Category Archives: Essays

‘The Coal curse: Resources, Climate and Australia’s Future’ by Judith Brett QE 78

Posted on May 13, 2022 | Leave a comment
2020, 75 p. Follow up correspondence in QE 79 The End of Certainty, Katherine Murphy

My son will testify that I have about 50 Quarterly Essays on my shelf, most of which have not even been opened. I seem to put them aside thinking “Ooooh- I must read this after I have finished reading….” and somehow I never do. I was impelled to read Judith Brett’s The Coal Curse, released in 2020, after hearing her participation in Matt Bevan’s Australia, If you’re Listening podcast.

She started writing her essay just after Christmas in 2019, when our cities had been smothered in smoke and our newspapers carried those stark hell-red photos of people on the beach at Mallacoota, waiting for small boats to evacuate them. She finished writing it in May 2020, in the midst of our early coronovirus lockdowns. As the fires burned, she was angry. Ross Garnaut had predicted fires of this scale back in 2008 but Angus Taylor had returned from the Madrid UN-convened climate change conference, declaring that we should be proud of our climate change efforts.

I have written this essay in an attempt to do something constructive with my grief and anger, and my fear for our collective future; not just to fume and blame, but to try to understand.

p.8

As a historian, she looked for explanations in the past – in those decisions and events that have shaped our present actions and future possibilities.

This is just a fancy way of saying that history matters, but it does shift our attention from the contingencies of events and personalities to structures and institutions. This essay is about the history of Australia as a commodity-exporting nation and its political consequences. Economic history is unfashionable nowadays. Economists focus on the modelling and management of the present and historians are more interested in stories and experience, and in uncovering diversity and neglected voices. Economic history is dry and hard to narrativise. But how a country makes its living can explain a lot.

p.8

Her essay is in two parts: first, a historic overview of how Australia came to become ‘resource cursed’ and second, how the resource lobby has captured successive Australian governments, but most particularly the Liberal/National Party coalition. She notes that in 2017 Australia came 93rd out of 133 economies ranked according to the diversity and complexity of exports. New Zealand was 51. In 2018-19 seven of our top ten exports were from the quarry and one from the farm (just as Donald Horne warned in The Lucky Country). In order, they were: iron ores and concentrates, coal, natural gas, education-related travel services, personal travel except education, gold, aluminium ores and concentrates, beef, crude petroleum, copper ores and concentrates. Neither the quarry nor the farm really generates much employment, no matter how much they crow about their importance to “jobs- jobs- jobs”. When Australia was first settled, our economy relied on wool being loaded onto sailing ships for Britain, our major export destination until Britain joined the European Common Market in 1973, after years of signalling that it would do so. Australia was saved by Japan and its demand for iron ore to make steel, replacing Britain as our top export destination in 1967. In 2009-10 top spot went to China. Between 1980 and 2013 there was a tripling of coal exports. In the early 2000s liquefied coal seam gas joined the ranks of the top exports, and we are now the world’s largest LNG exporter.

Against this reliance on primary produce and mineral wealth, neither of which require a large workforce, Australia needed to industrialize in order to create sufficient jobs for its population, especially after the gold rush. Victorian liberals (i.e. colonial liberals coming from the state of Victoria) were protectionists, flying in the face of both NSW policy and the current British economic theory of Free Trade. Protection won the day when the Australian states federated, with a goal of Australians buying Australian-made goods. Australian manufacturing was turbo-charged by WWII. Migration, foreign investment and protection combined to create a greatly expanded Australian manufacturing sector, peaking in the late 50s-early60s at just under 30% of GDP. We could have developed an export-oriented manufacturing industry, but tariff protection made local management lazy. But Australia was swimming against the international tide, which was increasingly moving to cut trade barriers. Under a Liberal government, the Tariff Board under the chairmanship of Alf Rattigan itself proposed a review of tariffs in 1967; and with a change of government Whitlam cut tariffs in 1973 (although Fraser reinstated some of them). By the time Hawke came to power in 1983, neoliberalism was becoming dominant, and it was a Labor government that, with the aim of revitalizing manufacturing, floated the dollar, opened the banking and finance sectors, and reduced tariffs to a single rate of 5% by 1996, with exemptions carved out for textile, clothing and footwear, and the car industry. However, looking back, this policy failed in revitalizing manufacturing, if that was its aim. Tourism and education thrived, but manufacturing did not. From 12% of GDP in 2000, by 2006 manufacturing was just over 10% of GDP, 5.8% by 2013. Its share of employment at 7.5% was just a third of 2007’s 21% of the workforce. The rise of China and its cheap goods knocked manufacturing out completely, but the demand for iron ore disguised the effect. It was China’s demand that helped Australia weather the 2007-09 Global Financial Crisis, and by now Australia has lost the capacity to manufacture things- something brought home painfully by the COVID pandemic and the supply chain problems that continue more than two years later.

This might not be a problem, were it not for the rising carbon dioxide levels, with a discernable effect on global temperatures. But it is a problem, and the entrenched fossil-fuel industry is fighting back. At first the fight was against indigenous land rights and the ability of indigenous owners to veto mining development. In this, the Australian Mining Industries Council joined with the National Party in opposing native title, thus promoting a grizzled human face in an akubra hat to an industry dominated by machines. Having hobbled native title, the mining industry entrenched its power further by lobbying, political advocacy, donations – and most disturbingly – the churn of personnel between government and lobby groups and back again in what Guy Pearse called ‘The Greenhouse Mafia’. It is certainly alive and well. Just look at the way that the government pounced on a ‘gas-led’ recovery as the solution to COVID, our indecent haste to ship coal over to Ukraine, and most recently, the number of mining-industry-related people that the LNP government has just appointed to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal.

Two decades of cultivation of a network of climate skeptics by the Lavoisier Group, the IPA and the Murdoch press have made climate change a toxic brew for any government. Many of our politicians, predominantly on the Coalition side but also amongst Labor, have been captured by this lobby. But resistance is rising from unexpected quarters. The Lock the Gate movement opposing coal and coal seam gas developments is challenging the social licence of the fossil-fuel companies, and renewables are becoming more attractive as an investment. However, Brett is clear-eyed about the continuing power of the fossil-fuel lobby, and the probability that

…our leaders will stick with what they know and eschew innovation, like the men of the early 1960s, when Donald Horne complained that decades of tariff protection had produced a “look-no-brains attitude”. The signs are it will be more business as usual than embrace of the new.

p.73

One of the advantages of reading a Quarterly Essay months (ahem- years) after it has been published, is that you get to read the correspondence generated by the essay in the following volume. Most of the correspondents in Issue 79 concurred with Brett, although rather predictably Andy Lloyd (Rio Tinto) came out with most of the fossil-fuel lobby talking points that Peter Christoff (University of Melbourne) predicted (e.g. we don’t contribute much to carbon; if we don’t sell, someone else will; technology -especially CCS- is the answer). Tim Buckley from the Institute for Energy Economic and Financial Analysis pointed out that many investment and superannuation funds are divesting from fossil-fuel industries. I really enjoyed Zoe Whitton from Citi’s Environmental, Social and Government Research Team, who wrote of the paradox that residents of the New Jersey shore who survived through Hurricane Sandy were even less likely to believe in climate change than before. She cited George Marshall’s book Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains are Wired to Ignore Climate Change, where he suggested that the desire to return to something like normal, to rebuild anew, to express solidarity and perseverance meant that people resisted the prospect that the same thing could happen again. Often the alternatives are so unappealing that we choose not to consider them.

It is outside the scope of Brett’s 2020 essay of course, but I think of the flood waters that have swirled around homes in Queensland and northern NSW multiple times in recent years, and successive floods occuring even within weeks. These ‘events’ are not one-offs anymore, and the lie in terms like ‘one in 1000 year flood’ has been exposed. The cost of rebuilding communities razed by fire, and the piling up of mountains of sodden furniture and carpets, again and again and again will eventually sap the will to persevere and rebuild.

Perhaps then we can shake off the Coal Curse.

Rating: 8/10

Sourced from: my own Quarterly Essay subscription

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‘Politics and the English Language’ by George Orwell

Posted on May 10, 2022 | Leave a comment
Source: Wikipedia

I’ve only just started attending the Ivanhoe Reading Circle after 122 years – of the Circle, not of me – and George Orwell’s essay ‘Politics and the English Language’ seemed a rather brave choice for a reading group. It was published in 1946 and it is only about 24 pages long. Many of its ideas have been rehashed (in, for example, Don Watson’s Death Sentence) and it’s hard now to come to it with fresh eyes. I must admit that I was rather disappointed in it.

It starts very abruptly, and I felt as if I had walked in on a conversation that had already started. He then goes on to lampoon five examples of writing, and identified four problems: (i)stale metaphors, (ii) ‘verbal false limbs’ (i.e. adding phrases like ‘serve the purposes of’ or adding syllables to a word like ‘deregionalize’). Then there is (iii) ‘pretentious diction’ or the use of foreign words and jargon; and (iv) meaningless words to hide the vacuity of ideas behind them. I don’t share his dislike of metaphors. Certainly they can become stale, but they act as a form of short-hand, and not every one has the clarity and imagination to mint their own. He uses the example of the ‘ancien regime‘ as an example of pretentious diction, but among historians ‘ancien regime‘ has a specific and accepted meaning. He then complains about the gumming together of long strips of words , much as Don Watson did sixty years later but with more elan. (Am I allowed to use that foreign word?).

He then goes on to talk about political language. It is, he claimed “broadly true that political writing is bad writing”. We’re about to be deluged with political writing now that we’re in election mode. I don’t know if it’s the writing about politics that is bad, or just the ‘talking point’ repetition and evasiveness of what comes out of politicians’ mouths that is the problem. “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind”. All true, but is this a problem of language or intent? To me, it seems that it’s the behaviour around the language, rather than the language, that makes it all so sordid. The failure to call politicians out when they refuse to answer a question; the failure to challenge dubious facts; demonisation (e.g. ‘illegals’ for ‘refugees’); the numbing repetition of phrases (‘going forward’, anyone?) and the dogged labouring of the issue of the day. “All issues are political issues” he says “and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, follies, hatred and schizophrenia”. For me, this is the nature of politics, rather than the language used to express it.

He makes some big claims about the connection between language and politics (hence the title of the essay), but he doesn’t back them up. “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought” he asserts, but then returns to his criticisms about woolly language and circumlocution. He claims that his prescriptions are not just about simplicity, or ‘good prose style’, and yet these are the solutions he offers without really tearing into the question of language and political imagination. He seems to see politics as only ‘retail’ (another buzz-word that I assume means ‘selling’ a policy) in terms of the hearers receiving politics, but not of creating politics or imagining alternatives.

The discussion at the group provided an opportunity to vent our annoyance at politicians and politics, but I don’t know if we generated anything new. I felt as if it had all been said before – albeit, possibly by Orwell before other people- and it just felt a bit stale.

My rating: No idea. How do you rate this?

Sourced from: purchased e-book, but you can find it online quite easily.

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Posted in Essays, Ivanhoe Reading Circle

‘The High Road: What Australia can learn from New Zealand’ by Laura Tingle (Quarterly Essay 80)

Posted on December 28, 2020 | 2 comments
2020, 100 p.

I always enjoy it when I catch Philip Adams’ “mingle with Tingle” segment on Late Night Live. She always has a way of looking at things that brings a different perspective to the day’s news, and she ‘interprets’ more than she ‘reports’. I was a little disappointed in the last Quarterly Essay (Katherine Murphy’s The End of Certainty, which I reviewed here), which seemed to be just a lengthier extension of her every-day reporting in The Guardian. Tingle’s essay, on the other hand breaks new ground by drawing our attention to something almost unremarkable: the similarities and divergences between Australia’s political scene and that of our neighbour, New Zealand.

There are many times, especially since the ascension of Jacinda Ardern, that Australians look ‘across the ditch’ and wish that we could co-opt her too, (as well as the Finn Brothers and the odd New Zealand comedian or two). But I am old enough to remember an older New Zealand that was even more sheltered and Anglo-centric than Australia was. I went on an home-stay exchange visit to New Zealand in the early ’70s when I was about 16 and certainly the house was austere and rather cheerless. I recalled that old, protected New Zealand, when we visited Janet Frame’s hometown Oamaru in New Zealand, which seemed likewise cold and straitened. Even today, Australians are reminded of Australia’s relative advantage by the pricetags on purchases that show the Australian and inevitably-higher New Zealand prices, despite the lower wages in New Zealand.

Tingle identifies 1973, when Britain joined the Common Market as the seminal date when both Australia and New Zealand were forced to ‘grow up’ and reduce their reliance on agricultural exports to the ‘mother country’. From that date, Australia and New Zealand had to forge their own ways, sometimes acting in synchrony; other times striking out in their own.

But there were other important historical events before then. New Zealand was at first conceptualized as part of the colony of New South Wales (indeed, my very own Justice John Walpole Willis was slated to be New Zealand’s first Resident Judge in 1839-40. I wonder how that would have worked out.) The signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 has allowed a completely different racial politics to emerge, especially in recent decades. Australia’s decision in 1901 to go with bicameral parliaments in most states and New Zealand’s go-it-alone single chamber, one state parliament, and more recently their almost accidental adoption of mixed-member proportional representation in 1996, has led to a different concentrations of political power.

As Tingle points out, the importance of each other’s economy has often been overlooked. At times, both governments had similar economic policies. I had forgotten ‘Rogernomics’, the extremely harsh free-market reforms introduced by David Lange’s Labour government during the 1980s. Although Australia’s Labour government under Hawke and Keating introduced deregulation and the Accord (something that probably only a Labour government could do in Australia) at much the same time, it was nothing like Rogernomics. And when New Zealanders put in the Nationals in 1990, instead of repudiating Rogernomics as they promised, they turned round and gave the country more of the same.

After losing the safe assurance of a British export market, both countries have been held hostage to their largest economic successes. In Australia’s case, mineral exports have dominated our economy and spawned a single-minded mineral lobby group that dominates Australia’s climate change policy and taxation arrangements. In New Zealand, flourishing under Hobbit-tourism, director Peter Jackson turned out not to be so benign when collective bargaining rights emerged under industrial relations unrest. Different players, but the same dilemma when one industry has a dominant role in a small economy.

But there are a number of other areas where Australia and New Zealand have taken different approaches, forming a type of laboratory experiment where two very similar nations, acting under similar geographical and population constraints, have adopted different policies. The most striking is the different experiences of Maori and Australian Aboriginal politics. I have often been struck by the use of the haka and Maori language by the broader New Zealand community, in a way that would be awkward and contentious in Australia. The Treaty of Waitangi, signed under the same colonial policies emanating from the Colonial Office, even though overlooked and dismissed for many years, was the springbroad for a judicial and political reckoning – something that Mabo and more recently the Uluru Statement could be if it hadn’t been dismissed out of hand.

Then there’s foreign policy, most particularly New Zealand’s firm stance on a nuclear-free Pacific, its deliberate distancing from US adventurism, and more recently in its approach to China which – let’s face it – Australia is stuffing up big time. None of these stances seem to have done New Zealand harm, as Australia always feared by throwing its lot in with the US.

Then there’s the policy continuity that a single-house, single government constitution provides. Although, as in the pre-Common Market days, this can lead to a stultifying dominance of one party, the recent mixed-member proportional representation has made coalitions of political parties the usual way of doing politics. There does not appear to be the huge culture war divide between the parties, who adopt each other’s policies (e.g. Rogernomics) to maintain a centrist government, less beholden to the extremists on both sides. I just can’t see “kindness” ever being adopted in Australian government speech despite a brief and fleeting flirtation during the recent pandemic.

Events have aligned to give Tingle a neat narrative circle. Just as UK bumbles its way out of Brexit, the final act of the economic play which began with the 1973 Common Market decision, we have Boris Johnson floundering in an ever-heightening pandemic, while Ardern calmly and decisively has given New Zealand a COVID-free community.

For me, the best Quarterly Essays are those that bring to the forefront something that is hiding in plain sight. I don’t think that I’ve read a historical or political comparison of Australia and New Zealand written in this way, and having read it, I don’t know why it hasn’t been done before.

My rating: 8.5/10

Sourced from: Subscription

I have read this as part of the Australian Women Writers Challenge 2020.

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Posted in Australian history, Australian Women Writers Challenge 2020, Essays

Essay: The Settler Fantasies Woven into the Prairie Dresses

Posted on June 4, 2020 | Leave a comment

wilder_prairie

Those of you who know me personally will know that I have absolutely no interest in fashion. Apparently during the 2010s the Prairie Dress – shapeless, high-necked, ‘modest’ dresses- became a thing.

prairedress

Recently I’ve been listening to podcasts by Heather Cox Richardson, and she has referred several times to Little House on the Prairie and the Prairie Dress as a way of valorizing conservative, white, racialized, gendered American values that completely elide any consideration of Native American and African American presence in the homesteading   American past.

The Settler Fantasies Woven into the Prairie Dresses by Peggy O’Donnell, published on the Jezebel website explores the reincarnation of the prairie dress, the attitudes in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s work and questions the statements that adoption of the prairie dress make about women, femininity and gender.

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Posted in Essays, Essays and articles

Article: ‘Ethel’ by Kath McKay

Posted on July 15, 2019 | 2 comments

I enjoy reading essays and articles, and so I’ve decided to write about them on my blog. Apart from the fact that they interest me, one of my criteria for selection is that they are available online or through a State Library library card. Provenance is the online journal of the Public Records Office of Victoria, and it has terrific essays that draw on the resources of the PRO.

‘Ethel’, Provenance: The Journal of Public Record Office Victoria, issue no. 16, 2018. ISSN 1832-2522.  Available here. 

In November 1895,  a little 9 year old girl stood before the Essendon Court of Petty Sessions, giving evidence against the man accused of raping her. The accused was Edwin Worrall, who had ‘taken in’ little Ethel and her two brothers while her sole-parent father worked in the city. She had been assaulted several times over a number of months, and it was only when she told her father that she had ‘a secret’ that the assaults were revealed. The case came before four justices of the peace at the Essendon court, who found the father not guilty. When the case was referred by the police prosecutor to the Victorian attorney-general, the JPs were asked to explain their reasoning for acquittal. It’s a sad litany of prejudices: the girl’s statement was too good to be believed and she had probably been coached; she was too intelligent; when she began to cry after cross-examination, that led to doubt; she never told the accused’s wife.  We’ve heard too many such statements in child sexual abuse cases in recent decades.

And so the case went to the Supreme Court- and I’ll leave you to follow up and find out what happened. This beautifully told and achingly sad essay is written by her grand-daughter, many years later, who found it hard to believe that her beautiful ‘little Gran’ had been this same little, abused child.

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‘On Identity’ by Stan Grant

Posted on July 10, 2019 | 7 comments

grant_on_identity

2019, 95 p.

This essay is published as one of Melbourne University Press’ Little Books on Big Ideas  series. The essays, all of which are titled with “On….” have stellar authors, sometimes writing in their areas of expertise (e.g. former Race Discrimination Commissioner Tim Soutphommasane ‘On Hate’ or Germaine Greer ‘On Rape), sometimes not (e.g. David Malouf ‘On Experience’, Anne Summers ‘On Luck’).

Stan Grant, journalist and commentator, has dealt with the themes on this ‘On Identity’ essay through his other recent publications as well with Talking to My Country in 2016 and Australia Day in 2019. The biographical outline at the start of the book (which I assume he approved) describes him as a “self-identified Indigenous Australian who counts himself among the Wiradjuri, Kamilaroi, Dharrawal and Irish.”

In this book, Grant pushes back against being asked to tick the box which appears on so many forms asking ‘Are you Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander?” By ticking the box, he writes, he is forced to deny the other parts of his identity- most particularly his white grandmother who was exposed to the virulence of the racism of the 1940s when she married his indigenous grandfather.

It is so simple I can say it in plain English and in one sentence: I will not be anything that does not include my grandmother. I don’t wish to be anything that sets me apart from my wife, or any of my ancestors, long lost to history, but whose blood still flows somewhere in me.  I will not put a mark in a box that someone has decided contains me. That box shrinks the endless mystery and possibility of the universe. I will always choose the side of love. (p.83)

As he points out, the question ‘Are you Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander’ is one that the nation pushes back onto the individual (p. 16).  John McCorquodale, the legal historian counted sixty-seven definitions, and Grant cites a series of statements from the High Court of Australia in the 1980s and 1990s that tried to definite Indigenous identity. He writes of the author Kim Scott, whose book Kayang and Me traced his own search for Noongar identity.  While claiming to be captivated by Scott’s work, Grant admits that he reads him now “with both eyes open and I realize that we are worlds apart” (p. 40)  Grant writes he has been long troubled about identity:

…how easily it morphs into tyranny. Scott is being asked if he is black or white, he can’t be both…It comes with the same assumptions of power: we will tell you who you are and whether you belong; we will determine your identity; you will answer to us. (p 26)

Instead, he claims love and freedom- something that he doesn’t find in Scott’s work.

This is a very poetic book, woven through with allusions to various writers and philosophers – none of whom are cited directly or referenced, so you just have to take his word for it. There is certainly the resonance of The Preacher in his writing, which I find rather off-putting.  Paradoxically, I read this book because I was preparing a talk to my Unitarian-Universalist fellowship on the theme of ‘identity’, a topic that I’m even more confused about now than when I started.  The book reads out loud beautifully (particularly for a spiritually-inclined gathering), but then I found myself wondering “but what does that actually mean?”

None of us likes to be defined by one thing only, and we are all aware of our own complexity and contradictions. Perhaps identity, and its attractions at various stages of the life cycle, is a malleable thing that is useful in different senses at different times. It has a personal meaning, but at certain junctures its political and historical uses are more pertinent.  Sometimes identity has a ‘conversion’ aspect, as when someone ‘comes out’, ‘comes to Jesus’  or discovers an indigenous heritage of which they had been previously unaware.  At such times, it is understandable that one aspect of identity overshadows the rest. Moreover, often the simplistic tick-the-box questions of indigenous identity or having a disability have funding and political implications that have been hard won.

As you can possibly tell, I found myself confused by knowing what to do with this book. Janna Thompson in ‘The Identity Trap’, at Inside Story, has done a much better job than I could ever do of grappling with this small, slippery volume.

My rating: 7/10 ?

Sourced from: Purchased at Readings.

 

 

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Posted in Book reviews, Essays, Essays and articles, Uncategorized

‘Australia Fair: Listening to the Nation’ by Rebecca Huntley QE73

Posted on March 21, 2019 | 7 comments

huntley_australiafair

2019, 64 p.

I’ve recently spent a week as the only Australian in a group of fourteen Americans.  While similar in age and political persuasion (mostly) to myself, it struck me how different my attitude towards the government was to theirs. While I might grumble about my government, (and heaven knows I can’t wait until the current crop of muppets departs the political stage),  I do not fear my government and indeed optimistically look to it to act as a force for good. I know, too, that although I may be left-of-centre in my politics, even conservative media and acquaintances urge that the “government should do something” about the issues they are complaining about. Despite conservative and business grumblings about red-tape, many people want red-tape once they themselves are being ripped off, and are disgruntled when, because of ineptitude or cronyism, corporations and shysters slip free of it.

In many ways social researcher Rebecca Huntley’s Quarterly Essay is a shout-out to the ‘sensible centre’ who, in spite of different political affiliations, have felt for some time that the climate really is changing and that ‘the government should do something’; that ‘big business’ and especially the banks are treating us like mugs, and that locking people up indefinitely on Manus Island and Nauru is not really sustainable for ever even though there is still support for turn-backs and off-shore detention. The figures show that the majority (albeit sometimes not a large majority) feel this way, but the government seems to respond only to the noisier, minority view.   Huntley makes no secret of her own political leanings, and she writes from the expectation that we will soon have a change of government.

She draws on historian John Hirst’s work, and particularly that of John Keane in his 2016 essay ‘Money, capitalism and the slow death of social democracy‘.  She harks back to Keith Hancock’s Australia, written in the 1930s when we were still clinging to the sheep’s back, where he described Australians’ almost instinctive turn to government to provide social good as ‘State Paternalism’ rather than State Socialism, and decried its deadening effect on society and its economy.  Most particularly she draws on social research: not the quick four-option polls that are churned out fortnightly in the newspapers, but in-depth qualitative research that tries to  uncover the values and priorities behind the opinions.

She points out that despite our disgust for our present crop of politicians, Australian (and especially older Australians) continue to respect the idea of democracy, and see nothing wrong with compulsory voting. They do, however, see a great deal that is wrong in terms of electoral funding and the pressure of lobby groups, especially big business.

This really is an essay, with a linking paragraph at the end of each section leading on to the next, just as we were taught to do in school. In a way, I wish that she had broken free of this template because it tended to infantalize her argument somewhat.  Nonetheless, it’s a cheering and rather empowering essay to read at a time when we feel that we’re actually in a position to vote for a changed political landscape. It would make a perfect reading partner to Judith Brett’s From Secret Ballot to Democracy Sausage, which I have not read (but Lisa at ANZLitLovers has) as a way of reassuring ourselves that we can be better than the government and politics that we have at the moment.

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Posted in Australian Women Writers Challenge 2019, Essays

QE71 ‘Follow the Leader: Democracy and the Rise of the Strongman’ by Laura Tingle

Posted on October 25, 2018 | 4 comments

tingle_follow_the_leader

2018, 90 p.

How frustrating it must have been to write this book!  The conclusion of the text is dated 27 August 2018, just three days after Australia’s 29th Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, was overthrown for No 30, Scott Morrison. The volume was no doubt planned probably a year in advance (certainly they’re pre-advertised six months in advance) and, being one of Australia’s foremost journalists, Laura Tingle would have wanted the book to be current. As it turned out, the Liberal (i.e. conservative) party decided not to choose Peter Dutton, the closest thing Australia has to a ‘strong man’ as leader – thank heavens. I wonder how much she had to change the book at the last minute to accommodate this change?As it is, the book concentrates more on leadership and democracy, than the ‘strongman’ mentioned in the  title. Perhaps there were whole chapters that ended up in the bin.

This is the third book in a series of Quarterly Essays that Laura Tingle has written over recent years. In 2012 she released Great Expectations: Government, Entitlement and an Angry Nation and in 2015 she followed it with Political Amnesia: How We Forgot to Govern, both of which have been released in a single volume called In Search of Good Government, where she added a new essay on Turnbull in Power (huh!)  Perhaps I’ve seen and heard too much of her elsewhere, now that she’s on the 7.30 Report and Philip Adams still ‘mingles with Tingle’ on ABCRN. I felt as if there wasn’t anything particularly new in this book. After all, others have commented on the obsession with popularity, the search for a strong man,  the ubiquity of ‘stakeholders’ instead of experts, and the deluge of information from a splintering of sources.

There were a few things that were new, though, and I’ve found myself thinking on them over the last couple of days. First, she uses as her analytic frame the work of Ronald Heifetz from the Kennedy School of Government, who published a book called Leadership Without Easy Answers in 1994. In it, he distinguished between leadership, power and formal authority. Leadership he defined as “helping a community embrace change”. This is not necessarily a party thing:  leadership can come from outside the formal power and authority structures, and indeed, this is what she ends up arguing for.

Heifetz defined leadership as helping a community embrace change, offering a map, a clear option to deal with a problem, and corralling factions to a compromise. For him, leadership is about possessing the skills with which to read and push a community (p.83)

Second, she compares a number of different leaders. She cites Miranda Carter’s article in the New Yorker in 2018 comparing Trump with Kaiser Wilhelm II.  Carter noted the Kaiser’s conviction that his one-on-one “personal diplomacy  would fix foreign policy”, just as Trump seems to view whole countries in terms of whether he ‘likes’ a leader, and more importantly that they ‘like’ him too. Like Trump, Kaiser Wilhelm viewed people instrumentally; he lied; he patronized the aggressive nationalistic right, and he was touchy and unpredictable.

Tingle then turns to two European alternatives. The first of these is Angela Merkel, where the cobbling together of coalitions means that she needs to listen and lead from behind. Tingle comments that in Australian politics, political barbs are always personalized against the leader, rather than the government or opposition they lead- note, for example, the almost instinctive response to immediately attack a policy in terms of the leader “But Shorten…” “But Morrison….”. She doesn’t say this, but a coalition of smaller parties would broaden the focus from just the leader.  The second alternative is Emmanuel Macron who leads from the “front, sides and middle” (p.47). He seems to break all the Heifetz rules, and like Trump, in his own way wants to break the system and make France “great again”. However, she says, unlike Trump so far he has been doing this without finding scapegoats, with a clear purpose and a sense of direction. Tingle is not quite sure about him though: there is a danger that he will resort to strongman tactics.

Third, she gives a real life example of Australia acting as a middle power- Turnbull’s “awful” phone call with Donald Trump after his inauguration, congratulating him on the presidency and ensuring that Trump honoured the refugee-swap arranged with Obama. It is a verbatim transcript, and she quotes it in full. I’m not really sure that it advances her argument much, but it’s just too delicious. It’s important, too, because it shows how slippery and self-centred Trump is in those relationships he so prizes with other leaders. I hadn’t seen the transcript previously in full, and she does us a service in reproducing it.  Quite apart from Trump’s childishness, skittishness and self-obsession, it also appalled me to see how little Turnbull was actually asking of him (even though Trump certainly didn’t see it that way). Turnbull was in effect telling Trump that he didn’t have to take a single refugee under the deal worked out with Obama; that all he had to do was go through the motions. In fact, it amazes me that Trump took any refugees at all (he has taken about 400). Even though I knew it at the time, it reinforced how instrumental and risk-averse the arrangement was for Australia to take 12000 Christian-only refugees when the Syrian situation was at its worst.

Finally, she returns to Australian politics and the failures of the leaders we have had over the last ten years.  Her prescription for leadership is bland and obvious, but harder to achieve than it sounds:

To be a leader, you don’t necessarily have to have a vision, but you either have to know what it is that you want to persuade other people to do, or else have the knack of identifying and synthesizing an issue on which people are seeking leadership. You also need to know how you are going to do something about such issues. And you have to know which are the most important things to get done at any given point in time. Then you have to make the rest of us understand why these things are important and what you are going to do about them. This task might simply be an echo of a crystallised or uncrystallised public mood. Or something that involves reimagining all the barriers and structures around a difficult issue. But it does ultimately require you to bring people with you.(p. 81)

She concludes that a large part of the job of political leadership now is “to rebuild the national political discussion after years of it being under assault”, and to recognize that “their own room to move is going to be vastly expanded if there are other leaders in the community with whom they can speak”(p.86). In Heifetz’s terms, this involves protecting the voices of leadership outside the political realm (Human Rights Commissioners and climate scientists spring immediately to mind).

In this, I agree with her.  I inwardly groan when I hear the panellists on Q&A on a Monday night as you see the same old faces and can predict the tenor of the ‘debate’ as soon as the camera sweeps along the table. Sometimes, just sometimes, there’s a new voice from outside, and you wonder “Why don’t we hear more of this person”?

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I’m adding this to the Australian Women Writer’s Challenge. During the month of October Brona, the convenor of the Non-Fiction round-ups challenged people to read a short non-fiction. This was just the push I needed to actually unwrap some of the Quarterly Essays which sit on my shelf (much to my son’s frustration: I figure that she who buys the Quarterly Essay gets to open the Quarterly Essay, no matter how much he wants to read it).

 

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Posted in Book reviews, Essays

‘Reason and Lovelessness: Essays, encounters, reviews 1980-2017’ by Barry Hill

Posted on May 22, 2018 | 3 comments

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2018, 488p.

This is a big book and it took a long time to read.  ‘Big’ because it’s pushing 500 pages in length, and ‘big’ because it spans  37 years – a whole career.  But it wasn’t just the size that made it such a drawn-out reading experience.  It’s also because the essays are dense with ideas, and I found myself only able to read one at a time.  They were mentally chewy and I wanted to let each one sit for a while.

Barry Hill has hovered on the edge of my consciousness without ever really breaking through.  I was aware that he won plaudits for Broken Song, his biography of Ted Strehlow, and I’ve been vaguely aware of him through the Australian Book Review.  Looking through the long list of publications at the beginning of the book, he’s been writing novels and poems since the 1970s. However, I haven’t read any of them.

I like reading essays, largely because they allow me to meet the author half-way: to sit in on a conversation, if you like.   The essays that I enjoyed most in this collection were where he wrote as a son, writing about his father – an old union man and peace activist-   in ‘Letter to My Father’; or about his mother in ‘Brecht’s Song’.

But many of other essays were more cerebral than emotional.  After an excellent introduction by Tom Griffiths, the book is divided into four parts: Close to Bones; Inland; Naked Art Making, and Reason and Lovelessness, from which the collection takes its name.  Part II (Inland) can be fairly easily characterized as being explorations of  colonialism, with reviews and commentaries on W. E. H. Stanner, Greg Dening and elaborations on his own work on Ted Strehlow.  He has really enticed me into moving Broken Song up from ‘one day’ to ‘soon’ as far as my own reading is concerned. He really does not like Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines at all (I haven’t read that one, either).  In Part III (Naked Art Making) there are several essays on Lucien Freud, John Wolseley and the Australian artist Rod Moss whose work is on the front cover.   Parts I and IV are more diverse, several of them based on interviews with poets, writers and artists. In Part IV in particular there are steps of logic that seem to link the essays together.

But I must confess that for many of these essays, I felt left behind.  I hadn’t read the work or the author he was discussing, and on the few occasions when I had, I realized the richness of what I was missing.  (e.g. his essays on Greg Dening and Robert Manne;  his excellent essay about William Buckley who lived with the Port Phillip Wathaurong people after escaping from the convict settlement at Sorrento in 1803, his essay on George Orwell).  Reading through his essay on Ezra Pound, I asked my very-widely-and idiosyncratically-read  husband “Have you ever read any Ezra Pound?”.  He had  (of course), and then went on to talk about several of the things that Hill discussed. ” Well, have you heard of Rabindranth Tagore?” I asked him.  Again, yes he had, and again mentioned things that Hill had also covered. “YOU should be reading this book!” I told my husband, and I meant it. There’s a conversation going on here, but I’m not part of it.

Should that matter? I found myself thinking of Montesquieu of all people, and the beguiling ease with which he draws you into his conversation. I rarely felt that same ease with Hill’s essays, beyond the more personal ones about his own family.  Perhaps that’s because in many of these essays, he’s writing as a critic.  Summarizing the content of a work is not part of the role of the critic, and there’s an implicit assumption that the reader is familiar with the work under discussion.  That is the  reader that Hill is writing for; not someone on the outside looking in.  Several of the essays are reflections on interviews and conversations he has conducted with writers –  Christina Stead and Rai Gaita – underlining that he is part of their milieu.  As a poet, he writes about other poets – Fay Zwicky, Shonagon (the author of The Pillow Book)- and he shares in own poetry in several of the essay.

Given that these essays were written over thirty-five years, they have probably been selected to resonate with the 2018 political climate. ‘The Mood We’re In: circa Australia Day 2004’ was given as an Overland lecture, and it captures that strange era of Latham-esque politics.  He still rages over the Bush/Blair/Howard invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and his feeling of impotence when protests across the world were futile permeates his essays ‘The Uses and Abuses of Humiliation’, ‘Poems that Kill’ and ‘Human Smoke, Bared Throats”.  There is not – mercifully- even a breath of Trump.  I suspect that he would find Trump almost beyond words.

This is not an easy book, written by “a truly learned man” as Tom Griffiths notes in his introduction. It demands intellectual chops and familiarity with an eclectic and erudite reading and artistic menu that strays far beyond my knowledge. I felt a bit intimidated by it, frankly.

Sourced from: a review copy from Monash University Publishing.

 

 

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Posted in Book reviews, Essays, Uncategorized

Quarterly Essay 67: ‘Moral Panic 101’ by Benjamin Law

Posted on September 10, 2017 | 7 comments

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It’s profoundly depressing that this Quarterly Essay, released last week, should immediately trigger reference to the Same Sex Marriage survey being run through the ABS between September and November this year.  This is because the initial ‘No’ case advertisement focussed not on the question of whether the definition of marriage should be changed to include same-sex couples, but instead on the Safe Schools program in schools. Former Prime Minister Tony Abbott has further muddied the waters by encouraging anyone who is uncomfortable with Political Correctness to vote ‘No’.  It’s wandering quite some distance from the question of whether two same-sex people who love each other are allowed to marry.

Benjamin Law’s Quarterly Essay Moral Panic 101 was written before the High Court gave the go-ahead for the survey. His essay is not about same-sex marriage. It is about the Safe Schools Program, and the lengthy and detailed campaign conducted by Murdoch’s Australian newspaper against it. He traces the history and genesis of the Safe Schools program, created in response to the distress and suicide rates of GLBTQI students, and its uptake throughout Australia.  He then looks at the ‘poison’ of the campaign against it, spearheaded by the Australian Christian Lobby and facilitated and driven by the Australian which somehow, in the reams and reams of print devoted to the topic, never once spoke to a student.  Law begins his essay with the suicide of thirteen-year-old schoolboy  Tyrone Unsworth, who took his own life after sustained bullying over his sexuality.  He ends it at Minus18’s annual formal for GLBTQI students. Law’s focus is on children: just as the Safe Schools debate should be.

So why then the link between this book and  Same Sex marriage? It’s because the ‘No’ advocates opened their campaign with an advertisement, which features three women, including Cella White, who claimed that her son was told that he could wear a dress to school.  Law knows Cella White. As he points out in his essay, her claim was rebutted at the time of her airing it (January 2016), and as far as I am aware, no other parents or students have stepped up to verify her accusations. That hasn’t stopped Cella White being featured in this advertisement in September 2017.

The calls to de-register the doctor who also appeared in the ‘No’ ad alongside Cella White are wrong. But Cella White is wrong to make this incorrect claim, and this should be called out- loudly and repeatedly. Law does it in this book, and Sean Kelly did so in his article ‘Welcome to the No Case‘ in a recent Saturday Paper.  Chrys Stephenson has been doing some interesting investigating into the links between American evangelical religion and the Same Sex Marriage debate, too.

This Quarterly Essay is not about the SSM survey, but because of the advertising campaign prompted by the ‘No’ side, it has been drawn into the whole debate.  It is a good and, unfortunately, very timely read.

A video of Benjamin Law talking about his Quarterly Essay:

 

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Posted in Current events, Essays