Politics

Michael Gurr was Victorian Premier Steve Bracks’s first senior speechwriter. I am his latest. Gurr worked for Victorian Treasurer John Brumby when he was leader of the state opposition in the mid-1990s. So did I. Gurr wrote the launch speeches for Steve Bracks’s successful 1999 and 2002 state election campaigns. As I type this review, I am also, coincidentally, in the midst of ballpointing my way to the summit of my first draft of the launch speech for the 2006 campaign (a campaign that I cannot know the result of as I type, but you will already know as you read this). The coincidences do not end there.

Gurr’s speech for the 1999 campaign – one made famous by the unexpected defeat of Premier Jeff Kennett – was launched in Ballarat. The 2006 campaign will be launched in Ballarat. Gurr is known in Labor circles as a ‘creative type’ (read: prolific, award-winning playwright of works such as Jerusalem and Sex Diary of an Infidel). I am also known as a ‘creative type’ (novelist and poet). And yet, despite all these coincidences and intersecting lines, not to mention the backbench of associates we have in common, Gurr and I had never met when a speech request landed on my desk a while back with the title ‘Michael Gurr book launch’. Of course, I knew of Gurr. Sort of.

The fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks revived familiar lines of debate about the significance of terrorism. On one side are those who believe that 9/11 brought into stark relief a deadly new challenge to our values and existence, an enemy that must be faced resolutely and fought on every front. On the other are those who believe that 9/11 gave birth (or rebirth) not to a new form of threat but to a noxious form of politics: self-righteous, muscular and xenophobic. It is to this stand-off that Robert Goodin makes a refreshing and much-needed contribution. Goodin is a rare commodity: a political philosopher who remains resolutely focused on the problems and controversies that bedevil the real world of politics and policy. His most recent offering, What’s Wrong with Terrorism?, sets out to make a ‘moral assessment of the phenomenon of terrorism and reactions to it’, asking: ‘what is the distinctive wrong of terrorism? … what makes terrorists different from, and morally even worse than, ordinary murderers, kidnappers, and so on?’

Of late there has been a good deal of agitated conversation about the political attitudes of ordinary Australians. As Judith Brett and Anthony Moran point out in this compelling new book, this has often taken the form of a ‘war of words within the political élites’, with the right using its supposed empathy for everyday people as a weapon against intellectuals, and the left blaming the deficiencies of John Howard’s Australia on the narrow-minded selfishness of ordinary voters. As it is, those of us who live in ordinary outer suburbs can hardly open Melbourne’s Age newspaper without finding ourselves accused of something, from a new Australian ugliness and the death of manners to the decline of civilisation. Mind you, the thought of being spoken for by anything-but-ordinary people like Janet Albrechtsen is even more distasteful.

If journalism is the first draft of history, this book is a rough-hewn draft of some important historical chunks. Greg Sheridan, the foreign editor of The Australian, may not match some of his colleagues there in gravitas, intellectual depth, or analytical precision, but he compensates with an abundance of enthusiasm and enviable access to those in high office. In the early and mid-1990s, when The Australian was prominent among those boosting Asia and Australian–Asian relations, Sheridan was cheerleader for the boosters. His columns and books were often based on long interviews with presidents and foreign ministers, recounted in a tone more often found in celebrity journalism than in diplomatic reports. Sheridan’s obvious delight at being granted personal interviews with the powerful aroused some envious comments, but his technique served a purpose.

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.’

Thirteen scholars here have fun changing the course of Australian history, but this diverting exercise has the serious purpose of making the real history fresher, more complex and surprising.

Even the more implausible scenarios can have this effect. Marilyn Lake imagines Prime Minister Alfred Deakin declaring independence from Britain in 1908 and aligning Australia with the United States, which brings to our attention the high place in the Australian imagination accorded to the American republic as exemplar, potential ally and partner in the spreading of a vigorous white manhood across the new world. Ann Curthoys ponders the character and influence of feminism by imagining a men’s movement emerging in the 1970s.

In the week that Voting for Jesus landed in my letterbox, the Howard government announced that it was considering dollar-for-dollar support for state school chaplaincies, while, in New South Wales, fresh allegations surfaced of branch stacking by the state Liberals’ ‘religious right’ faction. Those perplexed by such developments in secular Australia will find novelist Amanda Lohrey a helpful, warm-hearted guide. Her colourful, impressionistic and approachable account of Australia’s religious right welcomes readers into a debate that some might previously have been inclined to dismiss as too confusing, or as marginal to secular concerns. Chats with academics, theologians and commentators offer a variety of angles. Far from adopting a didactic tone, the text beguiles with numerous questions that sound rhetorical but often remain unanswered.

The subject of fear and politics has often captured the attention of the political left. Indeed, I am immediately reminded of two wonderful books: In Place of Fear (1952), by the British Labour politician Nye Bevan; and The Fear of Freedom (1941), by the post-Freudian and socialist Erich Fromm. Whilst Fromm set out to understand the roots of fear in the human condition, Bevan sought practical solutions to the most obvious manifestations of fear in a world that had been shaken to its foundations by economic depression, fascism and war. Both were democratic socialists who believed that the insecurities which led to fear could be tackled through political, social and economic change.

For a brief moment following the collapse of communism, it appeared that such a solution might be within our grasp. Some even talked of ‘the end of history’. How wrong they were, as we witness the rebirth of insecurity associated with global warming, international terrorism and nuclear proliferation.

Foreign travellers in India face four inevitable questions. ‘What is your good name?’ is usually followed in rapid succession by ‘Where are you coming from?’(meaning from which country), ‘Are you married?’ and, finally, ‘What is your religion?’. Backpacking through India twenty years ago, the first three questions presented few problems. My name was easy, Australia was recognised as a cricket-playing country, and I was young enough for my lack of a wife to be passed over as a matter of only mild embarrassment. The fourth question however, proved tricky. Usually, I gave the technically correct answer that I had been baptised into the Anglican Church – a reply that generally satisfied my interlocutors and not infrequently led into rambling, good-natured discussions about the similarities between the world’s great faiths. Once, I ventured a more honest response. ‘I am an atheist,’ I told a couple of friendly young Indian men on a long train journey. ‘I do not believe in any God.’ Their shock was palpable. It was not so much my spiritual deficit that appalled them as my arrogance. How could anyone have the audacity to declare that God did not exist? Our conversation never recovered. In response to all future interrogations, I retreated to my dissembling line about Christianity. The experience did not shake my disbelief, but it did serve to engender a greater respect for the question. Religion, I belatedly realised, is an important matter.

The provenance of The Howard Factor – a collection of essays by senior writers from The Australian newspaper – is not promising. The Australian is after all part of Mark Latham’s ‘Evil Empire’, cheerleader rather than critic of the Howard government. Yet its sympathy for the régime stems not from partisanship but from the newspaper’s philosophy: neo-liberal in domestic matters, neo-conservative in foreign policy. Populist desertion of elements of the neo-liberal agenda has aroused the wrath of the newspaper: witness its condemnation of the government’s policy funk in early 2001, and of its recent surrender to Snowy River romanticism. Discord has been less in foreign policy, where both government and newspaper have been willing recruits to the ‘war on terror’. So slavish has become the newspaper’s adherence to America’s contemporary wars that it has even repudiated its quite heroic stance on the Vietnam War a generation ago.