Tag Archives: Quarterly Essay

Alan Kohler’s Great Divide

Posted on 30 April 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.

2 Comments

Posted in Books, Page 7x/47/7

Tagged , , ,

Micheline Lee’s Lifeboat

Posted on 5 January 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.

4 Comments

Posted in Books, Page 7x/47/7

Tagged ,

Megan Davis’s Voice of Reason

Posted on 29 September 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.

Leave a comment

Posted in Books, Page 7x/47/7

Tagged , , ,

Saul Griffith’s Wires that Bind

Posted on 7 July 2023 | Leave a comment

tl;dr: This is a review of a book that argues that a future that isn’t devastated by climate change is possible. If you can’t bear to read one more thing about global heating, you might like to listen to Saul Griffith talk to ABC’s Richard Fidler at this link.

Saul Griffith, The Wires that Bind: Electrification and Community Renewal (Quarterly Essay 89, 2023)
– plus correspondence in Quarterly Essay 90

In the late 1960s at Sydney University, when someone from Engineering took the microphone at an anti-war rally, you could be sure he (they were always men) would speak for the forces of reaction. So there’s a frisson of pleasure for me in reading Saul Griffith’s visionary account of an electrified Australia where fossil fuels are kept in the ground, communities thrive, a new kind of politics has replaced the current toxicity, women’s leadership is acknowledged, and global warming is slowing dramatically. It’s visionary, but suffused with an engineer’s practicality, not to mention a baker’s dozen of complex charts.

If you’re tempted to despair about global heating – and who isn’t? – you’d do well to read this Quarterly Essay. It doesn’t offer blind optimism or hope based only in philosophy, but charts a feasible path to a desired outcome. It covers much of the same ground as the 2021 Quarterly Essay on the same subject, Getting to Zero by Alan Finkel, also an engineer. But where Alan Finkel had been scientific adviser to the Morrison government and seemed, to me at least, to be concerned not to antagonise that do-nothing bunch of deniers, delayers and obfuscators, Saul Griffith comes from playing a role in creating Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, and is co-founder of community organisations Rewiring America and Rewiring Australia.

In my blog post on Finkel’s essay, I said:

I was heartened to read Finkel’s lucid, careful, methodical argument that the challenge of the climate emergency can be met – with difficulty, but successfully, and without significant sacrifice (‘No trade off, no dichotomy. Prosperity and low emissions.’). I was also uneasy. Surely something has to change as well as our technology. There was a herd of elephants in the room.

Saul Griffith also seems to offer a way forward that doesn’t involve significant sacrifice, but he does address other elephants. Ordinary householders are at the centre of his argument. We don’t have to see ourselves simply as consumers of whatever is on offer from government and profit-driven businesses; if we act together we can become hugely effective agents for change. One simple thing we can do is to decide that, whenever a household item that depends on fossil fuel needs replacing, we opt for something electrical – an induction stovetop, an electric vehicle, heat pump, and so on. And we can see that our electricity comes from renewable sources. His local postcode, 2515, is making great strides as a community to becoming electrified in this way. If we all did this, without significantly pushing the speed of replacement of devices, we would all be electrified by 2040.

He argues that this electrification would result in cheaper energy and cheaper travel – the expense is all in the initial purchase. Government intervention will be needed to make it possible for less wealthy households to make the shift.

There’s a lot more to his argument. I can’t say I followed it all; some of the more technical bits mystified me; and the economic arguments are out of my league. But having had as an article of faith that technical solutions to global heating exist and all that’s needed is the political will, I’m heartened to read solid argument to back up my sometimes tenuous faith.

My current practice of looking at page 76 can give you a glimpse of how the essay works at a granular level.

The page is in the section ‘Planes, Trains and Automobiles’, which deals with transport (or transportation as he says, reminding us of his years in the USA). The section includes some envelope pushing – every parking space to have a solar roof, small electric aeroplanes with a 500-km range using today’s battery technology, etc. It also lays out some basic facts. The use of cars and trucks ‘for moving us and ourselves around’ is currently the second largest source of CO2 emissions. The switch to electric vehicles (EVs) is under way, but it’s not a panacea. Cars need not only to go electric (and run on renewably sourced electricity); they also need to be smaller, lighter and slower in order to reduce the environmental damage they cause, including the damage to roads. Griffin produces some interesting figures comparing the emissions per passenger of our most efficient public transport system – Melbourne trams – and a light EV with two passengers: the EV comes out ahead. But that’s not so with heavy vehicles.

Page 76 is mostly the subsection with the title ‘Tax the tyres’. It begins with hard facts:

Australians use about 50 million litres of petroleum products per day, We spend $35–50 billon per year importing foreign oil. The government collects 49 cents per lire, after the various exemptions that are granted (thereby subsiding fossil fuels and emissions), which amounts to around $14 bilion per year. About half of that goes to road building and transportation projects. Even so, it is not enough to pay for all our roads, and councils have to pay for much of this from their rate base.
Reforming how we pay for roads is a gnarly political problem that I think we must have some honesty about. Low-income people commute further, often in less efficient cars, and often for work. The crux of the political problem is that those who can least afford to pay for transport pay the most, and fuel excise exacerbates that problem.

Then he takes us on a brief excursion into utopian imaginings:

I would like more kids to walk to school on dirt paths through forests breathing clean air and learning about ecosystems as they do so. I’d like to fly electric aircraft more and have fewer ecosystem-damaging roads.

He may have utopian leanings, and it sometimes feels as if Damon Gameau’s delightfully optimistic movie 2040 is playing in the background (he does mention it once), but he comes beck to the practical problem:

But with all that, I am not going to deny that roads are useful and we need good road infrastructure. …
If you study road wear, it turns out that the damage to a road is proportional to the square of the weight of a vehicle. A ute will do about seven times as much damage as a passenger car, mostly because of the extra weight. If you were designing systems to pay for our road infrastructure, it would be most scientifically done by charging by the weight of the vehicle and the number of kilometres it travels.

Which calls attention to what may not be an elephant in the room, but is maybe a thorny devil. How do these necessary changes get paid for? ‘If you were designing … it would be most scientifically done by’ indeed. The next paragraph is in some ways characteristic of the essay as a whole. In his acknowledgements, Griffith says it ‘would not have been written without community’ and lists a number of people on whom he relied ‘to contribute long passages’. In this passage, he present an idea that came from the audience on his book tour:

An audience member came up after a talk and suggested what we should do is tax the tyres, which would have the same effect. Heavier cars doing more kilometres go through more tyres faster. It would be a way of taxing the system that pays for roads, which would push the system to evolve to smaller, lighter vehicles. That would be a good thing.

I hope it’s evident from that little bit that the essay is multifaceted, trying ideas on like an essay in the classical sense of the term, having a bit of fun, and offering insights and proposals that could have a profound impact.

As usual with the Quarterly Essay series, the correspondence in Nº 90 fleshes out the subject beautifully. It was excellent to note the absence of people wanting to deny the science, or others pushing for nuclear power as Peter Dutton is doing in the headlines as I write this.

For just one example, Christine Milne posed a question that had been niggling me:

Can the Earth afford the transition to renewables if it is embedded in the linear business-as-usual, take-make-dispose model of unlimited consumerism and economic growth? There cannot be infinite growth on a finite planet.

Griffith’s response is worth reading. To paraphrase and crudify his argument: to transform the economic system would take too long – you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs and this omelette is too urgently needed to worry too much about eggshells.

The passage that stands out for me in Griffith’s response to correspondents is this exemplary piece of self-criticism:

Guilty of boostering, addicted to carrots, I have avoided the hard discussion of regulations with teeth. Perhaps my time in the Land of the Free softened me or made me frightened of things that might be conceived as infringing on personal liberty. … To be very clear, it is in the interest of the energy transition to have a phase-out date for all fossil-fuelled machines, and the sooner the better. Governments are scared of the headlines around mandates and bans, but that is what is actually needed, not eventually, but soon.

At the Sydney Writers’ Festival recently, Saul Griffith said that someone described his earlier book Electrify as a brilliant piece of guerrilla policy-writing. The book went on to play a role in developing major climate-change legislation in the USA. I don’t know if it’s all completely practical or if it addresses the social issues adequately or accurately, but the thought that this isn’t just someone having good ideas on the sidelines but solid policy proposals backed up by substantial experience at the community level is surely grounds for hope

Leave a comment

Posted in Books, Page 7x/47/7

Tagged , , , ,

Katharine Murphy’s Lone Wolf

Posted on 26 March 2023 | 7 comments

Katharine Murphy, Lone Wolf: Albanese and the New Politics (Quarterly Essay 88, 2022)
– plus correspondence in Quarterly Essay 89

Katharine Murphy is Guardian Australia’s political editor. I always find her political commentary enlightening, and it’s a pleasure to read this Quarterly Essay, where she does a terrific job of making sense of what happened at the May 2022 federal election, which ended a decade of Liberal–National Coalition government, ousted Scott Morrison from the prime ministership, replaced him with Anthony Albanese and an Australian Labor Party majority, and increased the cross benches significantly.

A good half of the essay is devoted to the Albanese story, in particular the way he developed from the ‘lone wolf’ who once said he was in the parliament to ‘fight Tories’, to the man who, having decided he wanted to win the prime ministership, became a great unifier and team leader. Albanese’s starring offscreen role as ALP heavyweight in Robin Anderson and Bob Connolly’s excellent 1996 doco, Rats in the Ranks, gets a passing mention, but the Albanese who emerges into the spotlight in this essay is not so much a heavyweight as a lightfooted dancer, always with a plan.

The essay also, as announced in the second part of its subtitle, describes how Climate 2000 provided resource to a number of independent candidates (the so-called Teals), and how their electoral success, along with that of the Greens, has changed the nature of Australian parliamentary politics.

Page 76* is part of a short section subtitled ‘Big Tents and Unifying Theories’. The section begins by explaining that Australia’s major political parties are ‘big-tent actors’. The ALP and LNP Coalition each embrace a wide range of perspectives but, unlike the major political parties in the USA, have tight party discipline: they ‘model the reality that deliberation and compromise can lead to progress’. The section goes on to ask how these parties will respond to ‘political disrupters’ like the Teals and the Greens, as well as Pauline Hanson and Clive Palmer’s parties, that tend of offer uncompromising positions (as I was drafting this I saw a Greens poster for the NSW election: ‘All Pokies out of Pubs and Clubs’). The section warns against making firm predictions on the basis of Grand Unifying Theories; it hopes that Peter Dutton’s opposition will aim to (re-)build a diverse electoral community rather than allow its extremist rump to call the shots; and it ends with a line from elected independent Zoë Daniels, not necessarily quoting Bob Dylan on purpose: ‘Something is happening here.’

Katharine Murphy has a terrific ability to explain complex issues in memorable language, and she doesn’t indulge in pseudo-objective ‘balance’. Here are some bits from this page:

Democratic parliaments are not iTunes or Spotify. Citizens can’t curate their own playlists. Parliaments cannot possibly reflect the will of every individual citizen. They model the art of the possible.
…
In the positive, disrupters mirror the gnawing hunger among engaged people for a more perfect democracy as a bulwark in uncertain and dangerous times. In the negative, the mirroring engages with voter grievance or alienation.
…
Not every minority parliament will function as cooperatively and productively as the Gillard parliament, because not everybody enters politics to get things done.
…
There is a school of thought that Coalition governments – particularly Abbott’s and Morrison’s – existed largely to stop Labor doing things rather than to do anything much themselves.

As usual with the Quarterly Essay, the correspondence in the following edition casts further light on the argument, some disagreements, some amplifications. The first response is from Christopher Pyne, whom Katharine Murphy describes as ‘another wily factional veteran’ and Albanese’s friend and rival. He is sceptical about any ‘new politics’ – and sees politics as still, and always, about winning and losing. Michael Cooney, among other things a speech writer for Julia Gillard, has interesting things to say, but I am gratified that he also notes Katharine Murphy’s gift with a telling phrase – he says she ‘saw the election in haiku’.

Perhaps the most interesting piece of correspondence is from Simon Jackman, one of the principal investigators of the Australian Election Study. This study has surveyed a representative cross section of the electorate after every federal election since 1987 and, Jackman writes, is ‘an authoritative source for assessing what is “new” about the new politics’. Mostly he cites data that validates Katharine Murphy’s analysis. The data especially puts a rocket under the notion that Scott Morrison’s unpopularity played a role, showing him to be the least popular PM or Opposition leader ever seen in AES data. The information about ‘new voters’ is also interesting: ‘Only about 1 in 4 voters under the age of forty report voting for the Coalition in 2022.’ [Someone on the NSW election commentary last night said 1 in 5 millennials do so – presumably a version of the same research finding.]

Katharine Murphy’s response to correspondents is gracious and generous. It ends with a postscript correcting a minor factual error. That postscript leaves the final word to Dr David Champion, the rheumatologist who attended Albanese’s mother: ‘Young Anthony was an inspiringly good son from my perspective.’

The essay isn’t hagiography, but you do come away from it with a deep respect for Anthony Albanese, and a sense that Katharine Murphy likes him.

* Currently when blogging about books I have a policy of taking a closer look at page 76, chosen for the arbitrary reason that it’s my age.

7 Comments

Posted in Books, Page 7x/47/7

Tagged , , , ,

Aly and Stephens, Uncivil Wars

Posted on 14 December 2022 | 3 comments

Waleed Aly & Scott Stephens, Uncivil Wars: How Contempt is Corroding Democracy (Quarterly Essay 87, 2022)
– plus correspondence in Quarterly Essay 88

Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens are co-hosts of the ABC radio show and podcast The Minefield, on which they set out to negotiate the moral and ethical dilemmas of modern life. Their unscripted chats don’t shy away from big words like ‘epistemic’ or ‘teleological’ and refer frequently to philosophers ancient and modern, with occasional insights from the Islamic tradition. There’s usually a guest who has expertise in the topic of the week. There’s banter, an occasional malapropism, and usually – the main source of pleasure for me as a listener – a sense that no one knows quite where the conversation will go. One of the recurring motifs is the importance of thoughtful, deliberative communication, of which the show is a fine example.

Of necessity, in this Quarterly Essay Aly and Stephens speak with one voice – no mutual demurs, no pricking of pomposities, no license to meander. It’s not as much fun as the podcast but, especially when read along with the correspondence in QE88, it’s a stimulating and challenging essay.

The essay begins with a description of much current public conversation:

It is now entirely common for each of the opposing sides of a vociferous debate to consider themselves shamed and silenced, unable to speak without being branded in some malevolent way.

(Page 1)

Their diagnosis is that people on all sides of hot-button topics see the others as acting in bad faith, as tools of oppression, or perhaps as deluded fools – and the debate descends into mutual contempt. It’s not the readiness to be outraged or the short fuse to anger, but contempt that puts an end to any useful dialogue.

The essay then falls into four sections. First, some moral philosophy, which proposes some definitions of contempt and describes recent defences of it as a moral virtue. Second, some history: contempt as the air we breathe as fostered when the great US press barons of the 19th century realised that their profits would grow if their newspapers stirred up emotions, of which contempt was a real winner. Capitalist commodification of emotion reached an extreme with social media, particularly with Twitter’s retweet button and Facebook’s like button, both of which make it possible to broadcast an opinion to the world without any mental effort. Third: how this plays out in politics. The essay distinguishes between ‘thin’ democracy – in which people get to vote and that’s pretty much it – and ‘thick’ democracy, ‘which imagines society as a more dynamic organism where people can have their preferences and interests changed by interactions with others’. This is familiar ground to The Minefield‘s listeners. The final section, titled ‘Democracy as Marriage’, is a call for us to be more attentive to each other, including those with whom we disagree, and perhaps especially those with whom we disagree passionately.

As well as drawing on a wonderfully broad range of cultural touchstones – from Godard’s movie Contempt to George Floyd’s brother Philonise, with Simone Weil and James Baldwin featuring prominently – the essay draws heavily on recent events in the USA, because of its global cultural dominance and because it has gone further down the contempt road and so shows what can happen.

This Quarterly Essay featured in a special edition of the podcast, which originated as a session at the 2022 Festival of Dangerous Ideas in Sydney. You can listen to it here.

I can’t have a closer look at page 75* as there are only 64 pages to the essay. On page 47 (chosen because I was born in 1947 – is that arbitrary enough for you?) the essay is engaging with the argument in favour of ‘upward’ contempt as a way of doing politics. Quoting US philosopher Amy Chua, it argues that ‘to aggregate and compare … the average earning capacity of white and non-white families’ and similar statistics may be useful but it overlooks differences among white people, particularly class:

Many working-class whites clearly felt alienated from the culture and institutions that surrounded them. Few people with any mainstream cultural or political power seemed to take that alienation seriously. It’s easy to imagine that working-class whites felt themselves to be objects of contempt. And in an environment where such emotion can be commodified and turned into profit, someone like Donald Trump was always liable to come along.

The politics of contempt is what enabled the rise of Donald Trump and Trumpism. This leads into the beginning of the most interesting section of the essay, four pages in which James Baldwin is invoked. His body of work, the essay asserts, ‘stands as a monument to the refusal of contempt. It is shot through with sensitivity to its danger and warnings of its self-sabotage.’

So that’s page 47.

Leaping ahead to the correspondence in QE 88: it kicks off with a long essay by African-Australian Nyadol Nyuon, which argues with lawyerly precision that Aly and Stephens have missed the main point by apparently assuming an unreal symmetry between social groups struggling against oppression and those who are enforcing it (those are my terms: she is much more specific than that). In particular, she challenges their reading of James Baldwin. It’s a powerful piece of writing, and anyone who reads the original essay ought to read it. And not only it but the seven other thoughtful and not entirely supportive correspondents. And Aly and Stephens’s final reply.

Taken together, this is an inspiring example of serious conversation about real things. People misconstrue each other, but its generally in good faith. There’s an occasional sarcastic gibe, perhaps some defensiveness (if Nyadol Nyuon went after me I’d be a lot more defensive than thee authors, who hold their ground but remain genuinely respectful), some interesting anecdotes that are tangential to the topic, maybe a little self-promotion. But it’s a conversation, rich, thoughtful and mutually attentive.

* Currently when blogging about books I take a closer look, arbitrarily, at page 75 – moving on to page 76 at my next birthday if the idea works well enough.

3 Comments

Posted in Books, Page 7x/47/7

Tagged , , , ,

Hugh White’s Sleepwalk to War

Posted on 11 September 2022 | 2 comments

Hugh White, Sleepwalk to War: Australia’s unthinking alliance with America (Quarterly Essay 86, 2022)
– plus correspondence in Quarterly Essay 87

The title of this Quarterly Essay says it all: Australia’s foreign policy has had us in lockstep with the USA, and we’re heading for an inevitable war with China if the USA continues on its current trajectory and we stay blindly following. The people making key policy decisions, the title implies and indeed the essay states explicitly, are not living in the real world.

Specifically, our governments talk and act as if the USA is an unchallengeable world power both generally and in our region. In reality, China’s GDP is now greater than that of the USA (one of many assertions challenged by correspondents in Nº 87); it is a nuclear power intent on establishing a sphere of influence in the India Pacific; the USA has no compelling reason to challenge that intention, and there’s no way it will go to war, let alone risk a nuclear war, to do so. Australia and the USA should stop pretending they will defend Taiwan should China decide to retake it – which it inevitably will do. We should be working out how reconcile ourselves to living within a Chinese sphere of influence in a multipolar world where the USA and China are only two of several great powers.

Hugh White presents his argument cogently, and when he is dealing with the absurd sabre-rattling of Peter Dutton and Scott Morrison, his thesis looks like sweet reason. Nancy Pelosi’s weirdly provocative visit to Taiwan happened after the essay and its follow-up correspondence were published, making it very timely indeed in retrospect.

As usual, I delayed reading this Quarterly Essay until the next one came out so that I could read it along with whatever responses the series editor (still Chris Feik) chooses to publish. Unusually this time, politicians criticised in the essay have a say. Not Scott Morrison or Peter Dutton – it’s hard to image either of them meeting argument with argument rather than bluster. But Malcolm Turnbull and Kevin Rudd turn up to defend their records. They and other correspondents take issue with White’s thesis just about as vigorously as possible within the bounds of civil discourse.

Former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull:

White has strayed into sweeping generalisations and, frankly, ‘alternative facts’ to embellish his argument. I was disappointed that a scholar of his standing would do so.
White’s description of Australian foreign policy is simply wrong

Former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd:

A skilled political operator, White adduces selective facts and little reason in reaching [his] conclusion, but happily smears as ‘unthinking’ anyone who challenges his word as self-appointed prophet of both the anti-American far left and the ‘never upset Beijing’ Rio Tinto far right.

Michael J. Green, formerly the senior Asia policy official on the National Security Council in the White House:

Kudos to Hugh for shaking things up as always. There is urgency, as he notes. There are also many big and hard decisions ahead. But the basic consensus behind current Australian and American grand strategy is founded on a more nuanced and realistic assessment of the international system and the relative balance of power than offered in the polemical pages of Sleepwalk to War.

Rory Medcalf, head of the National Security College at the Australian National University:

I’ve admired my ANU colleague Professor Hugh White for decades: his singular intellectual style, public profile (such that many mistakenly assume he speaks for Australia), unorthodox career, generous mentorship of next-generation thinkers, sharp good humour, even his zeal. He is a past master of the strategic analysis game. But he insists on playing it just one narrow way – his own, derived from his training in philosophy and winner-takes-all Oxford debating. And, sadly, his new Quarterly Essay maintains the cage.

Not all the correspondents take issue with the essay as sharply as those, but Rory Medcalf’s gibe about Oxford debating rings true when Hugh White emerges bloody but unbowed to reply to correspondents, barely acknowledging the many instances where he allegedly got the facts wrong.

In the end, the discussion hasn’t left me any wiser about Australia’s relationships with the USA and China. My evaluation of Dutton and Morrison’s provocations has been endorsed. My sense that things are complicated has been strengthened. My anxiety about the possibility of nuclear war in my lifetime remains on a low simmer. I’m glad there are people who can think about these issues and are taking about them. I hope cool and wise heads prevail on all sides.

2 Comments

Posted in Books

Tagged , , , , , ,

Sarah Krasnostein’s Not Waving, Drowning

Posted on 13 July 2022 | 2 comments

Sarah Krasnostein, Not Waving, Drowning: Mental illness and vulnerability in Australia (Quarterly Essay 85, 2022)
– plus correspondence in Quarterly Essay 86

Sarah Krasnostein doesn’t explain the title of this Quarterly Essay. It may be a straightforward inversion of the name of a Melbourne band, but I read it as referring to Stevie Smith’s most famous poem, ‘Not Waving but Drowning’, which begins:

Nobody heard him, the dead man,   
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought   
And not waving but drowning.

You can read the whole short poem at this link.

The essay centres around the harrowing stories of three young people whose behaviour no one could have mistaken for cheerful waving, but who received attention from public institutions that left them immeasurably worse off. It’s pretty much a catalogue of horrors, with some glimmering hope to be found in the Victorian government’s commitment to act on the recommendations of the recent Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System.

Krasnostein avoids defining what she means by mental illness. It’s a bit like what a US supreme court justice said about pornography: ‘I can’t define it but I know it when I see it.’ As well as diagnoses like schizophrenia or – predominantly – various personality disorders, her use of the term comes close to encompassing homelessness, addiction, racism, marginalisation, responses to climate change, and suicide, or even simply vulnerability to the prison and mental health systems. This imprecision may be a feature rather than a bug. The essay is concerned to discuss mental illness from wider perspectives than the purely clinical, and boundaries between it and other forms of oppression are in their nature fluid.

She speaks of the profoundly destructive and destabilising effect of colonisation on the minds of settlers as well as First Nations people. She relies on Erving Goffman’s theory of stigma. She draws on Jung and Freud, and on recent thinking about systems change. She goes into some detail about the interface of criminal law and mental illness diagnoses. And in the middle of it there is the terrible vision of young people’s lives being ruined.

It’s a powerful and timely essay, but I found much of Krasnostein’s argument hard to follow. For example, I didn’t understand the logic by which a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder meant that a person who burned down a lot of buildings wasn’t an arsonist (though I get that punitiveness isn’t a reasonable response). Elsewhere, in an apparent non sequitur, a section begins, ‘I am thinking what it means to remember,’ and goes on to talk about stigmatisation of marginalised groups. Or there’s a beautifully written paragraph about a Trumpian demonstrations in Melbourne that seems to be there because the demo happened while the essay was being written.

More than any other Quarterly Essay, I’m glad of Black Inc’s practice of including correspondence in the following issue. This correspondence helped me understand what the essay was saying.

There are responses from journalists, historians, a psychiatrist, a criminal defence lawyer, and people who have worked in prisons and mental health institutions. Several of them mention their own experience as clients of the mental health system, as Krasnostein does in the essay. Taken as a whole, along with Krasnostein’s generous response, they illuminate the essay beautifully and extend its reach. To finish, here’s a quote from Joo-Inn Chew whose bio tells us she ‘works in general practice and refugee health in Canberra’, that gets to the heart of the essay (I like the way Joo-In Chew writes of wounds, addictions and diagnoses rather than conditions or illnesses):

Behind each wound, each addiction, each diagnosis is a person and a story, and beyond that a web of cultural and economic power which shapes everything, from the start people get in life, to how they express distress and whether they seek help, to how they are treated by front-line services and social institutions. Not everyone knows what it is like to feel safe and free in Australia. Every one of us can take stock of where we are in the web, how we use the power we have and how we recognise the common humanity of people around us. We can normalise our own vulnerabilities and use our power well. I thank Sarah Krasnostein for an essay which invites us to do just that.

(QE 86, Sleepwalk to War, page 123)

2 Comments

Posted in Books

Tagged , ,

The Reckoning by Jess Hill

Posted on 25 March 2022 | 2 comments

Jess Hill, The Reckoning: How #MeToo is changing Australia (Quarterly Essay 84)
– plus correspondence in Quarterly Essay 85

Given the dominance of the 24-hour news cycle and a federal government that seems to expect us not to remember anything that happened before last Tuesday, we can be grateful to the Quarterly Essay team for bringing us a history of the #MeToo movement in Australia. Jess Hill, author of the monumental account of domestic abuse, See What You Made Me Do (my blog post at this link), was an obvious choice to write that history.

She opens with a brief account of Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s press conference in March 2021, at which he began by calling ‘sincerely’ for an end to mistreatment of women in Parliament House, and then quickly descended into veiled and unfounded accusations against a woman journalist who had exposed the things he was deploring. This is an emblematic moment: political spin, Hill says, has no power against the rage unleashed by #MeToo.

The history follows, and it’s more complex and interesting than most of us remember, with a regular interplay between gesture and substance pretty much as foreshadowed in that opening scene.

It begins with Tarana Burke, who started a movement – not a hashtag – called ‘me too.’ in the USA 2005. It was ‘an activist group promoting solidarity, healing, education and community’ among Black women who had been sexually assaulted or harassed. #MeToo the hashtag burst on the world twelve years later on 14 October 2017, when actor and activist Alyssa Milano tweeted: ‘If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted, write “me too” as a reply to this tweet.’ The response to the tweet, with the revelations about Harvey Weinstein as background, was explosive. Milano did recognise Burke’s earlier work, but Jess Hill tells us that the distinction between the two movements was obscured:

The cultural revolution triggered by #MeToo was, at least in its initial phase, not in line with Burke’s vision of healing and structural change: it was about rage and retribution.

(Page 10)

The essay reminds us that impetus had been building before the Weinstein case. It goes into some detail about cases ranging from the Boston Globe‘s revelations about child sex abuse in the Catholic Church (as in the movie Spotlight) in the early 2000s to the 2016 case of Chanel Miller, whose rapist received a two month sentence because the judge feared for his career prospects when her victim impact statement, published online, had made it vividly clear that he had damaged much more than career prospects for her. The election of Donald Trump after boasting about sexually assaulting women completed the tinder pile. No wonder #MeToo exploded in 2017 and, as Jess Hill says, ‘powerful men across the United States started dropping like flies’.

In Australia, ‘extraordinary energy and heat [was] generated in the first twenty-four hours of #MeToo’. Here a small number of high-profile predators, most prominently Don Burke, were exposed by painstaking work by journalists including Kate McClymont and Lorna Knowles. But the building momentum was savagely undermined when The Daily Telegraph went public with a complaint against an actor without seeking permission of the complainant. When the actor sued for defamation and won, thanks partly to Australia’s ‘monstrous’ defamation laws, but mainly to the unethical behaviour of the Daily Telegraph, #MeToo faltered.

In 2018, the #MeToo movement rolled on in many parts of the world. In Australia its main front became the organisation NOW Australia, with Tracy Spicer as ‘talking head of choice’. This fizzled out: not only did NOW Australia present as ‘glaringly white and middle class’ (the phrase is from Darug woman and writer Laura La Rosa), but it lacked grassroots consultation, and ‘was wedging a collectivist movement into the prism of corporate feminism’ (that’s Jess Hill’s phrasing). So in spite of the massive impact that #MeToo had, and continues to have, on individual lives, it stalled as an organised movement.

Worse, in Australia most of the women whose stories went public did not give their consent: Hill gives four examples in some detail. In each of these cases the revelation brought unwanted negative attention on the women, described in one case as ‘not only brutalising, but dehumanising’, with the result that they could easily be seen by other women as warnings not to come forward.

Just the same, it seemed that Malcolm Turnbull’s government was responding. In mid 2018, Minister for Women Kelly O’Dwyer, initiated a national enquiry into sexual harassment, headed by sex discrimination commissioner Kate Jenkins. Simon Birmingham, Minister for Education, was preparing to announce a taskforce to oversee how universities responded to complaints of sexual harassment and assault.

Then Scott Morrison became Prime Minister, and Dan Tehan became Minister for Education: the universities task force was shelved. The national enquiry went ahead, but its report, Respect@Work, delivered in March 2020, was shelved by the government. Hill’s discussion of the report ends:

Respect@Work found the safety laws did impose a duty on employers to prevent sexual harassment.
Clearly, this wasn’t enough. Why shouldn’t employers have a responsibility to protect their workers from it under the Sex Discrimination Act as well? That’s what Respect @Work is asking the government to legislate. It is simple – and it’s revolutionary.

(Page 79)

The essay traces the impact of #MeToo in the private sector, the finance services sector, and the legal profession. The latter was racked by The International Bar Association’s report, Us Too?, which named Oceania as the worst region in the world for bullying and sexual harassment. Then former High Court Judge Dyson Heydon was revealed as a serial sexual harasser of young female associates. Instead of speaking of him as a ‘bad apple’, Chief Justice Susan Kiefel did what would have been unlikely a couple of years earlier, and apologised to the complainants on behalf of the High Court.

The movement had a massive resurgence in early 2021 brought about by the rape allegations against Christian Porter (which, Hill is careful to note, he denies), Grace Tame’s time as Australian of the Year, and Brittany Higgins’s story of rape in Parliament House. It’s a masterly telling of all three stories, including the dedicated work of journalists including Nina Funnell, Louise Milligan and Samantha Maiden, and the inadequate-to-hostile response of Scott Morrison, his government, and his allies in the press.

A final section is titled ‘Men’. Hill asks, ‘Is there a backlash against #MeToo fomenting among young men?’ and offers some chilling evidence that it may be so, including the existence of ‘well-oiled grooming machines capitalising on algorithms and social media platforms to radicalise young men into hatred of women’.

She also cites men who are energetic supporters of #MeToo and do powerful educational work among young men. She offers an interesting account of the conditioning that turns ‘those vulnerable, loving little boys’ into perpetrators of sexual violence, abuse and harassment. She revisits some of the analysis in See What You Made Me Do, and acknowledges that her husband, psychotherapist David Hollier, helped in the writing of this chapter. I found it quite wonderful, not least in its discussion of ‘the Australian virtue of mateship’, which includes this:

The thing #MeToo demands we confront is that mateship isn’t just about loyalty: it is also about protection, impunity and, following its perpetration, the erasure of sexual violence.

(Page 114)

Given that sections of the media are currently making much of the ‘mean girls’ trope in federal politics, in a fairly transparent attempt to claim an equivalency with the allegations of sexual misbehaviour and alleged criminality elsewhere in our parliaments, this essay is extremely timely. There is no equivalency.

The correspondents in Quarterly Essay 85, Not Drowning, Waving by Sarah Krasnostein, mostly enlarge on elements of Jess Hill’s essay. Journalists Hannah Ryan and Gina Rushton’s short essay seems to be there mainly to point out that they broke a number of important news stories, and to lend their weight to Hill’s negative account of Tracy Spicer’s moment in the limelight. Amber Schultz, and separately Sara Dowse, pick up on the party-political dimension, easy to do given Hill’s account of the Morrison government’s failure to raise to the occasion. (Sara Dowse has a beautiful paragraph listing the gains women have made since the Whitlam years.) Kieren Pender, who has led the International Bar Association’s efforts to address sexual harassment in the legal profession, picks up on the essay’s implication that focusing on the big-name offenders has limited effectiveness:

In individual workplaces, and in civil and criminal law, clear accountability mechanisms exist for serious forms of sexual harassment (even if too many workplaces still wish to conceal rather than address incidents). But what of the grey areas – the sexual joke in the elevator, the possibly suggestive text from a boss to their staff member, the colleague leaning in for an unreciprocated kiss at after-work drinks? In these contexts, right and wrong are not always as clearly distinguished – subtle cues, power dynamics and subjective interpretation can be everything.
     It is in these contexts that the million Australian perpetrators can mainly be found – not committing Weinstein-esque behaviour, but making inappropriate comments, or being ‘too friendly’.

(Quarterly Essay 85, page 137)

Journalist and novelist Malcolm Knox speaks for many men when he says that his ‘instinctive response, in the face of white-hot female rage, is silence and submission’. He rejects that instinct, and joind Jess Hill’s implied challenge to us men to stop being too passive around ‘our Christian Porters’. Nareen Young, Darug woman and writer who is quoted in the essay, stresses the importance of the Respect@Work report, and writes that

there are so many issues we need to track and continue to fight for collectively. And that’s long after the mainstream media band moves on, or white corporate feminists who claim ‘the movement’ as their own, then gate-keep and co-opt it for their own ends (activism is collective, not part of anyone’s ‘brand’), lose interest.

(Quarterly Essay 85, page 144)

Uncharacteristically, there’s a response from a culture warrior. Janet Albrechtsen appreciates the ‘excellent timeline’ and ‘sensible analysis of the need to focus on the long game of embedding cultural change’. She says some stuff that leads Jess Hill in her reply to wonder if she read the whole essay.

And the correspondence ends where the essay began, with Scott Morrison. Some time this year we will see if women are sufficiently disgusted with this government to change their vote. ‘How many women? we’ll have the answer by the time the next Quarterly Essay is published.’

2 Comments

Posted in Books

Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,

Lech Blaine’s Top Blokes

Posted on 22 December 2021 | 5 comments

Lech Blaine, Top Blokes: The larrikin myth, class and power (Quarterly Essay 83, 2021)
– plus correspondence in Quarterly Essay 84

About the time this Quarterly Essay was published (13 September 2021), two other books appeared on Scott Morrison: The Accidental Prime Minister (15 September 2021), a biography by Annika Smethurst; and The Game (1 November 2021) by Sean Kelly. Given that Quarterly Essay 79, The End of Certainty (September 2020) by Katharine Murphy, was in part a portrait of Morrison, no one could say Scott Morrison has avoided scrutiny. Judith Brett has a brief, elegant piece in the November issue of Australian Book Review discussing all four publications. It features on the ABR podcast, at this link.

The main thrust of this essay, as I read it, is that whereas in earlier times the ALP and unions were powerful voices to defend and promote the rights of working class people, they no longer serve that function, and working class voices in Australia – the voices of people involved in direct production and basic service work – have been marginalised. Instead, members of the political class take on cultural signifiers of working-class culture: there’s symbolic representation rather than participation. Memorably, the essay describes Matt Canavan’s selfies in soot-covered face and yellow jacket as the class equivalent of blackface. The argument is important, and urgent in its implications for the resistance to climate change action among mine workers: people who have the most at stake in the short term are unlikely to be persuaded by high moral argument, or even arguments about intergenerational justice, from people whose livelihoods and lifestyles aren’t obviously at immediate risk.

That argument is graphically presented in a history of Australian parliamentary politics since Howard, interspersed with commentary from Blaine’s unreconstructed working-class friends and family on both sides of politics.

The issue is muddied by the whole larrikin thing. It’s one thing to describes Scott Morrison’s construction of an artificial persona that would appeal to a certain part of the electorate: ditching his love of Rugby Union and becoming a League fan, having his photo taken with a meat pie and a beer, etc. It’s quite another to say that this is larrikinism: on the contrary, the ‘daggy dad’, ‘ordinary bloke’ persona smacks of suburban conformity rather than nose-thumbing disruptiveness, which I would have thought was a defining feature of larrikinism.

I went back through the essay looking for Blaine’s definition of the term. I found this:

In the beginning, larrikins sinned on the streets of Australian cities. They lusted not after power but for moral condemnation from coppers. The capitalist class was trolled for sport. That didn’t mean the larrikin was impervious to the seduction of money and media spectacle. Life revolved around get-rich-quick schemes and dreams of widespread notoriety. ‘The term “larrikin” was used as a handy way for journalists and the authorities to label any apparently lowborn young person … who engaged in uncouth behaviour,’ wrote Melissa Ballanta in Larrikins: A History. ‘At all times larrikinism had a profound connection to unskilled labour.’

(page 13)

That seems clear enough, but once the essay moves away from definitions, the word seems to be applied to any person, usually a man, who is solidly working class, and possibly raised in poverty. The essay discusses a wide range of individuals as exemplifying aspects of the larrikin, real and fake, including: Melissa Lucashenko’s father, an itinerant Russian migrant who was ‘extremely violent’; John Willey, who grew up in an orphanage, fought in World War II, was a solid unionist and helped build the Railways Rugby League Club in Ipswich; Anthony Albanese, at least in his early life, who was raised in public housing by a single mother on a disability pension; Bruce, a FIFO electrician on a gas mine; movie-star and tax evader Paul Hogan; First Nations senator Lidia Thorpe; poet Omar Sakr; artist Abdul Abdullah; Indigenous All Stars captain Joel Thompson. The term becomes wide enough to embrace anyone who is anti-authoritarian: Grace Tame, Behrouz Boochani and Adam Goodes. That is to say, the word becomes close to meaningless.

The muddled larrikinism discussion aside, the essay offers important insights into the One-Nation-voting working people who feel themselves, with justice, to be ignored and silenced by the mainstream media and politicians.

Six of the eight correspondents in Quarterly Essay 84 – Jess Hill’s The Reckoning – are women.

Rachel Nolan, a former Queensland MP, notes that Lech Blaine identifies strongly with his family’s Ipswich connections, and she gives a brief, fascinating political history of the town.

Bri Lee amplifies the essay’s description of the way people with university degrees condescend to those who don’t, the way some people on the left believe in ‘the stupidity and wholesale inferiority of the right’.

Economist Alison Pennington does a sterling job of outlining the origins of larrikinism in the success of enormous struggles by working people, and having done some of the work that was missing from the essay, she gives credit where it’s due, calling it ‘one of the most engaging analyses I’ve read of Australian contemporary class relations’.

Of the men, literary critic Shannon Burns offers some fascinating reflections on ‘authenticity’, and somehow includes a description of Bogan Bingo, an entertainment in which white-collar workers have fun pretending to be ‘bogans’. [She] He draws attention to an element of larrikinism that is missing from Blaine’s account: ‘He knows how to have fun and invites you along for the ride. A larrikin is playful when she is serious and serious when she is playful.’

Historian David Hunt challenges the essay’s identification of solid unionists with larrikins – historically the two groups have loathed each other.

Lech Blaine’s response to the correspondence is brilliantly un-defensive – a textbook example of how to respond to disagreement and criticism. He writes:

Flicking somewhat flippantly between historical scenes was meant to convey the mess of Australian national identity, and the way we frequently use the same descriptions and categories for people who are spiritually and politically opposed. I definitely should have provided a more succinct definition of what it means to be a larrikin, then and now, especially in a positive sense.

(Quarterly Essay 84, page 106)

5 Comments

Posted in Books

Tagged , , , , , , ,