Australian Politics

John Burton, Walter Crocker, Paul Hasluck, Gregory Clark, Burce Grant, James Dunn, Alan Renouf, Stuart Harris, Richard Woolcott, and Alison and Richard Broinowski are all former diplomats who have written (or are writing) about foreign policy and Australia’s regional and global engagements. Two of the authors reviewed here – Rawdon Dalrymple and Allan Gyngell – can be included in the list. Dalrymple had a distinguished career as an Australian ambassador in countries as diverse as Indonesia, Japan and the US. He spent his immediate post-retirement years as a visiting professor in the University of Sydney. Gyngell has worked at the coalface of Australian foreign affairs for many years. He was recently appointed founding Executive Director of the Lowy Institute for International Policy, the most positive sign on the foreign policy analysis horizon for a long time.

These two well-written, unpretentious and engaging books address a central question for those interested in parliamentary democracy: who should represent us? Is the best representative someone just like ourselves, or someone who knows how ‘the system’ works and can manipulate it in our interest? Should it be someone from the party in power? Should it be someone wise and experienced, or young and vigorous? Should it be a woman, to represent the largest proportion of the electorate?

It is fair to say that ‘truth in government’ has become Australia’s most critical political issue, as it goes to the heart of ministerial responsibility and public accountability, which in turn make possible representative government. In recent years, a number of constituent issues have arisen under the ‘truth in government’ heading, including the Australian government’s cover-up of unfolding events in East Timor in 1999, the ‘children overboard’ affair and Iraq’s alleged ‘weapons of mass destruction’. Alongside these issues is the sinking of the asylum-seeker boat SIEV X, in which 353 people drowned. Yet of these issues, the SIEV X affair is perhaps the least well understood, in large part due to government dissembling and lying. So far as information on SIEV X has come to public attention at all, it has had to be extracted, slowly and painfully, from a government most reluctant to let any part of it go.

Important political issues sometimes cut across traditional party lines, making it harder for us to confront and debate them. The ‘children overboard’ affair, for example, raised important questions about the relationship between public servants and their ministers. Some of these questions were blurred in the subsequent debate, however, for a simple reason. Since the 1970s, governments from both sides of politics have had, in effect, a common policy of restricting the independence of the public service, especially of heads of departments, in the name of accountability and responsiveness. Ministers now have departmental secretaries who can be dismissed for no stronger reason than that they have lost the minister’s confidence. The powerful mandarins who, it used to be said, ruled Australia from the lunch tables of the Commonwealth Club in Canberra are a distant memory. Political influence now affects appointments down to middle managers in ways that those mandarins would have thought totally improper.­­­

First, a small tribute to Peter Craven and his colleagues for the establishment of Quarterly Essay (of which the above is the eighth issue). It is such a good idea that one wonders why it is such a recent innovation. A 20,000-word essay on an important contemporary issue, followed, in later issues, by responses to that essay, enable one to get one’s teeth into a matter of moment while it is still topical. The production is nicely done, too.

Does Australia have a soul? I have been asked this question recently, in slightly different ways, by Russian, German, and French friends. They comprehend that Australians have an identity, but their question is about something deeper than words. About what animates us at a profound level, and which is related to our identification with the land. They say Australians demonstrate many estimable qualities, but they think that, apart from the indigenous peoples, our roots are still shallow. They think we have shed our European histories but are culturally adolescent.

John Hirst faced a challenging task when he set out to write Australia’s Democracy: A short history. In a single monograph, he has traced the story of political rights and practices of citizenship, assessed within a context of social change. Not only does such writing place considerable demands on a historian’s range, but any prominent historian who attempts a short history attracts the sharp attention of all stakeholders. In Hirst’s case, his position as chair of the Commonwealth Government’s Civics Education Group has contributed further to his high profile in recent discussion on the need for citizenship training. Australia’s Democracy was funded by the Department of Education, Science and Training, and made available to schools for the ‘Discovering Democracy’ programme. Few historians write while carrying so much responsibility towards their prospective readership.

What is it about Paul Keating that so fascinated his retainers? Six years ago, John Edwards wrote a massive biography-cum-memoir taking Keating’s story to 1993. Now Don Watson has produced an even heftier tome. Narrower in chronological span – 1992 to 1996 – Watson is broader in his interests, more personal, more passionate ...