Barry Jones

In 1968, Barry Jones edited, and contributed to, the first edition of The Penalty Is Death. The book was produced in the immediate aftermath of the execution of Ronald Ryan in Victoria in February 1967, and in the context of vigorous debates in Australia and other Western countries as to the retention of the death penalty. The second edition, published to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the abolition of the death penalty in Queensland, arrives in a very different world. A majority of countries are now either abolitionist in law, or have in place an express or de facto moratorium against execution.

Barry Jones is a proud member of the Awkward Squad, one who follows his own convictions rather than the exigencies of day-to-day government. He confesses that in Parliament, ‘I was always aiming for objectives that were seen as beyond the reach of conventional politics’. The memo about ‘the art of the possible’ clearly never reached Jones’s desk. His time as a minister between 1983 and 1990 was a strain for both him and the then prime minister, Bob Hawke. Jones recounts with some glee that Hawke once referred to him as ‘Barry Fucking Jones’.

Gough Whitlam is idolised, Bob Hawke respected, and Paul Keating admired, but Barry Jones is undoubtedly the most loved by the Labor party rank and file, a lovability which puzzled many of his colleagues in the Hawke government (1983–91). Insofar as they recognised it, they qualified it – labelling him ‘a loveable eccentric’ – a characterisation of ...

Justice Michael Kirby’s launching of Sir Zelman Cowen’s memoirs at the Melbourne University’s Woodward Centre in early June was a great Melbourne occasion. Two of Cowen’s successors as governor-general, Sir Ninian Stephen and Archbishop Peter Hollingworth, attended as part of a galaxy of judges, barristers, academics and a scattering of ex-politicians. The occasion was a festival of oratory, with five substantial speeches, possibly an Australian record for a book launch.

The Liberal Party, in its barren years (1983–96), was consumed in battles over beliefs. The dries took up the cudgels in a war over the nature of liberalism and effectively gained control of the party room. As Paul Kelly has described it, the party torched its Deakinite heritage. John Howard was not central to these battles, but he was the inheritor. His brilliance has been to take the neo-liberal agenda (individualism, choice, markets versus ‘bureaucracy’, the ‘mainstream’ versus ‘élites’), to give it an Australian resonance (by reinterpreting the ‘Australian legend’ as a story of individual battlers) and, relentlessly, to link his profession of beliefs to every policy statement he makes. It is unlikely that most of the punters systematically assess what Howard says in their own voting deliberations, or could complete a test on Howard’s key principles, but impressions have their effects. Recently, when I asked a group whether they thought there was a difference between the parties, a young woman confidently replied: ‘Yes, one party knows what it thinks and gets on with it; the other doesn’t.’

Geoffrey Blainey made his reputation as a prolific and accomplished economic historian, then turned to broader themes and wrote important analytical works, including The Tyranny of Distance (1966), The Causes of War (1973), The Triumph of the Nomads (1975), and The Great Seesaw (1988). When the so-called ‘history wars’ began in the 1980s, Blainey was characterised as an optimistic conservative, critical of ‘the black armband’ view of Australian history attributed to the more radical Manning Clark. I thought the differences between Clark and Blainey were grossly exaggerated. Paradoxically, Blainey took a serious interest in Aborigines and women’s issues long before Clark did.