Politics

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 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.

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.

Long term readers of Thea Astley have come to expect novels and short stories of finely tuned social satire which have increasingly employed Astley’s individual idiom: a richly textured and often baroque language of compressed meaning, of striking and original metaphor, of the incisively apt phrase which encapsulates character.

Her satiric themes have almost always focused on Australian society or that of the Pacific region – that ‘tropic cliché’ which she identified in her Herbert Blaiklock Memorial Lecture – ‘Being a Queenslander: A Form of’ Literary and Geographical Conceit’.

The favoured Astley microcosm is an enclosed or isolated community, the small northern town of many of her novels, or the tropic aeland of A Boat Load of Home Folk and her latest novel Beachmasters. Within this environment she is apt to place an isolated and vulnerable individual – perhaps an adolescent like Vinny Lalor of A Descant for Gossips or Gavi Salway of Beachmasters – who must, under the pressure of the social dialectic, learn the complexity of human response.

Those who have hopes or fears of a Reagan–Thatcher hardline conservatism arising in Australia can forget it, if this newest attempt by the local ‘right’ to define itself is any guide. For a major topic, it is a listless, sickly growth from Australia’s whiggish soil that struggles – mostly unsuccessfully – for anything new to say.

Sir Alexander Downer (1910–81) was a man of great courtesy, absolute integrity, honesty in reporting the things be observed. I think that these attributes are all self-evident in the book he has written about six Australian prime ministers. Also apparent was, I believe, a too subservient attitude to a Britain which was disappearing and changing throughout his life. After all, the concept of the Queen as the Queen of Australia – instead of the Queen of Britain or the Commonwealth – received acceptance only after World War II, which incidentally was a war that Alec Downer saw out living in the hell of Changi Prison Camp.

Times are changing within the Labor party. As L.F. Crisp points out in his essay on the branches, the new membership is often educated middle class and keen to discuss the International Situation where once the thing was to have a few beers and raffle a chook. Even Bill Hayden, despite his cop background, reflects some of the new flavour of the party with his too often carping manner, redolent of the classroom pedant. That Labor Essays – ‘designed to stimulate creative thought within and without the party’ – should have begun to appear in 1980 seems not unrelated to the growing desire within the party for intellectual as well as emotional satisfaction.