Politics

The careful media management accompanying the Australian National Archive’s release in January 2004 of cabinet papers covering the first year in office of the Whitlam government underlined the interest of the ageing ex-prime minister and his supporters in safeguarding his status as an Australian icon. It was a success: most analysts agreed that the papers showed that in 1973 the newly elected Labor government performed with exceptional dynamism and transparency.

Do John and Janette choke on their cereal at the name of Robert Manne as they breakfast in their harbourside home-away-from-home? They have every reason to do so. No single individual has provided so comprehensive a challenge to Howard and his ideological claque in the culture wars now raging in this nation. Manne was early to denounce Howard: for his soft-shoe shuffle with Pauline Hanson; for the inhumanity of the government’s approach to the boat people; for the shallow basis for our participation in the Second Iraq War. In the wider war, he wrote a savage critique of the right-wing cognoscenti who assailed Bringing Them Home, and he has rallied the troops to repel Keith Windschuttle’s revisionist history of black–white confrontation in nineteenth-century Australia. Now he has edited this selection of essays, which provides a critical survey of the Howard government across a wide range of its policies.

In the bitter federal election of 1917, Labor’s member for the marginal seat of Corio fell victim to dirty tricks. As a quartermaster sergeant in the AIF’s 3rd Division, A.T. Ozanne shouldn’t have been opposed. But Prime Minister Billy Hughes became electorally desperate, and he published a cable from General Monash, the division’s commander, which portrayed Ozanne as a deserter. Ozanne was indeed not in France with the AIF volunteers, but it was because he had been given medical leave, quite authentically. Monash was careless with the facts, and perhaps misled by officers who disliked Ozanne. Hughes’s ruthless use of the cable destroyed Ozanne’s political career.

In the aftermath of 9/11, Americans have been asking why the world hates them. Now it’s Australia’s tum. Why do Asians applaud when Dr Mahathir mocks us? Why docs the Indonesian prime minister snub Australian leaders? Why, despite progress with bilateral trade agreements, do we seem to be permanently locked out of organisations such as ASEAN and ASEM?

Does Australia need new laws against terrorism? In 1979 Mr Justice Windeyer of the NSW Supreme Court argued that all the forms of violent wrongdoing that are called terrorism are already punishable as crimes under Commonwealth or state law. The best safeguard against new terrors and apprehensions, he told the Hope Royal Commission on Australia’s Intelligence Agencies, lay in the rigorous enforcement of existing criminal law rather than in making new laws expressly about ‘terrorism’.

George Orwell must be spinning in his grave. Aghast at the use of his name to inspire any political crusade or bandwagon, the ardent advocate against the use of language to spin an alternative reality is forever being used to bolster the armory of political activists around the world.

Should Orwell be allowed to rest? Simon Crean’s speechwriter, the cerebral Dennis Glover, evidently thinks not. One hundred years after Orwell’s birth, Glover has recruited the socialist contrarian, novelist and essayist to his cause. In Orwell’s Australia: From Cold War to Culture Wars, Glover invokes Orwell’s legacy to rail not against the decline of the English language and the use of words to say one thing while meaning another, as is often the case, but rather to lament the state of modern Australia and the lost dream of a ‘social democracy without ideology’. Just like Orwell in the first half of the twentieth century, Glover sees a bleak future characterised by ‘the disappearance, under the pressure of coming wars, of a whole way of life, and its replacement with something shallower, nastier, prefabricated, more ideological and more politically and socially divided’ – in other words, John Howard and conservative hegemony enveloping the Australian way of life.

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.