Australian Politics

Australian conservatism, for all its political dominance, is little understood and has been studied by surprisingly few scholars. The very industrious and perceptive Peter van Onselen is almost single-handedly determined to correct this imbalance. He has brought together a timely collection of essays on the Liberal Party and its future, coinciding with yet another term in unaccustomed opposition, an experience invariably chastising for the conservatives. The immediate predecessors to the modern-day Liberal Party on the non-Labor side of politics disintegrated on losing office, and the Liberal Party’s own spells in opposition have been periods of both blood-letting and soul searching. There is a happy focus (for the Liberal Party, at least) on the latter in this necessarily mixed bag.

Since the November federal election, kicking John Howard while he’s down has become something of a national pastime. While Howard’s take no-prisoners-except-on-Nauru behaviour has now exposed him to gleeful mass taunting, the idea that the end of his resilient political career has instantly created a noble Australia, its citizens and institutions cleansed and renew ed, is wishful thinking. In this context, Judith Brett’s new Quarterly Essay injects some welcome clear-headedness. Brett rains blows on Howard, but she is not a Howard-hater in the counterproductive and grandiose style of, say, Phillip Adams. Instead, she takes aim at the former prime minister in a characteristically nuanced and astute way. She bridges a gap – too often in Australia, a gulf – between scholars and interested laypeople, offering prose that is accessible and lively but that avoids dumbing down complex issues.

Quite when the figurative usage of ‘companion’ as ‘a work of reference ... that is presented as a friend to be consulted with whenever needed’ came into fashion is uncertain. I well remember my first companion, the third edition of the invaluable Oxford Companion to English Literature, from my student days in the 1950s. Oxford University Press now has a large stable of companions – some seventy titles at last count – covering everything from Christian thought to jazz to baroque music. The latest addition to the Oxford stable is a doorstopper: The Oxford Companion to Australian Politics (OCAP). Together with its sister volume, The Oxford Companion to Australian History, first published in 1998, it should become an indispensable, if expensive, tome in the library of any thinking Australian.

Advance Australia … Where? is such an eye-catching pun on Australia’s national anthem that it is no wonder that it has been used, with slight variations, as the title of at least eight books and pamphlets since World War II. Such publications have tended to express an individual author’s vision for the nation. In contrast, the latest Advance Australia … Where?, written by Hugh Mackay, mainly discusses current trends in public opinion, although it includes a few cautious predictions about the future and a number of suggestions for social reform.

The cover says it all. The photograph comes from the Cole Inquiry, but it could be from any number of recent events. In the centre is Prime Minister John Howard, smiling without hubris, a confident leader going about the business of leadership, ready to inform the Cole Inquiry what he knew and what he was never officially told. But the prime minister is not alone. Blacked out on either side are two of his security detail: ‘fit for office’ does not begin to describe the appearance of lean efficiency of this pair of male and female minders. Just behind them are two classic minders, both more than a little tense but featured in bold colour, one with eyes up as if anticipating the show of prime ministerial confidence; the other with eyes lowered, anticipating what might go wrong. Not that it does.

The continued success and quality of the Quarterly Essay series has done much to promote the long essay as a legitimate forum for detailed, informed and accessible political discussion. That this has occurred during the Howard era suggests that all is not lost in the quest for genuine public debate. In the latest Quarterly Essay, David Marr acknowledges that, ‘[s]uppression is not systematic. There are no gulags for dissidents under Howard.’ Nevertheless, His Master’s Voice is born of, and fuelled by, exasperation. Marr makes little effort to mask his personal enmity towards John Howard. And his disgust at the manner in which the federal Coalition has governed for more than a decade is palpable: ‘Since 1996, Howard has cowed his critics, muffled the press, intimidated the ABC, gagged scientists, silenced non-government organisations, neutered Canberra’s mandarins, curtailed parliamentary scrutiny, censored the arts, banned books, criminalised protest and prosecuted whistleblowers.’

Whoever wins the federal election later this year, it is likely that at some stage in 2008 we will be looking back and post-mortemising the Howard government. One strand in the reviews will surely be the Howard government’s impact on the quality of public debate in this country. Whether it has been a contributor to Howard’s long ascendancy (and I think it has), this government’s ability to goad large numbers of academics and commentators into unbalanced and increasingly hysterical denunciations of nearly all aspects of its operations is unprecedented in Australian political history.

Canberra’s week of the two presidents – October 2003 – brought the unprecedented spectacle of George W. Bush and China’s President Hu Jintau speaking just a day apart to joint sittings of the Australian parliament. The coincidence elegantly dramatised the central questions for Australian foreign policy: how we manage our relationships with our superpower ally, how we live with our neighbours in Asia, and how we get the balance right between them. This has been the essential challenge for every Australian government since World War II. In his important new book, The Howard Paradox, Michael Wesley focuses on one side of that balance – relations with Asia – and on the Howard government.

Tom Uren was a prisoner of war on the Burma Railway during World War II, a professional boxer in his youth and one of the dominant voices of the Australian left for much of the second half of the twentieth century. Martin Flanagan offers a wide-ranging reflection on Uren’s life, drawing on his experience growing up in the working-class Sydney suburb of Balmain to his days as minister for urban and regional development in Gough Whitlam’s government. In doing so, The Fight conveys the resilient and visionary spirit that was central to Uren’s character. But Flanagan’s stated purpose is much more than biographical; his aim is to show the need in contemporary Australian society for the passion and vision Uren displayed throughout his life.