Michael Wesley

Michael Wesley is an academic and deputy vice-chancellor at the University of Melbourne. During the Covid lockdowns, while the rest of us were baking sourdough, he pulled together several related strands of thought about universities and Australia’s complicated relationship with them. Mind of the Nation, the result, offers a survey of where we are and how we arrived here, looked at from a number of different but intersecting angles.

It would be interesting to know how many Australians have heard of the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI). My guess is that not many have, and then only vaguely. It is interesting, then, that Melbourne University Publishing has published a book about the mission. Written by political scientist Michael Wesley, Helpem Fren is a detailed and meticulously researched account of the intervention, from an Australian perspective.

Sometime around 1820, forty years after its Industrial Revolution began, Britain overtook China to become the world’s richest country. Sometime between now and 2020, forty years after China’s own Industrial Revolution was launched by Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms, China is set to overtake the United States and regain its place at the top of the world’s economy.

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.

The fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks revived familiar lines of debate about the significance of terrorism. On one side are those who believe that 9/11 brought into stark relief a deadly new challenge to our values and existence, an enemy that must be faced resolutely and fought on every front. On the other are those who believe that 9/11 gave birth (or rebirth) not to a new form of threat but to a noxious form of politics: self-righteous, muscular and xenophobic. It is to this stand-off that Robert Goodin makes a refreshing and much-needed contribution. Goodin is a rare commodity: a political philosopher who remains resolutely focused on the problems and controversies that bedevil the real world of politics and policy. His most recent offering, What’s Wrong with Terrorism?, sets out to make a ‘moral assessment of the phenomenon of terrorism and reactions to it’, asking: ‘what is the distinctive wrong of terrorism? … what makes terrorists different from, and morally even worse than, ordinary murderers, kidnappers, and so on?’

A decade ago, security was the poor cousin to economics in policy studies and public discussion.  When John Howard took office in 1996, we were in the midst of an era of euphoric globalisation in which the popular imagination was dominated by wonder at the spread of the free market, growing volumes of trade and finance, and seemingly ever-rising wealth and standards of living. As Paul Kelly has observed, Howard realised early that in this context a government’s perceived capacity to manage the economy – balancing budgets, reducing unemployment, keeping interest rates down – was, to the mind of the electorate, the prime indicator of its fitness to govern. Australians, living through the longest economic boom in decades, had become fearful of a return to the days of economic turmoil and uncertainty. In this era, national security was a most unfashionable topic – at best a distraction, at worst a distortion of the ‘beautiful numbers’ delivered by globalisation.