DENNIS GLOVER – ORWELL’S AUSTRALIA: FROM COLD WAR TO CULTURE WARS SCRIBE 2003
GREG BARNS – WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE LIBERAL PARTY? CUP 2003
GEORGE MEGALOGENIS – FAULTLINES: RACE, WORK AND THE POLITICS OF CHANGING AUSTRALIA SCRIBE 2003
By serendipitous coincidence, late in 2003 these three important Australian books appeared in sequence. Each raises critical questions about the condition of Australian democracy, the kind of questions that are generally avoided in mainstream debate, because they’re not so much ‘barbecue stoppers’ as acupuncture needles piercing knotty nerveballs. Questions that probe more deeply than pondering Mark Latham’s ‘manboobs’, Steve Irwin’s peculiar sense of the humorous media stunt, or other ephemeral fluff in the national navel.
What are these questions? At heart they’re about the decline of respect in Australian public life for notions of mutual responsibility – a very different thing from the Howardism ‘mutual obligation’ – pluralism and open society. Glover uses the life, times and writings of English journalist and essayist George Orwell to deliver a stinging analysis of what many are calling Australia’s ‘culture wars’, in which ascendant neo-con politicians and commentators strategically drive wedges between the rest of us on matters of race, family, education, community and security. Barns looks inside the organisation that many consider to be the author of the most poisonous style of wedging in Australia – the Liberal Party, under the prime ministership of John Howard. He traces a disturbing shift since the 1980s, away from true liberalism towards a political philosophy and practice that is distinctly authoritarian. Megalogenis writes about a relatively hidden cohort within Australian society, what he calls Generation W. He means ‘women and wogs’ in their twenties and thirties, the university-educated daughters of old (that is, white) Australia and the sons and daughters of the non-English-speaking background immigrants of new (that is, golden brown) Australia. Megalogenis claims members of this ‘double-edged demographic’ are the ‘it’ boys and girls of globalisation, who are quietly redefining Australia’s middle class and who by force of skills and numbers will decide how our nation will develop in the future.
In different ways and with different emphases, Glover, Barns and Megalogenis take on the scary monsters of the triple-R bottom line of contemporary Australian politics: refugees, reconciliation and the republic. They variously characterise the Howard government’s approach to these issues as at worst shameful, at best unsustainable. All amass provocative evidence in support of their argument and communicate it clearly. All point to the need for a different style and content of domestic politics, so that Australian society can mend critical internal fractures and position itself to engage more effectively with the outside world.
Significantly, in these days of the rising tide of ‘anti-elitism’ that characterises the culture wars, all three books are written by men with respectable academic backgrounds. The petticoats of their different disciplinary backgrounds show in their writing. Glover is an historian, which leads him to pay detailed attention to the influence of Orwell on the leading thinkers of the Australian left and right, from World War Two to the present. Names like Ken Inglis, Peter Ryan, John Button, Peter Coleman, Frank Knopfelmacher, Pierre Ryckmans, Robert Manne, Lauchlan Chipman, Raimond Gaita and Martin Krygier are arranged in a readable narrative that helps explain the links and differences between their evolving public positions in arguments about democracy. Barns’s commitment to due process, justice and individual freedom is clearly influenced by both his early immersion in legal culture and his exposure to Hugh Emy and Dennis White in the politics department of Monash University in the early 1980s. Megalogenis uses his training as an economist to crunch raw numbers into sophisticated arguments about social change.
Just as significantly, these authors have worked at the pointier applied end of the theory that informs their analysis. All are players in the heavy-hitting zones of Australian political life, with considerable coalface experience handling the subject matter they describe. Glover was a key adviser in Kim Beazley’s office in the leadup to the 2001 election, working on the (ill-fated) ‘Knowledge Nation’ policy, and at the time of writing Orwell’s Australia was the principal speechwriter for (the even more ill-fated) Simon Crean as Leader of the Opposition. Barns – now a member of the Australian Democrats – was disendorsed by the Tasmanian Liberal Party in 2002 over his criticism of the Howard government’s asylum seeker policy, was chairman of the Australian Republican Movement, and worked as chief of staff for federal Finance Minister John Fahey. Megalogenis, himself a pinup member of Generation W, writes on national affairs for Murdoch broadsheet The Australian. He worked in the Canberra press gallery through the 1990s, covering many of the seismic political shifts he details in Faultlines.
These biographical sketches suggest considerable potential for these books to be vehicles of personal revenge, hubris, confessional therapy or party-political bias. Only the last charge has any hope of sticking to any of them. Glover is obviously a creature of the Labor Party, which to an extent hobbles him in terms of candidly exploring Labor’s response to the nationalist populism fostered by Howard. He almost completely glosses over Labor’s me-tooism in the face of opinion polling at crisis times such as Tampa, and in response to the ‘law and order’ agendas the public is force-fed by the neo-cons he so abhors. He also lashes out a little too defensively at Labor’s left-liberal critics. These he caricatures as the inner-urban, latte-loving intelligentsia, profoundly out of touch with the concerns of what Glover calls the ‘affluent working class’ (doublethink or what, Mr Orwell?) of outer suburban Australia. Tasmanian writer Richard Flanagan gets a special, personalised walloping for daring to criticise Labor’s border protection policies – as engaging in ‘negative’, ‘querulous’, ‘irresponsible carping’, with no understanding of the practicalities of the ballot box. Nor, apparently, of the realities of life as it is most nobly lived by Kaths and a variety of Kims. There’s a whiff of Stalinist romanticism (if that’s not more doublethink) about this enervated corner of Glover’s argument. His whole is much larger than this part, however, driven by his broader exhortation – paraphrasing his former boss on election night 2001 – to appeal to ‘the good angels of our nature’.
Barns is a man who saw his rightful place in the Liberal Party, as someone on track for some kind of leadership role, disappear overnight when he publicly championed what he (rightly) thought was core liberal business. The weak spot in What’s Wrong with the Liberal Party? is his fairly wholesale dismissal of the Greens as ‘an extremist hard left political force’, ‘a place for disillusioned Labor voters to park their protest vote’, lacking in policy rigour and condemned to ‘perpetual outsider and protest status’. By contrast, he offers the Australian Democrats as the great white hope of those who cannot remain in the major party tent, insofar as its leadership can embrace the ‘value pluralism’ articulated by Britain’s Liberal Democrats under Charles Kennedy. Barns would say that, of course, having shifted his own considerable talent and energy to the Democrats rather than the Greens, and given his unapologetic support for the forest industry in Tasmania. Again, however, the flaw stands at the margins of his argument. Barns’s book is replete with constructive ideas about developing a policy agenda that can take Australia forward socially, economically and morally.
And Megalogenis? Alone of the three, his writing reveals no party-political preference. That might be because he’s a savvy journalist who’s spent enough time in Canberra to know there are no good stories without high-level party sources. Or it might be because his own political bias cuts horizontally rather than vertically, across a faultline marked W. Unlike Glover and Barns, Megalogenis is part of Generation W, a group he says is underrepresented in the decision-making processes that determine everything from tax and childcare policy to the style of Australian electioneering and foreign affairs. Put bluntly, how many women or wogs set the policy or recruitment agendas of any Australian political party – or media organisation or major corporation, for that matter? Thankfully Megalogenis doesn’t trade too heavily on the personalia of his membership of Club W. He does include some pointed anecdotes, including one about squeezing a too-long, too-foreign name like Megalogenis into a tabloid byline, and another reproducing some typically charmless correspondence from a Hansonite. But he neither whines nor wraps himself in the flag of victimhood. George Megalogenis is no Helen Darville-Demidenko with worry beads.
We all have biases. My own incline strongly towards anyone who explores culture and politics in a way that expands our sense of who we are, and what we might become, without denying that we need to negotiate some tricky bumps along the way. These books by Glover, Barns and Megalogenis all pander to that prejudice. Read them all.
NATASHA CICA is an academic at the University of Canberra and the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics. She has worked as adviser to Petro Georgiou MP (2000) and Duncan Kerr MP (2001).
