Politics

On 15 September 2021, Scott Morrison announced his government’s commitment to a defence pact and nuclear submarine deal with the United Kingdom and United States. Abbreviated to AUKUS, this collaboration sent shockwaves through ranks of diplomats, security analysts, anti-nuclear advocates, and members of the Australian public. In signing the AUKUS pact, Morrison signalled Australia’s termination of a $90 billion submarine deal with the French government and reignited concern over Australia’s role in fuelling nuclear proliferation and potential conflict. Drawing upon ‘insider’ knowledge as a former diplomat, Richard Broinowski has contributed to the discussion by placing AUKUS in its historical context in an updated edition of his book Fact or Fission? The truth about Australia’s nuclear ambitions, originally published in 2003.

Since his (involuntary) retirement from politics in 2007, John Howard has gone to some lengths to encourage comparisons with Robert Menzies. He authored a lengthy paean to Australia’s longest serving prime minister (2014), appeared in a television series to appraise his leadership and era (2016), and curated an exhibition on him at the Museum of Australian Democracy. And while he does not don the knightly robes that Menzies did on the cover of his volume of essays, The Measure of the Years (1970), Howard does ape Ming’s serene, far-seeing gaze on the dust jacket of this, his third book, A Sense of Balance.

During his first electoral campaign, Daniel Andrews hung a sign in his office containing a timeless political wisdom from Lyndon Baines Johnson: ‘If you do everything, you will win.’ He has continued taking it literally. Australian politics has, it is agreed, few harder workers than Victoria’s premier: he is in the same class as LBJ, who famously said that he seldom thought about politics more than eighteen hours a day.

Selling books is a difficult business. Publishing, too. Booksellers and publishers need courage and imagination. A book about a contemporary Federal politician with the adjective ‘new’ in the title displays both these qualities. Tony Blair may have got away with ‘New Labour’ in Britain. In Australia, a large part of the disenchantment with politics and politicians stems from the feeling that, apart from the fresh face of Natasha Stott-Despoja, there’s nothing new around; no new ideas, no articulated vision of where the country might be in ten- or twenty-years’ time, nothing inspirational. Perhaps something might emerge before the next election. But no one’s holding their breath.

Twenty years ago there was a fashion in American political science of putting together collections of articles under a generic title such as ‘Political Parties in Developing Nations’. As with so many other American fashions, this spread to Australia and the edited collection is now common­place in the social sciences. The problem with all such collections, and it applies to this one, is the apples and pears syndrome – not all fruits are the same despite their common classification.

Scott Morrison needn’t waste time writing a political memoir: the work of self-vindication has already been attempted on his behalf by Simon Benson and Geoff Chambers, both columnists at The Australian, in their now highly controversial book Plagued: Australia’s two years of hell – the inside story. Theirs is a largely heroic story about Morrison’s leadership, which ‘served the nation well’ amid a ‘most extreme period of adversity’.

Theo van Gogh, born into a celebrated family, made himself famous, and infamous, in the Netherlands for his outrageous opinions, such as accusing the Jewish lord mayor of Amsterdam, the son of Holocaust survivors, of being a Nazi sympathiser. According to Ian Buruma, the author of Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance (2004), when van Gogh made the controversial film Submission with the Muslim activist turned politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Buruma thought that this would be seen as another of his national ‘village idiot’ gestures. There was no intention to draw more than imaginary blood. Van Gogh had lived his whole life secure in the knowledge that in the Netherlands he was onze Theo (our Theo), and that what he was free to deride because of Article 23 also protected him. But to Muslim fundamentalists, freedom of speech is anathema. God, and his representatives, decide what is and can be said. In this mindscape, this very freedom of speech, as espoused in the Netherlands, proves that the country is an infidel state.