Politics

This is a fascinating, inspiring and disquieting book. It is fascinating because it succeeds so well in its comprehensive overview of policy making and policy intentions during the Hawke government (1983–91). That success derives from the unparalleled mix of insiders (former ministers, public servants, leaders of unions and NGOs), journalists and academic analysts, though the voice that is notably absent is that of business. Inspiration comes when one can see, beyond the obsession with pragmatism and economic reform, glimpses of a genuine ‘third way’ in the development of social capital. Disquiet arises because so many of the contributors fail to see how they created the social malaise that dogged the final years of the Labor government, and how, in abandoning the ‘old’ ideologies, they prepared the ground for the profoundly ideological and destructive government that would follow.

Speaking in the context of the Quebec secessionist movement, Stéphane Dion described Canada as ‘a country that works in practice but not in theory’. Whilst particularly telling of that country’s political turmoil, Dion’s summary also points to an abiding tension in all Western democracies: the perceived gulf between the theory and the practice of modern government. Constitution and parliament, the people and their representatives, tradition and modern requirements: in theory, each pair dovetail, but in practice they tend to be loose at the edges. (Try finding, for example, any reference to ‘prime minister’ in our Constitution.) The ongoing efforts within Australia to reconcile the theory and practice of government are at the centre of this important book, which was released to coincide with the South Australian Constitutional Convention (held in August 2003).

During his lengthy career as editor of the Daily Express, Arthur Christiansen visited Rhyl, one of those grim towns that passes for a seaside resort in the English north. Strolling along the promenade with his wife, he was fascinated by the people: ‘Their flat, sallow northern faces, their Sunday-best clothes, their curious capacity for enjoying themselves without displaying any signs of emotion, moved me – people in the mass always do.’ Returning to London, he wrote a bulletin describing ‘the composite Englishman’ whose interests and perspectives his reporters should always have in mind. Christiansen called him ‘THE MAN ON THE RHYL PROMENADE.’

The 1990s will be remembered as the time when Australia slid into that morbid state of ‘new inequality’ that Will Hutton, writing about the British experience under Margaret Thatcher, called the ‘30/30/40 society’. In July 2003 the Australian Bureau of Statistics confirmed that income inequality had increased substantially during the 1990s. Whether a preoccupation with the ‘shrinking middle’, as Michael Pusey has recently argued, is therefore all that important is questionable. In Australia, one in four jobs are now part-time, and many are precarious. Persistent and long-term unemployment has contributed to the fact that one in three Australians are now relying substantially on government benefits. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that what Mark Peel in this new book calls ‘poverty news’ is back on the front page. By poverty news, Peel means the way Australia’s media has increasingly reported the problems occasioned by ‘welfare cheats’ since the late 1980s. Peel’s book challenges us to ask how we should think about poverty.

This book is dedicated to Judith Brett’s grandparents, ‘none of whom ever voted Labor’, and their grandchildren, ‘most of whom do’; and concludes with the observation that ‘the relationship between … emerging social formations and nationally based political parties is not yet clear – or at least not to me’. The dedication suggests even-handedness, and the concluding words imply a commitment to evidence as the basis for argument. These qualities characterise this major study of Australian Liberalism – an impressive personal achievement and a significant event in Australian intellectual life – though Brett sometimes appears to believe that they are one and the same thing, and that, in order to understand human relations, one must first accept the equal validity of ideologically opposed views.

Over the past few years, Bob Carr has been tweaking the veils that shroud his inner self. In essays, speeches and book reviews, he has teased and titillated us with glimpses of his diary and extracts from his unpublished autobiographical novel, Titanic Forces. Now, with Marilyn Dodkin’s Bob Carr: The Reluctant Leader, built around Carr’s personal diary, we have a grand disrobing. Although she has used Hansard reports, newspaper files and interviews, there would be no publishable work without the diary, quotations from which average two per page. Indeed Carr’s words constitute some thirty per cent of the book. The diary provides the work’s narrative structure, and, when the diarist flags, so does the book. A result of this approach is that the author’s rather pedestrian prose is often outshone by the diarist’s vivid and sardonic style.

These two well-written, unpretentious and engaging books address a central question for those interested in parliamentary democracy: who should represent us? Is the best representative someone just like ourselves, or someone who knows how ‘the system’ works and can manipulate it in our interest? Should it be someone from the party in power? Should it be someone wise and experienced, or young and vigorous? Should it be a woman, to represent the largest proportion of the electorate?

It is fair to say that ‘truth in government’ has become Australia’s most critical political issue, as it goes to the heart of ministerial responsibility and public accountability, which in turn make possible representative government. In recent years, a number of constituent issues have arisen under the ‘truth in government’ heading, including the Australian government’s cover-up of unfolding events in East Timor in 1999, the ‘children overboard’ affair and Iraq’s alleged ‘weapons of mass destruction’. Alongside these issues is the sinking of the asylum-seeker boat SIEV X, in which 353 people drowned. Yet of these issues, the SIEV X affair is perhaps the least well understood, in large part due to government dissembling and lying. So far as information on SIEV X has come to public attention at all, it has had to be extracted, slowly and painfully, from a government most reluctant to let any part of it go.