Politics

Less than a week after the publication of this book, the federal government gave notice that it intended to give legislative recognition to its major thrust – that is, the government said it would acknowledge that Australia’s aborigines once owned Australia.

On Bertrand Russell’s ninetieth birthday, the Daily Express published a congratulatory leader, which described him as ‘an intellectual gadfly on the rump of British society’. Moreover, to demonstrate that this most conservative of British newspapers intended no insult, the leader went on to describe Russell as ‘the second greatest living Englishman’ after Winston Churchill. Australia’s record of producing, much less recognising the achievements of, intellectual gadflies is if anything worse than Britain’s. The only figure of real stature who might qualify for that title is Hugh Stretton, an academic with an unerring talent for tearing the veils of pretension from the ideas and practices we most take for granted. Since this epoch, as much as any other, needs to take a mirror to its real rather than its pretended self, this too is intended to be anything but insulting.

The last decade or so has seen a spate of books and films about the days of British colonialism. While much of this outpouring has been critical of aspects of those days, it is hard to avoid the sneaking suspicion that underneath it all lurks a fair amount of nostalgia. And here lies the danger in much of this material: it is one thing for colonial survivors to feel nostalgic (as it is hard for people to discredit important actions in their own lives); it is another for them to lure readers into sharing that feeling.

The official myth of the relationship between the elected political leaders and the bureaucrats charged with the administration of their decisions has been that it is for the politicians to set the ends, choose the values, and for the bureaucrats to advise on the means for the implementation of those values. The bureaucratic advice is to be objective and impartial as bureaucrats are there to serve governments committed to very different political values. But the myth has not always fitted the reality; facts and values are not so easily distinguished. James Walter in The Ministers’ Minders: Personal advisers in national government documents the emergence of a new political role in Western parliamentary democracies from this inevitable gap between the administrative and executive arms of government; and he explores the implication of this both for traditional ways of understanding political decision-making, and the range of role options open to political activists.

Historians of the left have frequently adopted a highly sceptical, if not outright hostile, stance towards that pursuit of working-class interests through parliamentary politics which resulted in some form of ‘welfare state’ in most western industrial democracies. Historical interpretation has tended to polarise. On the one hand, liberal scholars have heralded the progress of governments towards active provision of an assured basic standard of living for those least advantaged in a capitalist society. On the other, a handful of socialist and Marxist scholars has discovered merely the minimal concessions of a bourgeois state to dampen the zeal of radicals, for fear of threatening disruptive social conflict; the reforms themselves were partial, inadequate, and a prop to the essentially conservative interests of the state, rather than a genuine modification of the body politic in the interests of the working-class.

The last few years have seen a major reorientation of Australian defence policy. The Guam doctrine of limited commitment declared by the United States, the withdrawal of United States forces from mainland Southeast Asia, the British withdrawal of forces east of Suez and the substantial development of the capacities of regional countries, especially the ASEAN states, to provide for their own security all had major implications for Australian defence policy. Australia’s defence planners (and successive Australian Governments) concluded that our first priorities should be the defence of Australia with increasing independence, the encouragement of a favourable security environment in our region and the maintenance of ANZUS cooperation. This reorientation effectively spelt the end of the so-called ‘forward defence’ era and initiated a challenging process of transition.

Party factionalism in Australia has traditionally been located almost uniquely in the ALP Splits and dissensions have been part and parcel of the Party’s long history: and some of their colleagues with them, had, even joined their former opponents. The Split, extending fully in 1955–56, destroyed Labor as a coherent political force, and as a serious alternative to its rivals. But other parties also have faced dissension; not excepting the Liberal Party, a curious mosaic of ideas and personalities. Yet writers in the past have only glanced at this characteristic in the Liberal Party.

The title Marx’s Lost Aesthetic makes two claims - that Marx had an aesthetic, and that it was lost. Here is the stuff of a good narrative here: What was Marx’s aesthetic? How did he come to have it? Why, when and how was it lost? This in the story Margaret Rose sets out to tell from the perspective indicated in the subtitle, Marx’s relation to the visual arts.

This is a massive book, as large in scale as the author himself, running to over 700 pages, and – at a rough estimate – to something like 300,000 words of text, lightened only by a few photographs, all of them of Gough Whitlam with friends and enemies.

The thing that has distinguished the ‘inspired genius’ from the run of the mill ‘practitioner’ in all creativity is quality of mind. Michael Leunig, few Australians have to be told, has this. But astonishingly, quality of mind has not been a gradual, developing part of Leunig’s work, for it was evident as an integral part of his art, first widely seen in the pages of the fondly remembered National Review fifteen years ago. This is not to say he has not developed – he has in subtle directions and of course his graphic expression too has developed, as it should, with the discipline of creating for the Melbourne Age newspaper.