Politics

Poor communication has long been activism’s Achilles heel. Engaging the wider populace and influencing opinion rely as much on the effective, reliable delivery of a message as on well-organised ideas and events. We may be loath to admit it, but intelligent public relations can aid any pursuit – advocatory, activist, or otherwise.

It is from this perspective that the expansive new publication How to Make Trouble and Influence People: Pranks, hoaxes, graffiti & mischief-making takes its cue. Compiled and written by Melbourne writer, zine-maker, and community radio presenter Iain McIntyre, this vividly illustrated volume documents not only an unofficial history of Australian protest, activism, and all-round cheek, but the connections between political trouble-making and its ability to influence popular opinion. It succeeds, for the most part.

Apologists for torture often defend their walk on the dark side by invoking putative imperatives, such as protecting their communities from great evils. The paradigm is the ‘ticking bomb’ situation, where pre-empting catastrophe hangs on extracting information from uncooperative terrorists. The merging of combatants and innocents in modern warfare has highlighted the terrible dilemmas of ‘collateral damage’: how much intended or foreseen material destruction and killing of innocents can be justified in engaging your enemy? Then there are the ‘noble’ lies that politicians seem obliged to tell in protecting the larger interests of the nation.

It is easy to believe, in the glad confident morning of the new presidency, that not being George W. Bush will be enough: that to restore America’s place in the world, Barack Obama need only avoid the mistakes and repudiate the misdeeds of his discredited predecessor. If so, his task will be easy, and this book may help. But what if something more is needed?

Edward Gough Whitlam bestrode the Australian political stage like a colossus for over a generation: first as federal Opposition leader, then as prime minister, and finally as martyr. A legend in his own lifetime, this last role threatens to turn him into myth. More books have been written on aspects of his short and turbulent government than on any other in Australian history. There are already three biographies: a competent quickie by journalist Laurie Oakes in 1976; an eloquent political biography by his speechwriter Graham Freudenberg in 1977; and a psychobiography by the political scientist James Walter in 1980, which depicts Whitlam in terms of a particular personality type – the grandiose narcissist.

One of the first books I read about news and politics was a lively British volume edited by Richard Boston, called The Press We Deserve (1970). In it, he quoted a recent speech by the Duke of Edinburgh reciting all the standard clichés about the role a free press played in sustaining democracy. On the contrary, Boston argued, a newspaper such as the News of the World is about as helpful to democracy as an outbreak of typhoid. It may, he said, be the price of democracy, but that was a rather different proposition.

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.

The day I began writing this review, the Jewish Telegraph Agency (JTA) news service carried three items reflecting the umbilical nature of ties between the United States and Israel. One item reported President George W. Bush as threatening to veto an intelligence bill because it would require revelations about a mysterious Israeli air attack on Syria on September 6. A second reported the Bush administration’s delaying a request to Congress for approval of an arms sale to Saudi Arabia. The sale forms part of a $20 billion deal with Arab nations, aimed at a united front against Iran, but ‘some pro-Israeli groups and Congress members say it is risky to sell offensive arms to a régime that has at times harboured militant Islamists’. The third item dealt with a bill to fully integrate the United States and Israeli missile defence systems. The bill’s congressional sponsor hailed it as ‘a symbol of our shared values and a safer 21^st century’.

Are ambassadors anachronistic these days, or do top-secret cables and personal finesse still outflank headlines and blogs? In his new book, Richard Woolcott, one of Australia’s most experienced former diplomats, quotes a French colleague who believes that ‘we have become a combination of travel agent, messenger boy, and inn keeper’. Yet Woolcott’s autobiography, The Hot Seat (2003), exemplifies historian Charles Webster’s definition of diplomacy: ‘… obtaining the maximum national interest with a minimum of friction and resentment’ – a rather more significant role. Perhaps this is because Ambassador Woolcott’s career spanned most of the second half of the twentieth century (he retired in 1992), when individuals found it easier to make an impact on what he calls ‘probably the world’s second oldest profession’.