – some because they were profoundly uninterested or lacked knowledge and competence, some because they could find no heroes, and not a few because they did not like what they heard. Many former staunch Liberal voters were appalled by what they saw as John Howard’s lack of morality.

In this environment the Labor Party spoke to them with its mouth half open. It did not use any new methods to confront their cynicism. Certainly, it talked about health and education and the environment – although the latter case was argued too late and ineffectually. But it did not show voters, particularly the fragile ones, how it would holistically protect their economic interests. Here, Howard’s scare tactics worked.

It seems to me that Pauline Hanson could speak to and for these Residents or outsiders because she was one of them. Howard seems to understand them, and claims to represent them, even if he does not. Latham emerged from among them and spoke to some of their needs during the campaign. He has travelled a long way from the outsiders, and yet may well still understand them. But he seems to have missed the pivotal point: they needed to be assured that their economic interests would be protected, that their mortgages were secure and would not become more expensive, that they would be shielded from any further effects of major economic and social change. And they needed to hear this clearly outside the normal round of “political speak”. In the end, although the devil may take the hindmost, the devil they knew and who had presided over eight years in which their world did not entirely fall apart, was better than the devil they did not know, particularly as the former seemed to speak their language.

Irving Saulwick

LATHAM’S WORLD

Correspondence

David Burchell

Margaret Simons’s masterful essay on Mark Latham ends on a discomforting note. On the one hand – as she observes ruefully – Australia’s self-styled intelligentsia has almost entirely missed the point of Latham’s “crazy-brave” assault on our inherited political verities from the 1980s and ’90s, and failed to offer the kind of moral support it required. Indeed, for all their vaunted capacity for empathy and imagination, our contemporary legion of high-self-esteem-plagued “knowledge-workers” have on the whole exhibited an almost heroic incapacity to evince sympathy for the bleached backyards of Australia’s suburbs and provinces, and the local, humdrum concerns of those who live there. And so, what could be called the “new suburbanism” of Latham – an attempt to connect with the anxieties and tribulations of those seeking to build families and futures out of their own resources in a time of unremitting social, cultural and gender based change – has passed by largely bereft of a sympathetic hearing from those who’ve devoted their lives to “social issues” of a grander variety. Instead, we were told again and again that the “real” issues of election 2004 were the two great knowledge-workers’ cris de coeur – the asylum seekers issue and the war in Iraq. (What a sad, self-indulgent fantasy that was.)

On the other hand, Simons hints, those self-same denizens of suburbia who might have much to gain from listening to Latham’s pitch will probably fear to make the imaginative leap required at the ballot-box. As she puts it, in her third last paragraph:

For decades, voters have been told that the main job of politicians is to manage the economy – a topic in which few voters feel qualified. I doubt if Latham will be able to convince them that it is now acceptable to vote on the basis of social issues, and the concrete issues that directly affect their lives, however much they might want to.

Simons’s misgivings were soundly based. The opinion-page pundits were, generally speaking, embarrassingly wide of the mark. And the punters – while, as the polls suggest, they toyed with it, from early 2004 right through to the early weeks of the election campaign – ultimately rejected the Latham experiment in a fairly decisive fashion, and very likely for at least some of the reasons Simons suggested. It’s now cast-iron common sense in the Labor Party that the party’s failure in 2004 was caused by its perceived lack of economic credibility, and, by implication, by the kind of hard-boiled policy language associated with that. Few people – even hard-heads in the smoke-filled backrooms of the ALP – were saying that, audibly, at least, a few short months ago. Simons was.

Indeed – remarkably, for someone who makes no pretence of expertise in political punditry – Simons’s is one of the few pre-election 2004 forays that survives the cold gale of 9 October almost entirely intact. I think it’s clear that Simons was spot-on in her analysis of Latham’s novelty, and of the reasons why this novelty was underestimated. She was also very close to the mark in her instincts as to why his charge at the Lodge would fail – and fail in such a personally humiliating fashion that he is now being publicly touted as a doomed leader, a mere twelve months after his accession.

And so Latham’s World requires little in the way of post-election revision in the light of events. Instead, I want to offer a couple of brief thoughts – one by way of update, and the other by way of sympathetic criticism.

The update is necessarily tentative, but easily enough expressed. As Simons suggests more delicately than I feel able to, the intelligentsia has largely been out to lunch for the last few years in this country. Ever since the nineteenth century it’s been a defining trait of the higher professions to be preoccupied by questions of political conscience and morality ahead of those of interest and personal security, by the global at the expense of the local, by the grand vision rather than the reassuring gesture. (To this day the present prime minister’s most oft-mocked comment remains his pledge to make Australians feel “more relaxed and comfortable” about themselves – surely an innocuous comment, by any ordinary standard.) From the Factory Acts through the Boer War and post-World War pacifism to the Vietnam Moratorium and Iraq, all that’s changed has been the political label. Over the last few years a curious conjunction of events – first the precipitous demise of the Labor settlement of the ’80s and ’90s, and the confident, outward-looking image of the country sometimes associated with it, then the Tampa, the detention centres and the Iraq war – has sent this tendency into a kind of moral overdrive, to the point that it’s now almost impossible to distinguish extra-parliamentary political opposition in this country from moral-aesthetic revulsion.

It may, just possibly, be that the 2004 election marks a slowing-down of this tendency, and even some kind of recognition that the experience of a tertiary education and an interest in the arts in itself provides no special expertise either in questions of politics or morality. As one small swallow in this approaching summer I’d offer the implicit post-election self-revision of Robert Manne – nowadays the de facto newspaper columnist of the leftish intelligentsia – published in the Fairfax broadsheets a week after the election. After some fairly uninspired commentary on the Prime Minister’s predilection for “conservative populism” (populism being the word you use for successful political ideas of which you disapprove), Manne frankly confesses his discovery that “many of the issues of greatest concern to us” – meaning the liberal-left intelligentsia – “are of little interest or are even anathema to the majority of our fellow citizens”. There is now a “fundamental contradiction” between the “political needs of Labor” and “the values of the left”, which “even the most eloquent flight of fancy cannot wish away”.

Of course, for Manne this doesn’t mean the left itself has any real soulsearching to do about its own political priorities and moral values. (Matters of conscience are rarely debatable, after all.) Rather, it means that the need of the Labor Party to address itself as an aspiring party of government to the concerns of a majority of Australians, and the need of the leftish intelligentsia to plough its own moral furrow, regardless of “populist” considerations, requires that the two groups now part company. And so Manne concludes with a (hardly original) clarion-call for “action independent of government and outside the framework of party politics”. The positive message may be rather feeble, but there is at least an implied recognition that the poet by nature, like the poet by profession, is not, after all, the “unacknowledged legislator of mankind”.

The sympathetic criticism is more complicated to explain, and I’m not sure if I’ll be able to express it adequately here. But I’ll try. I agree wholeheartedly with Simons that Latham’s attention to what could be called “new suburban” issues – around personal financial autonomy and security, family and gender roles, the “crisis of masculinity”, and so on – is a potentially fruitful policy vein for Labor, as indeed for anyone interested in the lives and hopes of ordinary Australians generally. And like Simons – if perhaps for somewhat different reasons – I fear a return to the economic verities of the 1980s and 1990s, whose fruits have (in my view) very largely been exhausted.

But there’s still a gulf between these two paired instincts and Simons’s conclusion about “the social” and “the economic”, as quoted above, and personally speaking I’m deeply reluctant to leap it. Throughout the ’80s and ’90s the liberal intelligentsia was as contemptuous of Labor’s economic preoccupations as it is now of the economic and security anxieties of the electorate more broadly. Again, there’s a deadly weight of history here. Ever since the nineteenth-century bohemian intellectuals rejected the “soulless materialism” of their middle-class parents (even as they lived off the allowances generated by it), there’s been a deep instinct among the “knowledge-working” professional classes in favour of “the social”, and against “the economic”, as a way of understanding life, morality and personal relations. It’s another incarnation of what Simons quotes Latham himself as describing (acutely) as the “theoretical” bias of intellectual Tourists in societies like ours: their propensity for dividing the world into rarefied oppositions, and then – as if in a fit of intellectual terror – siding with the term which seems to signify life, warmth, culture and happiness (as opposed to mean and petty pragmatism, bean-counting and calculation).

I’m not suggesting that these thought-processes underpin Simons’s own instincts here, exactly – her analysis is far too generous-spirited for that. Yet when she suggests, as in the quote above, that the punters will stick with voting on the basis of economic imperatives because they’re told to, even though “social issues” are actually “the concrete issues that directly affect their lives”, I think Simons is selling the punters somewhat short. Economic issues matter to ordinary Australians not because they’re told they should, or merely because it’s conventional to think them so. Less still do they matter (as is often tacitly assumed by critical commentators, if not by Simons) because of the supposed limited moral imaginations of ordinary folks. (As if a talent for thinking in abstractions were actually a kind of virtue.) In large measure, economic issues are social issues in most people’s lives.

Inner-city professionals these days have investment advisers, and managed funds; they own investment properties, and plan for their retirement with all the precision of NASA planning a space voyage. And so – even when they’re rather more heavily mortgaged than might be considered prudent – it’s actually quite easy for them to abstract themselves from the impact of interest rates on their lives. They’re just another risk that’s been built into the personal finance equation.

But if you live on a brand-new block in the outer suburbs of one of our major cities, with a brand-new, modest-sized swimming pool and a family car and a few of the mod cons, and you’ve got repayments due on all of them every other week, and you’ve got young kids, and you want better for them than you had yourself when you were young ...then the prevailing rate of interest isn’t just an economic issue – it goes to the very fabric of your life. It affects the way you look at the front lawn, even the taste of the morning cereal. It’s about your ability to get things together in your life, to stand on your own two feet, maybe even to get ahead in the world. And most important of all, the ever-fluctuating value of that family home – your managed fund and your super, all rolled into one – is a simple, brutal calculus of your ability to provide a nest-egg for the children, your inter-generational transfer of assets, that most sacred of Australian familial traditions.

And so, to cut a long story short, I suspect Latham’s (and Labor’s) problem isn’t replacing an emphasis on social issues with one on economic issues, or vice versa. Rather, it’s to do with Labor’s capacity to project a sense of the relationship between the two. Interest rates, after all, are a pretty potent symbol of life on the suburban fringe right now. They betoken a modest affluence in return for effort, and a gradual ascent into economic security and autonomy. Or they betoken all the troubles and anxieties that hit families in times of turmoil and crisis – relationship trouble, stress and tension, alcohol abuse, breakdown. They’re virtually every other rung in that fabled “ladder of opportunity”. It may not be quite right to suggest – as the hard-nosed types in the ALP are suggesting right now – that Latham’s “new suburban” vision prior to 9 October 2004 was too broad. Actually, it might not have been quite broad enough.

David Burchell

LATHAM’S WORLD

Correspondence

John Button

During the recent election campaign, journalists kept describing Mark Latham as “a work in progress”. I think they meant progress towards one day being prime minister. The Coalition had a similar line with a different spin. At present he was not a person “fit to hold office”, or in other words, “like us”.

Mark Latham has been a very difficult figure for conservative politicians and desultory journalists to have to confront. He is different. As Margaret Simons points out, he is a conviction politician, he understands how to use plain language and is “one of very few thinkers to have achieved political leadership”. In Canberra this is like letting a bear loose in a holiday camp.

What to do in this dangerous situation? The Coalition reaction was that the intruder had to be destroyed by whatever means possible. After the election it still is. Conservative columnists keep telling us that Latham might be another John Hewson and that the ALP is ill advised to keep him as leader.

The ALP reacted with mixed feelings, applauding Latham’s campaign performance, but uncertain about the strategy. Out of the comfort zone there’s a tendency to wonder where you’re going.

Some in the Canberra press gallery, having become accustomed to recycling ministerial press releases as “think pieces” and commentaries, found Latham’s style and ideas hard to handle. It’s not too difficult to imagine them thinking, this guy is different, there must be something seriously wrong with him. Perhaps it’s best to say he’s a work in progress.

Second-order columnists like the Australian’s Glen Milne coped by recycling gossip. Paul Kelly pondered on the meaning of it all, and strongly supported Latham’s tax and welfare package, which just happened to have had its origins in a seminar jointly sponsored by the Australian and The Melbourne Institute. Michelle Grattan managed to persuade herself and Fairfax that it was only a matter of time before Latham imploded. Hence the Age headline “Latham blows up” the morning after he gave a sharp answer to Laurie Oakes on the Sunday program.

I’m not suggesting that any of this was deliberately unfair to Latham. Rather that a lot of the press gallery seemed tired and lazy. By contrast Latham’s World is an essay of quality and an intriguing piece of diligent investigative journalism. Margaret Simons didn’t get to meet the man himself, so her story had to be constructed the hard way, from circumstantial evidence, pictures provided by others and her own analysis of this material.

Simons did what might have been expected. She investigated the gossip and allegations about Latham’s past and reached her own judgement about these matters. She weighed up all the evidence she could assemble about her subject’s character and personality. She observed him on television and, more importantly, at a community forum. And then she examined his ideas.

Sadly, intellectual rigour of this kind is not part of the regular practice or culture of contemporary Australian political journalism. That the essay was written in difficult circumstances with the topic a constantly moveable feast is an encouraging sign that professionalism still exists, albeit out of the mainstream.

Of Latham’s character and personality the best side is the challenge which comes from his intellect and commitment, the flashes of humour, the use of straightforward language, the empathy and humility displayed at his community forums. There’s another side, much of it best illustrated by past rather than contemporary events. Simons observes, for example, that in his time at Liverpool Council he was “rude”, even “cruel” to his predecessors. Latham admits this, blaming stress and political hurly-burly. More ongoing is his narcissism and controlling personality, which no doubt make it difficult for colleagues. But there are always crosses to bear. As the journalist Adrian McGregor perceptively observed when Kim Beazley became leader in 1996, “Kim Beazley is the first Labor leader since Chifley without a serious personality disorder.” A political party often gets the leaders it deserves.

Leadership is rare and obvious when it is around. A controlling personality is relatively common and should be discouraged. It is fair to ask whether it has worked for Latham. He has only been leader for ten hectic months and became leader with cross-factional support. He seems to have squandered some of the initial goodwill which arose from his good parliamentary performance. His election campaign was impressive in parts, but if he controlled the agenda for that, he clearly got some of it wrong. There was plenty of tactics and not much strategy. And nobody seems to have been controlling with a steady hand the caucus debacle since the election. So without overdoing it he has to get back on top of all that internal party stuff. It will take time and patience. His “tutor” Gough Whitlam had to put up with it for years.

Margaret Simons suggests that Latham tends to divide ideas and policies into two sections; the first is about the economy, the second about society (mutual obligations and values). The Hawke-Keating governments took care of the first section; Latham developed policies and attitudes to accommodate the second. Eight years have passed by since the end of the Hawke-Keating era. For most of that time there has been nothing by way of a robust critique from the ALP of the Coalition’s economic management.

Partly this was because the parliamentary party was unsure whether it accepted the re-structuring of the ’80s and the opening of the economy or not. The Coalition had no such hesitation. Latham and the party must now understand that the ladder of opportunity has to rest on a firm footing if the voters are going to put their feet on the bottom rungs. It surprises me that Latham seems to have thought otherwise or ignored this unpleasant reality.

This seems a touch Whitlamesque.

There are two other observations which emerge from this essay. First, it is pretty clear that Latham doesn’t suffer fools gladly. This is a pity because he has a few of them in his new shadow cabinet. In the past he’s had a few words about parliamentary colleagues which some have condemned but which to me seemed remarkable for their political astuteness.

Latham is also said to be a hater, which is seen to be an uncharitable characteristic. A couple of years ago Latham even said that he hated the Coalition, a remark which led Tony Abbott to pompously admonish Latham in the parliament. Hatred, Abbott said, was not an appropriate emotion for a member of the House of Representatives. This must depend on who and what one hates and why. Is it so unreasonable to hate certain values and hate the perpetrators of values totally repugnant to one’s own? Indeed it is arguable that the ALP Opposition before Latham took over as leader was too polite and pussy-footed with the Howard government because it lacked a clear sense of philosophical difference. This suited the Tony Abbotts of this world fine.

Latham’s World provides a lucid and interesting account of his background and ideas, of paradigms of insiders and outsiders, Tourists and Residents.

Some of this came out during the election campaign, particularly the How green was my valley stuff. With Latham’s passion for ideas this is hopefully an evolving story which will broaden with time. There are, for example, a whole lot of interesting community values out there in the bush to which the ALP ought to be giving some thought.

What is perhaps missing from this essay is that part of Latham’s world known as the ALP, of which he is a member and the leader. This is understandable. In a short time it would have been impossible and unwise to step into this minefield. Latham believes that politics has the power to change people’s lives. But to do this you need a political party which is in touch with the community and which has a parliamentary membership representative of a wide range of backgrounds and experience. This is not so. The factional system values mediocrity above ability, and loyalty (to the faction) above life experience. It makes for an inward-looking rather than an outward-looking party. There is plenty of evidence that the public recognises this, but the factional leaders don’t want to know about it. Latham by contrast reaches out to the community with his forums, a genuine innovation in contemporary politics. Perhaps he should start by teaching some of his less radical and less imaginative colleagues how to do it.

John Button

MISSION IMPOSSIBLE

Response to Correspondence and Update

Paul McGeough

Amman, 1 August: The reason for writing about the tribes is that they are virtually ignored by those with their hands on the levers of power in post-war Iraq and they get scant attention from the international media. Yet, as a crucial power-base they need to be understood and reckoned with if the new Iraq is to find the kind of peace and security in which a new nation might be built. Anthony Bubalo is right when he says that the Americans are “damned if they do and damned if they don’t” – the pity is that despite its huge resources, the US didn’t take this into account in its planning for the aftermath of invasion. The tribes and the mosques were the only institutional forces left standing by the Americans – they disbanded the country’s military; they left in tatters its bureaucracy, legal system and economy; and all members of the Baath Party, no matter how useful their skills might be, were drummed out of government positions. As the US still grapples with the hostility of the reception it received across Iraq, the result, notwithstanding the appointment of the Allawi interim government, is a power vacuum in which the tribes and the mosques have had a head-start to reassert themselves.

Bringing the tribes into the nation-rebuilding process would empower them, but leaving them out runs the risk of empowering them even more – as we are seeing. Bubalo presumes that the tribes might have only a negative impact on the new Iraq, but many of my interviews have revealed just how welcoming the tribes were towards the US, confirming a substantial reservoir of goodwill that the Americans might have exploited, even if the outcome was to be a “peculiarly Iraqi solution”, to borrow the words used by the US military chief, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, when he speculated on the likely outcome of efforts to defuse the US clash with the renegade Shiite leader Moqtada al-Sadr in April this year. This is a region in which the tribes still have a significant say in how countries are run. To varying degrees, all the regimes here are autocratic, but unless the sheikhs bless the autocrat, the regime can run into serious difficulty. It’s worth noting that in Jordan the late King Hussein was masterful in his recognition and inclusion of the tribes; but his successor, the young King Abdullah II, doesn’t have the same finesse. Now there are mutterings among the Jordanian sheikhs.

I’m writing from Amman, where analysts tell me that last week’s demonstration by the Adwan tribe – in which tribesmen rallied outside a company’s Amman office, warning that they would behead its executives unless the company abandoned its contracts in Iraq as demanded by Iraqi hostage-takers – was as much a protest at the new king’s failure to deal with the tribes as it was a pragmatic tribal response to the imminent death of two of their tribesmen. It is a measure of the power of the Adwan, angered at their exclusion from Jordan’s by-regal-appointment-only senate, that the company took only forty minutes to comply with the tribe’s demand. Equally, in the impoverished south of Jordan, there are fears that the king’s neglect of the tribes is making them more tolerant, if not welcoming, of al-Qaeda operatives and their associates seeking refuge from neighbouring Saudi Arabia.

Bubalo misses the point altogether when he quotes Dr Faleh Jabar on Ottoman Iraq being the “graveyard of the tribes” and Robert Fernea on the difficulties the tribes have faced under autocratic regimes. The reality is that they still exist as a force and, as they are demonstrating today, they have survived the greatest autocrat of modern Iraq – Saddam. Sounds like bedrock to me. Bubalo’s four-word quote from Jabar may do the Iraqi sociologist a disservice, if the content of a collection he edited in 2002 is any guide. I’m on assignment and I don’t have access to the book, but I’ve been able to read the on-line publisher’s review of Tribes and Power: Nationalism and Ethnicity in the Middle East (Saqi Books, 2002) which gives a different take altogether on where Jabar sits in this debate. It’s worth quoting:

The advance of centralized polities, modern technology and the market economy, among other reasons, have clearly modified the tribe – sometimes beyond recognition. But tribes are not “passive” entities, for they have a life of their own; they flexibly mutate, producing various new forms of tribalism in the process and providing a platform for social, economic and political action. This platform has been allowed to expand and become more complex, despite the fact that authoritarian regimes have attempted to co-opt tribes through control and coercion. Nobility of lineage, tribal allegiance and other aspects of tribalism have been reactivated or restructured to replace an eroded “modern” revolutionary legitimacy. The “new” tribes are politically savvy, adaptable and capable of playing for power.

Yesterday I dined with tribal elders in an ancient castle at Karak, high above the Dead Sea in the south of Jordan, and in keeping with the definition of contemporary tribes above, their preoccupation was how to extract money from the Jordanian government for a sound-and-light show and other crowd-pleasers for the remote castle. Most tour guides refer to this imposing fortress as a “Crusader” castle, but my host called it “Saladin’s” castle. His point was that it was the Arab warrior Saladin who drove out the Crusaders. Over a traditional mensaf lunch, this sheikh of the Majali tribe explained that the tribes of Karak predated all the foreign forces that had occupied the city and its citadel – from the ancient Natabeans to the more recent twelfth-century arrival of the Crusaders and, later, the Mamluks and the British – and that the tribes were still a force to be reckoned with. The Ottomans had executed three of his forefathers in the castle; and, after lunch, he showed me the jailhouse in which he himself had been imprisoned briefly. With an air that bordered on smugness, he told me, “We are eating in the same place where Saladin ate.” Yes, he said, there was an elected city council in Karak; but it was dominated by the tribes. He acknowledged that in Jordan there were two codes of law – tribal and notionally democratic – but added: “The way it works, is that as long as we can resolve issues according to tribal law, the government is happy to leave us to our own devices.”

It would be dangerous to get too carried away with the romance of Lawrence of Arabia. But putting him back on the bookcase, as Bubalo urges, would be more dangerous. The reason for invoking his spirit is not to invoke David Lean hoopla so much as T.E. Lawrence’s tenacious demonstration that a foreigner could work with the Arab tribes and, more importantly, that the tribes could agree to work with a foreigner. Today’s Iraqi sheikhs complain bitterly about the inability of the US to treat them in accordance with their elaborate sense of dignity and respect. But Lawrence, in the words of an analyst here, “wore our clothes, sat on the floor with us, ate our food and learnt our language”. John Negroponte, the new US Ambassador in Baghdad, doesn’t have to go that far, and neither should he concede on every tribal demand, but he and the Allawi interim government do have to deal them in.

When King Hussein introduced what passes for democracy in Jordan in 1989, the first reaction of the sheikhs was that they did not want it because the appointment of a prime minister and a cabinet would reduce their access to the king. Their argument was that they already had a voice in a system in which the king had taken responsibility for everything, so why should they have to be responsible through the ballot box. Jordan now operates with system of government that, at best, might be described as a stepping-stone towards democracy – its senate and prime minister are appointed by the king, the cabinet is appointed by the prime minister and it has an ineffectual elected lower house, none of whose members can serve as prime minister or as members of the cabinet. Iraq had a similar arrangement under its British-appointed monarchy.

Bubalo is welcome to suggest that “we change the paradigm”. He acknowledges that there is little democracy in the Middle East and that the Washington notion of a “democratic beachhead” in the region is flawed, and he pleads for the desire of individuals “to have their say”. But the US has demonstrated a failure to understand the realpolitik of the existing paradigm, which leaves it in the same position as the American who, in the Irish joke, asks for directions to the post office – “Oh, I wouldn’t start here …” his Dublin friend tells him. Indeed, as Bubalo says, there are nascent democratic stirrings in Iran and in Saudi Arabia. The activists behind these stirrings have a huge struggle ahead of them, but they are locally driven and they do not suffer from the handicap of their Iraqi counterparts – attempting to put down roots in the face of a much-loathed foreign occupation. Bubalo argues that historically “tribalism was less the cause of state failure …” – but to the extent that regimes in the region succeed, the tribes have been a reason for their survival.

He trots out the latest Iraq slogan from the US: “what happens next in Iraq will depend not on the US, but, quite rightly, on Iraqis themselves.” But it is naive to assume that the US no longer exercises great power in Iraq or that it bears no responsibility for what unfolds, or that it is not attempting to shape the outcome. Its power is inordinate – it still has 150,000 troops in the country, and just who it allows to come to the table, by the application of its military, diplomatic and financial clout, will have a huge bearing on how Iraqis decide their fate and the extent of their pain and suffering along the way.

Likewise, his talk of “love and loathing” of the Arabs is a nonsense. My comments on the Baghdad press were intended not so much to denounce them as to remark on former US administrator Paul Bremer’s habit of referring to their existence as proof of democracy at work. But the truth of the new Iraqi media is that as hostages to the narrow agenda of one party or another, they fail as tools of democracy. And for all the shortcomings of the Western press, it is absurd to compare them to the Iraqi media.

A more useful comparison with the West would examine the role of vested interests in politics. Bubalo is correct to note the self-serving nature of the tribes, but he doesn’t take the next step – if the tribes have a power-base in Iraqi society, it would be foolhardy not to acknowledge them, in the same way that any significant and self-serving power-base would be acknowledged in the West. I have no antipathy for the good intentions of the many Iraqis who have unquestionable democratic aspirations, but it would be negligent not to examine their ability to achieve democracy in the turbulent environment created by the US invasion and against benchmarks of expectation that have been set not by me, but by the US and its Coalition. The same applies with the tribes – we need to explore in detail what the proponents of democracy are up against.

I suppose one way to get readers’ attention is by an admitted opening cheap shot. But Anthony Bubalo buries an even cheaper one in the body of his critique – his suggestion that I confined my interviews to a “convenient sample” to make the story work. Wherever I go in Iraq, I make it my business to tap into the tribes, but the broader context in which I wrote was informed by interviews with perhaps a dozen Iraqi and regional experts and countless ordinary Iraqis. After reading Bubalo on Mission Impossible, it was difficult to know where to begin in response – because, despite his irritable tone, he agrees with or endorses much of what I wrote. It seems his principal objection is that I didn’t write a different story.

Part II

So how might you find the post office in Baghdad? A good place to start is where worlds collide on the terrace at the Intercontinental Hotel on a balmy summer’s night in Amman. A singer croons “New York, New York”, but crashing through Sinatra’s signature song is the thump of tribal drums from a wedding party deep inside the hotel. Guiding the waiters as they spread an Arab feast before us, Mudher al-Kharbit looks just like the multi-millionaire businessman that he is – from the swatch of silk in the breast-pocket of his well-cut suit, all the way down to shoes of fine crocodile skin. He crouches in his chair, smoking incessantly. And as he slows to find the right English words, he fills the pauses in frustrated Arabic: “Yanni? Yanni?” – “You know? You know?” But listen carefully – on this night, late in July, there is no talk of business. Al-Kharbit is speaking as the influential paramount sheikh of the two-million-strong Dulame tribe and head of the al-Kharbit clan, which dominate the tortured territories of western Iraq – Falluja and Ramadi and the endless deserts of al-Anbar province.

Al-Kharbit claims that he wants Iraq to have strong ties to US, but he is embittered by the fracturing of his immediate family’s risky and covert relationship with the Americans. Readers of Mission Impossible may recall how, in the years before the war, the previous paramount sheikh of the Dulame and the younger half-brother of this man, Malik al-Kharbit, had been meeting secretly with US intelligence agents, briefing them on how to topple Saddam, pleading for help to mount a coup and even using their oil-services and construction business as a cover to ferry CIA agents into Iraq. But on 11 April, Sheikh Malik’s palatial home was bombed by the US, apparently after a tip-off that Saddam Hussein was hiding there. Sheikh Malik and twenty-one members of the family died. In interviews soon after the April 2003 bombing, family members denied that Saddam was in the house. What seemed to have been a genuine love affair with America had been shattered because, in the doomsday language of the tribes, “Blood was spilled.”

Over dinner in Amman, Mudher al-Kharbit reveals that one of the Americans’ most-wanted “deck of cards” had in fact been in the house at the time of the attack. It was Rokan Abd al-Ghafur Suleiman, Saddam’s personal bodyguard, who also oversaw the ousted dictator’s relationships with the Iraqi tribes. Al-Kharbit is unapologetic: “He came for shelter and, according to Arab tradition, we could not refuse. But did they have to bomb? They could have surrounded the house and arrested him.” Then, in an act of pure tribal one-upmanship, he recounts the fable of an ancient Arab warrior who killed his last horse so that he could feed his guests, before declaring: “History will remember that the al-Kharbits sacrificed twenty-two family members for the sake of our guest. It’s the tribal way.”

For now, al-Kharbit runs his Iraqi affairs by phone. He moves between the Intercontinental in Amman and his other home in Damascus, wary of returning to Iraq where another twenty-odd family members have been jailed as suspected insurgents. He is seized by tearful rage when he talks of a threat by a senior US officer to send the arrested al-Kharbit men to Guantanamo Bay and, after this, to start detaining the women of the clan. He spits his words: “If they start with the women, they will never see the end of it … and we will never be quiet. I have told our people it’s more honourable to shoot the women than to allow them to be taken prisoner.” The Jordanian dining with us is deeply troubled by all of this. He urges: “The Americans should be trying to win the tribes over. Instead, they kill half of this man’s family and they arrest the other half; and when he comes to talk to them, they demand that he take a polygraph test. If you don’t know how to live in this part of the world, the Bedouin and the tribes will teach you a very expensive lesson. They don’t care about the US election in November – they have been around for more than a thousand years, so they believe that time is on their side.”

In a crisis like this, there is no bargain basement, so it’s not surprising that al-Kharbit’s expectations are huge. This is a man who is seriously bidding for control of the military and of national security in the new Iraq. His confidence is unnerving as he confirms much of what the experts cited in Mission Impossible said to me, but the sheikhs themselves would not be drawn on – Mudher al-Kharbit admits to having the power to end the insurgency, but he refuses to do so.

My first inclination is to dismiss him. But the Jordanian observer, a veteran analyst of Iraqi affairs who prefers not to be named, warns that this would be dangerous. And al-Kharbit underscores his point: “An Iraqi decision without the al-Kharbits is not a decision.” And there are other indications: Iyad Allawi felt the need to see al-Kharbit when he came through Jordan on his first trip outside Iraq as its new prime minister; the sheikh produces a conciliatory letter from a US general pleading with him to return to Iraq to help end the violence; and there’s an intriguing cast of American, British and Jordanian intelligence agents in the stories he tells. Al-Kharbit was instrumental in the release of up to a dozen of the foreign hostages held by insurgent groups in Iraq in July. And he enumerates the critical role played by his clan in every convulsion in Iraq’s history, concluding: “[Before the coup] in 1968 the revolutionary army met in our house at Ramadi.” Over several meetings his rhetoric escalates – except that in Amman and Baghdad I’ve been warned repeatedly that al-Kharbit does not engage in mere rhetoric. He means what he says, I’m told. When he is reminded that Allawi is building a 40,000-strong army, he laughs: “Ha! That’s just a family brawl.” And when the security crisis besetting Iraq comes up, he chuckles to another Iraqi in our company: “That’s not resistance – we’ll make Vietnam look like a picnic.”

The average Washington neo-conservative will have as much difficulty accepting al-Kharbit’s terms for peace as he will the sheikh’s vision of a workable “democracy” in Iraq. But he demands that they test him: “Let them give me the most dangerous area of Iraq – al-Anbar province or Baghdad city – and I guarantee to make it quiet in twenty days or a month. If that works, I should be given control of the military and security services for all of Iraq.” Al-Kharbit explains that he is not insisting on an immediate US withdrawal from the province: “They can patrol the towns, but they should remove their bases from the centres – and after a couple of months they would have to withdraw altogether. And I promise this: once they sign an agreement with me, there will be no foreign fighters in Iraq – all the strangers will be told to go. Their welcome will be over and no others will be able to cross our borders.”

Then he proposes a new Iraq government of twin councils, one that would be made up of the born-to-rule, unelected tribal sheikhs and “other notables”, which would have responsibility for defense and security; and another council of popularly elected representatives that would have carriage of the remaining business of government. It sounds like a variation of the Jordanian system or, as a Briton who joined us for dinner observed dryly, “He wants to replicate the House of Lords!” Al-Kharbit has put all of this to the Americans, claiming he told them: “Don’t believe the reports now about me supporting the insurgents. But in one year’s time I will be No. 1 in the resistance.” It’s an unambiguous threat.

The band changes gear. They sing “Hotel California” as al-Kharbit announces that he has bought a ticket to Washington. He’ll have nothing to do with the US troops in Iraq and he dismisses Prime Minister Allawi and his interim government as “burnt”, but he wants to put his case directly to the Pentagon and the State Department. So far, however, there has been little headway in back-channel attempts to arrange for him to talk directly to Washington.

The day after dinner at the Intercontinental, I call Washington to test what I’m being told about the power of al-Kharbit and the Dulame tribe. I track down Amatzia Baram, an Iraq specialist at the University of Haifa and the Washington-based US Institute of Peace. Baram worries that US forces are overplaying their hand with al-Kharbit. He proffers that the sheikh is overstating his power, but not by much: “His family were trusted go-betweens on the most sensitive issues for Saddam Hussein and the late King Hussein of Jordan. He can’t stop all the resistance in Iraq, but in al-Anbar, and especially in Ramadi, he is very important. I have no doubt that he could reduce the resistance by as much as 85 per cent in Ramadi and maybe 35 per cent in other areas. In Falluja the response would depend on what he had to offer in return for peace. The only problem is that I don’t know if the US understands how useful he would be – if he could be bought off.”

Before al-Kharbit could pursue his Washington mission all hell broke loose in Ramadi, his hometown. The tribal sheikhs and US commanders in the city are at odds over just what sparked the late July eruption. Al-Kharbit says the fuse was lit by an American decision to force his 77-year-old uncle and fellow sheikh, Abdul Razak al-Kharbit, into exile. The US says “nonsense” and describes the Wednesday on which the fighting started as just another bloody-minded day for insurgents who ambushed a US supply convoy as it motored through Ramadi.

The Americans can’t go on as they are. Only days before the Ramadi eruption, the US officers in al-Anbar spoke of pulling back to base – they were sick of being shot at by insurgents who simply refuse to bow to US force. But they hoped too that the new Iraqi government and its security forces would fill the power vacuum. Not so – yet. The city went mad as news spread of the red-faced old man’s departure to Jordan, for whatever reasons and on whoever’s orders. In an email exchange, a military spokesman denied to me that a sheikh had been exiled, but days later a UPI reporter embedded with the US military in Ramadi quoted a senior intelligence officer to the effect that a high-profile member of the local community had been forced to choose between imprisonment in Abu Ghraib or exile in Qatar.

Businesses in Ramadi were quickly shuttered as the thunder of rocket-propelled grenades, mortars, bombs and machine-gun fire ripped through its streets and alleyways. The locals rigged deadly car and roadside bombs and threw up pre-planned ambushes; the Americans called in air-support and hundreds of US Marines poured in for what became a four-hour opening street battle. More than twenty-five people died and dozens more were injured or arrested.

As the sun set and the dust settled, US surveillance helicopters were thick in the air as small funeral processions made their way to local cemeteries. The US denied a local claim that one of its helicopters had been brought down, and the spokesman offered this emailed explanation of the detention of the al-Kharbit men: “Approximately 20 [people] were detained earlier this month, but only a small number of them are thought to be actual members of the al-Kharbit family. Four of the detainees were sent to Abu Ghraib for involvement in facilitating cross-border movement of insurgents, financing insurgent activity and threats to kill the Governor.” The clash didn’t let up, though. A week later, the insurgents launched a series of co-ordinated raids on US posts in and around the city, killing two Americans and wounding eleven more, and damaging two US aircraft. And a couple of days after the departure of the old man there was payback for his expulsion – in a brazen daylight attack the three teenage and older sons of the US-appointed provincial governor, Abdul Karim Burghis al-Rawi, were kidnapped and their home was torched, prompting al-Kharbit to opine: “It was a clean attack – they didn’t touch the women in the house.”

The closest the US has come to apologising for the death of twenty-two members of the al-Kharbit family in the sixteen months since the US occupation began is a carefully worded, unsigned letter in the name of Major General J.M. Mattis, of the First Marine Division, in Ramadi. A copy was delivered to al-Kharbit in Amman. It reads, in part: “There has been trouble between the Kharbit family and the Americans in the past, but men of vision look to the future and put the past behind them. We have both mourned our losses, and better understand each other’s points of view. We are using this opportunity to extend the hand of friendship to you and to your tribe. As a gesture of this friendship, we invite you to return to al-Anbar province to live in peace … the Kharbits are an old tribe that has much influence over lesser tribes. We require [your] help in controlling these tribes and teaching them a life of truth and peace, instead of crime and violence.”

Al-Kharbit is impressed by the sentiment – he even describes Mattis as “a very nice man”. But he believes the general is in the thrall of the CIA and other intelligence agencies that are being fooled by what he calls “the rubbish guys” of al-Anbar – he names a reputed former Saddam bagman, who some say has now embarked on a new business career with millions he was holding for the ousted Iraqi leader, and an enemy Ramadi sheikh as being among those he says are attempting to manipulate events in al-Anbar and to do his family down. But chief among his “rubbish guys” is Iraq’s interim Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi. After their inconclusive meeting in Amman, al-Kharbit remains leery: “Allawi’s real motive is to show the US that the man they think is driving everyone crazy is in his pocket. But if the Americans didn’t understand the power and standing of my family, Allawi has just shown it to them by his need to meet me.”

Notwithstanding the need that Allawi felt to talk to him; the endorsements in Baghdad, Amman and Washington; the sentiment of the Mattis letter; and the fact that after the Ramadi violence, a three-man delegation from the US embassy in Baghdad traipsed all the way to Amman to talk to al-Kharbit, the US intelligence team in Ramadi seems to have gone into psy-ops overdrive in a effort to discredit the man who once was one of their staunchest allies. They found a receptive ear in an embedded reporter from United Press International, who quoted an unnamed Marine intelligence officer claiming that al-Kharbit had become an unbalanced megalomaniac as a result of physical abuse and neglect he suffered as the child of a sheikh who had two intensively competitive wives. Al-Kharbit, according to UPI, had won the role of sheikh by foul means; had become a “cash cow for the insurgency” on the back of a lucrative smuggling empire; and had been far too cosy with Saddam’s regime. The intelligence officer was quoted: “He was a businessman, a thug with money, well dressed, and he sucked up to Saddam. Really. I’ve talked to his family. At least four [of them] diagnose him as mentally disturbed, one of them a doctor. We have independent assessments of his writings, some intercepts. He’s a megalomaniac. It’s a [medical] diagnosis. He has delusions of grandeur.”

I had a translator read the UPI report to Mudher in Arabic. He laughed off most of it and when she reached the “megalomaniac” comment, he scratched his nose and said: “That’s good, isn’t it?” But for the most part, he batted back each of the allegations and lectured the Americans on the shabbiness of their intelligence work: “They get it from cheap guys. It’s not very professional – don’t they know how to go step by step?”

Almost 500,000 people live in the dust-bowl towns of al-Anbar. Apart from Ramadi, its other main city is Falluja, the scene of the bloody battle, in which as many as 800 died, between US forces and the insurgency in April 2004. The Americans have lost more than 120 men in the province since President George W. Bush declared an end to major combat in May 2003 – fifteen of them since the 28 June handover of power. Such is the resistance, the Americans have declared much of Ramadi and nearby towns to be no-go areas, and they say they have narrowed their objective in the city to protecting a key local supply line – the highway through the town. An American reporter embedded with US troops near Ramadi quoted Major Thomas Neemeyer, head of intelligence for the 1st Brigade of the 1st Infantry Division: “They cannot militarily overwhelm us, but we cannot deliver a knockout blow, either,” he said. “It creates a form of stalemate.” Neemeyer told the Knight Ridder reporter: “There’s a possibility that we’ll say we’ll protect the government and keep travel routes open, and for the rest of them, to hell with ’em. To a certain degree we’ve already done it; we’ve reduced our presence.”

Al-Kharbit says he is working the scratchy phone lines to Ramadi every night till 3 a.m., trying to quell the violence. “What’s happening now is bad for us. It would have been ten times worse than Falluja if I didn’t settle them down – everyone lost their temper; and now there is too much tension,” he says.

It all sounds very menacing. Al-Kharbit’s “I told you so” speeches are read here in Jordan as self-absolution ahead of what might happen in al-Anbar if he does not get his way. He told me: “All that I told the US before the war has been proved right, so this will be my last advice. If the US will not listen, I will go home; do nothing; and when the place explodes, they will accuse me of starting it. They wanted me on the Iraqi Governing Council. I wouldn’t do it unless it was by election; they offered me money and business deals – I said ‘No.’ So let them leave us alone. I know that, as the days go by, the people they rely on now will fall and they will come back to me, and I will refuse to help them.” And he concluded not so cryptically: “After that, I will do what I’m going to do.”

In Amman, it is easier – and perhaps more frightening – than in Baghdad to see how the Ramadi convulsions feed into regional power-plays. Al-Kharbit wants to talk to the Americans but Washington is giving him the cold shoulder. The Turks, wary of Kurdish autonomy in northern Iraq, are putting out feelers to him, while Baghdad has unsubtly threatened to send proven Kurdish fighters to sort out predominantly Sunni al-Anbar. But the greatest anxiety here is about the role of Syria and Iran. These regimes are very close – both are under US sanctions and are vehemently anti-American, and the prospect of a US-dominated Iraq sandwiched between them is a cause of deep anxiety. Al-Kharbit is letting it be known that if he has nowhere else to turn, he does have a direct line to Damascus – recently he has had three meetings with the Syrian President, Bashar Asad. The Jordanian analyst, who prefers not to be named, says: “He needs to survive. He will go to whoever supports him.”

Watching events unfold from his study in Washington, Baram argues that Washington cannot deliver on al-Kharbit’s outlandish demands, but that the US needs some of what al-Kharbit is offering. So, he concludes, “Middle East negotiations must take place.” Amidst so much Iraqi gloom, Baram sees positive signs: “Al-Kharbit can do some of what he says he will do – so they should test him; and after the Americans killed so many of his family, it’s not easy for him to swallow his pride and offer to talk to Washington. It means he thinks that being arm’s length from the US is not a good idea and that this is the thinking of the people around him. He is saying that he has demonstrated his nuisance value, and now he wants to cash in.”

Between tales of carousing on the trans-Atlantic Concorde and dining with his Jewish friends in Montreal, al-Kharbit also reveals that he is feeling the heat from his tribe. “We don’t have anyone to save our family and our country,” he told me, complaining of a stream of phone calls from people in Ramadi demanding to know why he is still in Jordan. An observer said: “He feels that he is losing his grip on the tribe. He has to go back to them with one of two things. Either the US is listening to him – or it’s not, in which case the response in al-Anbar will be: ‘Let’s give them hell.’ And that’ll make Falluja look like a tickle. The absurdity of all this is that the Americans were talking about the Sunni Triangle before the war. Al-Kharbit and his tribe were the only people who didn’t fire a shot at the Americans and they allowed US Special Forces into the country three months before the war started.”

Paul McGeough

WHITEFELLA JUMP UP

Response to Correspondence

Germaine Greer

Too many of the people who rushed into print about my Quarterly Essay, Whitefella Jump Up, make the mistake of belittling their subject, so that one must conclude that they had nothing better to do. Some of the authors egregiously confess to being so hampered by prejudice that they couldn’t address the substance of my proposition for fear that it was a “stunt”. Only in Australia is my life of unremitting hard work assumed to be driven by an infantile need for attention; this libel is asserted so often that it is axiomatic and will probably feature in my obituary in the Murdoch press. I spend four months a year in Australia seeking so little attention that nobody knows I’m there, yet the sneering axiom remains unchallenged. Only in Australia is Greer “famous for being outrageous”. Australian newspapers never commission me to write on any subject whatsoever, but pick and choose from what they consider the most sensational articles commissioned from me by British editors and run them under headlines that have been known to side-track a busy prime minister into condemning me for an argument I never made. This is the truth behind P.A. Durack Clancy’s fantasy of my “ten out of ten for media coverage”. When commonsense dictated she should have listened.

Clancy’s way of defending the reputation of her Durack ancestors displays as well as I could wish just what history looks like seen from the whitefella’s end of the telescope. A “well-organised, well-disciplined reconnaissance” can also be described as a “land-hungry posse”; it’s all a matter of point of view. Clancy will never understand that Australia was in no need of opening up, that opening up was in fact evisceration, that what drove the operation was greed, or that the final outcome was disaster, any more than she can understand that my essay is not about her aunt who I’m sure was a wonderful person. Clancy calls me “a self-exiled academic”, which will puzzle English readers who don’t know that in Australia the word “academic” is an insult. Her determination to use the word is the more piquant because, though I still teach, it’s more than thirty years since I earned my living in universities. Clancy is not the only writer to dismiss me as an expatriate; Australians have still to understand that one could be a Martian and still write truth about Australia. It is a curious fact that they will accept the snap judgement of a reporter who spends two days in the country (provided it is a rave) before they will agree to consider the hard-won conclusions of someone who has spent more than half a lifetime there.

Clancy’s cousin Patsy Millett, who is also involved in the Durack hagiography industry, is as convinced as she is that I wrote Whitefella Jump Up because I was desperate for media exposure. The sole ground for this belief is the fact that I made two appearances on Australian television in fulfilment of my obligations to the publisher of Whitefella Jump Up. Millett was not to know that I had repeatedly refused to perform (for a fee) for the insignificant Denton, whose impertinences I find unbearable, and only agreed to the exposure (for no fee) for Whitefella Jump Up, which, in keeping with his unassailable mediocrity, Denton had not bothered to read and did not discuss at all. Millett somehow managed to describe my demeanour with Denton (who was so struck by my indignation that he wrote an apology) as “mischievously flirtatious”. Avid for any kind of exposure though I am said to be, I consent to my publishers’ pressure to allow interviews about my work only for radio and television. So far radio and television have allowed me to give a reasonably fair representation of myself and my views, as interviews in print do not, but not to a viewer as astigmatic as Millett. She mistakes the tone of Whitefella Jump Up, attributing scorn where there was none, and seeing a analysis of settler mythology as a personal “denunciation” of her mother, Dame Mary Durack. Millett also states that I made “headlines” in 1972 with a condemnation of “disgusting conditions” for Aborigines in Alice Springs. I don’t think of Aborigines as being kept in “conditions” like animals in a zoo, or of the Todd River camp as “disgusting” then or now. If I made any such headlines it’s news to me and – as is usually the case in Australia – the words in inverted commas aren’t mine. Clancy and Millett need have no fear; Kings in Grass Castles is still displayed in every airport bookshop in Australia and nothing I say is likely to reduce the numbers of people who just want a reasonably priced adventure story that insidiously and relentlessly displays white supremacy. The royalties will keep rolling in.

A more sophisticated version of the argumentum ad hominem holds that everything one writes must be about oneself, the view taken by the West Australian poet Fay Zwicky, whose poetry does seem to be all about herself, which is why I don’t find it particularly interesting. So much more does Zwicky know about myself than I, I can’t actually understand what she is saying. “As daughter of the priestly utterance with a vision of the ideal, her posture of defender of the dispossessed is theatrically compelling if impracticable.” Cripes. I learn from her quotations of herself that Zwicky has been writing about me since 1989 and always apparently in the same patronising terms. Funnily enough for a poet, she interprets “the shortest way” as a short cut, and then intones that there are “no short cuts to anything worthwhile”. You’d think, wouldn’t you, that a poet would twig that the shortest way could still be very long. She should have recognised the echo of Cathy Freeman; after her win in the Sydney Olympics, with the media of the world pushing microphones and cameras into her face, Cathy said in an exhausted voice and her face stiff with a pain that was not muscular, “I just want to sit on the ground,” turned away and did just that. When I say that we should sit on the ground I mean what she meant.

Les Murray is a poet of another order. I can’t think why he agreed to comment on Whitefella Jump Up, except perhaps that he had a Germaine Greer story to tell. It is true that rather more than “a few” years ago Murray read his poems at Cambridge University and I was there. I wasn’t “a lady” and I wasn’t “in the back row” and I didn’t assert. In fact I was rather hesitant about my question. I confessed that I had been struck by the way he read, by the liquidity of his consonants and the Aboriginality of his way of speaking, and I wondered if he would agree. He didn’t reply “I’ve got any number of Aboriginal relatives.” It wasn’t such a fashionable answer in those days. He was a bit bemused by my question, as was I. There was no intention to trap him, but we have got used to Murray’s irrational suspicions and I shan’t take it personally. His idea that I want to transfer “nominal ownership of our country from Queen Elizabeth to the Aboriginal people” is entirely his own. The queen is not the crown; the crown is the landlord not the “owner” and the people would be us and we would have accepted our Aboriginality and we would simply claim the land for its people. Tired of me and my jejune ideas, Murray soon reverts to his own pet notion of convergence, not to be confused with assimilation, and provides a poem in support of it. We may be in the same ball park, after all, but Murray wants to own the ball.

As the latest of many white interpreters of Aboriginal society to the whites, having lived in Maningrida for a year and now writing a book about her experiences, Mary Ellen Jordan might be considered to have a better claim than most to take me to task, but not by referring to notions I do not peddle, such as “a mystical plane of higher Aboriginality”. The clichés are not mine but Jordan’s; because she thinks in clichés she cannot hear that I’m saying something different. Nor can she notice what I’m taking care not to say, the words I refuse to use. She and I will always differ about the success or failure of colonisation, because she interprets the devastation she witnessed in Maningrida as evidence of colonisation, and I interpret it as evidence of its failure. America was successfully colonised; settlers spread across the country and stayed there, so that you have urban nuclei across the landmass; you have desert conurbations like Reno and Las Vegas and Los Angeles, next to which Alice Springs is a truck stop. American hunter-gatherers have enjoyed head rights, a guaranteed income without hand-outs, since the 1920s (which hasn’t done them much good because like the Australian hunter-gatherers they are still in mourning for the lost land). Compared to the United States, Australia never got going.

Unable to imagine this different perspective Jordan decides that my account is “inaccurate” when my position is actually opposite to hers. Jordan frets about what my proposed “Aboriginality” might consist in, but she would have been even more fretful if I had prescribed some pseudo-Aboriginal lifestyle. Aboriginal people themselves could not describe Aboriginality, because it would be as new to them as to us. She vaguely twigs that the word would come before the fact, as a commitment, and then dismisses the idea as not new. Then she fakes obtuseness. In whose scenario would admitting that the continent is Aboriginal and adopting hunter-gatherer values involve pulling down your house and heading for the desert? It’s much easier to hunt and gather by the beach, where most Australians live already. Can Jordan be the only Australian not to notice that more and more Australians are building houses in which living is done more outside than in and that our semi-naked children are out there demonstrating for sustainable development and down with the multinationals? If Australian official culture was hunter-gatherer, Australia would be committed to conservation and maintenance of resources rather than massive exploitation in the interests of RTZ and their ilk. If Australia provided the international hunter-gatherer forum, we could help to defend other hunter-gatherer minorities, all of whom are under pressure and virtually voiceless. And no, we wouldn’t have to wear ochre and possum-fur.

My essay was not written for Aboriginal people or about Aboriginal people, but you won’t be astonished, dear reader, if I tell you that their reactions were of overwhelming importance to me. Just as I don’t know of any part of Australia that is not Aboriginal, I don’t know any Aboriginal person who doesn’t know (in his head) and feel (in his heart) that the whole island continent belongs to the Aboriginal peoples. It is important to me that ordinary Aboriginal people, as distinct from those Aboriginal people in charge of interpreting Aboriginality to their white counterparts, think I’m on the right track. If the central thesis of Whitefella Jump Up is not conscientiously absurd, if the right thing might be doable after all, it is all credit to the patience of the Aboriginal peoples and none whatever to the captious and capricious whitefella. Lillian Holt’s response to my groping suggestion was typically generous; she understood my silences. She saw where I couldn’t go, what I wouldn’t say, out of respect for the reticence of the people who’ve taught me the little I know. There have been other responses like hers, some from people who don’t write articles for print, some from senior anthropologists who, while stroking their grey beards at my temerity, sent me papers of their own on the moral and political systems of Australia’s indigenous peoples. There is a space where the idea is alive, just, but there’s no hint of it on the op-ed pages of the worst English-language newspapers on earth.

Of all the responses to my essay Marcia Langton’s was of the greatest importance to me. Years ago, when she was a light-hearted and astonishingly inventive activist, Professor Langton and I used to know each other rather better than we do now. Then we were friends and I thought we always would be. Now I am startled by the vein of nastiness that runs through her response; why does she think I boast about being adopted by Kulin women? What’s to boast? She is perfectly entitled to doubt the “depth of my engagement in these issues” which must perforce be less than hers, but not to accuse me of “essentialist ideas about identity” as shaped by “race”. The whole essay is obviously or, as Australians would say blatantly, anti-essentialist. Professor Langton calls me “Dr Greer” though I am as much a professor as she is and she knows it, and laments that I didn’t address the question of Australian racism. This I didn’t do because it was not my subject, just as it was not my intention to add to the volume of polemic clustering about Keith Windschuttle’s amateur historiography or deplore the appalling abuse of Aboriginal women. Of course the view of history in my essay is truncated; what else could it be? Though my subject was not the suffering of Aboriginal people or the terrible offences we whitefellas have committed against them, this consciousness suffuses the whole short work, otherwise I wouldn’t have argued that the wanton destruction of the continent is an expression of the whitefellas’ frantic guilt. More seriously, Professor Langton makes a fundamental error in dealing with my modest proposal, in assuming that what I propose as a necessary condition for achieving any kind of cultural coherence (aka nationhood) I am also proposing as sufficient. In case I didn’t make myself unmistakeably clear (and the title of the essay could mislead), let me restate it. Australia will never achieve political maturity unless and until it recognises its ineradicable Aboriginality. Ultimately Professor Langton, despite her belief that an Aboriginal Australia is a ludicrous idea, consents to move into the imaginative space of the essay. Once upon a time in the centre, she would have been less uncomfortable there.

Langton expresses regret that in illustrating two hundred years of misfit between the settlers and the land I didn’t discuss more recent Australian literature, which she takes to disprove my case. Among the examples she cites is Australian journalist Nicolas Rothwell’s Wings of the Kitehawk, which grew out of a commission for a series of articles retracing the steps of Leichhardt, Sturt, Strehlow and Giles. Rothwell as much as Leichhardt uses “the landscape as the sounding-board for his heart”. Like Leichhardt he seeks in the kite-hawk of his title the “dark reflection of his own character”. As he dashes about “discovering” a country that was never lost, he enters fully into the solipsistic world of the explorers for whom the country exists to be traversed, described, classified, and ultimately conquered. Why Langton would imagine that such a book illustrates a new relationship between whitefellas and the land I cannot imagine.

Tony Birch allowed himself to get off my case and take the idea out for a run. He has a right as an Aboriginal person to think that I romanticise settler violence, but actually it breaks my heart that people oppressed and driven from their own country ended up having to oppress and extirpate the people of another country, perpetuating the cycle of outrage in an endless proliferation of evil. It may be because I have followed the desperate struggles of my Australian forebears that I feel unable to demonise them, but he’s right. I didn’t. If that’s romanticising their violence, I’m guilty as charged. Birch was interested and amused to wonder how my “country folk” would respond to my suggestion that they take a long hard look at themselves in the mirror and repeat, “I live in an Aboriginal country”. Well, mate, I’ve done it. In my secret Australian life, in Queensland, echt Hanson country, I made that very suggestion to one of my workforce. “I don’t consider there’s any difference,” he said. “I see myself as Aboriginal.” I thought that was a bit steep myself, at the time, but he does work in rainforest rehabilitation, eats bush tucker in huge quantities, and treats the land with deep reverence, and I wish there were a few million more like him.

Geoff Sharp’s response to Whitefella Jump Up is to translate my argument into his own moral terminology and to congratulate me for something I don’t understand myself to have done. His attempt to argue that Australian use of alcohol is not dysfunctional is valiant, but it doesn’t convince me and I doubt it would convince anyone else looking at the figures for deaths on the roads or domestic and other violence. Still, I am grateful to him because he has understood what the space is that I want Australians to jump up to, which is not mysticism (of which there is far too much already) but awareness.

It was not as if I expected readers of Whitefella Jump Up to bear me in triumph through the streets and cheer me to the echo. It would have been wonderful if numbers of clever people had seen some potential in my idea of Australia as an Aboriginal republic and amused themselves by seeing how far they could develop it. I cherished a faint hope that the chattering classes might kick the idea around for a week or two, long enough to see if its time might not have come, but they didn’t and it hadn’t. It will come though; mark my words. A hundred years from now, Australian children will be amazed to learn that Australia once considered itself a “British” country. They will understand what a hunter-gatherer republic might be, and how the interests of hunter-gatherer minorities have to be reflected in international policy because they are fundamental to any notion of sustainable development. It would make me swell in my grave with pride if Australia got to lead this international conscience-raising exercise but, as whitefellas apparently can’t grasp the lesson that blackfellas never give up struggling to teach, we’ll probably have to learn it from Canada and the Inuit.

I expected ridicule because, though I didn’t expatiate on the vicious racism that disfigures much of Australian society, I am well aware of it. I’m used to being patronised by the stay-at-home intellectual establishment as well, but much of what was said and written was meaner-minded than would have been considered seemly in the wider world, and made me ashamed for the people who had written it. English readers will now have the opportunity to see the essay in the context of the responses that it elicited, and may come to understand why I choose to endure the manifold disadvantages and discomforts of life in England rather than return to my birthplace. And before Zwicky gets on my case again, can I just say that for me homelessness is not a disaster? For me diaspora is the true human environment and homeland a murderous delusion. I don’t sing the Ha Tikva any more.

Not one of the responses to Whitefella Jump Up so much as gestured towards the most pressing motive for writing it, though it was plain to see. Whitefellas simply look away when I point to the devastation inflicted on the island continent in a mere two hundred years. The denial of the disaster continues; the devastation accelerates. Two weeks ago, the British invertebrate conservation charity Buglife of which I am a vice-president had to protest to the Australian government over its grant of permits for the importation of European bumblebees to pollinate green-house crops. Just as Nicolas Rothwell couldn’t see the terrible wounds on the face of the Pilbara or the exotic grasses changing the face of western Queensland, none of these commentators has understood my genuine desperation. Australia doesn’t owe whitefellas (including me) a living. They should stop ripping its guts out for a pittance, and sit on the ground. Sit on the ground, damn you, and think, think about salination, desertification, dieback, deforestation, species extinction, erosion, suburbanisation, complacency, greed and stupidity. As if.

Germaine Greer

SENDING THEM HOME

Correspondence

Anne Deveson

In the ’70s, Australia moved from its grudging acceptance of post-war refugees to become a country which was beginning to grasp the concept of multiculturalism and celebrate diversity rather than shun difference. At the time I was working in various human rights areas, and I felt that we had some reason to be proud of the changes that were being made. Today, as I consider Robert Manne’s devastating critique of Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers, I am no longer proud. I am ashamed.

Sending Them Home is an indictment of government expediency and public indifference, which together have led to Australia having the most brutal asylum system in the Western world. It also provides a valuable historical and political perspective as part of its effort to show why and how this occurred.

When I began reading the essay, I thought that I already knew most of the background to these events. But the relentless litany of political manipulation, lies and deceit that Manne and David Corlett recount is at times almost breathtaking. They show how official propaganda grossly exaggerated the scale of the problem and consistently attempted to discredit and demonise some of the most vulnerable people in the world. The public was fed stories about illegals, queue-jumpers, opportunists, money-grubbers, people who demanded dental treatment and people who threw their children overboard. This ill-assorted rhetoric extended to people whose children drowned because an overcrowded smuggler’s boat leaked, and sank. We were told they shouldn’t have been there in the first place. Throughout this debate, few people protested that human rights should be accorded to everyone, irrespective of behaviour or background.

Meanwhile, in our name Australia continues to perpetuate abuses against asylum seekers that have been condemned by human rights groups around the world. The Howard government has chosen to attack or ignore these reports, just as the Bush administration initially chose to ignore reports of Iraqi prisoner abuse in American-run military jails.

I place America and Australia in deliberate proximity. Yes, the acts themselves vary in kind and in degree, but the essential nature of humiliation and degradation remains the same. Torture is torture. Brutality is brutality. In Australia, we haven’t even the excuse of wanting intelligence information.

In Iraq (and almost certainly in Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay) military prisoners are held in some of the harshest conditions imaginable. They have little access to legal representation and no knowledge when – or if – they will be released. They are beaten, dehumanised, handcuffed, shackled, held in solitary confinement, denied proper medical treatment. An unknown number have been set upon by dogs, sexually humiliated and tortured. Numbers have died.

In Australia and in the Pacific Islands, asylum seekers – whose only crime was to seek sanctuary in this country – are imprisoned in some of the harshest conditions imaginable. Manne and Corlett cite extensive testimony and research to show the extent of the damage that we are still inflicting. Here also asylum seekers have little access to legal representation, and no knowledge when – or if – they might be released. Many have been beaten, dehumanised, handcuffed, shackled, held in solitary confinement and often denied proper medical treatment. Perhaps the worst abuses are those concerning children and these are starkly documented.

In Australia, asylum seekers have not been set upon by dogs, nor is there evidence of sexual humiliation and torture. Rather than be killed, people have tended to attempt suicide. Some have succeeded in this.

One of the most damaging aspects of our present system of mandatory detention is that most people in the camps become deeply depressed and powerless, deprived of hope. Sending Them Home has stories of such grief and suffering among adults and children that it seems unbelievable that such misery is not only ignored, but exacerbated by a cruel and rigid insistence on never showing compassion and never yielding on draconian laws. Resilience literature concerned with psychological torture shows that while it may not be inflicted in such a dramatic fashion as physical torture, its effects can be just as devastating and last for years, sometimes forever.

The government’s approach to the now well-documented increase in mental illness among those held for prolonged periods in detentions is to deny that this is a problem, or to claim that the people concerned brought it upon themselves. When John Howard was challenged about the cruelty of holding children behind the razor wire, he responded that the action of parents who bring children into dangerous situations should be the subject of criticism rather than the action of the government. He took no responsibility for their welfare.

Fear of reprisals, inside Australia and outside, prevents most people in the camps telling their stories. Yet stories are an essential part of identification and acceptance. This is what prevents the kind of dehumanisation that has led to such abuse.

It was the muster, like animals, by number, always by number. Hen! Fox! Come here Hen 22, or Fox 30 … and some guards are very very rude and bring the torch and shine it and wake you up. “What’s your number?” And you just scared. You absolutely shocked.

Two police officer grabbed my friend, grabbed his hair from the back and just bang his face to the corner of the police cage, till his face open, and blood poured out.

This man from the government, he come to speak to us … “This is not your country. This is the country of people who want to run it and rule it in this way. You are a nobody here. You have no rights.”

His spirit was broken, he had simply waited too long.

The government started deporting people by force. They would raid the people’s rooms at 4 a.m. and handcuff them. Then a few guards would hold them down and force injection into them. To make them go quietly. Someone told me the department called it “doing extractions”.

These are some of the actual words of asylum seekers that were used in Ros Horin’s production of Through the Wire, which received standing ovations during the Sydney Festival early in 2004. The play was based on interviews with asylum seekers who had fled political persecution, torture and the threat of death, hoping to find sanctuary in Australia. Instead, for three to four years they were imprisoned in desert detention centres, beaten and held in solitary confinement for months at a time. One of the young men played his own life-story in the production, while others came up on stage after the event to join the actors. Actually seeing these people who had fled such terror, and in some way or another survived, was overwhelmingly powerful.

One of the other characters in the play was Susan, a psychotherapist who had befriended one of the asylum seekers. She described her first impressions of one of the centres:

The great rolls of razor wire were like a symbol of everything barbaric suddenly sprung up in Australia … I had always asked myself, how did the Germans not speak out? How did the intelligent ones not speak out? I suppose they had a death threat hanging over their heads, but we don’t.

Manne tells how a “terrible coldness settled on very many Australian hearts”. I wonder if this bears any relation to the terrible coldness that settles on very many of our hearts when we are asked to respect and respond to Aboriginal rights. Does it come from fear of the other, white xenophobia, arrogance, material complacency? Perhaps a mixture of all these. Are we so easily led? These are questions that need to be debated. Our present system of deterrence has worked, but at a cost which has nothing to do with the Monty Pythonesque accommodation bills that are sent to former residents of detention centres. Instead of bills, they should receive apologies. Instead of rejection they should be welcomed, in the full knowledge that people from other countries have made an immense contribution to our own.

I believe that what has happened will leave a stain on our national psyche that will not readily be expunged. Who we are and who we become is influenced by our laws, our values, our ability to connect with people from other communities and other countries, our willingness to show generosity, decency and compassion. Manne asks, “Can a political nation lose touch with moral reality?” The answer is yes. Civilisation is an ideal that can be blown away in a few seconds. At the moment, there is precious little of it around.

Anne Deveson

SENDING THEM HOME

Correspondence

Carmen Lawrence

As I write, the contemplation of the politics of “indifference” is particularly pungent. It’s a week in which we’ve seen photographs of US soldiers grinning as they sexually humiliate and torture Iraqi prisoners, the US President being more discomfited by the fact that he wasn’t told about the allegations than by the offences themselves, and his Defence Secretary “more peeved than sorry” about the affront to decency and the violations of human rights these images depict. The rest of us are shocked out of our complacency, our indifference – at least for the moment – by the power of the images.

As Susan Sontag observes in her recent essay Regarding the Pain of Others, “photographs are a means of making ‘real’ (or ‘more real’) matters that the privileged and the merely safe might prefer to ignore.” The fact that it takes such photographs to disturb our comfort suggests that “our failure is one of the imagination, of empathy; we have failed to hold this reality in mind”; the reality of war – the killing power of modern armies and despots, indiscriminately raining bombs and chemicals on civilians.

How many pictures of death and bloody destruction are we not being shown? And why do these images, above others, command our attention? As one commentator raged, “What is it about these images of sexual humiliation that is more distressing to us than bodies smashed by the bombs in Falluja or children being ripped apart by cluster bombs?”

We have been protected from the images of death that the viewers of al-Jazeera have seen on their screens with relentless frequency – smashed bodies and ruined neighbourhoods. These images will tell them little that they were not already primed to accept. Our delicate sensibilities have been protected from the full force of the invasion of Iraq. Nor, it is true, did we know – or if we knew, much care – about the sadistic brutality of Saddam Hussein. But that cannot exonerate us from understanding what we now see. The fact that Saddam’s victims were un-remarked and unmourned in the West does not excuse us from responding now.

Sontag observes that such images can give rise to a variety of responses – calls for peace; for revenge. “As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb. To acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible.”

And, she might have added, to mobilise the PR machines. The International Red Cross and human rights groups repeatedly complained about the American military’s treatment of Iraqi prisoners. They received very little response from either the military or the US government until the graphic photographs were made public. As Seymour Hersh wrote, “The Army’s senior commanders immediately understood they had a problem; a looming political and public-relations disaster that would taint America and damage the war effort.”¹

Manne and Corlett remind us in their excellent essay that indifference is a potent psychological defence against the kindred feelings which might otherwise overwhelm our detachment from the daily toll of killings around the globe, from the suffering of the people who’ve sought our succour and been penned like animals in the camps on and beyond our shores. If we could see the anguish and suffering of those on Nauru, would we not insist that our government immediately abandon the “Pacific Solution”? Our leaders were careful to prevent us seeing any “humanising” images of those stranded on the Tampa, to deny any access – even for lawyers – to those on Nauru, and to prohibit any photographs, videos or media coverage of the conditions in the mainland camps. This suggests that they well understand the power of the image. They appreciate that “indifference” is difficult to sustain when we are confronted with the vivid immediacy of the visual image.

In a speech in 1999, Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner, spoke eloquently of the “the perils of indifference”.² He surveyed the legacy of the twentieth century, labelling it a “violent century”, a century which encompassed two world wars, countless civil wars, a senseless chain of assassinations, civilian bloodbaths in many armed conflicts, the inhumanity in the gulags, the tragedy of Hiroshima and the vile stain of the Holocaust. “So much violence”, says Wiesel, and perhaps more surprisingly, “so much indifference”.

Indifference, as Wiesel conceives it, is “a strange and unnatural state in which the lines blur between light and darkness, dusk and dawn, crime and punishment, cruelty and compassion, good and evil”.

“What are its causes?” he asks, and its “inescapable consequences? Is it a philosophy? Is there a philosophy of indifference conceivable? Can one possibly view indifference as a virtue? Is it necessary at times to practice it simply to keep one’s sanity, live normally, enjoy a fine meal and a glass of wine, as the world around us experiences harrowing upheavals?”

“Of course,” he says, “indifference can be tempting – more than that, seductive. It is so much easier to look away from victims. It is so much easier to avoid such rude interruptions to our work, our dreams, our hopes.” It is, as he points out, “awkward, troublesome, to be involved in another person’s pain and despair.” Yet there are costs. For the person who is indifferent, “his or her neighbours are of no consequence. And, therefore, their lives are meaningless. Their hidden or even visible anguish is of no interest. Indifference reduces the Other to an abstraction.”

Wiesel argues passionately that “to be indifferent to … suffering is what makes the human being inhuman”. In his view, indifference is more dangerous than anger and hatred. He points out that anger can be a stimulus for creativity or for altruism because one is angry at injustice. But, he argues, indifference is never creative. Even hatred may elicit a response. You fight it. You denounce it. You disarm it. Indifference elicits no response. Indifference is not a response.

Indifference is not a beginning, it is an end. And, therefore, indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor – never his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten. The political prisoner in his cell, the hungry children, the homeless refugees – not to respond to their plight, not to relieve their solitude by offering them a spark of hope is to exile them from human memory. And in denying their humanity, we betray our own.

It is instructive from this perspective to remember our responses to the terrorist attacks on September 11 – reactions of grief at so many lives cut cruelly short, horror at the unprecedented scale and the cold calculation of the act – all appropriate responses.

Contrast this to the relative indifference shown to the loss of life in Afghanistan which followed. For much of the media, the war in Afghanistan ended with the fall of Kabul, and apart from the search for bin Laden and al-Quaeda, it quickly became yesterday’s news although so many civilians are still being killed. As David Edwards points out, a careful reading of the press reports at the time shows that the number of Afghan casualties of the bombing – collateral damage – quickly exceeded the loss of life on September 11.³ This on top of the decades of civil conflict, brutal repression and starvation. The fate of millions of innocents stranded in refugee camps as a result of the continuing strife in Afghanistan has been a matter of “supreme indifference” in most of the Western media. As Edwards says, “The sheer scale of what has been so casually passed over is extraordinary.”

Why universal reactions of condemnation in one case and muted responses or outright indifference in the other? Why such a discrepancy?

Perhaps it’s because we can be seduced into believing that we have no obligation to people who do not share our culture or race or religion. Perhaps it’s because the differences between “them” and “us” can be magnified to a point where these people become so alien that they tend not to be seen as fully human. They stop existing as beings with whom we share a common humanity. As a consequence, our capacity to empathise with their suffering and take in the nature of the crimes committed against them becomes partially obliterated. So we can feel the full force of the barbaric murders on September 11, but the thousands of civilian casualties in Afghanistan hardly touch us. And we, like the US military, “don’t do body counts” in Iraq and blithely catalogue the atrocities committed by Saddam Hussein and his regime while locking up his victims in the desert.

Whatever its parents or its progeny, indifference, as Wiesel reminds us, is the most poisonous of human reactions when action is needed.

Manne and Corlett’s essay provides a timely and dispassionate reading of the history of our recent refugee policy, particularly the most recent element of forcible repatriation, and how it both illustrates and is informed by what they call “the new politics of indifference”. In seeking to understand why many Australians appear largely indifferent to the fate of asylum seekers, they ask how we could tolerate such a network of “inhumane and destructive quasi-penal institutions” – the Immigration Detention Centres. How could we see the images of children behind the wire and not be moved? How could we accept the Minister’s interpretation of “lip sewing” as just another example of “their” calculated attempts to exploit “our” goodness? How could we cheer a Minister of the Crown who refuses to accept that depression is a mental illness and describes a nearly catatonic young boy as “it” – four times in one interview? And how we can stand uncomplaining as the government sends many of them back to the dangerous, life-threatening circumstances from which they fled.

They ask, rhetorically, “Can a political nation lose touch with moral reality?” and conclude that it can and it did when our government refused to allow Ahmed Alzalimi join his grieving wife after the drowning of their three daughters on the SIEV-X; that at that moment, “the cardinal Orwellian political virtue of ‘common decency’ was nowhere to be found.” In like manner, no one in the Australian government “bothered even to pretend to care about whether the hunger strikers (on Nauru) lived or died”.

The ultimate obscenity of the asylum seeker policy is the forcible repatriation of people found to be genuine refugees and those who, for various reasons, cannot return to the countries from which they came. Among the poor souls who face this threat are the Sabian Mandaeans, followers of the teachings of John the Baptist, who have fled from Iran. Together with several hundred other refugees from the repressive regime, these families face forcible deportation as part of the Howard government’s secret agreement with the government of Iran. Many have already received notice that they could, at any moment, be sent back. Indeed, several have already been removed without prior warning, and one young man was recently rescued from imminent deportation after an eleventh-hour intervention by sympathetic lawyers. Most of this is happening without any public reaction at all.

The government has persistently refused to make public the contents of the Memorandum of Understanding that details this agreement, telling the Senate and also in answer to one of my questions, that it was “not in the public interest” to make the document public. They have also consistently refused to provide any guarantees for the safety of those deported to Iran, or anywhere else for that matter. This despite the fact that the head of the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, Justice Louis Joinet, has made it clear that, having visited Iran to inspect the human rights situation, he came away with deep concerns about the nature of Australia’s agreement with Iran, particularly the fact that, “There are no guarantees as to what will happen when they (Australian detainees) are returned to Iran.” He also expressed some scepticism about whether so-called voluntary returns would actually be voluntary.

There is no doubt that the Howard government does not regard itself as seriously bound by our international treaty obligations. But even by their degraded standards, this represents a flagrant disregard of the obligations under the Refugee Convention not to return a refugee to “a place where his or her life or liberty is threatened” and of the Torture Convention not to send a person to “a place where there is a real prospect of torture”.

While the federal government has insisted that none of the Iranians threatened with forcible deportation are owed protection under Australia’s migration laws, many of those facing deportation fear that, in the very act of providing information for their refugee applications, they have exposed themselves to greater danger if they are returned to Iran. This is especially true for those who are easily identified by religion, occupation or region, even if their names are withheld. Louis Joinet told radio journalist Tom Morton that “the very act of fleeing takes on a political complexion” and in certain cases, “this has given rise to persecution.” When apprised of this elevated risk to those forced to return, Philip Ruddock stated the implausible conclusion that if Australia’s refugee assessment process has found that they are not refugees – i.e. that they do not have a well-founded fear of persecution – then they will not be persecuted. By definition. Yes, Minister.

The Mandaeans, a tiny pre-Christian religious minority, would, almost certainly, be readily identified from Tribunal and Court transcripts. Because their religion is not recognised by the government of Iran, they are subjected to discrimination and denied the normal protections of the law. The Federal Court, in an appeal against a decision of the Refugee Review Tribunal heard last year, gave the following measured assessment of religious persecution in Iran:

In Iran all religious minorities including Christians and of course Jews, suffer varying degrees of persecution, vis a vis the Shi’ite Muslim majority. The State, since the religiously inspired revolution, does not, for example, permit non-Muslims to engage in government employment or attend university and there are restrictions on the extent to which they can fully practise their religion, for example, by teaching it. If injured or killed, they or their dependants apparently receive less compensation than would the Muslim majority, and they may suffer in assessments of their credibility as witnesses before Iranian courts.⁴

Religious persecution in Iran is a matter of public record and the subject of frequent comment from human rights observers and even from the US State Department. Louis Joinet told journalists that Iran was detaining dissidents and others without due process on a “large scale” and keeping them in solitary confinement. Human Rights Watch also reported that:

The arbitrary detention of students and the targeting of government critics have increased. Scholars and students who criticise the ruling clerical establishment have faced death sentences, teaching bans or long prison terms.

There are many recorded cases of the execution of minority religious leaders for no other reason than that they practise their faith and organise their followers. Iran is almost as enthusiastic as the United States in its use of the death penalty, and for much less serious offences. Amnesty records that the death penalty and various brutal forms of torture were imposed “for issues concerning freedom of association and freedom of expression”. In one year alone 113 prisoners, including long-term political prisoners, were executed in Iran. Many were also flogged, frequently in public.

Although there are several Federal Court injunctions still standing between these people and other Iranian detainees threatened with deportation, it is clear that the Howard government is determined on a program of forced deportation, first of those people whose claims for asylum have failed and then of those on temporary protection visas whose countries of origin have been deemed to have improved sufficiently to allow their return. Even a cursory examination of the state of security and basic infrastructure in both Iraq and Afghanistan would lead to the inevitable conclusion that people returned would confront serious risks to their lives and health.

The government apparently wants to test the resistance of Australians to this indecency; to estimate just how profound is our indifference. I hope they are unpleasantly surprised and that Australians will draw the line at forcing people back to situations where their very lives are at risk.⁵

As I was reading the Manne and Corlett essay, I was struck by the paradox that at the same time as “a terrible coldness settled on very many Australian hearts”, many others were galvanised into action as they had never been before. While the majority of our fellow citizens may have endorsed the Howard government’s (and the Opposition’s) “pitiless” response to those few thousand souls fleeing persecution at the hands of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, there were many others who repudiated the rhetoric of “illegals” and “queue-jumpers” and “inappropriate behaviours”. For them, Tampa and the Pacific Solution were a bridge too far, the moment when the politics of indifference had to be challenged.

In my nearly twenty years in public life, I have never seen so many people devote so much energy, money and time to give practical effect to their convictions: lawyers acting without fee to challenge the prolonged detention of asylum seekers; writers and journalists meticulously unpicking the contrived fabric of deceit surrounding the official policies; men and women from churches and charities raising money, collecting furniture and clothing to support the refugees refused permission to work and thrown on the mercy of the community; artists probing the impact of our cruelty on the men, women and children we sent to remote camps and refused our compassion; medical professionals insisting that we understand the inevitably destructive consequences of the policies; academics and advocates researching and devising better policies; rural Australians standing up for TPV holders and helping them endure the separation from their families; decent people everywhere writing letters and visiting those detained and lobbying politicians for their release, setting up websites and discussion groups, and writing letters to the papers and often copping abuse for their troubles; ordinary members of both the major political parties bucking their leaders and pushing for policy change.

Perhaps there is hope, after all. I know from my many conversations with these good people that they are not likely to give up until we return to a refugee policy based on the values of a common humanity. While some of us clearly want to slip into insensibility, living moment to moment in soporific detachment from the suffering of others and finding no need to puzzle over the obvious injustices in our world, others understand the need to inquire and to reach more complex understandings – and to act to reduce the suffering of others. Like Robert Manne, they are anything but indifferent.

Carmen Lawrence

1. The New Yorker, 17 May 2004.

2. http://www.edchange.org/multicultural/speeches/elie_wiesel_perils.html

3. Edwards, David, “Media indifference to the Afghan crisis: Why is the mainstream media ignoring the mass death of Afghan civilians?”, The Ecologist, March 2002.

4. Federal Court of Australia, SCAT vs Minister for Immigration and Indigenous Affairs, 30 April 2002, http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/FCAFC/2003/80.html

5. The National Anti-Deportation Alliance has been formed to stop these forcible deportations.

SENDING THEM HOME

Correspondence

Amanda Vanstone

Robert Manne’s essay Sending Them Home: Refugees and the New Politics of Indifference is the latest addition to a genre that is popular within a small but articulate section of the Australian community. Dear to the heart of this collection of church leaders, journalists and academics is the view that a large section of the Australian community is racist and xenophobic. Perhaps because they feel unappreciated by the wider Australian community, many Australian intellectuals have tended to regard their “ordinary” brothers and sisters as redneck and racist. The views of this bunch in relation to asylum seeking are built on a psychological foundation of denial about some very uncomfortable realities.

The first is that global inequality and the growth of people smuggling combine to undermine the integrity of the international system, designed to grant protection to those people most in need.

The reality is that 1.2 billion people live in absolute, dire poverty, surviving on less than a US$1 a day. The world has millions of vulnerable people and people smugglers will always prey on that vulnerability.

Secondly, our tender-minded intellectuals cannot face the fact Australia’s capacity to provide places for refugees is necessarily finite. If we accept as a refugee someone whose claims are doubtful, we do so at the expense of someone else whose claims for permanent protection may be stronger. We can only help so many people and nothing can change that.

Focused on his own compassion and always ready to point an accusing finger, Robert Manne seems impervious to these uncomfortable realities. If he had taken a long hard look at some basic facts, he might have been much slower to condemn governments tasked with making the tough decisions these facts impose.

According to the International Organisation for Migration there are an estimated 30 to 40 million illegal immigrants worldwide. Annually, around 500,000 illegal migrants enter Europe and another 700,000 enter the USA. It is obvious to anyone with an open mind that the overwhelming majority of these people are not refugees.

Most of the 10 million people the United Nations estimates are genuine refugees live in camps where life is hard, generally much harder than in many of the source countries for Australia’s recent unlawful entrants. They are not wandering the world looking for a place to stop. Of course it is true that genuine refugees still cross borders to seek protection in Western countries. And it is important that access to a refugee determination process and a place of protection be available to all who need to seek protection.

Robert Manne is not moved by the plight of people in camps, however; they, it seems, are the world’s problem, not Australia’s.

But the reality today, which is confirmed by the statistics of asylum claims in Western countries, is that the overwhelming majority of claimants in recent years have not been found to be refugees.

In the Netherlands, for example, in 2002 only 0.6 per cent of claimants were given refugee status and a total of 12.2 per cent were given some form of protection. In Germany less than 10 per cent of claimants were successful in 2002 in gaining any form of protection.

In many cases, the people who arrive illegally in Western countries have travelled through countries where they could have found protection. Indeed, many of them may have enjoyed long-term protection in another country. Their motives for proceeding to the wealthy West are obvious. They want a better standard of living. This is no doubt a fact that causes discomfort for the guilt merchants.

Robert Manne admits that “very large numbers” of people have sought to exploit refugee laws by “claims of persecution which are either exaggerated or invented”. However, he does not dwell on this point or face the scale of the problem. The psychology of denial requires him to move on quickly.

With hundreds of thousands of people flowing into affluent European Western countries and most claims for asylum being rejected, there is inevitably a buildup of people without legal status. The many legal obstacles to removal of unsuccessful claimants in most jurisdictions are a major part of the problem.

In Europe, in particular, there have been relatively few removals. European countries have emphasised the importance of voluntary return. If failed asylum seekers are not removed, then assessment processes seem pointless and they can be allowed to move slowly.

What has happened, to be candid about it, is that the Europeans have made a virtue out of necessity. They cannot easily prevent arrivals, nor easily remove people, so they have been happy for their response to be portrayed as an exercise in compassion. Things are changing, however. The Europeans are more actively tackling these issues. Some of the approaches being considered mirror those taken by the Australian government. Robert Manne needs to open his eyes and see what is happening.

The Netherlands, a longstanding champion of the UN Refugee Convention, has recently confronted the problem of failed asylum seekers. In February this year the Dutch Parliament legislated to introduce involuntary removal for failed asylum seekers. This applies to an estimated 26,000 people who have arrived since the introduction of new asylum legislation in 2001. Some still have avenues of appeal open, but they now know that involuntary removal stands at the end of the process.

The sad reality is that the international system of protection for people fleeing persecution is under threat from economically motivated illegal migration. Unless the integrity of the asylum system can be ensured – and this means that failed asylum seekers must be returned – the whole system is in danger of falling into disrepute. Attacks on the return of failed asylum seekers are undermining the integrity of the 1951 Convention.

Unless governments around the world actively discourage the use of people smugglers the United Nation’s system becomes a second-class system, available only to those who cannot afford to pay a people smuggler.

The hope of an orderly system of resettlement for those refugees most in need of a new home is under threat from those who are happy for people smugglers to decide who gets resettled

Robert Manne makes much of the fact a large percentage of boat people in the years leading up to Tampa had been successful in their asylum claims in Australia. Yet he does not acknowledge that this suggests that Australia’s system is fair and that people whose claims are not recognised should leave Australia. His world is a world where everyone can have what they want, where no one gains something else at the expense of anyone else. This is the attitude of the armchair commentator, not someone with actual responsibility for making the tough decisions of government.

Manne rejects any connection between places granted “onshore”, that is, asylum claims approved for people who have arrived in Australia one way or another, and “offshore places”, that is, places granted to people outside Australia. He cannot face the reality that having set the number of places to be taken by refugees, any place taken by an “onshore” grantee will be at the expense of an “offshore” applicant.

Yet this is the way our system works. We grant as many places per year as we think we reasonably can. In 2004–05 it will increase from 12,000 to 13,000. If any of these places are unfilled in the year in which they are allocated, they are added to the allocation of the following year. Our commitment to providing protection to people most in need is clear and transparent. Where a person on a temporary protection visa no longer needs protection and leaves Australia, the place vacated will be added to the allocation available for that year. This is a transparent process. It makes brutally clear the fact that we live in a world where all of the good things we take for granted in Australia are very limited, globally.

Nowhere is Robert Manne’s state of denial more evident than in relation to the Pacific Solution. The decision to hear asylum seekers’ claims outside Australia has been very effective in stemming the flow of asylum seekers into Australia by boat.

The success of the Pacific Solution is something that seems to have Robert Manne shifting uncomfortably in his armchair. The objective of asylum seekers heading for Australia is to get a foothold in Australia, rather than to gain protection that may well be available elsewhere. If they make it to Australia, Australian courts and Australian refugee advocates offer a hope that people can stay, irrespective of the strength of any refugee claim. For claimants in detention, the advocates fight for release. For people granted a temporary visa, the advocates campaign for permanent visas.

Manne cites the case of the Minasa Bone, the Indonesian fishing vessel carrying fourteen Turkish Kurds that landed on Melville Island in 2003. He notes that the excision of Melville Island from Australia’s migration zone effectively prevented claims from being made in Australia. He fails, however, to mention how this story ends, with offshore processing. When the fourteen were given the opportunity to have their claims heard in Indonesia by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), seven did not even bother to take this opportunity – they caught the first plane back to Turkey. The rest had their claims refused and left shortly after that. In interviews with the media before leaving, they described their motives as a desire to set up kebab shops and earn $8000 a week, and to meet Australian women.

Robert Manne and other refugee advocates never explain why they are unwilling to abide by the umpire’s rules. It is evident, however, that they are sympathetic to any claim made by an asylum seeker and ready to reject as biased the assessments made by Immigration Department officials or the Refugee Review Tribunal.

Part of Robert Manne’s problem is his unwillingness to consider numbers. He wants us to focus on the 12,000 people who sought to reach Australia in the period in question. “There is little we can do for the overwhelming majority of the fourteen million.” He calls this “the ethics of proximity”. I call it the ethics of tokenism. This is just the salving of a conscience that cannot face the ugly reality of millions of refugees, let alone the much bigger moral problem of global inequality.

The most moral and compassionate way of responding to this horrendous problem is not to take the easy way out by accepting only those on your doorstep, but to determinedly take first those most in need. Largely they will not be people who can afford to pay people smugglers.

The fact is that Australia’s refugee and humanitarian program, which will have 13,000 places in 2004–05, can play an important part in helping the UNHCR to work with affected governments to solve the problems of refugees in camps. The UNHCR’s preference is always for people to return to their homes if this is at all possible. Where this is not possible, resettlement can play a critical role in resolving longstanding problems.

Over the past decade Australia has welcomed a million migrants from all over the world. Included in this are more than a hundred thousand refugee and humanitarian entrants. This is not a sign of a country that is xenophobic or racist. It is not cold or lacking in compassion. But clearly the majority of Australians, who support the government’s policy, are able to face harsh realities that leave tender-minded intellectuals in denial.

Robert Manne and other woolly-minded critics of our refugee policy need to face the fact that their armchair moralising is not some harmless excess of compassion. It provides critical support to the burgeoning people-smuggling business, which in turn threatens the future of the international refugee protection system. If this thought does not get through the net of denial that lets him sleep peacefully every night, he could reflect on the responsibility he would hold for any future loss of life through people getting into leaky boats and attempting to enter Australia unlawfully.

Amanda Vanstone

BEAUTIFUL LIES

Correspondence

John Benson

The issues discussed in Tim Flannery’s Beautiful Lies raise a complex but important debate with major ramifications for how we manage the Australian landscape. The debate is about vegetation structure and fire ecology. It’s also about the way simplistic statements made by reputable authors such as Tim Flannery can be used to justify ongoing damage to the Australian landscape.

First, I must refute some accusations Dr Flannery made in QE11 in response to a letter by the NSW Minister for the Environment, Bob Debus. Debus challenged Flannery’s assertion that increased bushfire intensity is due to less regular burning and that a run of intense fires has caused species extinctions in places such as Royal National Park near Sydney. He argued that there are other explanations for species loss including the introduction of exotic predators and that the fires in the Park were due to extreme climatic conditions. Arson has also increased in recent decades. To support some of his case Debus cited a scientific review paper that I co-authored with Phil Redpath on the nature of pre-European vegetation and fire regimes in southern-eastern Australia.¹

In his response to Debus, Flannery suggested that Redpath or I contributed to the Debus letter before it was published. This was not the case. Neither of us was aware of it until after it was published. However, we agree with its content. Although changed fire regimes may have played a role in some species extinctions in Australia, this has probably been insignificant compared to the impacts of domestic stock, exotic predators and European land use practices.

Flannery also asserted that we had published an “outright lie” about his writings on Aboriginal burning frequency. In our article we stated that the early explorers’ statements were used to give an impression that burning took place annually. In his book The Future Eaters Flannery used the term “frequent” in describing Aboriginal burning practices. However, he failed to qualify this by mentioning Aborigines did not burn everywhere “frequently”. The idea that Aborigines “more or less annually” burnt most of the country has been stated in places such as the booklet prepared by Ryan et al, The Australian landscape – Observations of Explorers and Early Settlers.² They refer to Flannery’s writings to support their case. This booklet is discussed below.

Fire and the mega-fauna

In The Future Eaters, Tim Flannery states that the Aborigines burnt the land “frequently”. This supports his hypothesis of a human blitzkrieg that caused the mega-fauna extinction. In brief, Flannery considers that the Aborigines hunted the mega-fauna to extinction within 2000 years of their arrival 40,000–50,000 years ago. He proposes that this led to a profusion of vegetation that fuelled large-scale bushfires which in turn led to the Aborigines frequently burning the bush to control fuel levels. Flannery asserts that this frequent burning changed the previous vegetation into open grassy woodland and grasslands. He then asserts that a cessation of Aboriginal burning since European settlement led to a regrowth of shrubby vegetation and this caused species extinctions, particularly of medium to small-sized native mammals. This is why in Beautiful Lies and elsewhere Flannery suggests re-introducing frequent burning to manage the bush now.

To the lay reader this sounds like a plausible hypothesis – it is certainly ingenious in its scope. However, it is not supported by much scientific evidence and it is likely that the hypothesis is wrong. Climate change over millions of years was the main director of vegetation change in Australia. Fires have raged on this continent for millions of years including during the times of the mega-fauna. The evidence for this lies in soil cores and palaeo-botanical research, some of which is beautifully summarised in Mary White’s book After the Greening: the Browning of Gondwana. Australia’s flora have adjusted to the drying out of the continent as it drifted north into lower latitudes by developing hard wax-covered leaves, reduced transpiration, hard woody seed coats, underground root systems that allows vegetative re-sprouting and other features. Many of these features are also advantageous to plants surviving fire.

Even if the Aborigines did rapidly extinguish the mega-fauna through hunting pressure, other species would most likely have taken over their herbivore niches. In any case, we know that invertebrate animals account for much of the herbivory of Australian vegetation. As for the loss of small mammals due to cessation of burning after European settlement, this seems an illogical argument since they require vegetation cover to protect them from predators. Cover is lost with frequent burning but is gained when there are long inter-fire periods. To add to the debate, there is evidence that early graziers burnt some areas more than the Aborigines (see our 1997 article for detailed references and discussion about this). Furthermore, recent research at Cuddie Springs south of Walgett in northwestern NSW by Judith Field of the University of Sydney points to an 8000-year co-existence (from 36,000 to 28,000 years ago) of Aborigines with the mega-fauna. If Field’s data is accurate, it not only challenges Flannery’s Future Eaters blitzkrieg hypothesis but also the consequences of that hypothesis about the scope of Aboriginal burning regimes. Field considers climate change may have played a major role in the extinction of the mega-fauna.

Regrowth and land clearing

The other aspect of this debate involves regrowth of vegetation and this relates to the discussion on fire above. The people who are the greatest advocates for clearing vegetation in NSW and Queensland are dry-land grain croppers, cotton growers and beef cattle graziers. Big agribusinesses are involved along with some wealthy farmers. Publications such as The Australian Landscape – Observations of Explorers and Early Settlers, professional rural lobby groups and influential individual farmers have used Flannery’s and other popular writers’ views about fire and regrowth to justify land clearing. They state that there has been massive regrowth of woody vegetation (shrubs and trees) due to a cessation of Aboriginal burning and by clearing it they are restoring it to a pre-European vegetation structure. This is largely nonsense but it has fooled some politicians and bureaucrats.

These people are clearing land to grow crops, not to restore some notion of a natural vegetation structure. If they were simply thinning regrowth it would be less of a problem for the environment. However, one cannot count a wheat crop as an environmental gain. Cropping wipes out most native species, destroys much of the soil biota and replaces them with an exotic monoculture. It’s not as if we don’t have lots of cleared country. In most parts of the Australian wheatbelt less than 20 per cent of the original extent of native vegetation remains. Yet they are trying to clear more of this despite documented species and ecosystem decline and the long-term ramifications of rising salinity levels to agricultural production. And they are pushing the grain belt further into marginal land at a time when climate change scenarios are predicting less reliable rainfall in these regions.

Nyngan is a town of about 3000 people on the western edge of the NSW wheatbelt. The surrounding countryside has moderate to poor soils and an unreliable and relatively low rainfall. It is marginal cropping country. Some landholders want to convert grazing country to crops to cash in on the better commodity prices for grains than for sheep or cattle. This requires them to clear the country. In fact, they want to clear about 80 per cent of the private land in the region. Recently massive areas have been cleared in the region leading up to the introduction of new vegetation management laws in New South Wales. This has mostly been done without permission under current laws. The land clearers in the Nyngan region argue they are clearing “woody shrubby regrowth”. However, in clearing the shrubs they sometimes also clear everything including old eucalyptus and wattle trees. More importantly, they are sowing annual crops so this radically impacts on the environment. The farmers say the woody regrowth is causing soil erosion and the shrubs have grown due to a lack of Aboriginal burning – thereby reflecting Flannery’s writings. An expert science panel reviewed the literature on soil erosion in relation to woody regrowth. It reported that site management, seasonal conditions and grazing pressure are most important in determining ground cover and therefore erosion.³ It is possible that the loss of topsoil after 150 years of excessive grazing, particularly during drought periods, may have created conditions that favour the survival of shrub species over herbaceous plants. Nevertheless, this does not suggest that shrub species did not occur in those areas, but rather are advantaged by the prevailing land management activities.

The creation of a myth

In 1995 a booklet was published titled The Australian Landscape – Observations of Explorers and Early Settlers. It was compiled by David Ryan, a former fire management officer with State Forests of NSW, Jim Ryan, an ex-hydro engineer and landholder from the town of Bredbo on the NSW Southern Tablelands, and Barry Starr who was then an employee in the former NSW Department of Land and Water Conservation (Murrumbidgee Region). The timing of the publication of this booklet coincided with the introduction of the first regulations in New South Wales to control land clearing. These regulations were in response to a public outcry over land clearing rates in New South Wales and the impact this was having on landscape functioning, river systems, wildlife and soil salinity.

The Ryan booklet was financed by the NSW Farmers Association and the former NSW Department of Land and Water Conservation. One could interpret it as a propaganda tool to convince those in power that clearing land was restoring the landscape to a notional natural state. It relied on the selective use of quotations from early explorers and some popular texts to support its case. One of these was Tim Flannery’s The Future Eaters and Flannery has repeated similar statements in his essay Beautiful Lies.

In 1997 Phil Redpath and I exposed major flaws in the Ryan booklet. A review of its historical references showed that different interpretations could be made of journal passages when read in their full context and when other passages were taken into account. The scientific literature on species–fire interactions, also reviewed, cast further doubt on the claims in Ryan et al and in Flannery’s writings on fire and vegetation. Yet the views of Ryan et al have been perpetrated as a myth by some farmer lobby groups, elements of the forest industry and others in order to justify frequent widespread burning and clearing native vegetation.

This is not just an esoteric academic debate. It impacts on the sustainable management of the natural resources of this fragile continent. It is about the way some loosely researched material in Tim Flannery’s The Future Eaters and in his essay Beautiful Lies are taken as scientific fact and used by those intent on continuing the degradation of the Australian landscape for economic gain without being made accountable for the long-term effects of consequences such as salinity.

Other controversies

Much of Beautiful Lies is drawn from Flannery’s earlier book The Future Eaters. I have no qualms with most of the essay’s content including the sentiments expressed in the chapters titled “The Founding Lie”, “White Liars”, “The Colonial Drain”, “Fighting for the Future”, “Australia Adrift” and “Sweet and Sour Nation”. These discuss some important social issues and matters to do with sustainable management of rural lands including the problems of over-allocation of water, soil erosion and degradation and salinity. Flannery is right to raise these big natural resource issues but he is wrong to criticise the benefits of the national reserve system and wilderness to the conservation of biodiversity and natural ecosystems and by default to our own sustainability.

Beautiful Lies contains several controversial statements, some of which were debated on the ABC Radio National Earthbeat program in April 2003. The participants in this debate were Flannery, a New Zealand whale expert Mike Donahoe, and me. Besides the issue of fire frequency, the debate covered these matters:

Cats: In his essay Flannery states that there is no evidence that cats caused the extinction of any species or animal in Australia. During the radio debate I handed Flannery a copy of a definitive review paper on this topic compiled by Sydney University researchers that reveals that up to seven species of animal may have become extinct due to predation by cats by 1850.⁴ Other factors such as sheep and changed fire patterns may have played a role but you cannot state, as Flannery does in Beautiful Lies, that cats did not cause any extinctions.

Sustainable whaling: It seems Flannery fell for Japanese propaganda about sustainable harvesting of Minke whales by repeating their hypothesis that the relatively large numbers of Minke whales may be inhibiting the recovery of large, rarer whales such as the South Right Whale through competition for food. Mike Donahue shot this hypothesis down by revealing that Minke whales eat different food than Southern Right whales and that illegal whaling by the Russians in the 1970s was mostly to blame for the lack of recovery of the Southern Right whale.

Wilderness, the reserve system and Aboriginal burning

In the chapter “The Dead Hand” Tim Flannery plays down the importance of the “flagship” battles won by the environment movement such as protecting special places such as Frazer Island and the Franklin River, stopping whaling, saving tracts of forest from the chainsaws and establishing a system of conservation reserves and wilderness areas to sample biodiversity and protect landscapes. He considers that reserves have failed to protect species from becoming extinct because they were intensely managed by Aborigines through the application of frequent fire and now are not.

Fire doubtless has a role to play in species management. By studying the ecology of a range of species that occur in an area, an appropriate fire regime can be implemented including through controlled burning if that is required. And burning to protect property is not in question here. However, species extinctions from natural remnants are most likely explained by the direct and indirect impacts of fragmentation of the landscape – a fact well established in scientific literature.

Taking Royal National Park near Sydney as an example, it is now surrounded by an urban sprawl, is encroached upon by domestic pets including dogs and cats, the voracious fox is common and pollution of waterways is difficult to control. These factors explain the loss of wildlife. You cannot just blame this on altered fire regimes due to a cessation of frequent Aboriginal burning. In any case we do not know how the area was burnt by Aboriginal people, although, paradoxically, recent charcoal evidence from Gibbon Lagoon near the town of Bundeena suggests that fire may have increased in frequency since European occupation of the region.⁵ This is the opposite scenario to what Flannery suggests. Besides, when it comes to assessing fire frequency the most informative approach to study is the life cycle of a number of species of plants and animals that exist in an area.

Researchers have demonstrated that a fire-free interval in the order of 8–25 years is required to maintain biodiversity in shrubby sandstone country around Sydney, including Royal National Park. This possibly mirrors long term El Nino climate patterns. However, it needs to be emphasised that appropriate inter-fire intervals vary for different types of vegetation in different locations across Australia, a fact recognised in many bushfire management planning instruments.

In Beautiful Lies Flannery questions the concept of wilderness, suggesting it supports terra nullius. He has stated that the Aborigines managed all of the landscape therefore none of it (other than the uninhabited Lord Howe Island) was wilderness at the time of European settlement. In a recent article in the Sydney Morning Herald’s Good Weekend magazine about the Wollemi National Park wilderness west of Sydney, Flannery was quoted as stating that Aboriginal people ought to be allowed to “hunt, use four-wheel drives and set up camps” because they originally managed these areas.

Over thousands of years Aboriginal people would have traversed every part of Australia but it is doubtful they intensively fire-stick managed all of it as was suggested in the 1950s and 1960s by anthropologists such as Tindale and Rhys Jones. Aboriginal numbers were limited (300,000–1,000,000 for the continent) and they concentrated mostly where Europeans now live or farm – on higher nutrient soils that produce more game and edible plant life. I agree that Aborigines may have regularly patch-burnt some grassy woodlands, grasslands, areas around camps and access routes. However, shrubby places such as Wollemi National Park are so low in nutrients it is doubtful that many Aborigines could have survived there other than for short visits, let alone intensively managed the whole 500,000 ha area. The recently discovered art sites in Wollemi may confirm the area was visited for certain purposes.

The biology of species reveals more about how places may have been burnt either by Aborigines or by natural fires. Many reserved lands in south-eastern Australia contain groups of plant species that are intolerant of being burnt every few years. Some vegetation types such as rainforest or saltbush cannot survive frequent fire at all and may become locally extinct. It is unlikely that Aboriginal people would have burnt too frequently if it affected food resources in rainforest or wetter forests. However, they may have regularly patch-burnt grassland areas to stimulate native yams that were a staple diet in south-eastern Australia. The point is that different types of vegetation were probably burnt differently by Aborigines. However, it beggars belief that such small numbers of people could have burnt the whole country all of the time as is suggested by some popular writers.

The national conservation reserve system and wilderness areas are the prime means of ensuring the survival of species simply because it is unlikely they will be grossly changed by humans. This contrasts with bushland on private land that is being cleared or over-grazed and some state forests that are being felled at unsustainable rates. At least our national parks are being professionally managed, albeit on limited budgets, by well-trained people who are dedicated to maintaining biodiversity. To downplay the importance of the national reserve system is foolhardy, yet this is what Flannery does in Beautiful Lies. However, most biologists (me included) agree with Flannery’s call to improve the sustainable management of the ecosystems across rural landscapes as this is the matrix between the conservation reserves. This (mainly private) land is vital to the long-term survival of numerous species and to future agricultural production. For these reasons a number of scientific colleagues and myself have been calling for a cessation of broadscale land clearing for over a decade now and have endeavoured to persuade governments to help farmers rehabilitate over-cleared regions! In that decade about six million hectares of bushland in Queensland and between 500,000 ha and 1 million hectares of bushland in New South Wales have been cleared. The next year or so will see if the politicians are serious about stopping this onslaught. Most of the public certainly want it stopped.

After the ABC radio debate on Beautiful Lies Tim Flannery lent over to me in the studio and said “I guess I should do better checks on my facts.” I agreed. Tim Flannery does himself a disservice by not doing so. He has a gift for writing and raises some important issues. However, he sometimes covers topics in which he lacks expertise and is therefore prone to make erroneous statements. These have been used by some as justification to destroy more land and wildlife habitat. Without losing his enthusiasm for environmental issues, Tim Flannery should check details more thoroughly when he pens articles for popular consumption.

John Benson

Acknowledgements: I thank Phil Redpath for commenting on the text. The views expressed are my own and are not necessarily those of the NSW government.

1. Benson, J.S. & Redpath, P.A., “The nature of pre-European native vegetation in south-eastern Australia: a critique of Ryan, D.G., Ryan, J.R. & Starr, B.J., The Australian Landscape – Observations of Explorers and Early Settlers”, Cunninghamia 5(2), 1997, pp. 285–328.

2. Ryan, D.G., Ryan, J.R. & Starr, B.J.,The Australian Landscape – Observations of Explorers and Early Settlers, Murrumbidgee Catchment Management Committee: Wagga Wagga, 1995.

3. Oliver, I., Eldridge, D. & Wilson, B., Regrowth and soil erosion in central-west NSW. A report to the Native Vegetation Advisory Council, Sydney, Department of Land and Water conservation, 2000.

4. Dickman, C.R., “Impact of exotic generalist predators on native fauna of Australia”, Wildlife Biology 2(3), 1996, pp. 185–195.

5. Mooney, S.D., Radford, K.L. & Hancock, G., “Clues to the ‘burning question’: pre-European fire in the Sydney coastal region from sedimentary charcoal and palynology”, Ecological Management & Restoration 2(3), 2000, pp. 203–212.

MADE IN ENGLAND

Correspondence

Gerard Windsor

David Malouf is that old-fashioned phenomenon, a cultivated man. He has the range of learning and interest that I would otherwise associate only with the great expats of his generation (Greer, Hughes, James, Porter). In spite of his fiction and poetry, opera is his idea of the supreme art, and he has written for it and about it. Galleries ask him to do introductions for exhibition catalogues. I have heard him sustain a discussion for over an hour on the more recondite archaeological sites in the Middle East with Mary Lovell, the biographer of the great Arabists Richard and Isabella Burton. Any reader of his fiction will know how deeply he has immersed himself in Australian history. With his Lebanese surname and ancestry, and his erstwhile apartment in Tuscany, we know that we have got a citizen of the world speaking to us.

His mother’s people, however, were of English origin. In his twenties he too went to England and stayed and taught there for nearly ten years. But he came back. It would be heavy-handed to call him an Anglophile, but he’s appreciative of England, and of what it’s given Australia.

David Malouf has never been a polemicist; his style has always been too urbane for that. It is his way of being a native of this country. “Australia”, he says, “is an experiment … an experiment is open, all conclusions provisional. Even the conclusiveness of a full stop is no more, so long as there is breath, than a conventional gesture towards pause in a continuing argument.”

These are the final words of Made in England. David Malouf’s argument is less programmatic, less a pamphlet, than earlier essays. It’s more discussion than argument, modestly asserting first the fact, and then the virtues, of England’s progenitive relationship to Australia. Given its kindly attitude to England, the essay’s most defiant feature is its publication in the week of the Rugby World Cup final – not an event the author shows any sign of adverting to. (Yet he does make the substantial point that organised competitive sport, such a mainstay and glue of Australian society, is a wholly Anglo-Saxon creation.)

This is a generous essay, determined above all to give credit – to Arthur Phillip, to the fitters-out of the First Fleet, the convict labourers, the anti-slavers, to a stable, enlightened Britain as a whole. It argues that the fall of Singapore did not turn Australians away from the motherland, that Britain’s joining the European Union was a necessary turfing of the adult offspring out of the nest, that at least until recently, and with the exception of the movies, it was British not American culture that washed over us. There’s room for debate on all such propositions, but the style of debate has been set – cheerful, moderate, reflective. More arguable, not least because it’s such a big claim, is the contention that the threat of invasion in 1941 brought “Australia – the land itself – fully alive at last in our consciousness. As a part of the earth of which we were now the custodians. As soil to be defended and preserved because we were deeply connected to it. As the one place where we were properly at home …” This is affectionate towards the land, generous towards fellow Australians, and instances a defining characteristic of this essay – its strong tendency to speak well of Australia and Australians. I’m not sure we quite deserve it. I have the uneasy feeling that although this passage is purportedly about 1941, it’s actually a wish-list of sentiments for now. As a statement of fact about either 1941 or 2003 it’s risky.

The overwhelmingly chewable ingredient, however, in this hamper of an essay is its point about language, the English language, the vital bond between England and Australia. D.M. defines an Anglo-Saxon habit of mind “whose most complete and perfect creation” is the English language. Language, he says, is what we come home to, and English has one huge distinction. Due above all to Shakespeare “the real motive force in English is metaphor … other languages move by logic … English, as we see from even the most common idioms – a ‘tower of strength’, ‘a dog’s breakfast’ – by association.” This is a gloriously bold claim to make, and for all the many virtues of Made in England I would like to read D.M. at the same length again on just this fingering of our native tongue. This is a linguist’s debate, and I have no particular credentials as such, but all sorts of scraps and mementoes of other languages start prodding me into opposition against this claim for uniqueness. The phrase “tower of strength” for example brings to my mind the Latin of the Litany of Loreto (approved 1587) where the Virgin Mary is invoked under all manner of metaphorical titles that gloriously ignite one another through their biblical associations – Mystical Rose, Tower of David, Tower of Ivory, House of Gold, Ark of the Covenant, Gate of Heaven, Morning Star … And if it’s classical Latin we want, what could be more metaphorically aphoristic than Virgil’s Sunt lacrimae rerum (there are the tears of things), or that great parable in five words, Pariunt montes, nascitur ridiculus mus (the mountains are in labour, a ridiculous mouse is born), or the three-word one, Facilis descensus Averni (the road to hell is easy).

The language of Shakespeare and his contemporaries was certainly suffused with metaphor, and this vivid colouring lasted for several generations. The linguotechnics of Sir Thomas Browne, for example, are a grand jumble of associations in pursuit of their tails. But Browne was dead a century before English was heard in Australia, and by the turn into the eighteenth century the frenzy of the language was calming down. The English who founded the colony at Sydney were the contemporaries of Gibbon. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was written in the years between Cook’s landfall in 1770 and Arthur Phillip’s in 1788. John Gross’s Oxford Book of English Prose has twelve passages from Gibbon, and the only metaphor that sticks its head up is a repeated variation on the notion of shades and clouds.

So where, linguistically, does this leave Australia? D.M. makes a point of the evolutionary nature of the English language, but having made his generalised point about its metaphorical core, he switches categories when he wants to point up the changes over 200 years. Metaphor is not mentioned again. Whereas a dominant but variable tone of the language is. The English of 1600 was “passionately evangelical and utopian, deeply imbued with the religious fanaticism and radical violence of the time”. That’s what America was given. Whereas the 1788 colony got an English that was “sober, unemphatic, good-humoured; a very sociable and moderate language, modern in a way that even we would recognise, and supremely rational and down to earth”.

One of the enjoyable things about Made in England is that you want to argue with so much of it – and this summary of the English of 1788 sounds just too good to be true, a determinedly Whiggish reading of linguistic history. Roger Sharrock, in his introduction to the Pelican Book of English Prose, presents perhaps the other side of the coin. In the middle of the eighteenth century, he argues, “the language no longer remains a disciplined, neutral medium for the thought [but] the balance tips towards greater politeness and rhetorical control”.

Ah, so Australians are children of an ultra-polite, to say nothing of a contained and gestural age? Maybe, maybe not, but D.M.’s thesis sounds just a little too nationalistically benign. English, he says, went through a period of reaction after the excesses of the English Civil War. It “had to be purged of all those forms of violent expression that had led men to violent action. By limiting one, you would limit the other. That was the program. The language itself was to be disarmed … And it worked.” So that the revolution of 1688 was “bloodless” and the enlightened ameliorist progress in language and hence state of mind (or is it the other way around) continued throughout the next century.

This calculated engineering of history by … by whom? … is so stunning as to be implausible. In any case, the revolution of 1688 wasn’t bloodless at all; it’s just that the bloodletting was done across the Irish Sea. And the Monmouth rebellion of 1685, just three years prior to this new age of enlightenment, was put down with Judge Jeffreys’s legendary savagery.

But what happened to the metaphor during all this? Far more noticeably than any violence of language, I would argue, metaphor is what has faded. Australian English has never been freely associational. Say too little rather than too much has been our motto. We shy away from the more decorative possibilities of the language.

Regrettably D.M. doesn’t discuss the current state of this metaphorically based linguistic bond. What he does do is rather more conventional; he talks of the content rather than the form of the language. Anglophones “in their exchanges with one another can take it for granted that a great deal of what is being left unsaid, or exists in shades and nuances under what is said, as half-heard echoes out of plays, poems, novels, or out of the obiter dicta of occasions great and small in a shared history … will not go unrecognised, and may even be left to bear the burden of much that is subtly intended”. The trouble is that D.M.’s examples of this lingua franca are the mots of Henry V (“once more unto the breach”), Sir Philip Sidney (“thy need is greater than mine”), Lord Nelson (“England expects …”), Howell Maurice Forgy (“praise the Lord and pass …”), all chestnuts of school storybooks of the 1940s and 1950s, but by now an almost completely withdrawn currency, at least in Australia. This unreality is repeated when D.M. says that “since the early decades of the nineteenth century most Australians … enjoyed the same reading [as their counterparts in Boston or Nottingham]: Walter Scott, Fenimore Cooper, Bulwer-Lytton, Dickens, Wilkie Collins …” D.M.’s own literateness seems to issue in wonderful optimism about the high cultural habits of “most Australians”. I’m reminded of his calls for the reissue of no doubt fine works of Australian literature, but ones which remain resolutely out of print simply because only a risible fraction of Australians have any interest in buying and reading them.

On the strength of this essay there’s no argument that Australia owes so many of its more admirable features to England. But the same language, the same state of mind now? What about starting with the two nations’ preferred choice of spectator hymns? (Let’s leave aside the imposed, longstanding official anthems.) The primary numbers on display during that great night at Homebush on 22 November 2003 were “Waltzing Matilda” and “Swing Low Sweet Chariot”. They’re a puzzle, both of them. Australians sing a bald narrative about a sheep thief, a ditty that obdurately refuses to be a metaphor for anything. The “waltzing matilda” of its title/chorus is, if anything, an anti-metaphor because it’s ultimately inexplicable (cf The Australian National Dictionary), and it repudiates the essentially romantic nature of the device. The English spectators on that night cut through the obfuscating nonsense and reduced it to “I shagged Matilda.” Or perhaps that was a metaphor, an utterly everyday and recognisable one, for the outcome of the match.

In any case, if it’s language and state of mind we’re talking about, what are we to make of a national hymn where at least five of the keywords – jumbuck, tucker bag, coolabah, billabong, trooper, and maybe waltzing for that matter – are fading, or have already faded, from public recognition? Can we really say the Australian state of mind is represented by words that are gibberish and describe an utterly alien experience?

And the English make no better sense. They cheer on their players by hailing the Grim Reaper’s personal hearse. “Swing low, sweet chariot,/ Comin’ for to carry me home,/ I looked over Jordan and what did I see?/ A band of Angels coming after me,/ Comin’ for to carry me home.” For a people at least as irreligious as Australians this is an astounding choice as a frenzy-enhancer. This language is far nearer to D.M.’s English of 1600 than it is to anything to be heard today in East Cheam or Grosvenor Square. It certainly doesn’t display a state of mind that many Australians enjoy. I’m very confused. Pleasantly so. I want David Malouf to start again.

Gerard Windsor

First published in the Australian Financial Review on 5 December 2003.

MADE IN ENGLAND

Correspondence

James Curran

David Malouf’s essay on Australia’s British inheritance is a timely reaffirmation of the defining influence of Britishness in Australian national life and culture. Believing that Australians have for too long undervalued their British heritage, Malouf reminds Australians of its enduring legacy to the nation. In the process he gives short shrift to a radical nationalist version of Australian history which, in its eagerness to pin down the precise moment of Australian independence, often portrays the Anglo–Australian relationship as one of mutual antagonism, or, more simplistically, depicts Australia as an impatient child forever pulling at the apron-strings of the “mother country”. The so-called “great betrayal” at Singapore in 1942 may continue to provoke the occasional rage – Paul Keating’s parliamentary outburst in February 1992 springs to mind – but, as Malouf notes, Australia’s attachment to Britain lingered long into the post-war era.

Likewise, in pointing to the desire of all the British dominions to achieve the cherished status of “equality within the Empire”, and in emphasising that Federation in 1901 was not powered by a distinctive Australian cultural nationalism railing against a stultifying Britishness, Malouf has thankfully dispensed with the “thwarted nationalism” thesis. In this view Britain – or bourgeois Australian Anglophiles such as R.G. Menzies – has continually conspired to stifle attempts by “true”, working-class Australians to realise their national “independence”. On occasion, Australians might well have thrown the odd tantrum and taken great delight in kicking the Empire in the shins, but such moments were inevitably followed by fulsome protestations of the nation’s loyalty to Britain.

The great strength of Malouf’s essay, though, is that he is unafraid to speak in glowing terms about the British inheritance. Unlike many other Australian intellectuals, who would rather subsume the British heritage into the rich tapestry of cultures that now makes up Australian society, Malouf rejoices in the richness of that British past and its manifestation in Australian language and lore, food and song. Moreover he illustrates the ways in which Australians have modified this heritage to suit their own circumstances and how the transplanting of a British culture here differed in quite fundamental ways from the American experience.

Yet there is a curious omission in his treatment of this important topic: race. Malouf hints at the significance of White Australia’s demise, but he is reluctant to delve too deeply. He is rightly troubled by the growing tendency to downplay or trivialise the British heritage, but it is precisely because Britishness was so intimately bound up with ideas of “race” that some have been so quick to consign this heritage to the cellar of the Australian consciousness. If we are now a nation of immigrants, so this theory runs, why should the British be afforded pride of place?

The myth of British race patriotism prescribed that Australians were part of an “organic” worldwide community of British peoples. Australians saw in the White Australia policy the means by which their racial homogeneity could be preserved, thereby keeping the ever-present threat of Asia at bay. As historian W.K. Hancock put it in 1930, among Australians “pride of race counted for more than love of country” and, “Defining themselves as ‘independent Australian Britons’, they believed each word essential and exact, but laid most stress upon the last.” White Australia, Hancock argued, was the “indispensable condition of every other Australian policy”. When Labor prime ministers Curtin and Chifley defined Australia as a bastion of the “British-speaking race” in the antipodes, it was no clumsy rhetorical stumble (my emphasis). They were giving voice to the fact that Australians essentially saw themselves as a British people who had welded the various English, Irish, Scots and Welsh components of their heritage into an indissoluble whole – such that they were actually more British than the British. It might be troublesome for some to accept, but during the high point of the nationalist era, that is from the late nineteenth century through to the 1960s, Australia’s national myth was a British race myth. (Britain, for its part, may well have been multi-racial by the 1950s, but the British themselves never saw fit to enshrine multiculturalism as a national ideal.)

When this intense British race patriotism collapsed around the time of Britain’s first, ultimately failed attempt to enter the EEC between 1961 and 1963 (see Stuart Ward’s Australia and the British Embrace: The Demise of the Imperial Ideal, MUP, 2001) and its decision to withdraw a military presence from East of Suez, Australian political leaders and intellectuals were left somewhat confused as to how to define the nation. Australians did not immediately claim a new identity; they were actually shocked, and in some cases aggrieved, that their British identity had been taken from them. It was nothing less than a crisis of national meaning. As historian Geoffrey Serle, himself an occasional proponent of the radical national school, observed in 1967, “there has been such a decline since the decline of standard imperial rhetoric, that it is difficult to make any sure statement.”

The void in national self-definition raised a key question as to the legacy of the British heritage: had it “thwarted” the move to independent nationhood and was it simply an anachronism in a post-nationalist society, or was it the bequest of a genial political culture in which the classic liberal ideas of freedom and tolerance had fostered an environment in which diversity could flourish?

Malouf’s essay is both a reflection of this ongoing identity crisis and an answer to it. In accepting and affirming the British heritage he has done much to highlight it as an ongoing source of vitality and vigour in national life (and thereby offered a warning to those who will craft future republican movements).

There now appear to be two differing responses to the problem of “race” and how it is understood in Australian political culture. On the one hand, left-leaning journalists and commentators are quick to tag as “racist” those who do not conform to their own idea and language of tolerance. So rather than treat Pauline Hanson as a reincarnation of 1950s-style assimilationism and the voice of an older Australia which felt betrayed by multiculturalism and globalisation, they cast her instead as a dangerous and malicious throwback to the worst aspects of the days of White Australia. Likewise the Prime Minister, in responding to the appearance of the Tampa on the nation’s northern coastline, was supposedly seeking to reconstruct the “great white walls” of the White Australia policy. (This despite Howard actually having lifted the official migrant intake during his term in office.) In both cases the “race” card has been played by the media, not by the political protagonists, and in each case it was played without due deference to the lessons which can be drawn from historical experience.

On the other hand, those who cherish the British constitutional and parliamentary heritage but who are embarrassed by the legacy of White Australia and the intensity of Australia’s attachment to the British race myth, argue instead that there was a seamless, painless link between the era when Australians saw themselves as “wholly British” and the moment the nation became multicultural. That a nation of Britishers was magically transformed into a “nation of immigrants” from every country and culture, and that the nation was in essence multicultural from the beginning.

The change in how Australians defined themselves was indeed relatively rapid, but that does not obviate the need to explore the reasons for the demise of Britishness nor should it entail ignoring the complexity of its legacy. Some are in fact finding new ways to come to terms with multiculturalism. The Minister for Health, Tony Abbott, once a critic of multiculturalism on the grounds that it detracted from national unity, has recently admitted that he now accepts it as a legitimate idea for the nation. The reason for this dramatic U-turn? He has met some migrants – with no ethnic links to Britain – who supported the monarchy at the 1999 republican referendum. Abbott’s “very conservative multiculturalism” in fact envisages a nation of what might be termed multicultural monarchists.

Malouf’s contention that imperial sentiment “is not what really moved” the likes of prime ministers Alfred Deakin and George Reid when they spoke to and defined their people, that they were “canny” in using the language of Britishness to secure a place in a powerful empire, similarly stems from an unwillingness to accept the power of the British race myth. On this reading, Deakin and Reid were not being true to themselves and were in fact manipulating a shallow and submissive populace. Such a view misreads the subtle relationship between sentiment and self-interest in Anglo–Australian relations. Australians may well have been fervent in their identification with the British race myth, but this did not cause them to lose sight of their own interests. Menzies’ decision to hold off sending Australian troops to the European theatre immediately following the outbreak of the Second World War – before he had received assurances from the British that they would send the fleet in the event of an attack on Australia – is a potent example of the way in which Australian leaders, though “British to their boot-heels”, nevertheless were careful to preserve distinctively Australian interests which arose out of the nation’s particular geopolitical circumstances.

If Malouf is searching for a way to deal with the problem of race, he could do far worse than turn to W.K. Hancock’s notion of Australians being “british – with a small b”: that is, a Britishness motivated neither by a belief in the superiority of the British race nor by thoughts of British glory or imperial grandeur, but by the vision of a diverse family comprising many kindreds and languages. Hancock and other liberal intellectuals of his generation had formed the view that Australia’s membership of the British Commonwealth actually guarded against the expression of a jingoistic nationalism, that this sense of loyalty to a wider community was a precious gift in a “sundered world of snarling nationalisms”. This allowed intellectuals like Hancock to reconcile their Britishness with their liberalism. Malouf is similarly aware that the British inheritance has had a moderating influence on Australian life, and his essay delivers another healthy blow to the radical nationalists, but in skirting gingerly around the problem of race he misses what for many defined their sense of membership of the wider British world – the “crimson thread of kinship”.

James Curran

MADE IN ENGLAND

Correspondence

Larissa Behrendt

David Malouf’s evocative account of the Australia of his childhood is a personal narrative of what it means to be Australian. There is an intimacy in his nostalgia for the Australia of his youth – one in which we can see Rita Hayworth on the big screen, hear Bing Crosby singing “White Christmas” and taste the bread-and-butter pudding. Made in England proudly acknowledges a British inheritance whose culture and values are so adopted into everyday life here in the antipodes that we hardly noticed that they were not ours. This easy integration is, as Malouf acknowledges, both a testament to the diversity of “British” culture and the diversity of “Australian” experience.

This is a different perspective on Australia to the one evoked by Germaine Greer in her essay Whitefella Jump Up. Malouf sees the normality of our British idiosyncrasies in his childhood where adaptation is as natural as ownership; Greer sees a discomfort and a cringe in the inability of white Australians to find their place here. Hers is a country where the sense of belonging needs to be cultivated and a feeling of acceptance needs to be learnt.

Both Malouf and Greer understand that it is only through the past that the way forward can be grasped. For Malouf, the acknowledgement of all that is solid and reliable about the cornerstones of our inherited British system of laws and governance provides the necessary confidence to look towards a content and independent Australia. Ours is a country blessed with a history of peaceful political change and the stability of the rule of law. For Greer, confessions of the inability to embrace Aboriginal experience and the treatment of Aboriginal people are the keys to an imagined future Australia where non-Indigenous people feel as at ease with this country as the original custodians.

In these assessments of what Australia was, is and may become, it is hard to forget Don Watson’s pessimistic and fatalistic essay, Rabbit Syndrome. As someone who was present when Paul Keating delivered the Redfern Park speech, I found much that resonated in Watson’s lament for the changing course of Australia. As an Aboriginal person, I see the turn away from the acknowledgement of Indigenous presence and culture as alienating. As Malouf writes: we find it so difficult to imagine any history but the one we have actually experienced. Malouf, as much as Greer, sees the acknowledgement of Indigenous presence and experience as a central part of an honest Australian persona.

Malouf’s contribution to this debate is that he acknowledges that, without the seeds of where we come from we would not be where we are now and, more importantly, would not have the same ability to determine our future. He makes a powerful argument that there is much to celebrate in that history which the recognition of historical truths that are unpalatable and shameful could not erase. I’ve never understood the argument that acknowledging the mistreatment of Indigenous people and saying “sorry” was a way of making Australians feel ashamed of their past. Recognition and acceptance of the past – even those things that we wished we had done differently – does not mean that we somehow lose the ability to appreciate all that there is to be proud about. Either view – all positive or all doom-and-gloom – is too superficial to be helpful in creating character and shaping identity.

Identity is as much defined by the way you see yourself as it is created by the way that others see you. Our idea of who we are is not just formed through our internal distinctiveness but also through our experience with others and the stereotypes society lays before us. It is shaped by self-expression and through our interaction with others, our socialisation by family, education and community, and our positive and negative experience in the world. Who we are is a process, transformed by our intellectual, emotional and spiritual growth, moulded by the actions, judgements and expectations of others. Our identity has a narcissistic, introverted and existential aspect that has the need for space and freedom for self-expression. It also has a symbiotic communal, extroverted and fraternal aspect that requires public space and institutional arrangements that provide the space and freedom to do as we wish.

The strength of Malouf’s essay lies in his ability to connect the trappings of culture and language to their institutional form. The relationship between society and its institutions is one that is often overlooked or downplayed. Laws are only a reflection of the society that makes them. Perhaps the best, and most quoted, example of this phenomenon is that Stalin’s Russia had a Bill of Rights. Our laws mean nothing if they are not enacted into a society that has the political, social and ethical will to ensure that they are interpreted and applied in the way they are intended to be.

However, there is one trap in the exaltation of our current legal system. We can all acknowledge that the common law is the most superior form of legal system and that the Westminster system the most democratic form of government, but that should not lead to the conclusion that they are perfect. Nor can the nobility of their principle lead to the supposition that they are implemented in the spirit in which they were intended. In fact, for all of the cornerstones of British law that we inherit – innocent until proven guilty, the rule of law, separation of powers, free elections – there are many examples of the way in which the gaps in that common law have led to the gross violation of human rights, particularly of the poor, marginalised, culturally distinct.

Malouf’s example of slavery raises this very issue. It is often held to be a distinguishing feature of the superiority of our legal system that there has never been an institutionalised form of slavery as part of our laws and that, as a result, we have avoided the hypocrisy of creating social and moral stigma while espousing egalitarianism. That may be the case that can be argued when looking at the black and white of the statute books. But Pacific Islanders who were “black-birded” and Aboriginal people who were unpaid for their work on cattle stations and in the kitchens of middle-class Australia found little comfort in the lack of legal sanction for the deprivation of their liberty and the exploitation of their labour. The fact that we have a system of laws that is silent on rights protection and therefore allows such violations of commonly assumed liberties without the need for formal laws is one of the more unfortunate legacies of our constitutional heritage. Idolisation of the English system of government often leads to the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” attitude that sees endorsement of laws if they work for the rich, middle-class and culturally dominant rather than measuring them against the way they work for the poor, marginalised and culturally distinct.

Malouf’s honest affection and insightful reflections on Australia and its embrace of British culture, like all powerful ideas, will be misinterpreted and exploited by those who are engaged in Australia’s vicious “culture wars”. Those who have sought to discredit the “black armband” view of Australia understand better than anyone how the values of society shape our institutions. These fierce debates focus on the telling of history, the squabbling about numbers killed on the frontier and the debates over the proper legal definition of “genocide”. But they are not discussions about “Aboriginal history”; the experience and perspectives of Indigenous people remains unchanged by semantic and numerical debates by academics. They are, instead, a battle about “non-Aboriginal” history and, more importantly, “white” identity. It is a debate whose results will have a profound influence on the values of our society for years to come and will determine whether we move towards tolerance, acceptance, co-existence and diversity, or whether we continue to move towards intolerance, suspicion, fear and conformity. It is because the stakes are so high that this war has been waged through so many of our cultural institutions, including the Australian Broadcasting Commission and the National Museum of Australia.

The use of Malouf’s essay to merely extol the virtues of our British past would misrepresent the undercurrent of recognition of Indigenous experience beneath his honest affection for what it is that makes us proud to be Australian. The real promise of his essay is that, if we are as truthful about what makes us great as we are about what we could have done better, we will be better equipped, more confident, as a nation to choose a dynamic, independent, unique and exciting future. I think Greer, and even Watson, would agree with that proposition even if their blueprints for that pathway would be vastly different.

Aboriginal Australia has long embraced its diversity while struggling to maintain a unified national front. We will continue to watch with interest as our fellow Australians struggle with their own identity crisis.

Larissa Behrendt

MADE IN ENGLAND

Correspondence

Phillip Knightley

Yes, David, there will always be the bond of a shared language and a cultural heritage between Australia and Britain. And, yes, the way the Mother Country tumbled us out of the nest was the making of us. I just wish she could have been a little more motherly and gracious about it, a little less selfish, cold and pragmatic.

Take that pommy bastard Sir Otto Niemeyer, a director of the Bank of England. He came to Australia in 1930 to tell us how to manage our financial affairs. He decided that the trouble was the Australian character and the Australian way of life. Australians had a natural optimism and this was very, very bad. Ordinary Australians had to be stripped of their belief that something would always turn up. And our living standards were too high, so wages had to be cut and cut again.

When he said this at a civic reception in Adelaide, the very same paper that reported his remarks, the Evening News, carried an item about Depression children starving, actually starving, in the Granville electorate.

Historians’ arguments about the fall of Singapore and the Anglo–American plan to concentrate on the war in Europe before turning to Japan – even if it meant temporarily leaving Australia to the Japanese – have rumbled on for so long as to risk becoming boring. But was it too much to ask of Mother that if she was planning to abandon us to save herself she might at least have told us?

No wonder Curtin said that from then on we were going to look to the United States as our protector. Although if Australia imagines that its loyalty to Uncle Sam in the recent war against Iraq now guarantees that the USA will always be there for us, a glance at any of the Washington plans setting out American geographical strategic interests for the twenty-first century will come as a bit of a shock. Where does Australia figure in them? Nowhere.

All right, Britain’s decision to end its traditional Empire trade arrangements and join the European Common Market was a shock but turned out to be good for us in the economic long run. But how can we forgive Mother for the 1971 Immigration Act, a nasty piece of legislation that many found the most painful betrayal of all? At a stroke it ended the right Australians had enjoyed since the founding of the country in 1788 to free entry into Britain and full equality with their kith and kin. A former editor of the London Telegraph, William Deedes, commented, “We should acknowledge that for our growing estrangement from Australia we carry most of the blame.”

So, Mother, let’s agree that we will still talk to each other because we share the same language and memories, but we have left home for good and will not be back. We are not a republic yet, but one day we will be and in the meantime we’re a country very different from you and the Old World.

This was brought home to me at the Australia Day celebrations at Australia House in London – an evening of hiccups, happiness and mini meat pies. It ended with a stirring “Advance Australia Fair”, in tune, in time and everyone knew the words. Later, walking down a freezing Strand it occurred to me that as a national anthem, “Advance Australia Fair” has got it about right. I cannot support the sentiments expressed in “aux armes citoyens”, or in “the rockets’ red glare”, and certainly not in saving of an elderly English lady whose only danger is probably from her daughter’s dogs. But I can wholeheartedly support the advancement of an independent young nation which offers wealth for toil. And that about sums it up.

Phillip Knightley

WHITEFELLA JUMP UP

Correspondence

Mary Ellen Jordan

Whitefella Jump Up. That’s me Germaine Greer is talking to. Jump up? Up where? Ah – to the mystical higher plane of Aboriginality. Germaine Greer has cast herself as midwife to the rebirth of Australia and white Australians. Yes, we are to be born again – but not as clap-hands-for-Jesus Christians; not as crystal-toting new-agers; not as super-self-aware consumers of pop psychology; but in a history-defying move, leaping cultural differences in a single bound, white Australia is to be born again as Aboriginal.

What might this mean? Is it satire? Is it nonsense? Could it possibly be the commonsense Greer says it is?

Germaine Greer is famous for being outrageous, so it’s no surprise that some of her claims in Whitefella Jump Up are a bit out there. But even if her basic premise doesn’t hang together, we can still enjoy the ride and think about some of the things Greer says along the way. Did she expect us to take seriously her revised version of history in which the British attempt to colonise Australia has failed? For her, the failure of individual attempts at settling in various parts of Australia adds up to the failure of colonisation itself. This failure has left a whole lot of non-indigenous Australians stranded on the eastern shore of an Aboriginal land, where we first landed.

While Greer’s account is clearly inaccurate, I did enjoy the inverted stories and rewritten histories such as this. They create an imagined world in which the power is reversed, any talk of assimilation is of white to black, and the only option non-Aboriginal people have for survival is to respectfully go to Aboriginal people to ask them how to live, and to hope desperately not to be turned away.

The imagined can make us see the real more clearly. The deserted interior that Greer encourages us to think of as the site of failed colonisation is in fact the site of multiple failures and multiple sorrows — the spectacular failures of white settlers to live harmoniously with Aboriginal people, and to respect them and learn from them; the blundering damage that has been done, and is still done, to the Australian environment; the fragmentation of Aboriginal families and communities; and the frontier violence. Colonisation failed in many things; but it did not fail to take hold.

As long as we assume that Greer is not to be read literally, this part of Greer’s retelling is particularly valuable because it highlights the way that power works in Australia. While the occasional stranded white explorer turned to Aboriginal people for survival, white Australia has generally been loath to learn much at all from Aboriginal people. Despite the rhetoric of self-determination, white experts still develop policy and programs for Aboriginal people, often without effective consultation, and then take them into communities, often to see them fail. A community development model, where outsiders work to help the community build a program for itself, is almost unheard of in the delivery of services in Aboriginal communities.

However, the aim of Whitefella Jump Up is not “to offer yet another solution to the Aborigine problem”, but rather to offer Aboriginality as a solution to “whitefella spiritual desolation”. But when Greer talks about Aboriginality, she leaves me bewildered. Where she speaks of Australia becoming an Aboriginal nation as a symbolic undertaking, the argument makes sense enough. This isn’t a particularly new idea; the “pay the rent” campaigns of the 1980s were based on this idea, and the signs that have sprung up all over inner Melbourne reminding us that we are on Wurundjeri land are just the kind of thing Greer is calling for. It would be a good idea for Australians to keep thinking about new ways of describing, understanding and depicting ourselves, and to think about new national symbols that might be more inclusive of both cultures than those we have now.

Clearly she wants more than this: but what? Following the thread of the “adopting Aboriginality” argument leads us though some strange terrain. Can she be serious when she says that, “As a hunter-gatherer nation, Australia could play a further role in world affairs by making common cause with other hunter-gather peoples, all of whom are taking a terrible hammering.” Does she think Australians both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal should pull down our houses and head for the desert? Surely not, for later she says that in this new Australia British common law would be the preferred legal system.

Greer states clearly that non-Aboriginal people can become Aboriginal, because Aboriginality is not genetic; if Aboriginal people have to learn their own culture, non-Aboriginal people can learn it too. But there is very little in her essay about what taking on Aboriginality might mean.

After all, what is Aboriginality? Greer acknowledges that this concept wasn’t even thought of before colonisation, when Aboriginal groups were distinct from each other and had no need to think of themselves collectively. In fact, in places like Arnhem Land, the concept of Aboriginality remains meaningless to those it identifies, with people identifying themselves with their tribe or language group, not with a collective “Aboriginal” group. But the collective concept is at the heart of Greer’s essay, because the idea is that white Australians would be absorbed into this imagined community, and we will all be Aboriginal. White Australians are still learning that each Aboriginal group is distinct, with its own language; that there is no such thing as one Aboriginal group or one Aboriginal culture. Greer simultaneously exhorts non-Aboriginal people to learn about this diversity while amalgamating Aboriginal people into a collective identity at the heart of her argument.

As well as putting aside differences between Aboriginal groups, Greer sweeps away the differences between black and white Australian cultures, going into great detail about the crossover between them. This annihilation of difference is essential to her argument; but it is also an obstacle to genuine exchange and understanding.

I lived in Maningrida, an Aboriginal community in the Northern Territory, for just over a year, so I brought my experiences there to mind when Greer talked about Aboriginality. In Maningrida, we grappled every day with cultural differences. Living there taught me that two cultures could be more profoundly different than I had ever imagined. I saw that some of the problems facing Aboriginal communities, and some of the problems in relationships between black and white, were caused by deep differences in the two cultures. This makes solutions particularly hard to find, because they are likely to involve changing cultures, which is a disturbing prospect.

Health care is essential in places like Maningrida: the most devastating statistics that come out of Aboriginal communities are those that measure diabetes, infant mortality and heart disease at far greater rates than those found in the broader population, and life expectancy as lower. Health care, particularly preventative programs, involves teaching Aboriginal people to think about food and hygiene in a white way, instead of in an Aboriginal way. Aboriginal knowledge worked before colonisation, but it does not work in sedentary lifestyles, where people live in houses, eat introduced food and take introduced drugs. In Maningrida, it was difficult to think about the impact that health care would have on the local Aboriginal cultures, because its necessity outweighed the philosophical questions about the imposition of one culture onto another.

If we did pull down our houses, then white people would have a lot to learn from Aboriginal people about health care. But non-Aboriginal people won’t abandon their culture; and the hunter-gatherer lifestyle Greer refers to is part of some Aboriginal cultures but no longer part of life for all Aboriginal people. The reality is much more complex, and we have to negotiate cultural interchange carefully. “Non-Aboriginal becoming Aboriginal” doesn’t seem like much of an answer for white Australia; and it seems like a very bad deal indeed for Aboriginal people. What would it bring Aboriginal people, aside from an increased burden of educating white Australians about their cultures?

Our attempts to understand each other are often marked on the white side of the equation by a tendency to oversimplify. In debates about Aboriginal policy, we pit left against right, rather than working together to find some kind of truth. We continually romanticise Aboriginal cultures, at the same time failing to see our own culture clearly. In Maningrida, I met many white people who declared that Aboriginal people are “very spiritual”, and that they have “so much culture”. I would often ask them what they meant, and they would talk vaguely about ceremony and the connection to the land.

Of course, even if you could quantify “culture”, you’d find equal amounts of it on both sides. But it’s harder to see your own culture, and easy to see the exotic and unfamiliar. This romanticism often extended to the perception of all Aboriginal people as inherently good, and most non-Aboriginal people as of less value. I came to think of this as “positive racism”. It involves judging people by their race, just as the old-fashioned pejorative, excluding kind of racism does, but in reverse. Most importantly, positive racism forms its own obstacles to intercultural sharing and understanding.

Greer’s central idea, that we can fix white Australian ills with Aboriginality, is a textbook case of positive racism, made all the more strange because she rails against the romanticisation of Aboriginal people, before doing it herself. Perhaps this explains the most disturbing aspect of Whitefella Jump Up. The primary evidence for – and symptom of – the spiritual desolation Greer describes in white Australia is alcohol abuse by white people, particularly men. In Maningrida, grog was allowed in under a strictly controlled system every two weeks – beer in cans only. And so every second Saturday the majority of Aboriginal people drank themselves to oblivion, and on these “wet weekends” the police and clinic were kept busy attending to domestic violence and neighbourhood fights. A suicide epidemic caused deaths on some of these Saturdays; and on some others, people were flown to Darwin Hospital with the injuries sustained in attacks and brawls. In between the wet Saturdays, a large proportion of the Aboriginal population of the town wiped itself out with marijuana.

These were the images that came to mind as Greer wrote that Aboriginality could fix spiritual poverty, characterised as problem drinking, in white Australia. Grog rips Aboriginal communities and families apart. It is one of the most tangible and most terrible of the colonial legacies, responsible in part for the destruction of some Aboriginal cultures. And so it seemed incongruous, extraordinary, offensive even, that Greer could mount an argument that used alcohol abuse as evidence of white spiritual poverty, and then offer Aboriginality as the solution.

Ultimately, in among the unconvincing pseudo-practical suggestions and the contradictions, I think that Greer is right in saying that our national life could be more informed by Aboriginality. Clearly a greater commitment by white people to learning about Aboriginal culture is needed for race relations in Australia to move forward. Many non-Aboriginal Australians have begun to do this in various ways, and we need more of this. Rather than romanticising Aboriginal people and their cultures, I hope non-Aboriginal people can look honestly at ourselves and our relationships with Aboriginal people, and try to go beyond the polarised, over-simplified political debates to a better level of engagement. And I hope that we will find better reasons for doing this than a quest for a black magic cure to white Australian problems.

Mary Ellen Jordan

WHITEFELLA JUMP UP

Correspondence

Marcia Langton

Germaine Greer’s Whitefella Jump Up proposes a whimsical solution to the immaturity and rawness of Australian nationhood and national identity. In her extended lament for “white” Australia’s lack of a sense of belonging to its expropriated homeland, she contends that if white Australians could accept their “ineradicable and inherent Aboriginality” (this “characteristic of the continent itself”), they will be “truly self-governing and independent”. Greer is embarrassed by persistent genuflections towards the British and the Americans, exasperated with the specious British ethnicity to which many “white” Australians cling, and disappointed by their failure to forge a full-blown identity that would anchor them in this continent. She wants Australians to acknowledge formally, in a nation-remaking gesture, that they have inherited an assortment of Aboriginal characteristics absorbed by their frontier forefathers in close and friendly contact with Aboriginal people.

I do not subscribe to the view that expatriates have no right to enunciate their views about the state of the homeland, but the niggling doubt about Greer’s depth of engagement with matters at home frays my commitment to the right to free speech in this case. Essentialist ideas about identity – for instance that a person’s or a nation’s identity is shaped by “race” – have permeated Australian life since the idea of an Australian nation was invented in the late nineteenth century. Simply to flip the foundation of the nation from a fundamentally White identity to a Black one is to remain trapped by the racism on which the nation was founded in 1901. Alfred Deakin judged that the strongest motive for federation was “the desire that we should be one people, and remain one people, without the admixture of other races”. Race was a key constitutional issue in 1900 when the drafters of the Australian Constitution excluded Aborigines from the ambit of this founding document in order to prevent surviving post-frontier Aboriginal populations from affecting the parliamentary representation of the states and financial distributions by the Commonwealth to the states. In a recent case the High Court of Australia has found that one of its provisions can be read in such a way as to permit government actions that work to the detriment of Aboriginal people. Admitted neither as nations nor as citizens, Aboriginal peoples have been the subjects of an extraordinary history of policy experimentation, much of it predicated on the belief that the first Australians would disappear.

What is astonishing about Dr Greer’s essay is the absence of any substantial reference to the “big picture” ideas for a postcolonial Australia during the last decade and their defeat at the polls by neo-conservatives who lured the electorate into voting against an Australian head of state and abhorred the idea of reconciliation with Aborigines together with Keating-style engagement with Asia and the Pacific. The history of removing Aboriginal children from their families is briefly mentioned, but this is incidental to a curiously over-emphasised sexual history of the Australian nation. One might read Greer’s main contention as a way of bypassing just how ugly the rejection of the “big picture” was – this was the period marked by Pauline Hanson’s rise to fame – and of holding instead to a brighter vision in order to beguile readers with nice arguments that draw on evidence from Australian literature, that speculate on the influence of Aboriginal languages on the Australian way of talking and on the origin in Aboriginal culture of the supposed Australian preference for egalitarianism.

Were the arguments and the vision itself more persuasive, the essay might be a serious challenge to the severely diminished idea of the nation presently proposed by contenders from both the Right and the Left. But Greer seems to be ignorant of an enormous body of fictional and non-fictional writing, cinema and art that has tackled this topic in a variety of regions and periods. For instance, she seems to have failed to notice that the last three decades have produced a body of historical literature which has made possible a much more robust idea of the past from which Australians need not shrink in denial, but which, if wrestled with honestly, lays the foundations for a new story of the nation. But there are also some particularly vicious ideas circulating at present which reinforce the old myth of a nation forged, so the assertion goes, by God-fearing men of restraint. As a consequence, this profoundly important new literature is presently under heavy attack by Keith Windschuttle and other patriotic warriors from the Quadrant fold who claim to be concerned with the craft of history, but these matters appear not to concern Dr Greer.

While Greer’s idea is a far more pleasant one than that proposed by the present prime minister in his 1996 Menzies Lecture, it is just as tendentious. Where Howard’s view of the nation’s history is expedient, with its forelock-tugging to Brave Pioneers and Little Aussie Battlers traduced and silenced by the brigade of wicked, black armband-wearing thought police, Greer’s idea is a weak tonic for this shallowness of identity, treating the infirmity with symbolic medicine rather than efficacious antidote. Where Howard was concerned “to ensure that our history as a nation is not written definitively by those who take the view that Australians should apologise for most of it”, Greer has drafted an idea of the nation that equally circumvents the horrible fate of Aboriginal people during that history, and for which some act of restitution from the settler state, such as an apology, is still required, if only to state an intention to refuse to allow such acts to happen again. This, I believe, is the secret at the heart of all the sneakily coded references to the idea of the nation expressed by opponents of Patrick Dodson’s vision: their motives are dubious. Or, at least, that is the threat that hovers before those of us who embrace our Aboriginality with pride.

The greatest weakness of Germaine Greer’s essay is its zany disconnectedness. Aboriginal societies were pushed to the brink of extinction, and yet the evidence for the Aboriginal influence on Australia culture is valorised in Greer’s essay with no mention of the disappearance of Aboriginal languages and the loss of cultural knowledge with the passing of the last generations who were brought up in the bush. For instance, her argument that the Australian accent derives from Aboriginal nannies teaching white children to speak and Aboriginal people influencing their white mates’ nasalised vowels as they yarned around the campfire is an example of simple inductivism, fitting a few scraps of literary evidence to feminist psychological theory. The comments about the influence of “corroborees” on Australian history are fascinating but not sufficiently supported by the evidence presented (though there is evidence, some of which is discussed in Henry Reynolds’ With the White People).

While Greer’s literary training allows her to sustain such romantic, if eccentric notions, linguistic research tells us that the 250 Aboriginal languages that existed at the time of British settlement have been reduced to less than fifty. All but a handful of Aboriginal languages will be extinct within fifty years. This is largely because Aboriginal people were forced to speak English instead of their own languages. With the exception of a few missionaries and linguists, few Australians have learnt to speak an Aboriginal language. Aboriginal children were not allowed to speak their native tongues at school and were punished for doing so. Aboriginal languages are the truly Australian languages, and constitute a precious heritage. Conserving Aboriginal languages by teaching them in schools in the vicinity of the relevant linguistic communities would be a splendid Australian gesture in the right direction. If Whitefella Jump Up has a lasting value it might lie in the power of Greer’s appeal to Australians to embrace Aboriginal culture as their own. There has been plenty of cultural diffusion in Australian history as in any other. The impetus for Australians to value Aboriginal culture might arise from a sense of this culture as being a part of their own heritage and their own historical legacy, not just that of exoticised and demonised others.

In the search for a sense of gravitas to underpin their “national identity”, Australians seem doomed to suffer one caricature after another, one more “prawn on the barbie”, one more cry from the heart and yet another diagnosis of the imagined crisis. All the while, of course, there have been some appealing and singular expositions of common themes, some of them textured and nuanced in the articulation, in the ideas about what it means to belong to a nation.

As Hugh Mackay and other students of the “national mood” attest, there is a far greater variegation and complexity to the construction of the “Nation” than newspaper columnists, politicians and ideologues ever dream of. And there is a dizzying range of differences – generational, regional, economic, educational, ethnic, cultural – to contend with. Greer’s vision of Australians somehow coming to adopt “their” Aboriginality is simply at odds with the facts of life in our country today. It’s a vision that expresses the needy idealism of the baby boomer generation, one of waning relevance to the younger generations of Australian intellectuals who lack the sentimentalism of Greer and her cohort and who are assuming ascendancy in public life.

With their access to a global market that empowers them as more than mere consumers, younger urban Australians are cyber-citizens, at once cosmopolitan and networked. They are able to relate to the Aboriginal world in a less troubled way than their parents and they are almost oblivious to Australia’s blinding colonial legacy of white supremacy and race hatred. Their images of the Aboriginal world are not the images of monochromatic misery that their parents see, but a heady mix of politics, sport and culture. They are familiar with a pageant of Aboriginal people who are talented, capable and attractive and who function as filmmakers, musicians, dancers, artists, writers, sports stars, intellectuals and actors. The reality and variety of the Aboriginal world is available to them as it never was to their parents. And for that reason they do not need to invent an Australia wrapped up in Aboriginal symbolism. But I do not want to overstate the case. They are less tolerant of the welfare approach to Aboriginal disadvantage, though they are also, to be fair, less niggardly than their parents’ generation. They are arguably the true advocates of the “fair go”, because their sense of fairness tells them that everyone should take responsibility for their own fate to the extent that they can. To this extent, Noel Pearson represents the views of a younger Australia as much as he represents those of young Aboriginal people.

The national literature of the ’60s lecture hall

Greer’s heavy reliance on “classical” Australian literary fiction is redolent of the late 1960s and the sense of protest at the colonial legacy of Australian literature. She critiques the references to Aboriginal people in Henry Lawson, Tom Collins and Mary Durack, and finds fair deeds and foul. Like Toni Morrison on Mark Twain, she does a good job of exposing one-eyed racism and of exalting the humanity of people who come alive on the pages of literature without the ideological drag of “race”. But it’s a limited sense of Australian literary history Greer exhibits. True, she cites Frank Moorhouse, Thomas Keneally, Sally Morgan, Mudrooroo, Tim Flannery and other modern writers, but we are left with the distinct impression that Australian literary life shrivelled after she left Sydney for London. What about David Malouf (The Conversations at Curlow Creek), Richard Flanagan (Death of a River Guide), Tim Winton (Dirt Music), Rodney Hall (The Island in the Mind trilogy), Murray Bail (Eucalyptus)? Apparently, Greer has not noticed that a distinctive Australian settler voice that speaks of a deepening attachment to place and locality as the core of identity has emerged in Australian literature. While Greer boasts of her adoption by people of the Kulin nation, other Australians are trying hard to adopt their own backyards and take responsibility for their history, their environment and the inheritance of their own racism. Books such as Nicholas Rothwell’s Wings of the Kite-Hawk, Peter Read’s Belonging: Australians, Place and Aboriginal Ownership, Eric Rolls’ A Million Wild Acres and George Seddon’s Landprints: Reflections on Place and Landscape attest to the various degrees of success Australians have had in explaining their intimate and variegated relationships with place, locality and history. The point is that the Aboriginal attachment to places inherited from many generations of ancestors and shaped by kinship, descent, culture and religion, does not preclude settlers from engaging with the land they love. Is it really necessary to claim a few threads of Aboriginality in order to affirm that experience? Might it not be more honourable to acknowledge frankly the frontier history that gave the white Australians their ascendancy, their control of the land and resources that have made them so wealthy. In this respect James Boyce’s essay in Robert Manne’s recent collection Whitewash is crucially important. Boyce tackles Keith Windschuttle’s nasty tome, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Volume One. His conclusion suggests the sheer difficulty involved in the debate about the character of the Australian nation and the complexity of the responsibility involved, towards whites as well as Aborigines:

Many will understandably want to ignore Windschuttle’s book dismissing it as either very bad academic history or a poisonous political tract, both of which are true. But in the end, the Tasmanian community will need to find a language and a framework – as other groups have been forced to do – to deal with the material in the text that is not concerned with academic debate but constitutes a slander on the custodians and creators of our land. This is not just up to Aborigines or activists: some respect for those almost-timeless generations who lived and developed this island before us is surely beyond race or politics; it simply flows from a love of the place.

While Dr Greer’s essay proposes a way for Australians to engage with Australia as a homeland, however ludicrous her central idea may seem, it is at least a vision that does not spring from hate. But it does skim lightly over the surface of the troubling issues Boyce contends with, and while it would be churlish to say that her essay is insulting, it nevertheless is necessary to say that the ease of her solution is exasperating in its triviality.

If Australians are concerned about national identity, then it seems to me that the history of Aboriginal–settler relations is as good a place as any to search for something worth constructing. But what can we make of what our intellectuals find in their quest for a history? Greer finds such commonality between Aborigines and “whites” that she recommends that “white” people declare their nation Aboriginal. Windschuttle finds only the most primitive people on earth, incapable of owning land, who seem to have asked for it so that it was the most natural thing in the world that they should die out. The challenge is there in these two facile conclusions. It is the challenge for settler Australians of recognising that Aboriginal people are fully human beings and the further challenge of recognising the value in the differences between our cultures and societies in such a way that everyone can own the civil society we share and, if you like, the “national identity” we yearn for with an equal cause and an equal commitment. This challenge goes under the label of “Reconciliation”.

But we should be fair to Germaine Greer. Even if her essential idea is flawed with a romantic notion of race, Dr Greer’s contribution throws into stark relief some of the myths that underpin the difficulty of overcoming the inherited frontier hatred that continues to drive racist discourse in Australian public life. Her essay leaves me pondering the question, of whether, in the end, a postcolonial patriotism is even possible. Is it possible that Australians will one day recognise the nations enclosed within their Commonwealth, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander nations from whose homelands a recreant and uncomprehending nation has been carved?

Marcia Langton

WHITEFELLA JUMP UP

Correspondence

P.A. Durack Clancy

Commonsense dictates: ignore Germaine Greer’s latest attention-seeking stunt. Response will simply encourage her. Reaction, it seems, is just what the “eminent expatriate” awaits.

It is possible to ignore the main thrust of Greer’s essay – her admonition to whitefellas to become jumped-up born-again blackfellas. Let those who will, “sit on the ground with (Greer) and think”. Others will give her nought out of ten for workable shortcuts; ten out of ten for media coverage.

It is even possible to ignore the numerous comments that reveal the depth of Greer’s myopia regarding Australia’s past and present. On page 22, for instance: “(in 1971) half a world away … I could suddenly see that what was operating in Australia was apartheid …” More comparable “insights”, along with contradictions galore, appear throughout the essay.

It is possible, too, to ignore the few occasions where Greer actually says something that is correct. The sentence beginning: “The intervention of the academics …” on page 45, is one such instance.

It is simply not possible, however, to ignore what Greer has to say when she turns her careless sights and shoots venom upon Mary Durack’s Australian classic Kings in Grass Castles.

Greer is not the first to descend upon Kings and willy-nilly to pluck passages from it in support of some cockeyed specious thesis.

Indeed for the past twenty years or so various minnows have nibbled at Kings. Those of us who happen, with reason, to admire our forebears’ achievements and Mary Durack’s art as a writer and historian, may have been irritated by the minnows but most of the time the things they said were so absurd and wide of the mark they could not be taken very seriously.

When “a renowned writer, academic and broadcaster”, quite a big fish in other words, also attacks Kings and Duracks and comes up with even more absurd and offensive inaccuracies than the minnows, it is time to stop thinking that the abuse of Australian history and of our family will simply go away.

As far as I am concerned there is no point in enumerating all of Greer’s shameless misrepresentations of Kings, its author and its lead characters. Three examples of the way Greer distorts history and of her jaundiced slipshod method will suffice.

The examples come from a long paragraph beginning on page 65 with, “The evidence from the Durack family …” and concluding on page 66 with “… an expensive disaster.” In amongst this jumbled paragraph Greer says:

1. “In 1879 their land hunger drove a posse of Durack men westwards towards the Kimberley where … they helped themselves to the pick of the Ord and Fitzroy country …”

In these remarks Greer summarises about five detailed chapters of Kings. Fair enough to condense, but what rough research led to such distortion of the facts? Apparently Greer cares not a jot for accuracy. In the interests of the latter, and for the record, here is a factual account of Greer’s loaded sentence above.

In July 1882, following reports by Alexander Forrest of his 1879 expedition to Kimberley, a party of six men, “expert bushmen of proven toughness and resource” led by “Stumpy” Michael Durack, left Brisbane by sea with “twenty-three tried and well-bred horses” and fifteen hundredweight of rations and equipment. They were bound for Cambridge Gulf, Western Australia to see for themselves whether the Kimberley country was as favourable and suitable for stock as Forrest had claimed. In Darwin they engaged two Aborigines, Pannikin and Pintpot, who not only proved their worth on the expedition but so relished their Durack experience they later joined the team on the long trek that led Queensland cattle into Kimberley.

In short, Greer’s “land-hungry posse” was a well-organised, well-disciplined reconnaissance, or survey, party composed of white and black men.

2. In the same paragraph, page 66, Greer adds: “[the Duracks’] first expedition (to Kimberley) was a disaster and they were repeatedly lost on the second …”

Again, for the record: In 1879 Alexander Forrest had “conjectured” that the mouth of the Ord was on the west of Cambridge Gulf and that is where the Durack survey party first landed in August 1882. It needs to be noted that before this date the rivers of East Kimberley had not been mapped. (Nor were there any roads, let alone comfy air-conditioned four-wheel drives that today’s “Kimberley explorers” take for granted. It should not be necessary to spell all this out but apparently it is for the likes of Greer.) Stumpy Michael and his party were identifying rivers and naming them for whitefella maps. They were the first to start sketching on paper the river courses and their tributaries. Over time it was discovered that five major rivers flow into Cambridge Gulf. The Ord had been named by Forrest but its course was not known. Stumpy Michael, foreseeing the route to the Ord would be circuitous, marked a boab tree “D1” at the site of their first camp. Within one month of landing on the west side of Cambridge Gulf the Durack party had found the Ord some two hundred kilometres east at its junction with the Negri (as noted by Forrest). There they marked a final boab “D24”, followed the river downstream almost to its mouth and reported Kimberley country to be “fine beyond expectations …”

Their return route, still “in the saddle”, was some one thousand kilometres west to Beagle Bay. From there they caught a ship to Fremantle and another on to Brisbane. From start to finish the reconnaissance took six months. It achieved its principal aim: to sight and assess land before commitment to leasing. Eleven horses had been lost but there had been no loss of human life – white or black. By any normal reckoning this first expedition was remarkably successful.

Yet Greer in her ivory tower at the University of Warwick sweepingly dismisses the expedition as “a disaster”? Has she ever read Kings?

Or did she pass on the task to some clueless research assistant? More likely, she uncritically accepted and repeated the denigrations of the minnows.

As for “they [Duracks] were repeatedly lost on their second expedition [to Kimberley] …” This remark is Greer’s view of the 1883–1885 overland cattle drive from Queensland through the Territory to East Kimberley. Has she any realistic understanding of moving stock long distances through uncharted land? Her put-down of the epic achievement is beneath contempt.

3. Greer again, on page 66: “The Duracks understood so little of what they were doing in the Kimberley they couldn’t even position their original dwelling at Argyle high enough to escape the rising waters of the Behn River in the wet season … it doesn’t take much bushcraft to find evidence of periodic flood; evidently they didn’t even look …”

What an offensive and inaccurate view of those “first footers” who shared a reputation with the finest bushmen in the land. Sure the Behn rose high in the record wet of 1888 and the kitchen, built as was customary well separate from the main house, was swept away. The house itself however withstood the flood and remained in use as a functioning homestead on the place where my great-grandfather Patsy and Pumpkin pegged it until it was drowned by the waters of Lake Argyle some ninety years later – (another story …)

While ever “posses” of prejudiced influential academics set out to rewrite our history and to knock cherished and good Australian stories (I refer not only to Kings), what hope for “reconciliation”? What hope too when loopy negative cock and bull is condoned and applauded? It would be interesting to know, for instance, the number of Australians who would agree that Greer’s “vision … may be precisely the kind of thing Australia has been yearning for all these years”; or that Whitefella Jump Up “crystallises something which has been in the air … for a long time … but which has never … been so well expressed”? My tip is that if today’s battlers were ever to read the essay it would (to paraphrase Greer) simply confirm their own deserved loathing of the eggheads.

For those of us who live in Australia there has long been awareness that in many subtle ways aspects of Aboriginal culture impinge on our lives. Likewise there is a mostly easygoing awareness and acceptance of many other peoples’ cultures. If being Australian is something that we feel and know “in our bones”, why try to pin it down? Can identity be pinned down? Surely identity, personal and national, is a dynamic concept that meanders, changes and adjusts as circumstances and understandings evolve?

To conclude with a prayer: Please God, spare us from a zealous self-exiled academic who preaches to us in real old-style missionary mode that “the way to light is through darkness, and this darkest hour could be just before our dawn as a genuinely new nation …” Amen.

P.A. Durack Clancy

WHITEFELLA JUMP UP

Correspondence

Les Murray

At question time in a reading I gave in Cambridge a few years ago, a lady up the back row asserted “You’ve got an Aboriginal accent!”

“It could well be, ma’am,” I replied truthfully, though with doubts about her ear, “I’ve got any number of Aboriginal relatives.” As possibly a majority of country Australians do.

When the audience and I were leaving, another woman asked me in awed tones “Did you know who that was?” I said no, and she reverently uttered the name of Germaine Greer.

“I used to see her around Sydney University a long time ago, but we never met,” I told the English woman, not adding that I’d thought Dr Greer formidable and rather forbidding back then.

“Would you like to meet her now?” the woman asked breathlessly. I agreed that it was high time, and in the event Dr Greer and I got along amicably, like old contemporaries. I told her how I’d been moved by her book Daddy, We Hardly Knew You, which works like a fine novel. Whether she had been testing me to see whether I would fumble my response to her assertion and so maybe reveal a streak of racism, I guess I’ll never know. Perhaps it was unworthy of me to admit the suspicion, but these are horribly political times, as the very early ’60s at Sydney were blessedly not.

One side of Dr Greer’s new manifesto Whitefella Jump Up that strongly appeals to me is its subtle understanding of what for a generation I have been calling convergence, the slow mutual assimilation of Aborigines and other Australians. She understands the dynamics of this, how it is both genetic and cultural, and how truly equal it has been, despite all the efforts, earlier and recent, to hide and deny it. She is good on the Aboriginal visual art of the last thirty years, which for me is Australia’s equivalent of jazz, a major new art style arising from the most oppressed group in our nation. The rest of her case mainly reflects the mythology of the Skippy left, and so will seem unreal to ethnic and mainstream Australia.

I doubt her proposal to transfer the nominal ownership of our country from Queen Elizabeth to the Aboriginal people, necessarily without any alteration of real ownerships, would have much chance in a referendum. I will be fascinated to read what Aboriginal citizens think of it. To me, it seems very American, in its urgent desire for resolution, for closure, the Big Fix Right Now, rather than the slow working out of themes and equity in a society. Something like it, if genuinely and widely embraced, might secure more visibility and credit for Aborigines as a vital creative force among us and a potent source of subconscious iconography. In a poem I wrote two or three years back, I adverted to what I’m sure must have been a marvel of serendipity, if indeed the architect had not studied Aboriginal forms:

Clothing as Dwelling as Shouldered Boat

Propped sheets of bark converging

over skin-oils and a winter fire,

stitched hides of furry rug-cloak

with their naked backs to the weather,

clothing as dwelling as shouldered boat

beetle-backed, with bending ridgelines,

all this, resurrected and gigantic:

the Opera House,

Sydney’s Aboriginal building.

Les Murray

BEAUTIFUL LIES

Correspondence

Bob Debus

I read Dr Tim Flannery’s essay, Beautiful Lies: Population and Environment in Australia, with interest. Correctly, Dr Flannery writes that, to avoid Australia’s environmental crisis, ‘we must base our action plan on the best science we have rather than prejudices and assertions.’ So why does he fill his essay with argument that does the opposite? Of course, he says many things that are reasonable and insightful, especially about issues of race and culture, but there are worrying numbers of factual errors and blatantly unscientific assertions about the environment. It is most unfortunate, indeed paradoxical, that Dr Flannery’s essay does so much to give comfort and political advantage to extreme anti-conservation groups and political parties who are, quite unashamedly, ideologically opposed to community and government efforts to conserve biodiversity: groups who aren’t too flash on race issues either.

First, Dr Flannery repeats his previously expressed and highly tendentious opinions on the role of fire in the Australian landscape. He wants us to acknowledge that the Aboriginal use of fire was central to sustainable land management in Australia: that is a point easily accepted. The concern arises from his argument about contemporary hazard reduction techniques. It is, he alleges, the ‘pyro-phobic Europeans’ who, by ceasing Aboriginal burning practices, caused the changes in Australia’s vegetation that have led to ‘ever more devastating and frequent’ bushfires in south-eastern Australia. He is vague about the significant ‘hazard reduction’ that is actually carried out by fire authorities and land managers at the present time and all but silent on the impact global warming has had, and will inevitably continue to have, on the incidence of wildfire.

The fundamental problem is that he ignores the single most important factor that determines the occurrence and intensity of fire, as well as the nature of vegetation, in the Australian landscape – that is, the weather. It should be obvious to even the casual observer that extreme fire events coincide with extreme weather events.

Dr Flannery misunderstands the causes of the January 2003 wildfires in south-eastern Australia.

Not only is Australia experiencing record maximum temperatures (in fact, 2002 was the hottest year on record), other factors such as low humidity, low rainfall, high wind speed and the incidence of dry lightning strikes have also been combining to produce lengthy periods of extreme weather conditions.

To place the matter in context, the number of total-fire-ban days in New South Wales usually ranges from about six in a very quiet fire season to around 30 in a serious season. In 2001/02 total fire bans were imposed on 38 days, including 12 days that affected the whole of New South Wales. This was, we recall, a very bad fire season. However, between 1 September 2002 and 19 March 2003, total fire bans were imposed on a massive 97 days including 13 days affecting the whole state.

This was a circumstance without precedent. The Forest Fire Danger Index in Canberra on the day of the Duffy/Chapman conflagration was the second highest ever recorded. On that day, almost-bare paddocks burnt fiercely.

Add in the fact that south-eastern Australia has been experiencing the worst drought on record and that there was an unusually high number of dry lightning strikes (around 160 separate ignition points were recorded on 8 January when the fires began), and you can begin to understand why the extreme weather was overwhelmingly the most important cause of the January 2003 fires in the Alpine region.

It’s also no coincidence that the last time we saw such intense and widespread fire activity in the Australian high country followed similar drought conditions in 1939.

The occurrence of these extreme fire events had nothing to do with the fact that Aborigines were no longer burning in that part of the country; indeed there is no proof that they actually did burn on a broad scale. My understanding is that the high country’s Alpine Ash forests were one of the areas we know Aborigines specifically didn’t ever burn extensively or frequently!

In one of the more detailed and evidence-based scientific critiques of Dr Flannery’s bushfire thesis, J. Benson of the Sydney Royal Botanic Gardens and P. Redpath of the former NSW Department of Land and Water Conservation ‘found no evidence that most of south-east Australia’s vegetation was annually burnt by Aboriginal people‘. Importantly, Benson and Redpath also highlight weather as the crucial parameter, stating that ‘the evidence suggests that climate change was the main determining factor of vegetation change even over the period since Aboriginal people came to Australia.’¹

Dr Flannery is also wrong in speculating that the futures of the corroboree frog and the mountain pygmy possum ‘hang in the balance after their populations were ravaged by the [January 2003] blaze’. The most up-to-date surveys undertaken by fauna ecologists with the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service show that it is in fact unlikely that there’s been any real loss of bio-diversity in Kosciuszko National Park, with remaining populations of tiger quoll, pygmy possum and corroboree frogs continuing to exist.

Controlled burning is an essential part of present-day wildfire management. However, it is critical that we design fire management and fuel reduction strategies to suit contemporary needs and base them on the best possible scientific evidence of how ecosystems function. Sensible fire management regimes change with the landscape in a particular locality. Useful knowledge to serve this purpose will only come about through continuous and carefully focused multidisciplinary research, not unbridled, unscientific speculation.

I now turn from fire to national parks. Using Royal National Park (Australia’s first and the world’s second national park) as an example, Dr Flannery questions the very idea of establishing conservation reserves as a means of conserving bio-diversity. He proclaims that,‘Clearly, it is a fallacy to believe that proclaiming more such reserves will do very much to preserve Australian wildlife.’

This part of Dr Flannery’s essay vividly illustrates the danger of speculating without referring at all to the findings of what is readily available scientific knowledge.

First, let me rebut Dr Flannery’s plainly ridiculous allegation that the Royal National Park (along, he says, with the ‘great majority’ of other national parks) is a ‘marsupial ghost town’.

On the contrary, the NPWS is able to demonstrate that the Royal National Park does in fact provide important habitat for numerous small marsupials and monotremes, including populations of the common dunnart, eastern pygmy possum, tiger quoll, long-nosed bandicoot, antechinus, ring-tailed and brush-tailed possums, sugar and feather-tailed gliders, echidnas and swamp wallabies. There is even anecdotal evidence that platypuses may be present in the area. The park is also one of eastern Australia’s most diverse for native bird life, with nearly 300 native species recorded.

In any event, Royal National Park does not exist in isolation. It is on the very edge of a continuous reserve system that runs for hundreds of kilometres right into Victoria. A little further away from the highly urbanised area of Sydney, the national parks abound with large marsupials.

The magnificent national parks of New South Wales are not claimed by any reasonable conservationists as the be-all and end-all of biodiversity conservation. They are, however, probably the single most important element in the strategy to conserve our state’s native fauna and flora. Achieving physical connections between public and private land of high conservation value (including national parks) is also an important part of the strategy because these connections allow species to migrate and re-colonise areas following extreme events such as fire.

The recently released Australian Terrestrial Biodiversity Assessment 2002 confirms the necessity of maintaining protected areas for biodiversity conservation. This assessment illustrates the importance of ensuring that sizeable areas of various unique forest ecosystems and biological features are represented in the conservation reserve system, and so protected by law for all time. It represents the most recent scientific analysis of the adequacy of Australia’s reserve system. For example, under the umbrella of the Northern Regional Forest Agreement in NSW, there are now 493 previously under-represented biological features protected forever in lands managed for conservation.

These conservation features include threatened or regionally significant plant and animal species, forest ecosystems, rainforest and old-growth forests – the same old-growth forests that Dr Flannery astonishingly asserts are ‘relatively unimportant’ in terms of biodiversity.

Our most recently created northern NSW reserves contain:

– a total of twenty-five biological features which were previously under-represented in the reserve system, thus meeting scientifically determined conservation targets; and

– a further 325 under-represented biological features which now have their conservation status significantly increased (i.e., greater than 100 ha addition and/or greater than 5 per cent area target improvement).

As a result of reservation, their values are now permanently protected from the threats posed by native timber harvesting. Thus, the chances of ensuring the long-term survival of species, communities and related ecosystems, which would not otherwise have been guaranteed, are now significantly higher.

If we fail to protect our landscape, as our forebears so often failed to do, our biodiversity will be artificially confined to botanic gardens, zoos and perhaps the random coverage of individual landholders who have a personal commitment to manage their land for conservation.

It is of course absolutely critical that we confront past errors, misunderstandings and ‘lies’ to resolve the serious ecological problems caused by dryland salinity, land degradation, poor river health and broad-scale land clearing. Governments must work intensively with local rural communities to ensure genuinely sustainable outcomes are achieved.

While Dr Flannery has correctly identified the widespread acceptance of terra nullius as our nation’s founding and most dangerous ‘lie’ (which has itself resulted in many of the environmental problems we now face), it is perhaps just as important to ensure that the decision-makers of today don’t fall into the same trap that many of our colonial ancestors did and adopt untested, speculative and simplistic ‘solutions’ to what are in reality complex environmental problems.

Bob Debus

1. See J. S. Benson & P. A. Redpath, ‘The nature of pre-European native vegetation in south-eastern Australia’, Cunninghamia 5 (2), 1997, pp. 285, 310.

BAD COMPANY

Correspondence

Trevor Sykes

Gideon Haigh’s critique of chief executive officers hits the bullseye.

One of the problems with chief executives is that they become transactional rather than committed. In the same way that one-night stands are eroding the long-term commitment of marriage, chief executives have become more obsessed with their personal short-term gains than with the ongoing success of their companies.

This is the prime reason why stock options have proved such a dud idea. If a chief executive is to be rewarded on the basis of the share price rather than the underlying health of the company, then sooner or later at least a few chief executives will start manipulating the share price. Frank Partnoy’s current book, Infectious Greed, cites several examples of this behaviour in the US, where chief executives have deliberately falsified corporate accounts in order to show higher profits. The false profits drove up share prices which in turn reaped a fortune for the CEOs in stock options.

The greatest Australian businessmen of the last century were Rupert Murdoch and Essington Lewis. They spent a lifetime devoted to building News Ltd and BHP respectively. If we look at the current generation of company builders, the best examples are those with a large stake in their companies, who have worked at building them for a generation. Frank Lowy and Gerry Harvey are two notable examples who have delivered great value to faithful shareholders.

CEOs who are short-term oriented and sign two- or three-year contracts with golden hellos, stock options and golden parachutes are never going to deliver the same results.

Trevor Sykes

BAD COMPANY

Correspondence

Michael Pusey

Gideon Haigh has produced a rich and finely crafted essay on the cult of the CEO. It comes grounded in an immense body of research that cuts through the generalities to deliver a measured account of how these people have deceived the public, cheated their shareholders, destroyed good companies and, with mass sackings and the brutalisation of workplaces, poisoned the lives of millions of their employees. It is such a fine piece of work because Haigh wastes no time with remonstrations and curses. Instead he channels his energies into marshalling all the evidence that a good society, an imaginary court and a clearheaded jury would need to pull these people into line. But no one pulls them into line because the regulatory apparatus has been destroyed! Yet Gideon Haigh says that “we” are complicit in the cult of the CEO. Complicit? How? I have nothing but praise for the essay. In what follows I wish to ask what the cult of the corporate superman has to teach “us” about “our” society.

It is interesting to learn that the increase in CEO salaries has been inversely proportional to what shareholders have received. And, yes, the same is true for the relationship between the corporation and the host society. What Haigh misses (though in fairness it was not part of his brief ) is that the CEOs have become, in effect, the most powerful politicians in the land. Twenty years ago we knew, sort of, that we were being asked to surrender our own extremely successful history of market democracy in favour of an American top-down government of big business, by big business and for big business, that would soon be fooling all of the people all of the time. And now the national accounts tell their part of the story. Over the course of our twenty-year-long program of economic “reform” – from 1980 to the turn of the century – the total wages share of national income has fallen from 60 per cent to 54 per cent as the profit share has risen from 17 per cent to just on 24 per cent. (The government share has stayed at about the same low level.1) Deregulation, privatisation, labour market reform, micro-economic reform, user pays, cutting government spending, more competition, tax reform (the GST) – all of this has been done with the single aim of creating new profit opportunities for big business. It has been a grand success.

First among the drivers have been the one hundred top CEOs who together constitute the Business Council of Australia. Former senior Labor minister John Dawkins speaks openly of the “intimacy” of the relationship between the Labor government and the BCA. He says that the Business Council CEOs were the “pacesetters”, the “cheer squad” and the authors of “reform”² (for which read the dispossession of the Australian people). Too much concentration on exorbitant executive salaries distracts attention from a capture of enormous political power, power that these CEOs have used to transform their relationship to “us”. With lots of well-coordinated help from their friends – the hired guns in the policy think-tanks, the media moguls, the economic journalists and The Australian, the top accounting houses, the credit rating agencies, the international peak business organisations and the economic rationalists who run the Canberra policy apparatus – they have succeeded in redefining the national government as little more than the front desk for corporate Australia. In this warped view of the world, “our” society reappears only as a generic externality of the economy, a frustration to corporate power, an idiot host, or simply as a dump for the unpriced human and social costs of operating corporations – overwork, unemployment and under-employment, degradation of the public domain, scrambled time-horizons, unsettled expectations, personal aggression, disrespect, stress-related illness, depression, and the list goes on – with all of this “collateral damage” amply confirmed by international comparative studies. For the CEOs, society now figures as a wholly external environment, rather like the biosphere, to which they feel neither attachment nor obligation.

Haigh is spot-on in commenting that, “The view of the corporation as a means to the creation of shareholder value should be seen as comparable to that much-despised fantasy figure Rational Economic Man: a useful simplification, but a silly assumption.” The failures of Enron, One. Tel, and HIH point beyond the antics of their CEOs to something more important still. They demonstrate the limits, if not the failure, of a free market, laissez-faire, “economic rationalism” that is still insistently touted by vested interests as the “one best way” of coordinating the affairs of nations. We remember the ideological justifications for deregulation that were served up to us every day in the early 1980s. States and their bureaucracies had grown like topsy and were now “bloated” (a favourite misrepresentation of Peter Reith and John Howard), incompetent, a drain on the creative energies of capital. They were hopelessly mired in too much “decision overload”. Only the markets could “reduce complexity”. The only way to save those drifting, rudderless, capitalist economies, the only way to rid ourselves of stagflation, the only way to stride forward to a new prosperity, was to set those animal spirits loose. Do it, or wither as a “banana republic”! How? With a crash-through “economic rationalism” that would shift the burden of coordination of a whole nation society from states, bureaucracies and the law on the one hand, to economies, markets and money on the other. Twenty years later, Haigh hammers home what we have learned from this unhappy experience. In the real world it is disastrous to let money function, as the eminent economist Lionel Robbins once put it, as the “solvent of knowledge”. When you use money, aggressively, deliberately, cynically, as a tool for melting down moral cultures, be it within the corporation, or more broadly across the nation as a whole, you are driven sooner or later to Haigh’s conclusion. Money is not a good motivator of human creativity. Incentives can only take you so far. Without deliberative reason, sound institutions and respect for persons, big money breeds risk and fear and is more likely to destroy creativity than to foster it.

Haigh, whom I would be pleased to count among my friends as a sociologist of culture, comes to some other equally important conclusions about money, reason and time. He tells us that executive salaries cannot possibly be taken as a measure of what the CEOs are worth in hard dollars. Why? Because the best empirical evidence of the 1990s shows that their pay is unrelated to real performance and, as he explains, because remuneration is assessed on present rather than future profitability and thus based on the decisions of others taken in the past. But there is something more. Economic reform and the CEOs who have driven it operate with a flattened-out functionalist model of time that is used as a weapon to overpower people and culture. In praising the achievements of his own government, Paul Keating touched on this in a speech he gave in 1996. “If you stop pedalling,” he said, “the bike falls over.” Although other people in the room were amused by this homely metaphor, I heard only a disingenuous justification for a general strategy with two admissions: Keating was saying firstly that searching for consensus is a waste of political time and economic opportunity; and secondly that one must keep up the momentum of change, not because you want to create anything in particular but rather because it’s the best way to overpower cultural restraints on the will of the people at the top – by making sure that normative judgements about justice, obligation, fair process and proportion are always left behind, subordinated in advance to economic functions. The strategy does what most of these CEOs routinely do in their first months in the job. They turn the place upside down and inside out so as to flush out their opponents and make uncertainty, and induced insecurity, work for them and against everyone else – opponents soon get the message that “all resistance is futile”. The strategy deliberately sets out to create a dynamic imbalance that puts opponents on the back foot appealing to past institutional arrangements and standards of conduct that the CEO has already defined as fetters and shackles on his or her corporate ambitions. Artificially shortened time-horizons normally point to a cultural disturbance, in this case to one that has been cynically contrived to maximise the power of corporations and of those who drive them.

To return to the one point that does, I think, too quickly close off Haigh’s own larger discussion. In apposition to his comment that “we forget that a lot of what the CEOs extracted was in full view”, Haigh immediately goes on to say, “We overlook how naively we bought the myth of their individual genius.” Who is “we”? Surely not the Australian people, who know perfectly well that they did not choose to throw themselves and their institutions into the furnace to feed predatory corporations. It is useful here to cite some revealing figures from my recent study of 400 randomly selected middle Australians (“middle” here means just about everyone who is neither rich nor poor: that is to say above the 20th percentile of average household income and below the 90th). The Middle Australia Project focus groups left us in no doubt about their feelings towards CEOs. The survey responses confirm what they said.

Middle Australia Project: Attitudes to big business, per cent.³

(All responses offer a 5-point scale with only “strongly agree”/”agree” and “yes!!”/”yes” responses presented here.)

Those who say that big business has too much power are more than three times more likely to say they are “angry or unhappy about what is happening to middle Australia today”. Of the majority who say that big business has too much power, 82 per cent think that the country is run by “a few big interests” rather than for “all the people”. What “they” are saying is not that “we” are complicit in what big business and the “reformers” have done to us (which would give them a certain legitimacy) but quite the opposite. They know that the big end of town and its helpers have deliberately wrecked our institutions (what else could deregulation mean?) turned their backs on “we the people” and left us at the mercy of naked power.

Michael Pusey

1. My economist colleagues tell me that, for technical reasons, this is not a good measure of the real government share. Yet there is no dispute about the relatively small size of our public sector. Other measures show that Commonwealth government revenues as a percentage of GDP have risen slightly from 23.3 in 1980 to 26.2 in 2000 (see Treasury Budget 2001–02, Appendix D, “Historical and Net Debt Data”, AGPS).

2. Pamela Williams and Stephen Ellis, “Dawkins Kisses and Tells on the BCA”, Australian Financial Review, 15 July 1994.

3. For further details see Michael Pusey, The Experience of Middle Australia. The Dark Side of Economic Reform, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003.

BAD COMPANY

Correspondence

Evan Thornley

As a second-year university student, I read Stephen Robbins’ textbook on Organizational Behavior (like all management theory in Australia, it was imported from the US – hence the spelling) and came across a new idea – “the managerial imperative”. I never did an MBA but many people who have assure me that “the agency problem” (the same issue) is a core part of the curriculum in any reputable school. Strangely, the issue doesn’t seem to have had much of an airing in the public sphere beyond business academia. Gideon Haigh’s outstanding essay places a welcome spotlight on it.

Agency theory runs counter to the quaintly selfless model of “master and servant” that begat modern capitalism – it suggests that managers’ interests may be different from, or even contrary to, those of the shareholders that ultimately hire them. When you give it a moment’s thought, it seems pretty obvious. As a certain former Labor prime minister was fond of saying, “In the race of life, always bet on self-interest – at least you know it’s trying.”

While no one doubts the vital importance of getting the best management if a business is to compete successfully, the question becomes, at what price? Who determines what management is paid, how performance is assessed, and who assesses the assessors?

That a small “club” runs most of “the big end of town” in this country is not a new observation. There is little deviation from the common interests shared by the group. Despite a certain level of competition and personal rivalry, for the most part “what happens on the field stays on the field”, as the footy players are fond of saying. As most of the boards of directors are drawn from this management group, its control of the organisations is further strengthened. In another era when such things were more popularly the subject of genuine analysis, the common interests of this group of senior managers might even have been said to amount to a “class”. Heaven forbid, the social construct that dare not speak its name!

It is no longer fashionable to talk about class – for some reason the collapse of totalitarian communism (itself the result of the total dominance of its own managerial class – the political apparatchiks) is taken as self-evident proof that class analysis – indeed political analysis generally – no longer has a role to play. Haigh’s essay shows that it does – although I freely concede that Haigh himself may not welcome this interpretation or terminology.

What we have here is the rise and rise of the managerial class: a distinct and separate set of interests from the respective interests of employees, shareholders and customers. Look at many Australian companies over the last two decades and you can see this trend emerging very clearly at the place where all class analysis begins – the economics. In too many of our companies we have seen workers forced to accept sub-real wage increases, shareholders receive sub-cost-of-capital returns, and customers pay exorbitant prices resulting from monopolistic and oligopolistic industry structures.

One group, though, has made out like bandits – senior management. As Haigh points out, the rise in CEO and other senior management salaries has outpaced any other index of economic benefit for shareholders, customers or workers. By a mile!

What price failed management?

No one seriously doubts that the quality of management is among the most important factors in any business. As in all avenues of life, leadership is always the scarce resource. The issue is, at what price? In particular, how do you judge good management from poor and how should that affect the rewards paid to managers?

At any given level of managerial competence, as the costs of payments to management increase, profits and shareholder returns must therefore decrease. Even if a given level of profit is to be maintained for shareholders, then these managerial cost increases must be offset elsewhere – either at the expense of customers (through higher prices), workers (through lower wages) or suppliers, many of whom are smaller companies less able to respond.

In this way the interests of the managerial class are economically opposed to the interests of almost all other groups of society in a simple and mathematical way.

When I discussed this recently with some of my colleagues in business, they expressed a concern that this was returning to the bad old days where we talked about “how the pie is distributed” rather than “how to grow the pie”. The theory is that good management “grows the pie” and is therefore entitled to a share of the benefit. It’s a great theory.

In practice we have seen senior management pay rising at about 15 per cent compound per annum and no other aspect of “the pie” has grown as fast. So whether we want to talk about it or not, the pie is being redistributed.

It is important to spend more time talking about how to “grow the pie”, but when those who say “Why are we going back to the bad old days of talking about distribution?” are in fact the prime beneficiaries of the largely silent redistribution of the last two decades, the plea rings a little hollow.

And it rings even more hollow when we ask how successfully Australian management is “growing the pie”, especially in the face of the onslaught of international competition. Every once in a while someone speaks up for “our business leaders” and laments that we do not laud their achievements in the same way that we do our sporting heroes. It is said that this is “the tall poppy syndrome” in action. I disagree. As usual, the punters have got it largely right. Most of our sporting heroes are acclaimed for being truly the best in the world – our swimmers, cricketers and even, on occasion, our downhill skiers.

How many of our CEOs could credibly claim to be the best in the world? The few I can think of who are in there with a shout are also those who run, or ran, the companies they founded. Dick Pratt, Rupert Murdoch and a few others at least have a shot at such a title in their respective industries. A tiny number of other truly world-class companies apparently have truly superior management teams – it’s hard to think of any among our larger companies, but perhaps in the minor leagues a niche specialist like Cochlear could claim to be a true world leader in its field.

John Button reports in his memoirs a conversation with Sir Peter Abeles in which Abeles asked Button how many good CEOs he thought there were in Australia. Perhaps typifying modern Labor’s reluctance to criticise business performance for fear of being seen to be anti-business in general, Button cautiously replied, “Twelve.” As Button records, Abeles replied, “I think you’re being generous. I think there are ten.”

In the tough world of global competition, we have almost no Australian companies, other than in resources, who generate even $1bn in exports. In a globalising economy where we have opened our markets and removed our tariff barriers to international competition, the capacity of our companies to do likewise and invade others’ markets will determine our place in the world. To date they have largely failed. By and large this provides the reason why most Australians are appalled by the cult of the CEO and its economic results – quite simply, “They’re not worth it.” This has been highlighted by the extraordinary cases of payout for failure. The press, in a rare display of business acumen, has said enough on this particular topic that I don’t need to press it further. Some of the debate has also been confused, however, with payouts to failed leaders like AMP’s George Trumbull lumped in with equity gains made by people who created tremendous shareholder value during their tenures. Whatever the merits of their level of compensation, at least it was part of “growing the pie”.

But otherwise, the continued rise of management salaries is always justified by the notion of peer assessment – “someone else is getting this much and I’m as good or better than them” and/or “our company is bigger/more profitable/ harder to manage/more committed to excellence etc.”. By some accident of history, almost every board seems to rate their own CEO near “the top of the class” and takes the high end of the comparison range. In this way the managerial class has given itself a 15 per cent compound pay rise as a group and justified every individual decision by the unrigorous application of the notion of “pay for performance” (an otherwise worthwhile idea).

Some even suggest that the mandatory publication of senior management compensation is at fault as it encourages this sort of peer review. That reminds me of Americans who told me with a straight face that the problem of schoolyard violence was caused by there being too few metal detectors at school gates. And here I was thinking it might be something to do with fourteen-year-olds having access to Uzis!

Rather than trying to place management compensation under the cone of silence, we need to push boards to be more transparent and more rigorous concerning the basis on which “pay for performance” will in fact be paid. It needn’t need to be that difficult to ascertain when it’s deserved – in many cases, being able to deliver abnormal returns (that is, a combination of share price improvement and dividend payment that outperforms peer companies in the industry over a sustained period) would be a pretty good start. It sounds simple, but it’s damn hard to do. But for those management teams that can do so, bring on the performance bonuses. But not for the rest.

I have also heard many people say that if we didn’t keep paying these spiralling costs to senior management, we’d lose all the good ones to overseas. That is a bogus threat. Firstly, of the many highly qualified ex-pats I know, not one of them went over “for the money”. They left for opportunity – for bigger challenges; to play in the global A-grade. If we want our best people to stay, we need to develop globally competitive export companies, not try to pay ever more to people to run our domestic services oligopolies. If people want to be paid “global-level” compensation, they should build global-scale companies and deliver world-class performance to their shareholders. You can count on the fingers of one hand the Australian companies that have thus far managed to do that.

In fact, my discussion with many ex-pats and “re-pats” (ex-pats who’ve come home) tells me that one strong reason why people want to return to Australia is its unique culture, values and lifestyle. Australian egalitarianism is constantly mentioned in this regard. If we continue to follow a pattern of excessive compensation for mediocre performance at senior levels while expecting “restraint” from all other interested parties, we diminish that egalitarian spirit and reality.

Australia is no longer distinguished, for example, by an unusually low degree of income inequality or an unusually high level of home ownership. The most precious differentiator that we have to encourage the return of ex-pats – our egalitarian values – is diminished, not increased, by the spiralling disparity in compensation unrelated to performance.

Time for solutions

Thankfully Gideon Haigh is not alone. A casual reading of a range of commentators – from Stephen Mayne’s crikey.com.au to Mark Latham’s “insiders and outsiders” – reveals widespread questioning of the current operations of corporate Australia. And so there should be. Haigh’s essay is long on rigorous analysis and pointed criticism but short on solutions. While his suggestion that former middle managers could serve effectively on boards may well have some merit, it’s insufficient to address the magnitude of the imbalance we now have. Here are some initial thoughts on how to restore the balance.

Shareholder proxy services

Shareholders are not currently organised very well. That empowers the managerial class to indulge in new forms of excess. Internationally, organisations exist whose sole focus is to advise institutional shareholders on how to vote their rights at shareholding meetings, such as Institutional Shareholder Services in the US and PIRC in the UK. These can be voluntary associations or even private companies that charge subscription fees to the institutions.

The development of similar voices for Australian shareholders (or preferably even more powerful ones) is essential to counteract the passive acceptance that currently holds sway. That the chair of the Audit Committee of AMP could be reelected with more than 80 per cent of the vote after presiding over some of the most imprudent and value-destructive efforts of recent times demonstrates how farcical the current shareholder democracy structures really are.

The involvement of active and activist shareholders in notable areas of value destruction – such as excessive management compensation and dubious mergers & acquisitions activity – is long overdue. Perhaps the establishment of such advisory services would provide an informational and organisational counterpoint to the resources available to management. To state the obvious, however, the existence of such a service was clearly not enough to prevent the recent US outrages at Enron, WorldCom, Tyco and many others, but it would be a start.

There is an emerging set of international precedents for better and more active corporate governance and shareholder activism. The shareholders at GlaxoSmithKline in the UK, for example, revolted a couple of months ago and voted down their CEO’s pay package. It has gone “back to committee” for a rethink and not yet re-emerged, but the chairman acknowledged that the message was loud and clear. Tesco, the very strongly performing supermarket giant, also nearly lost approval for Terry Leahy and his management board’s compensation. The complaint focused on the two-year contracts which could “reward failure” if they were paid out. The compensation scheme passed by a whisker even though the company’s management had been extremely successful over the last ten years.

Corporate governance reforms

Corporate governance has to be fixed. Governance problems are endemic in the incestuous corporate board environments and poor regulatory and prudential environments that we currently have – look at HIH, Harris Scarfe, One. Tel, AMP and many others. Whether in terms of preventing fraud or merely in being competent, these and many other boards have failed.

Let’s get serious about it. The Australian Shareholders’ Association suggests no one should serve on more than five boards – only two if they are performing poorly – and a chair position counts for three.¹ CEOs shouldn’t sit on each other’s boards. Executive and board compensation should be transparent and approved by shareholders, preferably in advance.

New forms of equity compensation

Having lived through the whole Silicon Valley thing, I’ve seen equity compensation work well and very badly. At its best, we’ve seen every employee be a shareholder in the company – in good times, most earned more from their shares than they did in wages, truly making them shareholders first and employees second. At its worst, poor performers made millions by being in the right place at the right time.

In Australia, through a perverse legislative environment, equity compensation is the preserve of the few. As a believer in the concept of aligning management’s interests (indeed all employees’ interests) and those of shareholders, I’d like to find a way for equity compensation to work. Current schemes, including their most evolved version in Silicon Valley, largely do not.

As Haigh pointed out, options are a one-way device – you win if the price goes up, but there is no penalty if the price goes down – and can encourage “swing for the fences” risks by management. Secondly, what happens to the price of shares at any given moment often has little to do with the inherent value of a company. Even very stable companies can often go through changes in share price of up to 50 per cent in a single year – even when the underlying business, and therefore its value, has changed little. Thirdly, as Haigh outlines in depth, the contribution of individual managers, if it could be measured at all, is often only seen years after the decisions they have made.

So let me outline a draft scheme that addresses some of these shortcomings:

• Equity compensation could be paid directly in common stock, rather than as options. That way its cost is easily measured and incentives are aligned directly with those of shareholders – both up and down. It should, of course, be expensed at the time it is earned.
• The amount of the equity compensation, like all compensation, should be determined by real relative performance measures, such as the “abnormal returns to shareholders” described above or measures based on the company’s relative financial performance to its peers on core metrics like return on invested capital – the important point being that the “performance” notion must be rigorous and must be comparative. It must be such that the worst performers in an industry actually don’t get any bonus at all (if indeed they keep their jobs) and only those who are unambiguously the best, on objective financial metrics, get the full amount.
• These measurements must be taken over substantial periods – favouring a gradual increase in management compensation over long periods based on proven performance, rather than negotiated up-front compensation or compensation based on inaccurate metrics like short-term share price which may have nothing to do with management performance and are often consistent across an entire industry, sector or market rather than being measures of relative performance.
• Management should be barred from selling more than a small proportion of stock – say up to one-third – in the year they earn it, and the remaining two-thirds should vest (that is, only be made available) two years after departure from the company. Such a measure would ensure that management works for the long-term value of the business. Of course, if the individual is fired for incompetence, this portion is retained by the company – a modest comfort to shareholders rather than the current practice of adding insult to injury by giving failed leaders massive payouts. (There would need to be safeguards to ensure such “firing” was not perverse or unfair.)

This type of structure appears to be gaining support. Microsoft has ceased granting options and instead now favours a form of restricted common stock. In the UK, Luc Vandervelde, the well-regarded Belgian CEO of retailer Marks &Spencer who turned the company around and has now stepped up to chairman, takes 100 per cent of his salary as a fixed number of shares per month. When he first joined the firm, sales and profits were sinking fast and the shareholders revolted and forced him to slash his package. Apparently this new idea was his own.

Corporate tax rebalancing

Companies and boards are ultimately free to pay their employees as they see fit (provided that they properly consult shareholders), but there should be some point at which excessive disparities no longer attract tax benefits.

Haigh cites such venerable business names as J. P. Morgan and Peter Drucker who both suggested the principle that no one earn more than twenty times that of their lowest-paid colleague. Heavens, in the current environment we could aspire to hold it at fifty times and still be found wanting. But at some multiple, whatever it is, it seems fair to draw the line – beyond this, managerial compensation ceases to be a deductible expense for the company’s taxation.

Government ultimately determines which expenses are tax-deductible and which are not; which calls on revenue have priority over the call of taxation and which do not. Hence the Fringe Benefits Tax. And so at a wider level it is neither conceptually inconsistent nor frighteningly radical to say that beyond a certain point the claim of management to compensation does not supercede the claim of taxation.

Of course, to rebut the accusation that this would increase corporate taxation by stealth, I’m quite happy for the average rate of corporate taxation to be adjusted downward so that the total tax take is the same. This fiscally neutral solution would reward good behaviour and discourage bad behaviour. Of course, without the other measures outlined above, it wouldn’t work very well because boards and senior management would probably just continue with the current level of continually rising excess and shareholders-be-damned. That’s why corporate governance reform is crucial.

Conclusion

These suggestions are by no means complete and some may prove to be ineffective on closer inspection. The important point is that this is the debate we should be having. How can we fairly split the economic fruits of our labours between capital, management and labour and indeed ensure that the pie is being “grown”, not just redistributed to the managerial class? What mechanisms can be used to ensure good governance, good management and maximum economic efficiency? Gideon Haigh has re-launched an important debate – let’s talk about solutions.

Evan Thornley

1. Position Paper on Multiple Directorships, Australian Shareholders’ Association, 28/6/02.

“KANGAROO COURT”

Correspondence

Bruce Hawthorne

John Hirst raises many salient issues. However, in his attempt to champion the cause of many deeply aggrieved non-resident fathers, it is a pity that he allows his acrimony to infiltrate his essay and sometimes to cloud his judgment. His understanding of how the family law system operates is surprisingly accurate for someone who admits to having played only a minor role in one of its many dramas. He has highlighted some of the legal strategies employed to gain advantage in parenting disputes before the Court, and the injustices that sometimes result. He has, however, fallen into the trap of arguing from the particular to the general in interpreting some individuals’ experiences of the system as indicative of the Court’s policies and procedures. It is not standard procedure for parents to surrender contact with children in order to receive news of them. It is highly unlikely that most officers of the Court take an Apprehended Violence Order as prima facie evidence that violence has occurred between the parties. They recognise that many Apprehended Violence Orders around the time of separation are about safeguarding boundaries that one or other party is unwilling to respect. 

In the thirty years since the establishment of the Family Court, growing numbers of fathers have become more involved in their children’s lives and have assumed greater responsibility for them, sometimes by choice and sometimes because of mothers’ greatly increased participation in paid employment. As intact family life has changed, pressure has grown for changes to separated family life. The current political influence exercised by non-resident fathers, whose frustration and pain Hirst has clearly identified, is an attempt to convince both legislators and policy-makers of the need for that change.

Hirst bravely ventures into a minefield when he challenges the weight given by the legislation and the Court to the best interests of children after parents separate. In 1975, when the Family Law Act was introduced, there were very real fears that no-fault divorce would lead to widespread abandoning of marital commitments and to increasing numbers of children becoming the “innocent victims” of divorce. It was socially imperative for legislation and practice to protect children, even though there was then very little quality research into the impact of divorce. Now, however, children of separated parents are no longer the social oddity they may have been thirty years ago. Many children of divorced parents score as well as children in intact families on measures of adjustment. Research has also shown children usually benefit from both parents in their lives, provided they do not become ensnared in ongoing inter-parental conflict. 

Family law rhetoric and practice are very much about the best interests and rights of children, and the responsibilities rather than the rights of parents. Hirst cites incidents where seemingly innocent non-resident fathers have been denied contact or involvement with children in the belief that such contact is not in children’s best interests. While rejecting his somewhat patronising description of the Court as “pious”, I suggest that both the legislation and jurisprudence appear precious at times. They seek to provide children in separated families with the sort of privileged position that most children in intact families do not enjoy. Families generally do not always function on the principle of children’s best interests. What frequently happens in a healthy family life is that parents do not live for their children but seek to strike a reasonable balance between the rights, needs and interests of all family members. How many get the balance right is a matter of conjecture. Families in which children’s interests always prevail do not seem any healthier than those in which they are consistently swamped by those of parents. Competing interests are often evident, for example, when parents relocate for employment or lifestyle reasons. Although the relocation usually results in children experiencing short-term deprivation and pain, it may be to their long-term benefit. Nevertheless, parents’ claims that they are relocating because their children’s interests are paramount still deserve to be met with scepticism.

The reluctance to recognise parents’ rights along with their responsibilities is surprising. Making children’s best interests the paramount consideration in resolving disputes seems to distance the family law system from what commonly happens in intact family life. It is little wonder that many non-resident fathers complain that the system is gender-biased, accusing it of marginalising them within the family, denying their rights and failing to enforce contact orders contravened by resident mothers. It is unclear, though, whether the bias is gender-based or the product of the sole-residence arrangement.

Hirst cites cases to do with children’s names and family relocation to demonstrate the almost exclusive authority that resident parents (the vast majority of whom are mothers) enjoy. The 1995 Family Law Reform Act has effectively restricted the resident parent’s right to relocate with children, but there remains a very telling example of this authority. Court orders commonly direct resident parents to authorise schools to communicate details of children’s academic progress to non-resident parents and to inform them of significant school events. How resident parents ever gained the authority to prevent that flow of information remains unclear. Just as puzzling is the reason why schools, as a matter of policy, do not automatically include both separated parents in the information loop in the absence of any court order to the contrary. 

This example shows that systemic forces impede non-resident parents from having substantial involvement in children’s lives and restrict their opportunity to exercise parental authority. The irony of it all is that the authority bestowed on resident parents was largely an attempt to protect children from becoming ensnared in potentially harmful, ongoing inter-parental conflict. Yet some research reports that a sense of being unable to exercise parental authority is strongly associated with ongoing hostility between parents. The following comment by a non-resident father captures the ambiguity that many men encounter in their post-separation fathering:

I grew up as a young man when society was actively encouraging men to be involved in their families. Attend the birth, go to school meetings, read to your child, etc, etc. Quality time was the mantra. And many of us took this on, albeit imperfectly in many cases; after all, where was our role model? Our fathers did not do it. But then the relationship breaks up and then you are the disposable parent … can it be a surprise that some men are pushed to doing irrational things? I think not.

Hirst accurately recognises that difficult families requiring a judicial decision have become the template for other separating families. Many non-resident fathers, often on solicitors’ advice, simply do not apply to the Court for substantial involvement with children. They rather settle for a level of contact that they would expect to receive should they contest the matter in court. (However, since the Reform Act, court orders now more often provide for non-resident parents to have contact with children during the week as well as on alternate weekends, and to be responsible for day-to-day decisions when the children are in their care.) Some resident mothers, too, use the “court standard” of contact on alternate weekends and for half the school holidays as the criterion by which they measure their goodwill or generosity in offering contact to non-resident fathers. 

For this reason, the adoption of shared residence for children as a rebuttable presumption may have a profound effect by shifting the implied template for all separating parents. It will very likely influence attitudes. Parents may well invest more energy and time in trying to salvage their relationship when faced with the child-support implications of shared residence and the substantial separation from children that it implies. Having decided to separate, they may be willing to come to negotiations about their new family arrangement on a more equal footing. Presently, because of the general expectation that children will live with mothers after separation, many fathers have no input into decisions about residence and contact, and perceive that their involvement with children and parental authority depends entirely on mothers’ goodwill. 

Not all separated fathers want a shared-residence arrangement. As Hirst states, the call for joint custody is partly symbolic, reflecting many non-resident fathers’ desire for greater involvement in children’s lives and the chance to exercise parental authority. Certainly, those for whom fatherhood is of little significance are unlikely to want to assume responsibility for children for substantial periods of time. For some, work demands and geographical distance render shared residence an impracticable arrangement. For some, family violence, substance abuse, psychiatric disturbance and limited parenting skills rule it out as a viable option. For others, though, shared residence, or at least the opportunity to exercise significant parental authority within the family is what they want, what they consider they have a right to, and what they are convinced will benefit their children. 

Bruce Hawthorne

THE WORRIED WELL

Response to Correspondence

Gail Bell

One of the principal aims of my essay was to call attention to the significant rise in antidepressant use in Australia in the past five years. The numbers alone ought to trip a warning siren. Twelve million antidepressant prescriptions dispensed through the National Health Scheme in 2004. Carve up the total any way you want, it’s a lot of doses to swallow, a lot of computer key-strokes or pen scribbles by physician fingers, a lot of money passing from consumers to doctors, from consumers to pharmacists, from pharmacists to drug warehouses, and on down the line from the middlemen to the drug manufacturers. And the figure of twelve million doesn’t include drug orders written for hospital in-patients, or capture the ones who got away – the patients who put their pieces of paper in a drawer instead of handing them to the pharmacist when doubts or economic factors or something they heard on television intervened after their trip to the doctor. 

Having raised the red flag, I sought to humble myself before the mountains of information available on changing trends in the classification of depression and its treatment (principally antidepressant drug therapy), with an eye to finding a source for this eruption.In the wake of Prozac’s fall from grace, and the increasing public demand for drug company accountability, an obvious starting point seemed to be big pharma. Indeed the working title of an early draft of the essay was Drug Companies and Depression. Drug company money washes in and out of this story, a bit like the tides one sees on parts of the Cornish coast; generously buoyant on the in-rush and heartlessly high-and-dry on the retreat. Drug company money keeps the prescription-writers afloat during their training by funding medical education, university departments, hospitals, research institutes and entrepreneurial chemical labs; and it maintains the comfort factor into the middle years with conferences near golf courses and five-star accommodation. As long as big pharma sees a return for its dollars, it will maintain the incoming tides. Following the money, as my correspondent David Webb recommends, leads the researcher to the multinationals’ doors, but also to our own National Health Scheme which can’t be overlooked as a contributor to the dominance of drug-based therapies for depression. In 2004 the NHS contributed $342 million in subsidies for antidepressant prescription costs. 

My concerns were in place, however, long before I ever saw the figure of twelve million. Over the last ten years of a thirty-year watch at the dispensing coalface I’ve witnessed the increase in numbers first-hand. I saw Zoloft move from its alphabetical placement on the dispensary shelf into the frequent flyer division, at arm’s reach for quick access and labelling. Only an automaton, or the truly disaffected, could ignore a phenomenon that involved large numbers of patients with complex symptoms being processed uniformly through a single portal.

But it is a distortion of the total picture to single out big pharma for exclusive attention. I made a decision early on to widen the goalposts. To quote myself: “I want to suggest that this impressive, noticeable increase in antidepressant usage in Australia today has come about through the co-operation of three large but inherently unequal groups: the multinational drug companies; the physicians who write prescriptions; and the public who turn to medicine for answers.”

Three groups, not one. And more complexity, not less. Guy Rundle points out, very eloquently, that “a whole level of social life and social process” was not taken into account in my essay as it attempted to diagnose the causes of increased reliance on drugs to treat depression. I couldn’t agree more, and I was careful to note in the essay’s sources (#6) the lines of enquiry I considered to be outside the scope of my brief. The patient/drug interface is, I believe, an under-represented source of empirical evidence. Social scientists are welcome to interpret the significance of these findings for the wider culture, as seen from this relatively unfamiliar vantage point.

Professor Gordon Parker, psychiatrist and head of The Black Dog Institute, has provided a lucid history lesson in his response. He reminds us that modern medicine has been devising typologies aimed at better classification of depression since the 1950s, acknowledges the emergence of a “procrustean model” where the patient is in effect stretched to meet the length of the bed, and argues for a “horse for courses” model; all of which, if I read my own work correctly, were covered in the essay. This concordance, however, breaks down dramatically when Professor Parker expresses his concerns. I am accused of taking a “pull up your socks”, ad hominem attitude towards those with significant mood disorders. Worse, my words are “misanthropic, trivialising and belittling”. His argument takes the following surreal path: I tried an antidepressant and it didn’t work for me, therefore I have channelled my inner bitterness and disappointment into a hatchet job on those whose lives have been changed for the better by SSRIs. Paternalistic huff aside, this is an odd and worrying response from a medical man whose reputation is built on astute judgments. My own position, clearly stated from the outset, is pro-patient. They (we) must never be underestimated. Gone are the days of the divine physician and the silent apothecary. Questions must be asked up and down the line; and answers, where possible, must be given. If we are to maintain our relevance against the loquacious, ever-available internet search engines, we must offer what a machine cannot: wisdom and compassion and a degree of humility.

With regard to two worrying expressions, “The Worried Well” and “misery chic”, I make the following remarks. For Professor Parker’s sake I regret that “misery chic” became detached from its qualifying clause in successive drafts of the essay. It belongs to the vocabulary of the Prozac phenomenon of the ’90s and comes from the book Prozac Nation. My correspondent “Angie” to whom the postcard section was addressed was familiar with its import and needed no amplification, but for the benefit of readers who may have felt slightly jolted by its impact, I offer the following. The term was invented and first used in New York. As the uptake of Prozac escalated beyond all projections in the United States, “depression” acquired fad status, and from “fad” came “chic”. 

The prominence of “The Worried Well” seems to have impeded Elizabeth A. Wilson’s ability to read beyond the title of the essay. And this leads me to a suggestion for the regulators whose demanding task it is to apply labels when describing the diagnosis and treatment of depression. Abandon the words “mild” “moderate” and “severe”. Abandon the procrustean model of fitting the patient to the disease (as described by Professor Parker). Apply the clinical sophistication that modern training is supposed to confer on our physicians and consider each person on his or her own merits. As one psychiatrist recently told me, “severe” depression should mean “the depression I’m seeing in this patient is as bad as it gets for him or her”. Treat accordingly. Drugs perhaps. Lifestyle changes. Counselling.

I’m writing this response a week after a visit with Angie, whose story featured in my essay. She is back from four months in New York and has had time to absorb the personal implications of having a literary snapshot of controversial aspects of her life circulated widely in print. Even under a disguised name and hidden inside a trench coat of deliberately misleading clues, she has been recognised by her nearest and dearest, and quizzed. I engineered this follow-up meeting because I felt a duty of care towards Angie. It is one thing to grant an author permission to use quotes and observations; it is often quite another to read what an author makes of intimate revelations. The one subject we didn’t discuss was Zoloft, the focal point of our first and subsequent encounters. Why? Because, in essence, it’s none of my business whether she maintains, escalates, tapers or even ceases her doses altogether. Our relationship mirrors, in many respects, the relationships I form with patients in the pharmacy. It is respectful, episodic; noses are not poked in where they are not wanted. I chose Angie’s story from hundreds, perhaps thousands, of stories I’ve heard in a long career dispensing mood-altering drugs because she was articulate, candid and confident in narrating her experience of depressive episodes; and because she exemplified the “just dose me up” class of patients, a group who interest me personally. Those who seek (rightly) to destigmatise depression must be discouraged from dumbing down the really useful message about depression: that it is complex, that one person’s dark night of the soul is not the same as the next person’s, that what works for one does not necessarily work for all. 

From the viewpoint of someone who works in the drug delivery system (a coalface, I might argue, that is deeper in the mineshaft than the university library shelf), it is blindingly obvious that antidepressants are over-used. But that is not to say that antidepressants represent the wrong choice for the treatment of depression, merely that at this time, in this country, the drug option is over-represented and some attempts to restore balance are called for. 

Gail Bell

THE WORRIED WELL

Correspondence

Elizabeth A. Wilson

“Worried well” is a term of disdain. It has become a common way of dismissing the distress experienced by a significant sector of the community, and it does little to help us understand what is at stake – politically and psychologically – in the current psychopharmaceutical climate. Much of the rhetorical strength of Gail Bell’s analysis follows from the distinction she makes between the seriously depressed and those “with the sort of normal sadness that afflicts us all, the people with low-level sorrow”. In the first group, Bell asks us to imagine a twenty-something woman who self-harms, or a withdrawn and suicidal teenager who doesn’t leave his bed. These are the people for whom antidepressants were invented, Bell claims; and there is no question in her mind that these disabling conditions warrant pharmaceutical intervention. On the other hand, we have the worried well. These are the people who have fallen victim to less significant worries – falling out of love or becoming stressed at work. A psychiatrist might categorise these kinds of ills as dysthymia (chronic, low-level sadness). Bell is much less convinced that the worried well require the level of pharmaceutical treatment they have been receiving (mainly from GPs) since the introduction of Prozac in the late 1980s. 

While the category of the worried well may be intuitively appealing, it is extraordinarily unhelpful for analysing the nature of depression and for thinking about its treatment. Distinctions between the deserving and undeserving depressed profoundly underestimate the psychological, and indeed physiological, issues at stake. That there are different kinds of depression is not in dispute. Depressions can be major, bipolar, post-natal, dysthymic, acute, seasonal, fatal. They can manifest with or without psychotic features, with or without the co-morbidity of trauma, an eating disorder, indefinite detention or cancer. Bell seems less interested in the heterogeneity of depressive experience than she is in demarcating a particular subgroup of depressives (the worried well), and then withdrawing empathy and the justification for pharmaceutical treatment from them. 

Bell suggests that the phrase “worried well” comes from Freud. It does not. But what she may be thinking of is a widely circulated quote from Freud, in which he advises that the best psychoanalysis can do is to turn acute misery into everyday unhappiness. Let me quote Freud fully – as I think attention to the detail may enable us to find a way past Bell’s rhetorical, political and (worst of all) moral demarcations. In 1895, at the very end of his Studies on Hysteria, Freud writes:

When I have promised my patients help or improvement by means of a cathartic treatment [the precursor to psychoanalysis proper] I have often been faced by this objection: “Why, you tell me yourself that my illness is probably connected with my circumstances and the events of my life. You cannot alter these in any way. How do you propose to help me, then?” And I have been able to make this reply: “No doubt fate would find it easier than I do to relieve you of your illness. But you will be able to convince yourself that much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness. With a mental life that has been restored to health you will be better armed against that unhappiness.”

In these early years, when Freud was immersed in the treatment of hysteria, he was finely attuned to the needs of his patients. His texts, while fully medicalised, are notable for their empathic engagement with women in particular. He makes no judgment about whether or not a patient ought to be unwell. He treats every patient on her merits, and he asks us to take every affliction seriously, even those that seem petty, disagreeable or self-indulgent. Bell, in repeatedly making a distinction between those who are miserable and those who are merely unhappy, lacks this attentive eye for psychological detail. Where she is concerned that the category of depression has become too large as a result of the big pharma’s marketing and advertising, I am troubled that the category of “common unhappiness” has been expanded so that increasing levels of stress, anger, low mood and self-hatred are seen as a normal part of life. In the end, the politics and rhetoric of those who agitate against the overuse of antidepressants often feel disdainful of certain kinds of emotional distress. Put simply, the category “worried well” tends to obstruct rather than facilitate an understanding of the experience of depression. 

There is now a large body of evidence that suggests not only that drug treatments and psychological treatments of depression work best when combined, but that – more provocatively – psychological treatments have material effects on the nervous system. Freud’s work was prescient in understanding this essential intimacy of neurology and words. The choice between Freud and Prozac (to use Bell’s shorthand) turns out to be less ideologically and medically definitive than we have been led to believe in the post-war, post-Freudian, pro-pharmaceutical years of the twentieth century. Psychoanalysis and psychopharmacology are not competing ideologies of depressive malady – they are different lines of attack into the same bioaffective system. Which line of attack, for how long and at what level of intensity is an issue for each individual in consultation with their mental health practitioner and in accordance with that patient’s circumstances, anxieties and emotional preferences. It is not an issue of principle or politics that can be adjudicated in advance (and for this reason it is exceedingly difficult for those not working at the psychological coalface to know whether or not antidepressants are being over-used). The pro-Freud/anti-Freud, pro-drug/anti-drug debates that have occupied the political field since the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s are becoming less potent as we see growing sophistication (and increasing collaboration) in psychodynamic and psychopharmaceutical research. In the years to come, the difference between treating a depression biochemically and treating it psychologically may be less fraught than we currently suppose. With this future in mind, Bell’s call for a greater variety of resources for treating mild to moderate depression need not also be a battle cry against psychopharmaceuticals.

Perhaps most importantly of all, what Freud is advocating in his treatment of hysteria is not an acceptance of common unhappiness, but the building up of psychic robustness so that life’s misfortunes and heartbreaks can be understood and worked through. This kind of robustness is precisely what depressives (major and minor) lack. Without this psychic strength, every blow – even the smallest – is amplified in force. The damage from being battered by the quotidian events of life ought not to be underestimated. For many, many patients, antidepressants have proven themselves to be an effective bulwark against such everyday battles. Freud himself struggled for the last decades of his life, without the aid of psychopharmaceuticals, to find his emotional equilibrium and buoyancy after the death of his favourite daughter and a grandchild, the exhausting effects of professional battles, the deprivations the Great War had inflicted on those living in Vienna, and then finally the onslaught of cancer. Readers of Bell’s essay who are dissatisfied by her disregard for the harmful effects of mild depression may want to look at Peter Kramer’s new book Against Depression. Kramer (the author of the 1993 bestseller Listening to Prozac) argues that chronic low-level depression eats away at us not just psychically, but also physiologically. Far from being benign, the dysthymic complaints of the worried well register a serious attrition of psyche and nerves. There are no gains to be made from moderate depression (as Bell contemplates), and no excuses for letting it proliferate among individuals or across the culture under the romantic ideal of artistic genius, comedic spark or existential rumination. 

What we need in the public sphere is a greater empathy for what depression – even when minor – feels like, and a wider awareness of the damage it does to our emotional strength, our relationships, our bodies and our capacity to work and play. One of the things that chronic low-level depression may do is make those so afflicted unlikeable and tedious. Further distaste, elicited under the shaming rubric of the “worried well”, only makes the political and emotional challenges of dealing with depression that much harder.

Elizabeth A. Wilson