LIFEBOAT

Correspondence

Robbi Williams

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robbi Williams

LIFEBOAT

Correspondence

Rhonda Galbally 

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

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

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

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

I approached and gave him a smile . . .

“Aren’t we just inspirational!” . . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rhonda Galbally

LIFEBOAT

Correspondence

Monique Ryan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monique Ryan

Voice of Reason

Response to Correspondence 

Megan Davis 

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

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

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

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

This is the parliament.

This is Australian democracy.

This will be the Voice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Megan Davis

Voice of Reason

Correspondence

Rachel Buchanan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rachel Buchanan

Voice of Reason

Correspondence

Daniel James

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Daniel James

Voice of Reason

Correspondence

Mark McKenna

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mark McKenna

The Wires that Bind 

Response to Correspondence 

Saul Griffith

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saul Griffith

The Wires that Bind 

Correspondence 

Robin Batterham

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

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

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

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

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

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

1 To achieve an energy transformation:

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

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

• Greatly increase electrification and energy efficiency.

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

• Greatly expand our utility networks.

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

2 To transform exports:

• Transition to clean energy and minerals.

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

3 And to invest in people, land and biodiversity:

• Add 700,000 workers.

• Move the land sector towards net zero.

• Address major land-use changes.

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

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

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

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

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

Robin Batterham

The Wires that Bind 

Correspondence

Bjorn Sturmberg

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bjorn Sturmberg

The Wires that Bind 

Correspondence 

Christine Milne

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christine Milne

The Wires that Bind 

Correspondence 

Simon Holmes à Court

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Simon Holmes à Court

LONE WOLF

Correspondence

Rachel Nolan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rachel Nolan

LONE WOLF

Correspondence

Carol Johnson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carol Johnson

LONE WOLF

Correspondence

Frank Bongiorno

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Frank Bongiorno

LONE WOLF

Correspondence

Michael Cooney

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I just think that is so true.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michael Cooney

UNCIVIL WARS

Correspondence

Waleed Aly & Scott Stephens

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Waleed Aly & Scott Stephens

UNCIVIL WARS

Correspondence

Karen Jones

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Karen Jones

UNCIVIL WARS

Correspondence

Martin Krygier

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Martin Krygier

UNCIVIL WARS

Correspondence

John Quiggin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Quiggin

UNCIVIL WARS

Correspondence

Nyadol Nyuon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nyadol Nyuon

SLEEPWALK TO WAR

Correspondence

Dennis Altman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dennis Altman

SLEEPWALK TO WAR

Correspondence

Rory Medcalf

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rory Medcalf

SLEEPWALK TO WAR

Correspondence

Sam Roggeveen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sam Roggeveen

SLEEPWALK TO WAR

Correspondence

Michael J. Green

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michael J. Green

SLEEPWALK TO WAR

Correspondence

Malcolm Turnbull

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Malcolm Turnbull

NOT WAVING, DROWNING

Correspondence

Sebastian Rosenberg

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sebastian Rosenberg

NOT WAVING, DROWNING

Correspondence

Joo-Inn Chew

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joo-Inn Chew

NOT WAVING, DROWNING

Correspondence

James Dunk

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

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

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

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

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

James Dunk

NOT WAVING, DROWNING

Correspondence

Janet McCalman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Janet McCalman

NOT WAVING, DROWNING

Correspondence

Jennifer Doggett

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jennifer Doggett

THE RECKONING

Response to Correspondence

Jess Hill

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jess Hill

THE RECKONING

Correspondence

Sara Dowse

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

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

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

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

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

And then things get dark.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sara Dowse

THE RECKONING

Correspondence

Janet Albrechtsen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Janet Albrechtsen

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

THE RECKONING

Correspondence

Amber Schultz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But his attempts are too little, too late.

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

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

Amber Schultz

TOP BLOKES

Response to Correspondence

Lech Blaine

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

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

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

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

The protestors evoked the textbook larrikins described by David Hunt in his characteristically witty correspondence to Top Blokes:

Hunt takes issue with the historical fidelity of the larrikin in my essay, and I don’t blame him. As a historian, I’m not fit to shine David’s shoes. I’m more interested in the myth of larrikinism that Australian politics has inherited than the literal inner-city larrikins of the 1800s.

My point wasn’t that Paterson and Lawson were bona fide larrikins, but that they played a pivotal role in disseminating the myths we still cling to. Likewise, nobody would sanctify Scott Morrison as a bona fide larrikin, partly because he has zero sense of humour. But his ScoMo persona is heavily influenced by the myths of larrikinism. Larrikins such as my brother John immediately see and hear a fellow traveller. Morrison conveys to a certain cohort of voters that he will fight against the political correctness Sky News believes is killing our national hero.

Not long after the tradie riots, John Elliott died. Figures from the right and left united to describe him as a “larrikin,” a euphemism often wheeled out on the death of disgraced businessmen. In the 1980s, Elliott belonged to a coterie of right-wing white-collar mavericks that included John Singleton and Alan Bond. They loved sport and beer, and made politically incorrect faux pas about women. This made them seem like mates, rather than vulture capitalists.

Increasingly, I’ve noticed the figure of the larrikin highlighted by culture warriors on the right as a defence against political correctness. This reactionary larrikin bears little resemblance to Hunt’s textbook larrikin, or the egalitarian larrikins – of both genders – celebrated by Alison Pennington. The myth-makers link a series of contradictory figures whose common feature is that they hearken back to an idealised – and less socially progressive – time in Australia’s history. It also happens to be a time when the transgressions of men went unchallenged.

In hindsight, I could have done a better job of clarifying these competing larrikins at the outset, although I reckon Shannon Burns is probably right: the business of determining exactly who is and isn’t a “real” larrikin might be a fool’s errand. Flicking somewhat flippantly between historical scenes was meant to convey the mess of Australian national identity, and the way we frequently use the same descriptions and categories for people who are spiritually and politically opposed. I definitely should have provided a more succinct definition of what it means to be a larrikin, then and now, especially in a positive sense.

Burns does a stellar job of pinpointing charismatic aspects of a larrikin:

I wish I’d written this. Burns could be describing my father. Dad was a Grade Eight drop-out who once upon a time worked at an abattoir while belonging to a gang of bodgies in hardscrabble Ipswich. After a serious workplace injury, he moved through various jobs, including professional gambling, dalmatian breeding and driving taxis, always hustling for money. He maintained a deep mischievous streak after becoming a publican. But there was always a warmth to his piss-takes, and he was consistently the target of his own scorn. The open advertisement of personal imperfections invited others to loosen up.

In her correspondence, former state Labor MP Rachel Nolan fleshes out the rich tradition of labourism in my father’s hometown of Ipswich:

This atmosphere provided the sincerely egalitarian side of my father’s larrikinism. The son of a trade unionist, he was a foster parent for almost thirty years. He also must’ve been one of the only publicans in the country who waged personal war against WorkChoices, because he believed that the government should protect the penalty rates of his employees and customers. And – along with former Ipswich Jets coach Tommy Raudonikis – he had a profound influence on the nefarious tendencies of his nephew Allan Langer, who would become widely beloved as Queensland’s number one public larrikin.

Growing up, I worshipped larrikin athletes such as Langer and Shane Warne for the same reason my father preferred Doug Walters to Don Bradman. It wasn’t just their athletic prowess that enchanted. They sounded like me, a bogan with a thick Australian drawl. There were increasingly few areas of public life where I saw my identity represented unironically, or where I could look without feeling in some way substandard by comparison.

I was delighted to receive Pennington’s erudite attention to gaps in my essay, and her personal identification with some of my experiences:

My brother John and I aren’t biologically related, but we are cut from the same cloth. His shame caused him to identify with John Howard, who appealed to people sick of feeling like they weren’t enough. As a teenager in country Queensland, my shame caused me to identify with urban elites, although I had much more in common with John on most matters except politics.

I’ve long since made peace with my bogan roots. Still, one of my missions as an essayist is to capture the perspective of self-identifying outsiders like John. Not because I agree with everything that he believes, but because John’s beliefs are extremely popular. He isn’t really an outsider. There are more of him than me. Bri Lee writes about the geographic distance between Australia’s media class and the cohort of unseen voters now known as Scott Morrison’s Quiet Australians, highlighted by the 2019 election:

The great irony – which I perhaps didn’t explore for fear of being self-absorbed – is that by pursuing a career in writing and journalism, I’m at great risk of squandering my father’s class advancements. Indeed, my brother John earns significantly more money than me, and nobody would accuse him of being an elite. I ain’t complaining, because I knew what I was getting into.

But Vivian Gerrand does have a point in her correspondence:

I’ve been incredibly lucky since publishing Top Blokes to generate positive feedback and vehement disagreement, frequently within the same breath. Some have asked why I care if Morrison is a fraud. The best politicians are bullshit artists, and all human beings are inauthentic to some extent. It is impossible to be the same person all the time, and social media has allowed human beings to be several different people at once. As Elizabeth Flux notes:

My memoir, Car Crash, analysed the several different identities I oscillated between as a teenager. The epiphany wasn’t picking just one but becoming comfortable with my contradictions. So why do I care so much about ScoMo’s? Principally, I think his reinvention is interesting on a human level. It also explains something fundamental about our national identity and the changing voting bases of the major parties. Tom Lee somewhat interprets the bee in my bonnet:

I wouldn’t have such an issue with Morrison’s careerist reinvention as a suburban rugby league fan if he didn’t frequently seek to force Australians to conform to a narrow version of Australian identity, or to exclude people who don’t from political debates. Anyone who disagrees with the government from the left, especially on climate change, is likely to be labelled as an inner-city elite. But there are no more powerful “inner-city elites” than the ones Morrison used to rub shoulders with at rugby union games or Liberal Party fundraisers. And if you seek to police public debate with stringent identity markers, you should expect your own carefully focus-grouped identity to be scrutinised.

At the same time, I didn’t want the essay simply to be a critique of Scott Morrison and Coalition voters. It takes two to tango. The reason so many Australians find ScoMo’s unpretentiousness appealing is because they generally feel contempt emanating from members of the media and political classes, especially progressives. Morrison embraces them unconditionally.

It remains to be seen whether a Johnny-come-lately love of beer and rugby league can save Morrison from the wrath of battlers in 2022. The prime minister has lost support among female voters, probably owing to his mishandling of the Brittany Higgins affair. This explained his puzzling appearance at the height of the Higgins cover-up to chug a beer in the dressing sheds of the Parramatta Eels, a rugby league team that he doesn’t even support. Morrison wants to compensate for the loss of women by attracting blokes anxious about woke feminists.

The Coalition’s game plan for the 2022 election will be similar to the last one. Morrison needs his incompetence to be eclipsed by infighting between voters who should be economic allies. At the eleventh hour, the main person responsible for the fear and loathing will present himself as a down-to-earth bloke who can unify the nation, deliver economic stability and defend larrikins from political correctness. And there is still every chance that this will work. Although I do think that “Albo” is much savvier than many pundits give him credit for, and not just because he’s a South Sydney Rabbitohs fan.

Lech Blaine

TOP BLOKES

Correspondence

Tom Lee

Lech Blaine’s essay is a welcome provocation to think in more nuanced ways about the complexity of Australian culture and character. Archetypes abound in the essay: the eponymous larrikin, in particular, though the bogan, aristocrat (I suppose we have them in Australia, bizarro versions like Kerry Packer), silvertail, fibro, tradie, miner, squatter, snob, cosmopolitan and parochial all get a look-in.

Blaine’s greater instinct, however, is for paradox and complication, rather than settled, generic images of the nation and its constituents. As Bruce, one of his dad’s best mates from Ipswich, says at one point: “I wish politicians would stop talking so much about tradies and miners … Some of us blokes are on a coupla hundred grand. We’re doing just fine. When was the last time you heard any politicians kick up a stink about the single mum cleaning the shitters at a nursing home? Or the bloke delivering Uber Eats on a bicycle for $5 a pop. That’s the real working class, mate.” Can you imagine the iconic, oversized thermal backpacks used by food delivery workers as the new high-vis? Matt Canavan, Bill Shorten or ScoMo donning one for a photo op on a street corner while shaking hands and getting to know the folk who wear them daily? Seems unlikely.

Cultural and financial conditions can change a lot over the generations, but off-the-shelf categories persist, shaping the stories told about the past, the analysis of the present and aspirations for the future. The metonyms “blue-” or “white-collar” capture a fragment of the worlds to which they refer in name; the more recent “laptop class” and “lentil belt” do the same. But how effective are these proxies at capturing what’s important about what people do and want in Australia?

Blaine’s essay shows how important political, sporting and business figures in Australia, largely men, mould themselves and in turn mould the categories that are used to define Australian aspirations and antagonisms. The end result: an unholy motley of chameleons, charlatans and spruikers, always slipping through and warping archetypes.

This raises an open question, which Blaine addresses impressionistically, without being dogmatic: what ingredients do we want to make up the important figures of the future? The journey away from deprivation to relative prosperity is for many Australian families the story of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But now, so-called upward mobility is looking increasingly challenging for younger Australians who don’t come from home-owning families. Much change has taken place even within one generation.

This is the case for Blaine and many of his interlocutors, including Terri Butler, the member for Griffith, and Joel Thompson, a retired rugby league player of Indigenous descent and founder of The Mindset Project. Both Butler and Thompson have direct and compelling ways of describing class distinctions relevant to their upbringing. Butler describes the lives of her cousins in North Queensland as ranging from “just tough” to “really fucking tough.” Thompson observes that growing up he didn’t know anybody who owned their own home, making him a tad different in material circumstances from Morrison, who in 2018, according to Blaine, described himself as starting out “very, very small” on entering the property market, when in truth, “small” meant owning two houses in Bronte.

That Morrison might be perceived by the public to share common ground with the likes of Butler and Thompson on the basis of culture, largely via rugby league and a cultivated lack of pretension, could matter more in the end than whether or not he shares a common origin. The relationship between the authenticity of origins, a relatively recently acquired yet nonetheless genuine symbolic solidarity with the working class, and a strategic misleading of the public – this is the very tricky-to-map and ultimately unresolved mess that Blaine traces.

I’ve got to dig deep to connect with anything like “tough” or “really fucking tough.” Yet like many Australians, I’m a bastard form with mixed trimmings, able to select which parts of my history to brandish, a luxury in itself. I came from Protestantism (Dad) and Catholicism (Mum), private school (Dad) and public school (Mum), the upper-middle class (Dad) and the lower-middle-to-middle class (Mum). Far from the most heady of contrasts, but enough to create some tensions.

I prized the rugby league heritage on Mum’s side in my teens while attending a rich, all-boys boarding school in Sydney, taking perverse delight in being on the outer. But it was hardly the outer: State of Origin was the only weeknight of the year that we didn’t have to do enforced prep after dinner. Everyone loved it.

The performance of a particularly rugged version of masculinity was the norm at the school: speaking in the harsh, monosyllabic drawl most likely learnt from farm workers, wearing shearers’ singlets, smoking rollies, cutting the toes and backs off our joggers to make a sort of thong (nicknamed “Shane and Waynes”). The greatest aspiration of many was to own a B&S-ready ute with all the roo-shooting, circle-working trimmings. Stupidity was certainly the currency, rather than sensitivity or intellect. A peculiar mix of cowboy and bogan commanded, on balance, more respect than the yachtsman, the preppy, the skater or, certainly, the hipster. Everyone tended to gravitate towards larrikin types who were a bit rough around the edges. There were niches for most, although it was certainly not the happiest time for all.

I felt immense relief when I spent my gap year working at an equally elite boarding school in the United Kingdom, a co-ed school where art, music, drama and a greater level of emotional sensitivity were the norm among students. It seemed like heaven. Though perhaps I was seeing everything through the romance of my own newfound freedom and the novelty of travel.

As for ScoMo, Blaine makes a lot of the love of rugby league he seems to have developed relatively late in life (as late as 2012) and brandished as part of his political self-image. There is something cringe-worthy about the idea that Morrison is just supporting the Sharks because he knows it will play well with a section of the electorate. But perhaps we should entertain the idea that he has come to love league, like his God, and while it might be politically convenient for him to do so, he’s going to games in the same way he’s going to church – a good Christian, buying the hat and the scarf.

Morrison’s greater crime might be that he is at best naive to the extent of his own hardship. This is Blaine’s broader point concerning authenticity: if you’ve always done alright for money, just admit it or try to have some perspective. If you’ve decided to be a Sharks fan because you want people to like you, fair play, but be straight about it. Perhaps this is terrible advice from a political perspective, but I like the sound of it.

Climate change looms in Blaine’s essay as a complex and divisive issue concerning class and perceived cosmopolitan elitism in Australia – a government-killer, since Abbott at least. It reminded me of a story I heard from my dad …

Dad is driving along one of the gravel roads at home and encounters a local lad, let’s call him Morgan, chopping wood by the side of the road. Morgan is an old primary school friend of mine, from Cumnock town, not the landed elite, who has returned to the district as an adult. Morgan certainly had an upbringing that was challenging compared to my own. I lost touch with him when I went away to boarding school, as I did with many of my local friends.

Dad, who’s become something of a local climate-change advocate, warns Morgan that he is breaking the law, that fallen branches are valuable habitat and provide soil nutrients. Morgan obediently packs up his kit and probably goes to get his wood somewhere else on the side of the road.

Whenever I remind Dad of this story, it presents him with a moral difficulty. A robust family argument tends to ensue. Dad and my brother chop firewood on our land and it’s legal to do so; sometimes people ask if they can come onto the property and do the same, and permission tends to be granted. But if lots more people started asking, Dad would certainly start saying no. Our family has access and rights to a massive portion of the countryside and all the work and leisure that affords, largely because of the time my ancestors arrived in the country, as well as other rolls of the dice and, no doubt, a fair amount of sacrifice, skulduggery and nous on their part – it would be churlish of me to imagine they were without ingenuity.

But how must this feel for Morgan, less well-off, prevented from chopping the wood he needs over winter in the name of biodiversity? I know Dad feels this as a profound moral quandary. Not so Mum, who isn’t from the landed gentry despite now owning the land. She doesn’t feel the class guilt that Dad does, and even though Mum’s arguably less of an advocate for biodiversity (despite doing plenty of practical work), she appears less conflicted laying down the law, hypothetically, to Morgan chopping wood by the side of the road.

This story is a parable because it so neatly illustrates the relationship between key progressive issues of the day, including climate change and class. Is it fair that those with existing privileges accrue more capital, both social and financial, when politics demands a shift in the trajectory of industry and the economy? How can we ensure people like Morgan have equitable access to a comfortable life without having long-lasting detrimental effects on the environment? Is it fair that some are forced to commit crimes against the environment in full view, while others can do the same things, at scale, inconspicuously and often to their financial advantage? And alternatively, should class guilt impact moral authority?

No answers from me here, merely a story to help frame the problem. This is also the value of Blaine’s similarly personal but far more expansive essay. I wouldn’t be surprised if it becomes a touchstone in the current political climate.

Tom Lee

TOP BLOKES

Correspondence

Shannon Burns

After reading Lech Blaine’s excellent and illuminating essay, I found myself thinking about notions of authenticity, impersonation and larrikinism as they apply to the so-called working class. Of course, some working-class people embody every cliché about working-class life, and there are others who are barely recognisable as working class to those who haven’t been exposed to its diverse manifestations. As with any group, some of its members are easy to read because their personas have been predigested, while some are almost unreadable because they represent a departure from the norm and others actively reject the obvious costumes and mannerisms because contrarianism is a common impulse. Working-class people put on many uniforms and speak in many tongues.

Blaine documents the political appropriation of well-worn working-class traits or tropes and the way they are employed in the pursuit of power, and he accuses Scott Morrison of a particularly cynical and artless variety of this common act of plagiarism. “Scott Morrison’s ScoMo persona was a focus-grouped act of identity theft,” Blaine argues, but I’m inclined to counter that identity is always performative and that mimicry is not theft. Blaine’s point is that Morrison is not authentic; part of his political strategy is to conceal his true face because his true face is not electable. He adds: “The closest that Morrison came to battling – or being a larrikin, for that matter – was getting cast as the Artful Dodger in Oliver!” It’s a killer line, but I’m not sure that it’s a killer blow. Here is a prime minister who releases images of himself making (or pretending to make) curries while listening (or pretending to listen) to a playlist entitled “Desi Hits.” His theatrical impersonations, the willingness to transparently perform a role, seems more significant than the particular material he works with. That Morrison played such a lively and seductive part in a school musical suggests that overt theatricality is one of his organic traits, that when Morrison puts on a mask he is being his authentic self.

“Bogan Bingo” features actors who perform the role of a lower-class bingo caller. I’ve been to at least three performances in the past decade, all of them in the inner suburbs of Adelaide. The bingo callers pretend to be promiscuous and stupid, most of their dialogue is sexually suggestive and the action centres on the grotesque, revelling in transgression. The audience is expected to dress down as bogans and participate in various activities. This typically produces a few smoking-while-pregnant teenagers, a lot of flannel shirts and ragged jeans, ugg boots, beanies, football apparel, Iron Maiden T-shirts, mullets, references to lower-class suburbs, V8s and fast food. I’ve attended versions of this performance at sports clubs and schools, and in each case the audience has been primarily white-collar middle class.

It is uncomfortable to see the broad outlines of people you grew up with transformed into figures of fun – family members who did smoke as pregnant teenagers (like my mother and stepsister), who wore those clothes and exhibited that kind of rough and rowdy behaviour (like my younger self), people who retrospectively seem to have lived their whole lives in what others perceive as amusing costumes. That they are so easy to mimic, that the outward signs of a social group’s singularity can be catalogued and repurposed with so little effort and that strangers who do not share their backgrounds or experiences can wield those signs however they like – all this is a little hard to stomach. But it is a fact worth digesting.

Part of the discomfort has to do with our relationship to the surface of things. It feels as though the people I knew and loved are being worn at Bogan Bingo, that the spectacle is a ghoulish possession of real bodies. But of course, they aren’t part of the performance at all; their inner lives and personal histories are not attached to the cheap reproduction of those superficial traits, just as a soul is not attached to the image of a person in a photograph. It is hard to get beyond the image, to accept that imitation is not extractive and to acknowledge that the original is not diminished by insensitive reproduction just because it feels that way. But I am inclined to make the effort instead of giving in to the illusion. Nothing real is being “stolen” in these performances, and this kind of impersonation is not identity theft.

A complicating factor with Bogan Bingo is that its caricatures of lower-class and uneducated people are explicitly associated with liberation and fun. You dress down to behave in impolite and transgressive ways, to be openly unpalatable and superficial, to dance, shout and run amok and thereby taste a kind of freedom that is not usually available to you. There is an implied envy at work, a repressed desire to be a different kind of person, to strip away those middle-class masks and restraints, and become something more “real.” This is not to say that those who enjoy Bogan Bingo are free of ugly beliefs or motives. Contempt for the poor and uneducated is one of the last great pleasures for inner-city progressives and conservatives alike, and I half-appreciate the openness of it all. Because this kind of “appropriation” is not yet subject to serious scrutiny or censure, we are still permitted to have fun with it, if only for now. It allows us to see how people behave before one of their tendencies becomes morally indefensible – before they learn a new set of manners and develop ways of concealing or repressing yet another impulse.

I was born into the underclass, migrated into the working class as a teenager and then settled into the middle class (via university and marriage) when I was close to thirty. I don’t regard myself as an underclass or working-class writer or critic because, for me, the material conditions that people endure in the present and the social worlds they inhabit are the best guide to their class status. This belief probably says more about my origins than about the world I live in now, a world in which the “working class” is the subject of writerly analysis and political discourse instead of daily experience. “Identity” in this particular context – a context that produces things such as Quarterly Essays and the reactions they provoke – is primarily a symbolic affair, and I wonder if Blaine’s strong reaction against Morrison’s theatrics is a simple extension of the well-educated, middle-class sensitivity to symbols. Or to put it differently: is our hostility to Morrison’s blatant imitations a sign that we don’t know how to bring a lasting focus to bear on material concerns?

To my eye, Scott Morrison poses as a middle-class suburban dad. Such men drink beer, watch sport and cook food while wearing aprons. Many change personas effortlessly. One moment they are standing near the barbeque with other men talking about sport or films or women while punctuating every sentence with “fucking”; the next they are sitting down with their wives and daughters, making dad jokes while using soft gestures and polite language. The same men go to work and deploy similarly branching personas in different contexts, just as their wives present one face to their mother or siblings and other faces to their friends, neighbours, employers or employees. This morphing of character is not uncommon. In fact, it is a sign of basic social competence.

You might even say that changeability and the confident willingness to perform disparate roles is an “authentic” trait of the suburban middle class, so the question of exactly who is being impersonated when Morrison dons the supposed garments of working-class life – rugby league and beer – is tricky to determine. If middle-class people have been performing in exactly this way for decades, and if the adaptability that comes with performative prowess is one of the many sources of their confidence and success, isn’t Morrison really impersonating, and thereby flattering, the middle class?

I suspect that Morrison’s costumes appeal to the broader suburban middle-class more than anyone. A more interesting question, perhaps, is who does it repel? The answer, I think, is that a solid portion of intellectuals, writers and artsy types – people such as me – are viscerally repulsed by images of Morrison drinking beer at league games, almost as much as they are repelled by his hulking male blokeyness. Morrison doesn’t bother to flatter us with imitation, perhaps because he would lose more votes than he gained. “ScoMo the typical bloke” is a steady reminder of our political irrelevance.

Blaine argues that larrikinism has its origin in forms of performance and impersonation – that Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson were partly masking their own effeminacy or high status when they developed the anti-authoritarian larrikin figure. This is as contestable as any biographical analysis, but if we go along with it and accept that larrikinism is partly founded on deception or masking and that the “authenticity” we associate with a robust larrikin persona is an effect rather than a reality, then the business of determining exactly who is and isn’t a “real” larrikin is a fool’s errand.

I grew up in such safe Labor seats that voting seemed almost redundant. Even so, federal Labor victories were registered with a collective sigh of relief, and federal Labor losses had a profoundly depressing effect. The adults in my life liked Bob Hawke because he was a “character” – his larrikinism won their affection – but they also saw that he was a bullshit artist. Hawke was not one of them, and they never thought he was, yet his persona suggested that he would not regard them with contempt either, and he was prepared to tell a story and put on a show that included them in his audience. Keating left them cold.

I think that Blaine undervalues one of the most powerful qualities of the larrikin. Anti-authoritarianism and hardnosed tenacity are not the whole story. The larrikin catches your eye because his dynamism and outsized personality makes him unpredictable. He knows how to have fun and invites you along for the ride. A larrikin is playful when she is serious and serious when she is playful. He winks at you while earnestly declaring that he is a wholly honest man on serious business. The larrikin is a “character” who is capable of seducing and persuading without seeming desperate or superior. These are fundamental skills that politicians need to possess if they want to be elected, so it’s not surprising that larrikinism and politics continually converge. They are made for each other.

Shannon Burns

TOP BLOKES

Correspondence

David Hunt

Scott Morrison is a dingo in sheep’s clothing. Lech Blaine’s Quarterly Essay leaves us in no doubt that the chickens of the PM’s self-publicised coop should be wary whenever their jailer ambles towards them with a carefully curated bowl of kitchen scraps – and not just on curry night.

On this subject, Top Blokes: The Larrikin Myth, Class and Power presents nothing new. Politicians pretend their way to power? Who’d have thunk it? While Morrison’s masquerading as “a typical Aussie bloke” who loves a beer at the Sharkies’ game is disingenuous – and coming up with his own nickname (after road-testing it with a focus group of men in shiny vests) is just plain sad – these deceptions pale in comparison to those of some of Australia’s early Labor leaders.

In 1886, Chris Watson left New Zealand for Sydney, where he found work mucking out Government House’s stables. Seventeen years later, with an intuitive understanding of the connection between government and shovelling shit, he became prime minister of Australia and the world’s first Labor/Labour national leader. Watson didn’t just give himself a new nickname – he manufactured a whole new identity. No one knew that Kiwi Chris Watson was really Chilean John Tanck until after his death. Tanck, who had a non-British father and had never applied for British citizenship, would have known he was constitutionally ineligible to sit in the Australian parliament, let alone serve as prime minister.

King O’Malley, Labor’s minister for home affairs in the 1910 Fisher government, was another proto-Barnaby. This is, of course, a reference to O’Malley’s foreign citizenship excluding him from the Australian parliament and is in no way intended to imply that Barnaby had home affairs (he appears to have used his workplace and discreet motels). O’Malley, the man responsible for constructing the national capital in a frozen sheep paddock, pretended to be a respectable British Canadian, rather than an insurance salesman from Kansas.

Thomas Walker was a Labor man who actually did come to Australia from Canada … to escape a manslaughter charge. A coronial inquiry found the young medium had killed a combustible seance attendee who’d come into contact with the phosphorous he used to make “spiritual lights.” In 1877, Walker fled to Melbourne, where he delivered the first of a series of Australian spiritualist lectures, during which he claimed to be possessed by the spirit of Giordano Bruno, a Dominican friar, cosmologist and occultist burned at the stake in 1600 for saying sacramental wine was not the blood of Christ and Mary was not a virgin. In 1892, while a NSW member of parliament, he was charged with shooting and wounding a clergyman while drunk. None of this stopped Thomas Walker serving as a West Australian Labor attorney-general and minister for justice and education.

Politicians who lied about their name or nationality, or claimed to be an undead Italian heretic, make Morrison’s frauds on the Australian public seem milder than one of his chicken curries. But the falsehoods of these early MPs were essentially personal in nature and didn’t interfere with their policy platforms.

Some other early Australian leaders abandoned ideology and jettisoned principle for political gain. Joseph Cook, the first leader of the NSW parliamentary Labor Party, ditched the silent “e” in his name as an ostentation unbefitting a working man. He then ditched being a working man, joining, and later leading, the Free Trade Party; becoming prime minister as leader of the anti-Labor and anti–free trade Liberal Party; and again turning coat to serve as deputy prime minister in the Nationalist government of Billy Hughes.

Hughes, another Labor man turned political weathervane, represented six parties during his parliamentary career, leading five of them. Prime Minister Robert Menzies once commented that Hughes had been a member of every political party, at which point Arthur Fadden interjected he’d never joined his Country Party. Hughes, showing that what he lacked in political consistency he made up for with a sense of humour, retorted, “I had to draw the line somewhere, didn’t I?”

I reference these Labor men (and they were all men for a long while) not to attack their party or ideology, or to pump the wheels of the Coalition bus, but to make the point that Morrison is merely at the tail of a conga line of suckholes of all political stripes.

Politicians should not be criticised for changing their views over time or in response to altered circumstances, but Cook and Hughes arguably ditched their core political beliefs for personal political gain. In fairness to Morrison, he can’t be accused of ditching his core political beliefs, because he’s never held any. No Australian politician, even one-armed Peter Lalor, has had Morrison’s facility for not holding things. His capacity to say one thing and then declare the opposite, while unashamedly maintaining his position has never changed, is unrivalled in Australian political history. While another conservative leader was not for turning, Morrison is not for sticking. He is human Teflon.

Many Australians recognise this. The question is: why do they put up with it? Lech Blaine is right in laying the blame, at least in part, on “the identity crisis at the heart of Australia,” although he over-eggs the larrikin pudding.

One of the issues I have with Blaine’s eminently readable and enjoyable essay is that while he accuses Morrison, Hawke and other powerful people of hijacking the larrikin for personal gain, Blaine also appropriates the larrikin. He projects aspects of the current larrikin image (egalitarianism and disregard for convention) back in time and suggests larrikins shared a strong affinity with the working class and labour movement. A reader of Blaine’s essay would be left with the impression that striking shearers, bush poets such as Banjo Paterson and Henry Lawson, bushranger Ned Kelly, writer Miles (aka Stella) Franklin and feminist Vida Goldstein were all larrikins.

The term “larrikin” first appeared in print in Melbourne in 1870. Larrikins were not knockabout blokes who called a spade a spade – they were disaffected young people who formed loose gangs, known as “forties” and then “pushes”. The larrikin was a “yob” – that is, a boy in the back slang of the English costermongers (mobile grocers with attitude) whom the larrikins modelled themselves on. “Yob” came to mean a lout or hooligan, because that is what larrikins were. Following the 1886 sexual assault of Mary Jane Hicks by members of the Waterloo Push, and a series of similar offences, they were popularly perceived as gang rapists.

While most nineteenth-century larrikins had “working-class” backgrounds, they were generally unskilled labourers – tuppenny capitalists who disdained those who’d learnt a trade. They loathed the labour movement, and the emerging trade unions loathed them in return. Larrikins disrupted union parades and pickets, hurling abuse and rotten food at the marching or striking workers. Causing mayhem at union picnics was a favourite larrikin sport.

The nihilism at the heart of larrikin culture drew them to the legend of Ned Kelly, a man whose charisma and showmanship elevated him from being a poor, horse-thieving, police-murdering terrorist with a penchant for cast-iron fetish wear into Australia’s answer to Robin Hood. The “larrikin class was strongly represented” at the 5 November 1880 Melbourne rally that called for the government to commute the bushranger’s death sentence, but Kelly was in no way a larrikin. He was country, while the larrikins were very much city.

Bushmen were not larrikins. The striking shearers did not see larrikins as co-revolutionaries in the war between labour and capital but as self-indulgent, antisocial townies. Banjo Paterson painted larrikins as vicious urban thugs in “Uncle Bill: The Larrikin’s Lament”, with Henry Lawson doing likewise in “The Captain of the Push.” Larrikins, like many other Australians, were drawn to the professional sports that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in particular boxing and Australian Rules football, and later rugby league. Lawson saw the Australian obsession with sport over the arts as a blight, writing in “A Song of Southern Writers”:

Lawson was in no way a larrikin. Neither was his protégé and fellow writer Miles Franklin. Franklin was a deep thinker and keen social observer, while larrikins cultivated an air of insular anti-intellectualism. Vida Goldstein, like Franklin, was a feminist – a charge that could never be levelled at larrikins, who the popular press accused of demeaning and assaulting their “donahs” or “tarts”, as women who inhabited the edges of larrikin society were known. Goldstein was unabashedly intellectual and passionate about politics and improving Australian society, again areas into which larrikins rarely strayed.

Nobody liked a larrikin, not even other larrikins, with the most vicious larrikin assaults reserved for members of rival pushes. Strangely, it was the arts, not sport, that began the rehabilitation of the larrikin image, first with music-hall larrikin acts in the late nineteenth century, then with the writing of C.J. Dennis, whose Sentimental Bloke and Ginger Mick were uncomplicated working-class blokes with hearts, dreams and aspirations. World War I gave rise to the larrikin digger trope, an irreverent bloke whose dishevelled dress showed his disrespect for the British officers he served under. As larrikins stopped their street brawls and shooting each other in the late 1920s, the larrikin menace faded, and the larrikin mantle settled on the shoulders of the knockabout anti-authoritarian male.

Blaine’s historical larrikin is myth, as is his story of the foundation of the Australian Labor Party, a fable nurtured by generations of Labor men and women, most of whom undoubtedly believe it to be true. Blaine traces the ALP back to the 1891 striking shearers who gathered in the Queensland town of Barcaldine – and the shearers’ 1891 May Day march and reading of the Manifesto of the Queensland Labour Party to a gathering of workers under the Barcaldine ghost gum on 9 September 1892 – undoubtedly key moments in the history of the Australian labour movement.

However, this myth ignores the NSW origin story, which traces the birth of the party to quarryman Charles Hart convening the first Labour Electoral League meeting at Balmain’s Unity Hall Hotel on 4 April 1891. South Australians, by contrast, insist they founded the Labor Party, when the United Trades and Labor Council met on 7 January 1891 (almost certainly at a far creepier location than a pub or a tree) to form the United Labor Party of South Australia. All and none of these foundation stories are true. There was no angelic trumpet, or even the drunken cry of a striking shearer tripping over an unshorn sheep, to herald Labor’s birth. There were instead a number of meetings of unionists, socialists and radicals, held across the colonies, where it was agreed that industrial action, in the absence of political representation, was no longer sufficient to advance workers’ rights.

The fact is the Queensland origin story is more romantic – and it has a tree in it, a key element in many origin myths. Labor even named the ghost gum “The Tree of Knowledge,” a blatant biblical rip-off. The Queensland story was a deliberate attempt by Labor’s founding fathers to link the party to the biggest Australian myth of all – the bush legend – a myth so powerful that it made citizens of the most urbanised society on earth (if you ignored First Nations people) build a common identity around the idealised bushman, his stoic wife and their golden-haired, ruddy-cheeked children, a myth with the power to make a mild-mannered Sydney accountant who owned an Akubra think he was the Man from Snowy River.

The emerging labour movement latched onto the bush legend like a blowfly to a jumbuck’s jacksy, hoping that a little of its magic would rub off. As acknowledged by William Guthrie Spence, foundation president of the Amalgamated Shearers’ Union of Australasia and a founding father of Labor:

Blaine’s essay identifies a number of other key Australian myths, in particular that Australians are naturally anti-authoritarian, a myth closely tied to that of the larrikin. Australians, as acknowledged by Blaine, are one of the most law-abiding people on earth. From the foundation of the convict colony of New South Wales, government provided services that were delivered by churches, charities, friendly societies or private enterprise in other societies. Despite these services, and the administrations and budgets that grew to provide them, the residents of the Australian colonies paid no direct taxes until Victoria introduced a modest land tax in 1877. The Australian colonies led the world in establishing the modern secret ballot, postal voting, full women’s suffrage, independent electoral bodies and a host of other reforms that increased public confidence in government and its institutions. Most Australians have accordingly been historically trusting of the state, its institutions and, sometimes regrettably, its politicians.

Australians’ willingness to embrace myths have allowed them to reinvent themselves. Their desire to rinse the convict stain from the moral fabric of the nation, which remained strong until the late 1970s, led them to fabricate their own family histories, replacing ancestral handkerchief thieves with sturdy farmers, adventurers and down-on-their luck aristocrats. They pushed the inconvenient truths of the dispossession and frontier murder of First Nations people, and of White Australia, to the back of their collective consciousness and conscience, embracing John Howard’s 1996 “Bex, a cuppa and a good lie down” mantra that we should feel “comfortable and relaxed about our past, as the balance sheet of our history is one of heroic achievement.”

Blaine cites Clare Wright, one of Australia’s most compelling and insightful historians, as arguing that Labor can’t “consistently win federal government until it tells a coherent story that links back to deeper myths about Australian identity.” I respectfully disagree. My view is that we Australians and the politicians that serve us should not attach ourselves to myths, but to truth.

Our susceptibility to myth-making allows us to accept the bush and larrikin legends, and their appropriation by elites. It allows us to embrace the myth of anti-authoritarianism, without asking difficult questions of those in authority. It allows us to look inwards on our own self-created realities, as we lock out the world from Fortress Australia, lock out the “new foreigners” of the other Australian states from our resurrected parochial fiefdoms and lock out the disadvantaged and the dispossessed from our McMansions.

Blaine cites Russel Ward’s 1958 The Australian Legend, which concluded that the “typical Australian” “believes that Jack is not only as good as his master but, at least in principle, probably a good deal better.” Sixty-three years later, it’s now, “I’m alright, Jack.”

Until we Australians look beyond our own self-interest, discard myths for truths and accept our past in all its beauty and its terror, we will be condemned to a stunted present and an even more diminished future. We will turn a deaf ear to the lies of politicians such as Morrison as long as they comfort us with platitudes about being at the front of the queue and being the best people in the world. We get the politicians we deserve.

David Hunt

TOP BLOKES

Correspondence

Rachel Nolan

In Top Blokes, Lech Blaine applies his intellect and kind-hearted curiosity to an essential current of Australian identity, the myth of the larrikin: the anti-establishment figure (invariably male) who employs a “reckless collectivism,” bringing mates together in the face of injustice.

Lech is from Toowoomba, but that’s a conservative, uninteresting place. His worldview arises from the cultural identity of Ipswich, the working-class city his late parents came from and of which Lech’s cousin Allan Langer remains the most celebrated son.

I’m from Ipswich, and as no one’s written about the city since the now ageing poet Thomas Shapcott, Lech’s interest in the place makes my heart sing. The story of Ipswich is the story of class, identity and labourism in Australia.

The Labor Party was born in Barcaldine in 1891, but before that, in 1888, Australia’s first Labor MP emerged from Ipswich when Thomas Glassey, a coalmining unionist describing himself as “independent Labor,” won the seat of Bundamba in the Queensland parliament.

In 1899, the region contributed members to the world’s first Labor government, that of Queensland premier Anderson Dawson.

From 1915 to 1948, the workers of Ipswich were represented by Frank Cooper, an eight-hour-day campaigner who became treasurer in the reforming government of William Forgan Smith. Elected in 1932, that government rejected the austerity of the Premiers’ Plan, rebuilt Queensland in Art Deco style and entrenched the state as the highest wage, highest-taxing jurisdiction in the country. As premier himself in 1942, Cooper stood by Labor prime minister John Curtin through World War II.

Ipswich produced Queensland’s first Labor woman MP when Vi Jordan was elected member for Ipswich West in 1966. She was backed by mining and rail unions, all-male workforces. Years after her death, Vi Jordan’s son told me about the atmosphere of the times, how Gough Whitlam would stay with the family when visiting the city as federal Opposition leader, and how the house would be filled with excited and erudite conversation as unionists, directly influenced by the more radical British socialist movement, envisaged a program of industrial relations reform, free public health and free tertiary education.

In 1977, Bill Hayden, a working-class policeman from Ipswich, became leader of the federal parliamentary Labor Party. Hayden had already built the structure of Medicare as health minister before seeking to salvage economic policy as Whitlam’s last treasurer. As Opposition leader, Bill Hayden built the foundations of the modern Labor Party, socially progressive but economically robust. He was replaced by Bob Hawke on the day writs were issued for the 1983 poll, with Hawke winning the election Hayden himself said “a drover’s dog” could have won.

The Hawke and Keating years coincided with, but didn’t cause, Ipswich’s deindustrialisation. From the 1970s, coalmining moved to the Bowen Basin, and electric trains didn’t require local workshops employing 3000 men. Ipswich people resented economic liberalisation and were suss on Paul Keating’s Zegna suits. The politics of class shifted from economic to cultural identity.

After Hayden’s preferred successor, a working-class boy and Rhodes scholar named David Hamill, missed out on federal preselection in a shonky factional stitch-up, the ALP lost the Ipswich-based seat of Oxley to Pauline Hanson in 1996.

She remains our gift to the nation.

By the 2000s, unionism in Ipswich had collapsed. The Labour Day march was a shadow of its former self, and the Trades Hall, the original building with its wrought-iron verandahs having been replaced by a jerry-built concrete block in the 1980s, gradually became empty.

With the city becoming a commuter satellite of Brisbane and its working-class identity adrift, the political void was filled by populism. The new mayor, Paul Pisasale, developed a classic larrikin persona, taking the longstanding resentment of class and directing it towards an “other” defined by geography rather than income. Pisasale’s schtick was that Ipswich people should be proud of where they came from, sticking it to sneering outsiders, including those from Brisbane. He was making Ipswich great again.

As a member of the ALP, Pisasale neutralised Ipswich’s only potential source of organised political opposition, but did little for the city or working people. As his cult of personality grew, Pisasale was re-elected with as much as 87 per cent of the vote, making him the most popular politician in Australia. Under his mayoralty, property development became Ipswich’s boom industry, the city sprawled and the CBD became derelict. He’s now serving seven years for official corruption related to taking cash from developers and for sexual assault.

While Pisasale’s populist cult is an extreme example, the truth is that every one of Australia’s large former industrial cities has seen some kind of scandal combining elements of populism, sex, property developers and/or larrikins.

In Wollongong, a sex-for-development-approval scandal contributed to the downfall of the last state Labor government. The Newcastle mayor, a property developer, resigned after he was caught funnelling secret donations to Liberal MPs, and Geelong Council has just emerged from administration after the council, dominated by a former paparazzo turned larrikin, was sacked for bullying and failing to provide good government.

Once, the local politics of these places would have been defined by class, with an active civic culture characterised by unions and Labor activists on one side and chambers of commerce and service clubs on the other. Lech is right to say Australia’s working-class towns have held together better than Trump’s Pennsylvania or the Brexit-voting north of England, but it’s a near-run thing. There is, as the councils have shown, a constant vulnerability to shysters.

Lech Blaine’s thesis is a simple one: that Anthony Albanese, with his working-class authenticity, may neutralise the culture wars through which conservatives separate educated Labor representatives from their working-class base. Perhaps, he says, by staying mum on coal and Instagramming photos of tinned peas and corn on his plate, the dinky-di Albo can defeat ScoMo, an entirely confected character whose feigned interest in rugby league disguises a puritanical rah-rah from the Eastern Suburbs.

I hope, of course, that Lech is right. Surely Labor can defeat a government that has systematically suppressed wages while delivering tax cuts that most benefit the rich, that has endangered our economy and security by stirring up China while dropping the ball on critical relationships in Southeast Asia, and that caused half the country to be needlessly locked down for months through its incompetent management of the vaccine rollout?

Not having a crystal ball, I don’t know if it can. What I do know, having spent a good part of my working life representing Ipswich, is that the cultural markers as they’re currently defined are hard to cut through. I was never so shameless as to feign passionate interest in rugby league, but my earnest commitment to social justice and good economic policy was no competition for the vacuous identity politics of the uber-larrikin Pisasale. A solid voting record on IR reform, public education and public health is harder to sell when there’s no sense that class is an economic phenomenon and justice can only be achieved through collective action. The term I decided I didn’t want to run again was the term I bought an Alfa.

It must be possible for Australia to get beyond the mindless and divisive identity wars that lure working Australians to vote against their own economic interests and for a smaller, meaner country. We can do so either by seeking, as Albanese has, to neutralise the most shallow of cultural markers or by elevating the elements of cultural identity that unite us in an expansive vision: the Olympic team, an affinity with the landscape, the music of Paul Kelly.

That musician is, in my view, the great storyteller and unifier of Australian popular culture. In 1998, as John Howard was turning his back on Aboriginal reconciliation, Kelly wrote “Little Kings,” a song about how power is exercised, how lies told as history can alter our sense of identity and about how, everywhere, warning bells ring out across the lucky country:

Rachel Nolan

EXIT STRATEGY

Correspondence

Andrew Wear

Reading George Megalogenis’s eloquent and thoroughly researched essay on Australia’s recent political economy, it’s hard not to relive the rollercoaster of emotions that accompanied the onset of the pandemic in Australia. His essay recalls the pride in Australia’s collective response, the sense of security that came with a system of government that functioned when it needed to, enabling us to get on top of the virus and respond appropriately to the economic challenge. There were the trials and quiet traumas of long lockdowns, accompanied by the guilt that came with the knowledge that what we were suffering did not compare with the devastation experienced in places such as the United States or the United Kingdom. And finally, there is our present bewilderment at Australia’s lack of any obvious pathway out of the crisis, even as other nations are opening up.

Megalogenis’s central insight – that lessons from past recessions informed our economic response to the pandemic – is an important one. It points to the method we might deploy as we shape our approach to recovery, once we finally figure out how to emerge from the shadow of the pandemic: lessons from past crises have the potential to shape the recovery that remains ahead of us.

Megalogenis shows us that the transfer of insight from the global financial crisis to the present was largely by virtue of the personal experience of Treasury officials. While this demonstrates the value of this type of policy transfer, it also reveals that Australia’s approach to learning across time and from other jurisdictions is somewhat ad hoc and perhaps Anglocentric. Other nations, such as Singapore, embed policy transfer deeply into the fabric of their public sectors, regularly sending public servants on learning missions abroad, where they seek to absorb knowledge from the world’s best. Australia has room for improvement here.

It must have been challenging for Megalogenis to land a piece like this in the midst of an evolving crisis; the pandemic has yielded a steady supply of plot twists. I am writing this response just as Melbourne enters its sixth lockdown and, with Sydney showing no signs of being able to rein in the virus, it’s clear that Australia’s response is not quite so textbook as it may have seemed when Megalogenis completed his essay. With the pandemic having a way to run, it’s now clear that the depth of the 2020 recession is an inadequate – and overly simplistic – way to assess Australia’s economic performance. More important will be where Australia finds itself when the pandemic is over. In May – before Australia’s latest Delta-driven wave – the OECD was forecasting that Australia would be back to its pre-pandemic GDP per capita by the first quarter of 2022 (surely now an optimistic assessment), meaning we would have experienced two years of lost growth. That puts us tenth among the G20 countries – mid-pack. While our 2020 recession wasn’t as deep, other countries – with higher vaccination rates and more open economies – are recovering faster. As the pandemic has progressed, the importance of the health response to the economy has only become clearer.

While the essay is subtitled “Politics after the Pandemic,” its focus is predominantly on politics during – and in the years before – the pandemic. The promise of an exploration of what comes next remains largely unfulfilled. Yet there are enough insights to point us to a method with which to approach the challenges that await. While Australia responded well to the GFC, it squandered the recovery, experiencing a decade of stagnant economic growth, negligible improvements to productivity and median incomes that went backwards. An effective tactical response to the crisis won’t be enough if we forgo the opportunity the crisis presents.

Following the Spanish Flu in 1918–19, the United States boomed through the Roaring Twenties, fuelled by new technology and social change. In the 1930s, President Roosevelt’s New Deal inspired the confidence that pulled the country out of the Great Depression, with enhanced social security, labour protections and infrastructure investment. Germany and South Korea boomed in the decades after World War II and the Korean War, driven by a determined focus on education and industry policy; both countries pulling themselves out of misery to emerge as among the world’s most advanced economies.

What is common to successful recovery from a crisis is a big ambition for what the nation might become, and a preparedness to plan and deliver over the medium to long term. What might such an agenda look like for Australia? Most obviously, fiscal stimulus must flow for as long as it takes to build economic momentum. The opportunity now is to fashion that stimulus into an agenda that fuels long-term economic growth, ideally while tackling legacy challenges at the same time. Megalogenis is right to point to climate change as the obvious candidate here, and there are no shortages of projects that deliver on this dual objective. Large amounts of private-sector capital are poised and ready to be spent on decarbonisation projects. To unlock this potential, it’s critical that governments provide policy certainty. This will involve a fast-tracked transformation of energy supply towards renewable sources and investment in infrastructure such as energy storage and transmission. Germany, for example, is investing more than €50 billion of its stimulus on initiatives such as electric vehicle–charging infrastructure and the establishment of a green hydrogen sector, a next-generation export industry that will enable it to store and sell surplus renewable energy. South Korea’s “Green New Deal” involves a US$62 billion investment in advanced technology to create jobs – in areas such as renewable electricity, electric vehicles and the circular economy.

The central message that the study of past crises yields, though, is that they do not have to leave a long-term legacy of harm. Places recovering from devastation can create prosperous, exciting futures. People living in New York, Aceh or South Korea now enjoy a quality of life that far exceeds what existed before their crisis. In many instances, such places have not merely recovered, they have gone on to lead the world. It will soon be time – if it’s not already – for Australia to craft a similarly suitable ambition for the decade ahead.

Recovery is not guaranteed. History is also strewn with examples of places that failed to recover. They withdrew economic stimulus too early, or held too tight to their pre-crisis world view. As Megalogenis demonstrates, it’s important that we approach our future in a considered fashion, learning the lessons of the past. While the Covid-19 pandemic has been the biggest crisis of a generation, our recovery also represents an enormous opportunity.

Andrew Wear

EXIT STRATEGY

Correspondence

Travers McLeod

Reading Exit Strategy as most of Australia went back into lockdown with one of the world’s worst vaccination rates made me wonder whether the title was an oxymoron.

When historians examine Australia’s response to Covid-19, the absence of a clear strategy to steer Australia beyond a pandemic into a brighter future may well be the most mystifying part of the whole episode. Our inability to plan and implement a response to a known systemic risk could be one of the biggest own goals in our nation’s history. If repeated on climate change, we are doomed to fail.

None of this discounts George Megalogenis’s essay, which offers a dose of history on how Australia has tackled systemic shocks, the latest of which is Covid-19. His story of the distinctive values and culture of Australia’s public services and the widespread acceptance that they should be able to offer frank professional advice without fear of losing their jobs provided a ray of light in an otherwise grim time, as did his snapshot of the new lease of life in Joe Biden’s America, where strengthened social infrastructure and a US$450 billion investment in early childhood development are central tenets of the response.

Australian policymakers have known about the devastating regularity of pandemics for some time, and they were warned about the risk of coronaviruses specifically nearly a decade ago. A Senate Estimates hearing in federal parliament way back in June 2013 was told the possibility of a “novel coronavirus” was “very scary.” Among the participants in that exchange was Jane Halton, then secretary of the Department of Health, who was appointed to the National Covid-19 Coordination Commission (NCCC) in March 2020 and was a key adviser as Australia explored suitable vaccines.

When the prime minister established the NCCC, he said it would “coordinate advice to the Australian government on actions to anticipate and mitigate the economic and social effects of the global coronavirus pandemic.” This was, he said, “about mobilising a whole-of-society and whole-of-economy effort.” The NCCC sounded like a “red team” for Covid-19, and it should have been, yet by 3 May 2021 its work had concluded. “We have moved past the emergency phase of the Covid-19 response and are now on the path of economic recovery,” said the prime minister. “Australia’s strong health and economic circumstances and our strong outlook make it the right time for the Board to conclude its work.” With Australia then at the bottom of global vaccination rates, and the Delta strain having just been used to justify a ban on Australians returning from India, it beggars belief the NCCC was told to down tools early. One wonders what it actually did, or whether it offered nothing other than smoke and mirrors. Whatever the NCCC spent time on, it does not appear to have war-gamed different strategies on quarantine hubs or vaccination rollouts, or to have tested various tactics to keep Australia one step ahead of the virus.

The grim short story of Covid for Australia is that we were caught napping at the start and have been reactive throughout. While some of our responses have been inspired, overall we have lacked the courage and creativity to use the crisis to imagine a better future for Australians and our region. The initial flurry of national collaboration that we saw at the beginning of the outbreak has been replaced by a fractured federation. According to the Oxford Covid-19 Government Response Tracker, Australia now has some of the most stringent restrictions among OECD countries. That is a predictable consequence of sticking with last year’s strategy, not chasing and securing multiple vaccines, being too slow to add new technologies to our arsenal, such as rapid lateral flow tests, and not preparing effectively for the inevitable future waves and variants.

Megalogenis is spot-on about Australians placing their faith in government being the story of the pandemic. I am willing to believe the desire Australians have for more active government was growing before Covid-19. Two years ago, in the Quarterly Essay Australia Fair, Rebecca Huntley wrote that Australia is a nation of democrats. The Centre for Policy Development’s research on public attitudes reinforced this, revealing that, as Australians, we share a unique resolve to make democracy work, solve big problems and improve the lives of others. The 2019 federal election did not disprove Huntley’s thesis. The twin crises since, the bushfires and pandemic, have put it firmly back in the frame. When CPD asked Australians in June 2020 what the main purpose of their democracy is, the answer three times more popular than any other was ensuring all people are treated fairly and equally, including the most vulnerable. This answer was chosen by 45 per cent of respondents, up from 36 per cent in 2018, far ahead of other answers, such as ensuring people are free to decide how to live (15 per cent) or electing representatives to make decisions (13 per cent).

The other key takeaway from this attitudes research was how voters across the political spectrum are at the end of their tether with the contracting-out services. On this, Australians are united. Ninety per cent now think it is important for government to maintain the capability and skills to deliver services directly, instead of paying others to do it. This is up from 75 per cent in 2018. In a sign of the times, Coalition voters are now the strongest supporters of rebuilding an active role for government in service delivery. The failure of private contractors to efficiently roll out Covid-19 vaccines will only reinforce this view. Let’s not kid ourselves: when lives are on the line, you want someone to take responsibility, not outsource it.

Megalogenis nails this issue, although I wish he had given us more on the central question he poses: can Australia restore faith in good government? His essay dares to dream that Australia can adapt its model of governing and delivering services “to the new consensus for a more active government” and “reconceive the political economy of the nation.” I agree that the answer lies in reconnecting with communities, just as Lynelle Briggs found in the aged-care royal commission, and that one part of the answer is a more effective approach by the Commonwealth to partnering with (and funding) state and local governments to deliver services in communities. But I want to suggest the challenge is more profound, for at least two reasons.

First, the how is not for the faint-hearted. As Megalogenis writes, “The gaps in the safety net which the coronavirus exploited will become poverty traps in recovery if the government continues to defer to the market.” A new approach requires a reorganisation of government and a commitment to regional and community deals involving levels of government alongside business and the community. That’s very difficult with anaemic public-sector capability and depleted memory at the national level, especially in social policy. Even if it prefers to fund than to deliver, the Commonwealth will need, and the community will expect, more feet on the ground. Digital delivery helps but is no substitute for interpersonal relationships and knowing what it takes to run things well at neighbourhood level, whether this is in early childhood development, aged care, disability or employment services. Each of these service systems faces acute challenges. Take employment as one example. As of 30 June 2021, there were 1,013,452 Australians on the employment services case load. Around three-quarters have been there for over twelve months. More than a third have been there for more than two years. We have been asleep at the wheel.

Second, this century demands a richer understanding of what a sustainable economy looks like over the long term. Unless we change tack, it will be impossible to disentangle Australia’s strategy to exit the pandemic from our future approaches to care, climate change and growth. In each, we see danger signs of the old model: reactive, not proactive, policy development that is based on events, not on evidence and foresight; the government not valuing or nurturing work in the “caring and brain economies” for Australians young and old; and a fossilised approach to boosting economic and social participation in communities in desperate need of new energy and fresh horizons.

Since Megalogenis wrote his essay, the federal government has published its Intergenerational Report, with rosy projections for productivity growth. But at the same time, we have seen a drain of international students and skilled migrants, and a stubborn lack of national planning for carbon transition. Optimistic forecasts are no substitute for an exit strategy.

This future has caught up with us. It demands that Australia change now or be steamrolled. In the run-up to a federal election, the prime minister and Opposition leader need to answer the questions Megalogenis poses. Otherwise, to use a word deployed by the prime minister during the current lockdowns, we will “squander” the natural advantages and opportunities already open to Australia and be on a road from which there is no exit.

Travers McLeod

EXIT STRATEGY

Correspondence

Andrew Norton

Since Australia’s borders closed in March 2020, preventing new international students from enrolling onshore in Australian universities, the government has made higher education policy errors. At this high level of generality, I agree with George Megalogenis in Exit Strategy. But I would like to present a different analysis of events since, and to share the blame more broadly.

Like many in the higher education sector, George Megalogenis argues that “denying” universities access to JobKeeper was a mistake. But JobKeeper was never the solution to the problems universities face. The program suited businesses that could recover swiftly once Covid restrictions lifted, taking back their old workforces to serve customers newly freed from home detention. It wasn’t right for universities, which face a prolonged decline before a slow recovery.

The first Covid lockdowns created an immediate cashflow problem for many Australian businesses. Financial problems developed more slowly for universities. After a fast move to online teaching, they delivered most of their scheduled classes to most of their expected first-semester 2020 students. Direct travel from China stopped on 1 February, stranding some Chinese students overseas, but fortunately many of them studied online. With a few exceptions, first-semester international students from other countries arrived before all routine international travel ended in the second half of March. But with the borders still closed, midyear international student intakes fell well below previous years.

Financial results in university annual reports confirm that 2020 revenue declines were contained. For the thirty-five universities with published 2020 annual reports as of late July 2021, total revenue was down 5.3 per cent on 2019 levels. A slight increase in government grant and HELP student-loan income partly offset reduced fee income.

The federal government did tighten university JobKeeper criteria to make universities less likely to qualify. But university annual reports suggest that few would have satisfied the rules applying to other organisations. Their loss of revenue just wasn’t large enough.

Rather than the quick dip and rapid recovery envisaged by JobKeeper, universities face accumulating financial problems caused by long-term border closures. As of May 2021, commencing international enrolments were a third lower than those of the same period in 2019. Although that may sound better than expected, the enrollees are students who were already in Australia. As time goes on, the number of potential international students who arrived before March 2020 will dwindle.

Losses against pre-Covid revenue projections will continue growing past mid-2022, when borders are expected to reopen. Someone who is not a first-year student in 2021 will not be a second-year student in 2022, and so on. It will take years to rebuild total numbers and fee income.

Under this scenario, a JobKeeper-style policy to keep all employees and employers together is not feasible. It would mean keeping staff on the payroll to teach students who won’t be back for years, and whose enrolments are not vulnerable only to Covid-19 or Australian border policies. China might stop its citizens studying here, changes to visa rules may deter prospective Indian students, or our competitors could gain lasting market shares while Australia remains a hermit nation.

Some jobs could be preserved by teaching more domestic students, and the government allocated $550 million in temporary funding for additional domestic student places, mostly in short graduate-certificate courses. But the unmet demand for domestic student places is well below the numbers of lost international students.

The university business model means that retrenchments reach way beyond staff directly involved in international education. Profits on international students have financed many otherwise unaffordable university activities. On my estimates, these profits funded at least $3.3 billion of the $12 billion that universities spent on research in 2018, and quite possibly much more.

Although the 21st-century university research boom is clearly over, an orderly phase-down of research activity would avoid projects being closed prior to completion, with all the waste that would involve. It only gets a passing sentence in Exit Strategy, but the government did provide an additional $1 billion in research funding for 2021.

The problem is that no additional research money, and only a small amount of temporary student-places funding, will continue into 2022, which is likely to be the peak year of the Covid crisis in higher education. That was a significant omission in the May 2021 budget.

In explaining these and other absent dollars, Exit Strategy pursues two arguments, around educational spending priorities and voting patterns.

According to Exit Strategy’s account, since John Howard’s term as prime minister, Coalition governments have pursued a dubious long-term strategy to preference private-school funding over public-university funding. The essay says that the Whitlam, Fraser, Hawke and Keating governments never considered giving more money to private schools than universities.

At one level, it would not be surprising if private-school funding surpassed university funding, as private-school enrolments exceed domestic higher education student numbers by more than 200,000. But the poor presentation of higher education assistance in Budget Paper No. 1, which looks like the source of Exit Strategy’s numbers, obscures much of the Commonwealth’s funding.

According to Budget Paper No. 1, non-government school funding in 2021–22 is $14.7 billion, while higher education funding is put at $10.6 billion. The budget documents don’t explain this, but the $10.6 billion consists of grants authorised by the Higher Education Support Act 2003. It omits funding from the annual appropriations bill, along with money authorised under separate legislation for the Australian Research Council and the National Health and Medical Research Council. It doesn’t include higher education student income support or HELP student loans. The budget papers do not itemise all funding sources according to sector, but I estimate that total Commonwealth cash outlays for higher education purposes will be approximately $22 billion in 2021–22. HELP repayments will probably be around $4 billion, leaving $18 billion in net cash outlays – more than the Budget Paper No. 1 figure for non-government schools.

University and private-school funding are similar in the ways they fit into the Australian system of funding social services. Both mix public and private funding; private schools have done so since the late 1960s, and universities have always done so, although there were no domestic higher education student tuition charges between 1974 and 1988. In both sectors, the government means-tests public contributions, although in novel ways, using parental income for schools and graduate income for higher education students via the HELP repayment system.

Despite the similarities in their funding models, their political circumstances differ. Like George Megalogenis in Exit Strategy, many people who support more funding for public universities see something wrong with funding private schools. The Coalition, on the other hand, sees a bigger and more sympathetic constituency in private schools than universities. Neither major political party believes that many votes turn on higher education policy.

Despite this political calculation, public universities, overall, did as well or better than private schools in the government’s Covid response. Both were excluded from the JobKeeper registered-charity category, and were therefore required to demonstrate a revenue decline of at least 30 rather than 15 per cent to qualify for payments. The fact that both sectors receive significant Commonwealth funding already is the common factor, meaning that sector-specific mechanisms of support already existed, if needed. Some private schools did nevertheless qualify for JobKeeper. No public university received JobKeeper in its own right, although thirteen had subsidiaries that did.

Private schools could receive their government grants early, forgoing future income, while public universities could keep their teaching grant money, even if their domestic enrolments fell. Universities could retain previously budgeted HELP student-loan revenue, to be repaid between 2022 and 2029 if not matched by student borrowing. Private schools could also benefit from modest cash payments available for small businesses and not-for-profits, but there was nothing like the extra $1 billion in university research funding for private schools. But nor should there have been, as this money responded to a problem unique to universities.

We are left trying to explain why this research money does not continue into 2022. Limited and fractured advocacy from the sector itself may be a factor. Throughout the Covid crisis, it has, at least in public, offered few specific suggestions about how the government should respond. This may reflect the sector’s diversity of interests. The research money mostly helped the research-intensive sandstone universities, and outside the Group of Eight lobby group, support for another year of it may have been lukewarm.

On the government’s side, it may feel that it did not get a political dividend for its first $1 billion. This was partly its own fault; it revealed the funding in the very busy October 2020 budget rather than announcing it in the preceding weeks. But while the higher education interest groups acknowledge the significance of the funding, the broader higher education community reaction matches Exit Strategy’s. The additional money might be mentioned briefly, only to be reframed as a cut when future funding drops back to previously announced levels, before returning the discussion to grievances about JobKeeper, an unsuitable scheme now closed to everyone.

Higher education is never going win votes for the Liberal Party, but this does not mean the party won’t respond to persuasive analyses of policy issues in the sector. There was a significant Covid response, albeit with the major elements of that response announced late in 2020 and finishing too early. The Job-Ready Graduates policy, released in June 2020, which was unrelated to Covid issues, jeopardises courses and campuses with reduced per-student funding in some disciplines, and needlessly adds many years to HELP repayment times for some students. But Job-Ready Graduates should deliver more student places for the “Costello baby boom” cohort, who will reach university age in the mid-2020s.

On both sides, the government and the higher education community, there is room for more engagement, so that the next few years have fewer avoidable policy and political mistakes than the past few years.

Andrew Norton

EXIT STRATEGY

Correspondence

Dennis Altman

The difficulty with writing about current events is that they change faster than it takes to produce and circulate an essay. I am writing this during Sydney’s Covid-induced lockdown, which has shattered the myth that the New South Wales government could manage the epidemic more successfully than the other states, even as it reinforces George’s argument about the fracturing of the federation.

Where George’s essay is strongest is in its assessment of the shifting political landscape of party loyalties and the Coalition’s hostility to universities, which he sees as connected. He is correct that state allegiances have changed, particularly that of Victoria, once the jewel in Menzies’ Liberal Party and now the strongest Labor state. But there seems to be some confusion in his argument, which shifts between suggesting that political fault lines lie along state lines and that there is a city–country divide.

Massive swings against Labor in regional Queensland at the last election certainly reflected perceptions that Labor is hostile to coalmining, but this hardly explains Labor’s failure to win back seats in suburban areas of the capital cities. While Labor seems obsessed with winning back coastal Queensland seats, it could easily win government if the five metropolitan areas of Australia voted similarly to Melbourne. Of the ten most marginal government seats following the last election, all but three are in the capital cities, and those three include electorates in Cairns and Launceston, neither of which depends on mining.

Only in Melbourne and Adelaide does Labor hold a clear majority of seats; Sydney, once reliably Labor south of the harbour, is now fairly equally divided. That Sydney has become much more culturally conservative than Melbourne is suggested by the results of the plebiscite on marriage equality in 2019. Of the ten electorates that recorded the highest “no” vote, eight were in Sydney, with only one (Maranoa) in rural Australia.

George suggests that the Coalition’s hostility to universities is closely related to Morrison’s apparent disregard for Victoria. Yes, the major export industry of Victoria has become higher education, while New South Wales’ is coal, but it is unlikely that this is a major factor explaining votes in metropolitan Sydney. Josh Frydenberg claims universities are victims of their own success, citing their willingness to embrace a corporate model, but he saw no problem in allowing major corporations to access JobKeeper and JobSaver programs, which were denied to universities. Given there are well over a million local university students in Australia, one would have thought the electoral calculus alone would encourage governments to be more supportive.

The consequences of declining financial support for universities are severe, not only for staff who lose jobs and students who can expect declining support. After the University of Western Australia, one of the richest universities in the country, embarked on a round of midyear cuts, Professor Mark Beeson pointed out that the cuts would drastically reduce the number of people working in the areas of international affairs and the politics and societies of the Indo-Pacific, with Asian Studies becoming further marginalised, Other universities have seen major cutbacks in language programs, including major Asian language programs.

Governments of both persuasions are obsessed with the need for more science and technology students, but in a complex and threatening global environment there is an equal need to increase competencies in disciplines associated with international studies. If, as the Morrison government believes, China presents a major long-term threat to Australia’s security, there should be a greater emphasis on building deep ties with the countries of Southeast Asia and expanding Australia’s diplomatic footprint, which is smaller than that of other countries of comparable wealth. One detects in Morrison something of an echo of Tony Abbott’s obsession with “the Anglosphere,” and a failure to recognise the long-term damage of successive cuts in foreign assistance to regions other than the Pacific.

The key question is whether either side of politics has the skills and vision to guide Australia into a post-pandemic world. One of the consequences of the pandemic has been an emphasis on the role of government; the neoliberal panacea of letting the market rip is no longer attractive, as George indicates. Sadly, the lack of a vision for the future is largely bipartisan; having been scared off by the reaction to Shorten’s mild suggestions for correcting some of the rorts within our taxation system, the current Labor Party finds itself unable to argue for the increased government commitments needed to improve our health, education and welfare systems. At a moment that calls for radical innovation, Labor risks missing the opportunity to offer a genuine alternative to the lack of imagination which George so accurately points to in the Morrison government.

Dennis Altman