Tag Archives: Quarterly Essay

Marian Wilkinson vs Woodside vs the Planet

Posted on 18 Dec 2025 | Leave a comment

Marian Wilkinson, Woodside vs the Planet: How a Company Captured a Country (Quarterly Essay 99, 2025)
– plus correspondence in Quarterly Essay 100

Marian Wilkinson has a formidable CV as an investigative reporter. This substantial survey of the politics around the activities of Woodside Energy adds one more jewel to her crown.

The essay’s title and subtitle provide an excellent summary. Expanding it slightly: Woodside is expanding its gas extraction and export activities in a way that will contribute to global warming to an alarmingly dangerous extent, and they have gained the wholehearted support for this from successive Western Australian governments and Australian federal governments.

Three things aren’t included in that summary: first, the well organised, courageous and well informed opposition movement; second, the potentially disastrous impact of Woodside’s current and expanding activity on ancient petroglyphs on the Burrup Peninsula in Western Australia; third, the fact that fossil fuel industries have a limited life ahead of them.

A couple of years ago I visited the standing stones near Évora in Portugal. Our guide said that if the stones were in Spain they would be treated as a national treasure, but in Portugal they remained virtually unprotected in someone’s field. Well, if they were in Australia, and tens of thousands of years older, with infinitely more to tell us about human history, they would be left exposed to whatever pollution fallout might be created by a major industrial site nearby while scientists employed by the responsible corporation argued that there isn’t sufficient evidence of harm.

Marian Wilkinson is a journalist, not an advocate. But she is not in thrall to that concept of balance where you present any situation as a debate between two points of view, with no fact-checking or conclusion. Among the many people she interviewed for the essay is Meg O’Neill, CEO of Woodside, whom she quotes as saying that gas produces less greenhouse effect than coal, and that some gas is necessary as the world transitions to renewable sources of energy. But she doesn’t leave that as one equal side of an argument for and against. What emerges is an understanding that yes, gas will play a role in the transition to renewables, but Woodside and its supporters (or possibly dupes) in government and the media massively overstate how much gas will be needed. The profit motive overrides any concern for the common good.

I came to the essay with a heavy heart. In my mind Woodside was already a climate villain, Western Australia was a state that had been captured by the fossil fuel industry (or was even a virtual branch of it), and Woodside’s impact on the petroglyphs of the Burrup Peninsula was a slow-motion version of the blowing up of the Juukan Gorge by Rio Tinto. Nothing in the essay made me change my mind. Instead, it put paid to my lingering hope that the Albanese Labor government would make use of its large majority to face down the mining companies and their allies in the press. And it gave me a much greater understanding of what Wilkinson calls ‘the disruptors’: Disrupt Burrup Hub activists, some Indigenous traditional owners, and more.

Page 78* is in the eighth and final section of the essay. Earlier sections have dealt with Meg O’Neill’s career, the growth of Woodside, the way Woodside has come to have such tremendous influence on government policy, the disruptors, the struggle over the petroglyphs, and the vision of ‘gas-fired futures’ shared by Woodside and governments. This final section – ‘Woodside in the Age of Accountability’ – introduces an element of hope, and urgency. It lists the tangible results of global warming so far, and quotes eminent scientists as saying that ‘the next three years will be crucial in stopping this seemingly inexorable rising of emissions’. On page 78, the full absurdity of Woodside’s favoured activities come to light:

[Alex Hillman, former Woodside climate adviser turned shareholder activist] said Woodside needs to think about shrinking its gas business, not expanding it. ‘We think it’s a pretty compelling financial case that Woodside should just admit that this fossil-fuel business is going to get smaller and actually celebrate that, because it’s a more valuable strategy.’
 Right now, this may sound farfetched, but gas companies like Woodside are under threat. Hillman argues that, globally, oil and gas businesses have made below-market returns and not come close to earning their cost of capital for the past fifteen years. ‘To me that makes it pretty clear that what these companies have been doing isn’t working for investors.’

So even from a purely capitalist perspective, Woodside’s expansion makes no sense. The fact that now the Trump administration is backing a huge Woodside project in mainland USA, as the essay mentions, only underlines that point. Short term gain, long term disaster all round.

Woodside is being hit on two fronts. Not only is more LNG [liquefied natural gas] coming onto the market, but it’s also facing competition from a rising tide of renewables. This year, global investment in the energy transition is set to increase twice as much as investments in oil, gas and coal. This investment is being shaped by what the IEA [International Energy Agency] is calling the ‘Age of Electricity’. The ‘Golden Age of Gas’ that began well over a decade ago is drawing to an end.
China was the world’s biggest LNG importer and Australia’s second-biggest LNG customer in 2023. But China’s prospects as a long-term lucrative coal-to-gas switching customer are in doubt. Instead, its massive investment in renewable energy is disrupting fossil-fuel markets around the world. You can get a striking insight into the scale of China’s renewables revolution by looking at satellite images from NASA’s Earth Observatory of the ‘Solar Great Wall’ in the Kubuqi Desert.

But CEO Meg O’Nell sticks to her guns.

Correspondence in Quarterly Essay 100 (The Good Fight by Sean Kelly) mostly reinforces Wilkinson’s argument. The world is not decarbonising fast enough to avoid dire consequences. Woodside’ activities aren’t helping. Peter Garrett discusses the politics. David Ritter focuses on Scott Reef, an extraordinary marine habitat that is under threat. Shane Watson and Kate Wylie from Doctors for the Environmental Australia describe the difficulties of appealing to existing laws to defend the environment.

Wilkinson says in her response to correspondents that ‘the gulf in thinking between the fossil-fuel industry and the climate movement in Australia was as wide as ever’. I had a brief moment of hope for a robust debate between these two perspectives when I saw that there was a contribution from Glen Gill whose bio says he ‘has over forty years of global experience in the petroleum and electricity industries, including in technical, commercial, regulatory and pubic policy areas’. Sadly, Gill manages to shout a lot. His first paragraphs refer to ‘wild, uninformed statements from activists’, describe the essay as ‘ridiculous’, ‘misleading’ and full of ‘fear, ignorance and hatred’. Marian Wilkinson doesn’t really bother to engage, except to say that the science he claims to rely on is ‘alas not climate science’.

Things are crook, but I’m glad there are people like Marian Wilkinson who are willing to look steadily around them and communicate what they see in clear, uncompromising prose.

I wrote the blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation. I acknowledge Elders past and present, and welcome any First Nations readers.

* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 78.

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Hugh White’s Hard New World

Posted on 11 Sep 2025 | 2 comments

Hugh White, Hard New World: Our Post-American Future (Quarterly Essay 98, 2025)
– plus correspondence in Quarterly Essay 99

This is Hugh White’s fourth Quarterly Essay. As the titles, and especially subtitles, of his essays demonstrate, he has been on the same track for fifteen years (links are to my blog posts):

The gaps between essays, like those between major bushfires, have been getting shorter, and his argument more pressing. The US isolationism of Trump’s second coming, the genocidal war crimes of the US ally Israel, and what looks like Vladimir Putin’s unending war on Ukraine all make his argument more cogent and persuasive.

In a nutshell, he argues that after the end of the Cold War in which two superpowers were in uneasy stand-off, and the period since then when there was just the one, we are now and have for some time been in a multipolar world. The USA no longer has the resources to dominate the globe, and nor does it have sound reasons to do it. In the past, when a single power could potentially dominate the whole of Eurasia, the USA had reason to be concerned for its own security. And when no other power hcould match the US’s economic heft, the US had the resources to do something about it. Now, as China’s economy is by key indicators larger than that of the US, it at the same time shows no sign of becoming a dominant force in the rest of Asia or Europe – India is a rising power, Indonesia isn’t far off, Russia would be a problem, and likewise Europe can if provoked present a united front. The US has neither the resources nor strategic reason to continue to invest in the security of the Asia pacific region. It no longer makes sense for Australia to depend on the US for its security.

There’s a lot more to his argument.

Something I found refreshing is the way, having made it clear that he considers Donald Trump to be sociopathic, he considers his approaches to global politics as being erratic and weird, but in essence correct as he ‘rejects the whole idea of America as the global leader, upholding and enforcing international order and promoting American values for the good of the world as a whole’. Specifically, he’s not going to take on China, and nor would it make sense to do so. To quote page 47*:

There is no evidence that Trump cares much, if at all, about the strategic contest with China in Asia. On the contrary, a lot of evidence points the other way. It suggests that Trump is happy to deal with China in the same way he deals with Russia, as a fellow great power in a multipolar world. That means conceding China’s right to an exclusive sphere of influence in its own backyard, just as he insists on America’s right to dominate the Western Hemisphere.
So, in strategic questions, Trump really isn’t a China hawk … He dislikes America’s Asian allies and has often dismissed the idea that America should defend Taiwan.

Xi Jinping’s great parade to celebrate the end of World War Two, with its attendant photos of Xi, Putin Kim Jong Un and Modi in cheerful togetherness hadn’t happened when this essay was written, but Trump’s Truth Social message to Xi, ‘Please give my warmest regards to Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong Un, as you conspire against The United States of America,’ looks more like posturing for his base than any substantial evidence that Hugh White is wrong.

The essay ends with a draft speech for an Australia leader to communicate a necessary shift in policy. A few speeches like it, he says, ‘could start the national conversation we need to have, but which we have so far done our best to avoid’. The speech includes this:

In these very different circumstances we cannot expect America to keep playing the same role as hitherto in the security of our region and as Australia’s ally. That old order cannot be preserved by war or the threat of war. Our focus instead must be to help create a new order in Asia which fits the new distribution of power and best protects our core national interests, and to do whatever we can to help ensure a peaceful transition from the old order to the new. Then we must prepare Australia to survive and thrive in this new order. That starts by accepting that our relationship with America will change. It will remain an important relationship, but it will become less central to our security in the years to come as America’s laters and role in Asia change. We will rely more on our relations with our neighbours to help keep the region peaceful and minimise any threats, and we will rely more on our own forces to defend us from any threats that do arise.
All this will be demanding. The new world we face will be harder than the one we have known for so long. But there is no choice.

I’m well outside my comfort zone on the subject of international relations, defence, security, war and threats of war, but I found this essay compelling.

Correspondence on White’s previous Quarterly Essays included a number that dismissed him as simply wrong, a winner-take-all debater, selective with his facts and using little reason. I quoted a number of them in my post on QE 86. Perhaps it’s just that current and former prime ministers no longer engage in this kind of forum, but the correspondence on this one, published in QE 98, mainly from academics in relevant fields, is generally supportive of its central thesis.

I wrote the blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation at the moment the sky is clear but the ground is sodden with recent rain. I acknowledge Elders past and present, and welcome any First Nations readers.

* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 78.

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Jess Hill’s Losing It

Posted on 5 Jul 2025 | Leave a comment

Jess Hill, Losing It: Can We Stop Violence Against Women and Children? (Quarterly Essay 97)
– plus correspondence from Quarterly Essay 98

I came to this Quarterly Essay with a heavy heart, but I’m very glad to have read it, to know that there are people who are tackling a huge evil with intelligence, courage and compassion.

In the final chapter of her groundbreaking 2019 book, See What You Made Me Do (link is to my blog post), Jess Hill wrote:

The mission to transform attitudes to gender inequality and violence is laudable, and will no doubt produce important cultural changes. But as a primary strategy for reducing domestic abuse, it is horribly inadequate. 

Losing It enlarges on that argument. Hill is all in favour of transforming attitudes to gender equality, but argues that an almost exclusive focus on giving that strategy leads to neglect of other significant factors and of strategies other than education and awareness-raising. In Nordic countries, where by most measures gender equality is more established than elsewhere in Europe, there is more violence against women. This is known as the Nordic paradox.

Hill gets into the nitty-gritty of Australian campaigns, and argues that they have stuck to an original plan in spite of evidence that it isn’t working. Although Australia is to be commended for leading the world in funding and developing primary prevention, we are not world leaders in actually preventing violence. The people responsible for developing strategies, she argues, are caught in rigid groupthink.

Advertising campaigns that intentionally or otherwise shame perpetrators can actually increase violence, because a lot of violence has shame somewhere at its root.

School education session on consent and gender equality are up against the enormous influence of internet personalities like Andrew Tate, and beyond them of ‘co-ordinated, strategic and incredibly well-funded’ organisations with anti-rights agendas around the world. Sexual violence is being reported by ever younger male perpetrators. On page 40, Jess Hill quotes Deanne Carson, an ‘external educator’ who teaches the Respectful Relationships program in Victorian schools:

Every single classroom I go into, I have children who have been raped. I have children who have sexualy abused other children.

Regulation of alcohol and gambling is needed; likewise more nuanced understanding of what is happening in the lives and minds of men who perpetrate violence. More attention is needed to the situation of child victim-survivors, especially when they are not accompanied by a victim-survivor mother. Something with the benign name of ‘alternative care accommodation’ can be a horror show.

There’s a ‘fifty-year-old turf war’ between the adherents to the ‘feminist’ model and the ‘psychopathological’ model. The quote marks are important: not all feminists and not all psychologists are in the trenches, but non-warriors tend to be sidelined in the policy debates. Hill argues for a ‘properly negotiated peace’ between the sides:

Australia’s prevention strategy should be alive to how gendered violence is driven by power imbalances – from gender inequality to homophobia, racism, economic inequality and ageism – as well as by suffocatingly narrow models for masculinity. But it must also strive to stop violence passing from one generation to the next, which requires a much stronger focus on preventing child mistreatment, helping children and victimised parents recover, placing more limits on harmful industries, helping men who are willing to do the work to heal, and keeping women and kids safe from the men who won’t. It’s only by integrating both viewpoints – feminism and psychopathology – that we can start to truly comprehend the phenomenon of men’s violence against women and children and find effective ways to stop it (pages 73-74).

Page 78* is in the six-page section ‘State of Neglect’, which discusses our collective failure to provide systems that would keep children safe, including people who get into violent intimate relationships in their teens.

The previous page has given a list of appalling options. This page begins with a barb at ‘respect education’:

If we told young people what kind of ‘help’ we might be offering them, what might they have to tell us about ‘respect’?

The rest of the page is an excellent example of what Jess Hill has described, also on the previous page, as the purpose of the essay: ‘to amplify the many voices … urging governments to transform Australia’s prevention strategy.’

Twenty-one-year-old Conor Pall spends most of his waking hours trying to persuade policymakers to respect and respond to children and young people. He knows what it’s like to be ignored and further endangered by systems that should be there to keep kids like him safe. Pall has strong ‘eldest son’ energy, and in just a few short years his quiet drive and determination have helped him become one of Australia’s most recognisable advocates for young victim-survivors. For Conor, there’s an acute irony to this: ‘We are consulted more often than we are supported.’
….. The mainstream family violence system is built for women and their children; if teenagers aren’t with a protective parent willing and able to seek support, they rarely get help. ‘I hear about children and young people calling specialist family violence services saying they’re at high risk, and they’re told, “Call Kids Helpline.” Kids Helpline. Like, what the fuck?’
Kids Helpline may be great for kids who need counselling, but it can’t provide the urgent, practical help young victim-survivors often need.

Voice amplified, even before the brief description on the next page of Conor’s own experience ‘surviving after surviving’.

The correspondence in Quarterly Essay 98, Hard New World by Hugh White, is what you would expect, given the existence of a turf war. Some of the leading figures in the main government programs respond with understandable ire, saying the essay ‘lacks any nuanced discussion of the kinds of intersectional solutions needed’ and insisting that current strategies are based on sound research and wide consultation (Patty Kinnersly, CEO of the primary prevention organisation Our Watch); that it’s divisive, makes sweeping public critique of the workers in the field, is misleading and harmful (Helen Keleher, lead researcher and writer of the framework Hill criticises). I am absolutely in no position to judge the rightness and wrongness of the various arguments, but I do note that there’s a moment when Keleher accuses Hill of using ‘a recurring straw-man fallacy to position feminism as an obstacle to the prevention of violence against women’, which is itself a total straw man, as Hill doesn’t make that argument at all.

Of the other correspondents, the most horizon-broadening is a brief, revelatory essay on ‘how family violence is facilitated within Australia’s migrant and ethnically diverse communities’ by Manjula Datta O’Conor, a founding director of the AustralAsian Centre for Human Rights and Health and author of Daughters of Durga: Dowries, Gender Violence and Family in Australia. I’ll give her the last word here:

If we are to reduce the rates of family and domestic violence, we must look unflinchingly at all contributing factors. Mental health is one of them. That means rethinking how we design perpetrator intervention programs. It means integrating mental health support, not as an excuse but as a method of accountability.

I wrote this blog post on the still-beautiful land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation. I acknowledge their Elders past and present.

* My blogging practice is focus arbitrarily on the page of a book that coincides with my age, currently 78. It’s like a lucky-dip sampling of the book.

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George Megalogenis’ Minority Report

Posted on 22 Apr 2025 | Leave a comment

George Megalogenis, Minority Report: The new shape of Australian politics (Quarterly Essay 96, December 2024)

George Megalogenis takes Australia’s federal polling statistics and renders them into readable, even enjoyable prose. In this Quarterly Essay, he reads the data from elections since John Howard’s time up to the present moment, and attempts to make sense of the current political landscape.

The global financial crisis, the coming of the teals, Covid, the defeat of the Voice referendum, the genocide in Gaza, housing, the climate emergency, the hollowing out of the ABC: all are grist to the mill of this nuanced inside-baseball analysis.

The essay and the correspondence in Quarterly Essay 97 probably make a significant contribution to our general understanding of Australian electoral politics. But as I was reading it, I couldn’t help but be aware that it was written at the end of 2024, and if a week is a long time in politics, then the four months that have passed between then and now amount to an epoch. Even the correspondence was written before Donald J. Trump’s ‘Independence Day’. Who knows if, as Megalogenis projects, there will be a hung parliament in May? And if there is, who knows if he is right that it ‘offers perhaps our last best chance to restore purpose to our politics – and policymaking’?

Still, I admire and enjoy Magalogenis’ ability to communicate complex matter in a readable way. Page 47, which begins a section on the level of trust in government, includes an example:

In the wake of the 2010 federal election, I pinpointed the 2001 campaign as the turning point to a more trivial politics.
John Howard responded to warnings of electoral doom with a panic of handouts in the first half of that year. …
None of the bribes offered to voters in this period came with offsetting savings for the budget. They left a maze of entitlements and distorted market signals which stored up problems for the future, most notably in the housing sector, where prices boomed beyond the reach of the middle class, and in public infrastructure, which could not keep up with population growth.
Labor’s unforced policy errors on climate change and the mining tax in 2010 felt like the culmination of a decade-long trend which reduced the relationship between government and citizen to the question: how can I buy your support?

That general trend to trivialisation was interrupted first by the global financial crisis which, Megalogenis argues, created ‘a bubble of trust in our leaders and institutions, which burst once the existential threat passed’, triggering what he calls a ‘new super-cycle in our politics – pro-incumbent in the crisis and anti-incumbent in the recovery’.

There’s pleasure in discerning patterns of this sort. There may also be some usefulness.

In the correspondence, the stand-out for me is Judith Brett. She observes that the major political parties have been hollowed out, as their membership has declined and they have become ‘professional electoral machines’. When memberships were much larger, debate, negotiation and compromise took place within the parties. These debates connected with the lived experience, interests and prejudice of a range of electors. And when the legislation reached the parliament it was assured safe passage by the government’s majority:

What is happening, I think, is that the debate, negotiation and consensus-building is shifting from inside the parties back to the parliament, where they were for most of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries … The conflicts of interest will be more publicly visible than they are when the resolution takes place inside the parties. This will be a magnet for media speculation and give the impression of dysfunction, but in my opinion it is no cause for alarm. The public will have a clearer view of the interests and arguments at play, and the government will have to negotiate. But it does not mean the end of effective legislation.

We’ll see.

I wrote this blog post on land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation, where the day started out with rich blue sky, turned to heavy rain, fined up, and as I press ‘Publish’ is beginning to rain once more.. I acknowledge the Elders past and present who have cared for this land for millennia.

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Don Watson’s High Noon

Posted on 15 Dec 2024 | 3 comments

Don Watson,  High Noon: Trump, Harris and America on the brink (Quarterly Essay 95, September 2024)

Eight years ago Don Watson reported on the presidential election face-off between Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton. According to my blog post, his Quarterly Essay 63, The Enemy Within: American politics in the time of Trump dwelled on Bernie Sanders as belonging to ‘a much assailed and greatly debilitated, but unbroken American tradition of democratic socialism’, and expanded his point by focusing on the history of the state of Wisconsin.

In this Quarterly Essay, as Trump is once again up against a female opponent, Watson doesn’t have a third option to discuss but he again goes local, and gives fascinating brief histories of two US cities, Detroit and Kalamazoo. These snapshots, plus his reports on conversations with Trump supporters, make the essay worth reading even though its journalistic moment is past. Maybe it’s even more readable now, because its resistance to the temptation to predict outcomes might have frustrated his readers three months ago.

The fifteen pages on Detroit are excellent: Watson traces the city’s history from the first half of the twentieth century when:

White folk from the economically depressed regions of the United States, especially Appalachia and the South; Black folk from the South and east-coast cities where wages were low and jobs hard for Blacks to get; Poles, Greeks, Irish, Italians, Germans, and people from the Middle East and the countries of Central America were all drawn to Detroit by the unstoppable car industry and the promise of five dollars a day.

In 1960 it had a population of 1.8 million. Since then ‘the city that gave the world the Ford Mustang and Stevie Wonder’ has fallen on hard times as the motor industry collapsed. Corruption, racism, predatory lending, the destruction of unions had their effects:

Detroit became a shrinking city of the poor, the poorly educated, the unemployed and the unskilled. A city of crime: corrupt in its high places, its streets plagued with violence, theft, arson, prostitution, drug dealing and addiction.

Detroit, Watson writes, ‘was the definitive American city … For a city like Detroit to fail was more than a disaster, it was a humiliation.’ Yet, his strategy of focusing on this one city, and then the contrasting city of Kalamazoo, brings home the immense diversity of the United States. It’s not a country where one story covers all.

There are insightful discussions of Trump and Harris, but you know, though I’m as mesmerised by the Trump phenomenon as anyone could be, I can’t bear to say much about that here.

The essay ends with the date: 23 August 2024. It was written after Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race, after the Democratic Convention, but before the ‘They’re eating the dawgs’ debate.

Even the Correspondence in the following Quarterly Essay was written before the election results were known.

In the correspondence, Tom Keneally, lively as ever, contrasts Australian and US politics but doesn’t engage with Watson’s essay in any detail. David Smith, who did his PhD in Detroit, makes fascinating additions to Watson’s account of that city, including more examples of how unhinged US public life can be. Bruce Wolpe, senior fellow at the US Studies Centre, does a nice job of validating and amplifying Watson’s points. And Paul Kane, among other things former director of the Mildura Literary Festival, praises Watson for his ‘adroit outsider’s perspective’, and, in a lovely three and a half pages, manages to include references to or quotes from Raph Waldo Emerson, Alexis de Tocqueville, Robert Penn Warren (All the King;’s Men, 1946), Father Charles Coughlin (a whiff from my Catholic childhood), Woody Guthrie, Plato, John Stuart Mill, Wordsworth, and Barry Hill. He concludes with Benjamin Franklin’s reply when asked if the Constitution had established a monarchy or a republic: ‘A republic, if you can keep it.’

Both Don Watson’s essay and the responses to it are full of the pleasures of language. The subject is grim, and even grimmer when read after the event, but the telling of it is a joy to behold

I wrote this blog post on land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation, where we have had very heavy rain and are now sweltering in great humidity and heat. Cicadas are deafening. I acknowledge the Elders past and present who have cared for this land for millennia.

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Joëlle Gergis’ Highway to Hell

Posted on 21 Sep 2024 | 6 comments

Joëlle Gergis, Highway to Hell: Climate Change and Australia’s Future (Quarterly Essay 94, 2024) – plus correspondence in Quarterly Essay 95

I’ve worn a Peter Dutton mask with devil horns in street theatre outside Anthony Albanese’s office. I’ve asked awkward questions at the AGMs of fossil fuel companies, scripted by Market Forces. I’ve participated with gusto in Move Beyond Coal‘s campaign targeting banks that provide financial backing to new coal mines. I joined the People’s Blockade of the coal port of Newcastle last November and plan to join again this year. Do I need to read ONE MORE BOOK on climate change?

Well, yes, I do. I had pushed out of my mind the terrible events of Summer 2021–2022. I even wrote about Judith Beveridge’s poem ‘Choirwood’ as if it offered some kind of hope after those fires (at this link). After reading Joëlle Gergis’s essay, the poem is still brilliant, but it feels like so much whistling in the dark.

Joëlle Gergis is one of the 234 lead authors of the most recent IPCC Report. She is a climate scientist who, she tells us in this essay, has become so frustrated at the way the reality of climate change is downplayed or ignored by those in power that she quit her job as an academic scientist to become a public advocate. I’d say she has become a Cassandra warning of the dangers, except that Cassandra was doomed to be ignored, a fate I hope will not befall Joëlle, for all our sakes.

After noting the relief of seeing the end of the denialist Morrison Government (remember ‘Labor’s war on the weekend’, and ‘Don’t be afraid, this is carbon’?), the essay tackles the current situation – better, but a long way from hopeful. Here’s a key paragraph, on page 7:

The scientific reality is that, regardless of political spin used to justify the continued exploitation of fossil fuel reserves, the laws of physics will keep warming the planet until we stop pumping carbon into the atmosphere and begin cleaning up the mess. The situation is too far gone for renewable energy alone to save us. Pinning our hopes on carbon capture technology to justify the continued burning of fossil fuels is a disastrous gamble the world can’t afford to take. So, as this fateful moment approaches, we need to take an honest look at the government’s climate policy and realistically assess the situation we are in. Are the climate wars really over, or has a new era of greenwashing just begun?

As she goes on to say what the laws of physics are up to and to outline a range of future scenarios, she begs us: ‘Please, don’t look away. Thee isn’t a moment to waste.’

I won’t try to summarise the science, but if you’re looking for a solid, accessible presentation, I doubt if you’ll find a better one anywhere. It’s a gruelling read, from which my main takeaway is that I need to grieve for the corals of the Great Barrier Reef that thrilled me as a child, for the thousands of cattle and millions of wild animals that have died and are yet inevitably to die as the planet heats up, for the vast tracts of forest, including rainforest, that have already been devastated. I need to grieve and I need to treasure what remains – and be prepared to fight for it.

After a blistering account of carbon offsets and carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) in a chapter headed ‘Chasing Unicorns’, she asserts that we know what needs to be done, but such is the power of the fossil fuel lobby that Australian governments won’t do it. True, there has been significant movement in State governments, and outside of government. But it’s pretty grim, when the main message to the reader about what can be done is to stress the importance of voting in the next federal election.

Almost any paragraph from this essay is worth quoting and pondering. On page 47*, there’s this:

To its credit, the Albanese government has tried to support Australia’s emergence as a renewable energy superpower. [She lists an impressive number of initiatives taken since the ALP’s election win in May 2022.] While these are all steps in the right direction, the challenge is not to undo all of this good work by allowing the interests of the fossil fuel industry to co-opt the process and weaken real progress towards reducing global emissions.

Rather than ‘net zero’, the goal must be to achieve ‘real zero’, which can only happen once we stop burning fossil fuels. In fact, the science tells us that around 60 per cent of oil and gas reserves and 90 per cent of coal must remain unextracted if warming is to be limited to 1.5°C. There is no way around having to eventually face this scientific reality.

But instead of facing facts, in December 2023, the federal government caved in to lobbying from the oil and gas company Santos.

The correspondents in Quarterly Essay 95 mostly agree with and amplify the arguments of the essay. There’s an excellent piece by David Pocock, who is probably the parliamentarian that Gergis meets with early in the essay. He describes his shock as a senator now for a little over two years to see how ‘policy is consistently shaped by political considerations ahead of evidence and research’. Often he says, politicians ‘are not looking for genuine, long-term solutions, but for the next opportunity to back their opponents into a corner’.

A stand-out exception to the generally supportive tone is a grim piece by Clive Hamilton. He’s not the only correspondent to describe Joëlle Gergis as operating on an ‘information deficit’ model: if only people, including those in power, had correct information they would do the right thing. Scientists have been trained to look for solid, verifiable facts and to base their actions on what they find. But it’s a mistake to assume that that’s how people in general function. Hamilton dismisses the essay’s hope as wishful thinking, argues that nothing Australian governments do can have much impact on climate change, and generally sees the outlook as bleak:

After two decades of research into the psychological, social and political complexities of persuading people to recognise and act on the science of climate change, it’s wearying when another scientist comes along convinced that it’s only a problem of someone with authority communicating the facts. I’d be more energised if Gergis, as an IPCC lead author, had written an essay arguing that it’s time for a campaign of industrial sabotage.

I would love to know how Joëlle Gergis responds to Clive Hamilton. Sadly, no response from her is included in QE 95. Maybe in Nº 96? Or maybe she’s already out there like the main character in the movie Woman at War.

I wrote this blog post in Gadigal Wangal country, where it is my great joy to live. I acknowledge Elders past and present for their continuing custodianship of this land.

* My usual blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 77. But as this Quarterly Essay runs to just 72 pages including notes, I’m looking at page 47, the year of my birth minus 1900.  

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Lech Blaine’s Bad Cop

Posted on 13 Jun 2024 | 6 comments

Lech Blaine, Bad Cop: Peter Dutton’s Strong Man Tactics (Quarterly Essay 93, 2024) – plus correspondence in Quarterly Essay 94

Peter Dutton eats bleeding-heart lefties for breakfast. He is tall and bald, with a resting death stare. His eyes – two brown beads – see evil so that the weak can be blind. His lips are allergic to political correctness. Peter preaches the gospel of John Howard with the fanaticism of Paul Keating. He wants to do the Labor Party slowly, slowly, slowly, and defeat the woe-is-me heroism of identity politics.

That’s the start of this Quarterly Essay, and it was nearly enough for me. Life’s too short and the times are too perilous, I thought, to indulge in another witty hatchet job on a dangerous politician. And I was grumpy with a heavy cold.

But I persevered, partly out of a QE completist compulsion but also because I’d heard Lech Blaine talking to Richard Fidler on the Conversations podcast (link here), where he said some interestingly complex things about Dutton.

Much of the essay, it turns out, is a slog. It follows the ins and outs of Dutton’s life and career, along with the vicissitudes of the Liberal Party and Queensland’s Liberal National Party and the internecine leadership struggles on that side of Parliament over the last 40 years or so, with occasional glimpses at what’s happening in the ALP. Blaine has done a shedload of research, including many interviews with key players and interested observers. There’s far too much going on to enable a coherent narrative, and that’s not counting the brief look at Dutton’s squatter ancestors who were in the tiny minority of their class who stood up for First Nations in Queensland.

The reader is never left in any doubt that Blaine doesn’t like Dutton or his politics – and Dutton has thoughtfully provided a steady stream of pithy quotes to justify those dislikes.

In Blaine’s account, everything Dutton says and does is calculated for its electoral usefulness, but at least some of his outrage has a germ of personal truth to it. His projected identity as a Queensland copper, unlike Scott Morrison’s ‘ScoMo’ persona, is based in actual experience, specifically his nine formative years in the Queensland police force. He was genuinely affronted when someone on Twitter called him a rape apologist, as his dealing with horrific instances of rape as a policeman had been a major formative experience. It’s not just a matter of convenience that he doesn’t spruik his subsequent decades as a property wheeler and dealer, even though that experience, that unacknowledged identity, lies at the back of many of his policy positions.

The correspondence in Quarterly Essay 94 kicks off with a brief, resounding endorsement from Niki Savva, the Queen of Liberal Party Coverage. Encapsulating much of Blaine’s essay, she says, ‘I call Abbott Terminator One and and Dutton Terminator Two.’ Thomas Mayo underlines Dutton’s role in defeating the Voice referendum, quoting Noel Pearson: ‘A heartless thing to do – but easy.’ Other correspondents join the argument about Dutton’s strategy to become the next Prime Minister – interesting, but largely ‘inside baseball’ discussion.

Paul Strangio, an emeritus professor in politics who is currently working on a study of ‘Australia’s best prime ministers’, add some interesting perspectives. He reminds us of that other Queensland copper who was leader of the Federal Opposition, Bill Hayden:

Despite the similarities in their back stories, the differences between Hayden and Dutton could hardly be starker. Arguably, the contrast is a disturbing marker of the degeneration of the political class across generations, of the retreat from a milieu of enlightened social-democratic optimism to irrational conservative populist pessimism, and of the decline of a political sensibility of compassion and empathy to one of stony-heartedness.

Strangio reminds us that Dutton’s strong man approach to politics is part of a planet-wide phenomenon. And he puts his finger on the thing that I experienced as a vague discontent with the essay. Blaine’s view of Dutton, summed up in his final words – ‘Tall and strong at first glance, but when you watch him for a long time, you can see that the man is small and scared’ – isn’t strongly substantiated. The reader is left with the suspicion that it ‘springs as much as anything from a distaste for his subject, a distaste that he struggles to disguise’.

I agree. This essay works brilliantly as a reminder of the many ways Peter Dutton has shown himself as the ‘strong man’ of the Australian parliamentary right-wing, there are hints of how he got to where he is, and a persuasive account of his current campaign to become prime minister, but Dutton the breathing, feeling man remains a mystery.

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Alan Kohler’s Great Divide

Posted on 30 Apr 2024 | 2 comments

Alan Kohler, The Great Divide: Australia’s Housing Mess and How to Fix It (Quarterly Essay 92, 2023) – plus correspondence in Quarterly Essay 93

Alan Kohler appears regularly on the ABC News, the genial presenter of largely incomprehensible finance updates. He usually flashes up a chart or two, giving the impression he’s doing it for his own amusement as much as our enlightenment, and then signs off, ‘And that’s finance.’

This Quarterly Essay has some of that trademark geniality, and it has graphs, but it’s a long way from incomprehensible. As someone who is near-illiterate about economics, I found it wonderfully instructive about the background and causes of the current housing crisis, and while his proposed solutions seem unlikely to be implemented I could follow their logic.

The key issue is probably obvious, but it’s a joy to see it named so clearly:

The houses we live in the places we call home and bring up our families in, have been turned into speculative investment assets by fifty years of government policy failure. (Page 3)

The notion of a home as investment goes back further than 50 years, as the essay describes, but as with so many of the ills of contemporary Australia, it got a big boost under the prime ministership of John Howard. Then, around the turn of the century, three main things pushed up demand for housing and consequently the price:

A sharp life in immigration that increased the number of people needing a place to live; capital ganis tax breaks and negative gearing, which represent a $96 billion per year subsidy for buying houses;and federal first home buyer grants, which represent a $1.5 billion direct addition to house prices each year. (Page 7)

Add into the mix the conflicting concerns of the three different levels of government, particularly the stalemate that results when state governments push for medium density housing in areas where local governments insist on restrictive zoning regulations.

On the reluctance of politicians to do something about the cost of housing, Alan Kohler quotes John Howard’s bon mot (or mauvais mot if you like): ‘No one came up to me to complain about the increase in the value of their home.’ A sizeable portion of the electorate – home owners and many aspiring home owners – have a vested interest in having prices continue to increase.

Kohler expands lucidly on all these matters, and goes on to propose solutions: of course, to increase the supply of housing, for which he makes a number of suggesrtions; ‘a big investment in trains designed to at least double, preferably triple, the commutable distance from the capital cities and industrial inner suburbs where people work’; ‘reducing demand by restricting negative gearing and increasing capital gains tax’, which ‘should happen, but probably won’t; ‘increasing the supply of medium density in existing suburbs through better zoning and planning’ (which is ‘still more talk than action’); and more abstractly, for government to set an ‘affordability target’, to reduce the ratio of house prices to wages.

On page 77*, Kohler expands on that last proposal:

House prices need to stay put for a while and allow incomes to catch up. Average weekly earnings are currently rising at about 4 per cent a year. For the national median house price [at time of writing the essay] of $740,668 to be 3.5 times income, the average wage would have to be $210,000, more than double what it is now. At 4 per cent growth in incomes per year, that would take about eighteen years.
The only time house prices remained unchanged for that long was from 1930 to 1949 – that is, during the Great Depression and the period of price controls in the war. Even after the recessions of 1982 and 1991, it took less than half that long for prices to start rising again.
So fifteen to twenty years of static house prices would be unprecedented, but that sort of time frame might also get Australians out of the habit of thinking that house prices always rise and that housing is the best way to build wealth. And if housing affordability is to be properly dealt with, we have to change that mindset, because house prices won’t stop rising at twice the rate of incomes unless we stop expecting them to.

Alan Kohler’s 86-page essay generated more than 50 pages of correspondence in the next Quarterly Essay (Lech Blaine’s Bad Cop: Peter Dutton’s Strongman Politics). The correspondents range from qualified approval, such as Joseph Walker’s description of the essay as ‘sober, necessary and broadly correct in its conclusions’ to this scathing ‘stay-in-your-lane’ dismissal by Peter Tulip, chief economist at the Liberal-Party aligned Centre for Independent Studies:

Public discussion of housing policy suffers from undisciplined eclecticism. Too many commentators provide long, unstructured lists of multiple causes or conclude that the truth lies between competing explanations. This muddle reflects an inability or an unwillingness to distinguish the important from the unimportant. Alan Kohler’s Great Divide and the accompanying media coverage are examples.

There’s a lot of robust discussion, which (did I mention that I’m ignorant about economics) I can only watch in dismay. Everyone agrees that there is a problem – that, as Kohler says in the essay, ‘the high price of housing is undermining social cohesion and the proper functioning of the economy and the nation.’ And it’s heartening to see so many people who have invested so much thinking and action in the issue. I’ll give Alan Kohler the last word (it is the last paragraph of his gracious Response to Correspondence):

The process of researching this subject and then engaging with responses to my essay has confirmed that this is a subject about which a lot of people have been thinking deeply and expertly for a long time, and Australia is well served by them. It’s just a pity they are not listened to more. We are less well served by the politicians and bureaucrats whose job it is to do something about it.

* My fairly arbitrary blogging practice is to focus on the page of a book that coincides with my age. This page often reveals interesting things about the book as a whole.

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Micheline Lee’s Lifeboat

Posted on 5 Jan 2024 | 4 comments

Micheline Lee, Lifeboat: Disability, Humanity and the NDIS (Quarterly Essay 91, 2023) – plus correspondence in Quarterly Essay 92

Micheline Lee is a novelist. In this Quarterly Essay and in her reply to correspondents in the following one, she demonstrates that she is a master of the killer last line. The essay ends with a personal story. When she was eighteen, anxious at the prospect of becoming increasingly disabled, she went travelling in Europe and Africa alone, without any support:

I remember Kamanja, a man I met in Kenya. He was one of many people who came my way and helped me through, who pushed me in my wheelchair and carried me when I was at a low ebb and battered. I started to thank him. He held out his hand for me to stop. ‘I help you because you need help,’ he said.

(Page 59)

Her reply to correspondents ends with a reference to Ann Marie Smith, who died in Adelaide in 2020 after years of extreme neglect while on a full time care plan with the NDIS:

If Ann Marie Smith had had one friend in the world, the abuse she suffered over three years that finally took her life would not have happened.

(Quarterly Essay 92: The Great Divide by Alan Kohler, page 122)

The essay lays out the origins of the National Disability Insurance Scheme, its underlying principles and goals, and the massive faults in its implementation, but it also offers sharp insights into lived experiences of disability – and the overwhelming importance of meaningful human connection.

The medical, or individual, model of disability defines disability as individual deficit or tragedy. The social model ‘demonstrates that the problems people with disabilities face are the result of exclusion and social and environmental barriers’. The activists whose lobbying led to the creation of the NDIS were proponents of the social model. The NDIS was intended to serve the needs of people who otherwise could not participate in society, and was to be one part of a whole ecosystem of support for people with disabilities.

The scheme was legislated in the last days of the Gillard Labor government, but it’s implementation took place under successive Coalition governments. Micheline Lee refrains from pointing the finger of blame, but she describes the way the rest of the ecosystem failed to materialise, much of the support that previously existed dried up as the NDIS was seen to be the only game in town, a narrowly market-based system was established that meant the ‘participants’ in the scheme have to negotiate complex application processes and regular reassessments of their disabilities. The individual model of disability reasserted itself in an economic rationalist environment.

My blog practice is to have a closer look at a single page. Usually it’s page 76 (my age). As there is no page 76 in this essay, I’ll talk about page 47 (I was born in 1947). As it happens, it’s a brilliant example of the feature of the essay that makes it not just informative but engrossing. Along with the trenchant analysis of the system, its potential transformative value and its actual flaws, the essay contains many startling glimpses of the realities of life with a disability, always in the service of the argument.

Page 47 is part of the longest of these glimpses. Micheline is travelling by plane to a writers’ festival. She decides to travel without a support worker because it would cost the NDIS 14 hours of the worker’s time, and she would have to pay their return air fare. Her preferred airline refuses to take her without a carer. The more expensive airline that will take her does so on a much longer flight, but she calculates that even with an hour’s delay she can hold off going to the toilet, which would raise impossible logistic difficulties. She arrives at security at Melbourne airport, and asks the officer if he could help lift her bag off the back of her wheelchair onto the screening table:

‘Where’s your carer?’ he asked. I told him I was travelling alone.
‘You should have a carer to help you with that,’ he said. I was taken aback; in the past, airport staff had always helped. The woman behind me in the queue muttered, ‘Unbelievable,’ and lifted my bag onto the belt. I could have kissed her.
Next, I met the wheelchair assistance officer at the boarding gate, and he asked me where my carer was. And similarly, on the plane, the fight attendant asked, ‘Who’s assisting you?’

The story continues:

I arrive at Sydney airport only to find that the connecting flight has been cancelled and the next one is four hours later. My heart starts pumping faster. I ask the airline assistant who is pushing me in an aircraft wheelchair if he can bring my electric wheelchair to me. He makes a call, then tells me that all the luggage needs to stay on the plane.
‘My wheelchair is not luggage,’ I cry out. ‘I can’t move without my wheelchair.’ The chair I am strapped into is what the airline uses to fit between the aisles in the aeroplane. It’s a thin wedge of a chair that is hard for me to balance on and you can’t push it yourself. He parks me on a square of carpet with a wheelchair symbol on it some distance from the service desk and the customer seating area. He tells me he’ll let them know at the service desk that I want my wheelchair. ‘Can you take me over so I can speak with them myself?’ I ask, but he has already walked off.

An hour later:

It’s a new person at the service desk now and I call out to get her attention. She is busy with customers and doesn’t hear. I call out to passengers passing by but they don’t look my way.

Reflecting on the episode o the next page, Micheline acknowledges that it wasn’t just the expense that made her decide to travel solo:

It has more to do with protest. I don’t want the NDIS to take the focus off the need for society to be more inclusive.

It’s not a tragic story, like that of Ann Marie Smith who was confined to the same woven chair for over a year, but in this one the readers are implicated. Would I be one of those passengers passing by, or would I be the woman who mutters, ‘Unbelievable’?

The essay, in the end, isn’t an account of another bureaucratic stuff-up like Robodebt that we can shake our outraged heads over. It’s a passionate, articulate appeal to our common humanity.

The correspondents in QE 92 include the current Minister for the NDIS, a commissioner of the recently concluded Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disabilities, and a number of disability activists. Often the Quarterly Essay correspondence includes argumentation, or correction, or defensiveness. Not here. These writers reinforce the essay’s account of things, coming from a range of perspectives and a range of lived experience. Taken together with the essay and Micheline Lee’s ‘Response to Correspondence’ they make a compelling case for change.

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Megan Davis’s Voice of Reason

Posted on 29 Sep 2023 | Leave a comment

Megan Davis, Voice of Reason: On Recognition and Renewal (Quarterly Essay 90, 2023)
– plus correspondence in Quarterly Essay 91

As we approach voting day on the Indigenous Voice to Parliament, bad-faith arguments multiply and I don’t intend to add to the clamour. But I can recommend this Quarterly Essay by Megan Davis, one of the architects of the consultation process that led to the Uluṟu Statement from the Heart.

It’s short – just 66 pages. It’s personal – Ms Davis gives enough of her story that we know who she is. It’s instructive – she tells how the proposal for the Voice evolved through several official processes under several Prime Ministers. It’s respectful – it understands why some First Nations people might vote against the proposal, and argues the case with them. It has heroes and villains – John w Howard and Tony Abbott feature as wreckers; Yunupingu as a leader. It’s not into blame and rage. It has hope. And it’s utterly convincing.

If the referendum fails, as current polls suggest, this essay will bear re-reading for decades to come, though it will have to be read through tears.

You don’t have to buy a copy. At least for now you can read it on the Quarterly Essay website, beginning at this link.

My blog practice is to look a little closely at a single page. Usually it’s page 76 (my age). As there is no page 76 in this essay, here’s a little about page 47 (I was born in 1947).

In 2015, there was apparently bipartisan parliamentary support for constitutional change acknowledging that Australia was first occupied by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, recognising their continuing relationship to the lands and waters, and expressing respect for their ‘cultures, language and heritage’. That is to say, it looked like all systems go for symbolic recognition: nothing about non-discrimination, and no structural change. A group of 40 First Nations leaders met with Prime Minister Tony Abbott and Opposition leader Bill Shorten, and explained that such a change ‘would not be acceptable to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ (the quote is from the Kirribilli statement). This meeting led to the consultation process that produced the Uluṟu Statement from the Heart and the proposal for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. (It also proposed a Makaratta / Treaty and a truth telling process, but those aren’t on the table just yet.)

On page 47, Megan Davis hits the pause button in her recount of the history:

The thing I could not shake from my head was watching the prime minister and Opposition leader sit at the head of the table while forty people from forty communities spoke about the structural problems their communities faced. What is it like to be the leader of a nation and encounter a polity that is profoundly unhappy?
At this time, as one of the main Indigenous lawyers working on constitutional reform, I found it difficult to understand why politicians failed to hear what First Nations leaders and community members were saying. I had a textbook idea about how political and law reform work, but none of it applied to our people.
There were two challenges I saw. One is that politicians meet with Aboriginal leaders on a myriad of issues, but often First Nations do not feel heard and politicians and advisers do not listen.
The second is the impact of telling your story over and over again and not being heard – what effect does this have on health and wellbeing?

Which comes close to being the heart of the argument for a constitutionally enshrined Indigenous Voice: it’s not that First Nations people haven’t been speaking, it’s that the necessary people haven’t been listening – because, as Megan Davis argues elsewhere in the essay, they don’t have to.

That’s just a tiny part of the essay. The whole thing is worth reading.

The correspondence in QE 91 includes some big names, in particular historians Mark McKenna and Henry Reynolds, and some brilliant fleshing out of the issues by First Nations and other writers. Megan Davis acknowledges them all as ‘worthy and inclusive commentary on the essay and on this historic moment that we are barrelling towards’. She singles out the joint contribution from Sana Naka and Daniel Bray, a Torres Strait Islander woman and a man of European heritage who write about the way their family is constantly negotiating intercultural complexity. She gives them the last word in her response. Following her lead, I’ll end the blog post with the same quote from them:

Structural injustice exists because that is how our political system is structured. We are getting exactly what the system was designed to deliver. A Voice to Parliament alone cannot specifically redress every injustice, but it will connect people to power in a way that currently does not happen. Democracy demands nothing less.

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