Politics

It is sobering to read these two optimistic works about a man of promise, written in mid-2004, in the light of their subject’s defeat in October 2004. Neither author was convinced that Latham could win. Barry Donovan has too much experience of the vagaries of the electorate to be anything but cautious, though he concludes with the hope that ‘the Lodge may yet have a prime minister’s young kids bouncing around in it before Christmas’. Through Margaret Simons’s essay runs an undercurrent of doubt about such a possibility, and she identifies Latham’s Achilles heel: ‘For decades, voters have been told that the main job of politicians is to manage the economy ... [and] I doubt if Latham will be able to convince them that it is now acceptable to vote on the basis of social issues, and the concrete things that directly affect their lives.’

‘Some of the ideas for this book were first tried out,’ writes its editor, David Carter, during the 2001 conference of the European Association for Studies of Australia at Lecce, in southern Italy. Displaying interest in Australia as a way to get one’s fare paid to leave the country is not the only reason why this bain-marie of a book has not found a reason to exist.

Bring back Carmen. Bring back Cheryl. Bring back Natasha. I would even have accepted a bit of Bronwyn as a relief from the relentless maleness of this year’s federal election campaign. The female politicians who were household names less than a decade ago – Carmen Lawrence, Cheryl Kemot, Natasha Stott Despoja, Bronwyn Bishop and Pauline Hanson – have been disgraced, marginalised or relegated to the backbenches. Replacements do not appear to be imminent, in part because the still-pitiful number of female parliamentarians are rarely allowed to shine. In the campaign, for instance, talented female politicians such as Julia Gillard were kept tucked away, despite the fact that what might be called women’s issues – especially childbearing and rearing – were central to the platforms of both major parties.

Vote ‘No’, some republicans said at the 1999 republican referendum, and then we will work towards a republic that is a better one than the one being put forward. When the referendum failed, many of those republicans disappeared, and the movement lost momentum. Others who campaigned hard for a Yes vote have continued to push the republican agenda along. A similar group of tenacious Australians is undeterred by the federal government’s sidelining of the reconciliation process. Since joining Australians for Native Title and Reconciliation or their local reconciliation groups, they have maintained the commitment to social justice for indigenous people that they demonstrated when they walked across the bridge or signed the ‘Sorry books’.

Though reviewing books is a humble enough task, it frequently leads to elevated thinking. As I read these books, it occurred to me that, perhaps, unwittingly, they pointed to the ambiguous legacies of the Enlightenment. One of those legacies is found in the conventional political distinction drawn between ‘left’ and ‘right’; the other concerns the role of the expert.

On the face of it, this book represents a strange project: to elaborate for the reader’s consideration the moral beliefs of a man whom the author judges (and judged in advance, one suspects) to be shallow, inconsistent, lacking moral and intellectual sobriety, and to have failed so often to act on the moral principles he repeatedly professes that he can fairly be accused of hypocrisy ... 

Commissioned by the Liberal Party thinktank, the Menzies Research Centre, this book has as its subject the ‘crisis’ in education. It opens with an endorsement by Malcolm Turnbull and closes with a Glossary of Edubabble, the entries of which include: progressive education, fuzzy maths, political correctness, black armband, whole language and phonics. If Turnbull’s enthusiastic foreword and the title of the glossary are not enough to suggest the conservative politics of the book, the cover is a dead give-away. The words Why Our Schools Are Failing are written as if in chalk on a blackboard, wistfully signifying a time in the past when teachers stood at the front of the class and transmitted knowledge in a neat cursive script using a dependable technology.