Politics

A key argument deployed by those in favour of the United Kingdom leaving the European Union concerned the restoration of parliamentary sovereignty. One of the ironies of Brexit is that some of the leading figures who argued for parliamentary sovereignty during the 2016 referendum tried to shut down Parliament three years later so that they could ‘get Brexit done’. This attack on a representative institution was part of an international pattern of democratic backsliding during the 2010s. For the authors of this new book, understanding the internal dynamics of Parliament during the Brexit years forms part of an effort to ‘defend democracy and its institutions’. 

In June 1971, Sir John Bunting, secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, observed that new prime minister Billy McMahon was ‘the most political of all politicians’: demanding, difficult, always reacting to new, feverish urgencies. The result, according to Bunting, was constant crisis. ‘In fact,’ he went on, ‘I have come to look forward to each new crisis because it is the only way I have discovered of being able to be rid of the existing one.’

When the Whitlam government was elected in 1972, women across Australia responded with elation. The Women’s Liberation Movement had helped bring Labor to power and was in turn galvanised by the programs, reforms, and appointments that began to be put in place. In Women and Whitlam: Revisiting the revolution, Michelle Arrow has assembled a splendid range of memoirs, reminiscences, and short essays that document twenty-five women’s perspectives on this much mythologised era. The collection will be of great interest to those who lived through these momentous times and to readers of Australian social and political history more generally. It will also serve as a useful teaching text.

'Australia faces the real prospect of a war with China within three years that could involve a direct attack on our mainland.’ That was the opening line of a 2,174-word article – headlined ‘Australia “must prepare” for threat of China war’ and tagged with a ‘Red Alert’ graphic – that ran on the front pages of The Age and Sydney Morning Herald on 7 March. Next day, the authors of the ‘Red Alert’ special, journalists Peter Hartcher and Matthew Knott, ran a 2,241-word hypothetical about how a conflict over Taiwan could, within seventy-two hours, result in missile bombardments and cyberattacks against Australia. On the third day, Hartcher and Knott’s ‘Red Alert’ special concluded with a 2,278-word front-page piece on the steps that Australia needed to take to prepare for war with China.

In early March 2023, Tanya Plibersek fronted an audience at the Australian National University to question historian Chris Wallace about her newly released account of twentieth-century prime ministers and their biographers. Coming shortly before the publication of Margaret Simons’s biography of her, Plibersek’s interest in the dynamics of writing about a living, breathing, vote-seeking politician seemed prompted by more than mere professional courtesy. ‘It’s like building a golem, in the shape of a person, in a way, isn’t it?’ she remarked. ‘And then you’re putting magic into it and animating it. It comes out of the mud.’

We live in an age of leader- and media-centric politics. There is a name and a personality attached to every significant political initiative, and chief among them are prime ministers and premiers. Political junkies will be familiar with the torrent of ‘leader’ profiles generated by the press and well versed in identifying implicit bias. Yet we constitute a ready market for biographies of current (and perhaps rising) stars, and journalists are often first to seize the opportunity to write ‘the first draft of history’. How well do we understand the genre and its effects?