Politics

Was there ever an uglier duckling than Australian republicanism? It’s a movement whose end is vital to anyone who believes that a people should attempt to extend the control over their own destiny, but which, of itself, fails to inspire the slightest excitement in anyone for whom politics is a living, breathing thing. Even more suspicious are those for whom republicanism is an exciting cause. They’re a strange mob, often decent and committed people, but able to subsist on a fairly thin diet. Because so many of them are lawyers, they are always on the ball when it comes to saying how the Constitution should be changed and what new mechanism should be put in place. Because so many of them are lawyers, the movement is efficient and well run. And because so many of them are lawyers, no one else trusts them or feels comfortable working with them.

Peter Craven calls up an echo of W.B. Yeats’s ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’ at the conclusion of his introduction to Germaine Greer’s highly charged and instantly controversial essay Whitefella Jump Up. ‘It is an essay about sitting down and thinking where all the politics start,’ he writes.

This book is as beguilingly English as a Fortnum & Mason picnic hamper. Peter Stothard (a former editor of The Times and current editor of the Times Literary Supplement) spent a month inside 10 Downing Street reporting in intimate detail the comings and goings there during the critical days before and after the Coalition of the Willing began its assault on Iraq on March 20 this year. He evokes a life-size doll’s house from which a war is being waged by perplexed adults in suits and jeans, who pick spasmodically at substandard food, fantasise about fitness régimes and support spectacularly unsuccessful soccer teams. The man in charge lives in a flat above this strange enterprise with the rest of his family.

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.