Tag Archives: Quarterly Essay

Waleed Aly on conservatism

Posted on 20 March 2010 | 1 comment

Waleed Aly, What’s Right: The future of conservatism in Australia (Quarterly Essay 37)

In the 1950s my parents subscribed to The Saturday Evening Post. I habitually started reading it from the back, because there were no cartoons in the front half. There are no cartoons at all in Quarterly Essay, but I usually start up the back here too, because that’s where I find responses to the previous issue, in this case 30 pages about Mungo MacCallum’s essay on Kevin Rudd, Australian Story. Katharine Murphy, national affairs correspondent for the Age, wins the Me Fail I Fly ‘I Wish I’d Said That’ Award for this:

The problem with Mungo is you can’t read anything he writes without feeling the need to agree with it on the spot, and wish you’d written it yourself. Reading Mungo is like resisting the pull of a great seducer.

That’s so much more grown-up and articulate than my own post-reading ‘Hmmm … But I enjoyed the ride.‘ Indeed the opening sentence of Mungo’s response to the correspondence does command assent:

The most interesting thing about all the correspondence my essay has provoked is the hugely different ways in which different people see Kevin Rudd.

[Editor Chris Feik and his Board apparently agree that the multiplicity of views on Kevin is interesting: QE 38 promises to give us yet another essay on the man, this time by David Marr.]

He then goes on to characterise each of the respondents: one ‘presents the standard view from the Right’, another is ‘a Labor insider’, a third speaks ‘from his position on the ideological Left’. This mode of analysis is fortuitously held up to a harsh light on page 1 of Waleed Aly’s essay, which of course I read after Mungo’s page 140. According to Aly, the terms Left and Right, ‘in spite of their ubiquity … are utterly meaningless and should be abandoned by anyone interested in having a substantial political conversation.’ The great seducer interrupted in flagrante?

Waleed Aly’s rejection of Left and Right as terms for political debate is not of course in response to Mungo MacCallum’s use of them. As he says:

For a long time I have been intrigued by the fact that I find myself in agreement with much conservative political philosophy, yet in consistent disagreement with politicians and commentators who call themselves conservatives.

The essay sets out to reclaim the ground currently occupied, one might say infested, though Waleed Ly is far too polite and reasonable to put it like that, by  neo-liberals and neo-conservatives. These politicians and commentators, he argues, have moved a long way from the conservative philosophy first articulated by Burke, and are in fact progressives in the sense that they are committed to moving towards an ideal world, albeit one from which most people who actually think of themselves as progressives would recoil in horror. I won’t try to summarise the argument. Much of it might be either glaringly obvious or obviously specious to anyone who has studied political philosophy, but to the general reader (that’s me!) it’s an education, and a pleasurable one.

Aly does a job in this essay that has needed doing for some time. He exposes the contradictions and fallacies in the utterances of the likes of John Howard, Tony Abbott, Nick Minchin or Kevin Andrews, but from a conservative perspective. He hoists them, as it were, on what they claim to be their own petard. ‘The conservative, ‘ he writes for example,

would certainly not run immigration at record levels (as the Howard government did) and then lecture its migrant population on what their values should be. That is especially true when it is done pursuant to a neo-liberal plan, where individuals are encouraged to use their mobility for entrepreneurial reasons, not cultural ones. The conservative takes the world as it is, not as she or he wishes it to be. And it is a world in which pluralisms in culture, politics and identity within a society are an inescapable and irreversible fact of life.

After taking his scalpel to the neo’s on multiculturalism, he moves on to the climate change ‘debate’, which he describes as ‘a fight to the political death’:

Of course, it is possible that climate-change activists are motivated more by their ideological commitments than by their trust in the scientific consensus. It is conceivable that staunch opponents of capitalism may leap on the opportunity climate change provides to argue for the destruction of the market’s political dominance. But it is also conceivable – and probably much more common – for climate-change believers to take their position based on trust in what they perceive to be conventional wisdom. Climate-change denialism on the part of non-scientists, by contrast, is always an ideological or an emotional process. The intellectual lengths required to sustain it are only feasible for those who have pre-existing reasons for wanting to deny it. That may be because its implications are devastating for one’s present livelihood – as might presently be true of certain farmers, or people working in high-emissions industries – in which case the response is probably emotional. Or it might be because it counters one’s deeply held views of the world, in which case the response is ideological.  … The simple fact is that neo-liberalism is incompatible with the politics of climate-change response. In order for neo-liberalism to be preserved, climate change must, in the first instance, be denied.

As you see, Waleed Aly is not a great seducer. He’s not out to win our assent by charm, or standover tactics, or appeals to team loyalty. On the contrary, he invites us to think with him.

It’s a quick read – just 105 pages. I recommend it.

Added on 30 March: Irfan Yusuf has an excellent review of this Quarterly Essay on New Matilda.

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Mungo on Kevin

Posted on 5 December 2009 | 1 comment

Mungo MacCallum, Australian Story: Kevin Rudd and the lucky country (Quarterly Essay issue 36, 2009)

Mungo MacCallum is now, according to the blurb of this Quarterly Essay, one of Australia’s most influential political journalists. He was probably already influential all those years ago when he was telling Nation Review readers how well Prime Minister Gough Whitlam filled a pair of swimming trunks, but now he is an elder. Mercifully, he is also still a bit of a smart Aleck.

There are no hints here about Kevin Rudd’s physical endowments – the essay’s main interest is in the nature of his appeal to voters. The essay quotes poetry, mainly bush verse, including a savage parody of ‘Clancy of the Overflow’:

He was poisoning the water when he chanced upon a slaughter
So he joined in patriotically to massacre and rape
And he sees the vision splendid of the native problem ended
and a land made safe for cattle from Tasmania to the Cape.

The essay takes the odd potshot at contrarian right-wing columnists. It produces some fabulous quotes, including for example a definition of a modern progressive as ‘a fella that stumbles forward every time somebody shoves him’. (Sadly there are no footnotes, so we often don’t know what wits are being quoted – I’m guessing Mungo himself did the Paterson parody.)

That is to say, there’s a lot to enjoy in this essay. It also has substance – of an airy sort. It deals with policy, that’s true, and Kevin Rudd’s largely successful response of the GFC, but mainly it argues that he taps into some deeply held myths about what it means to be Australian – egalitarianism, fairness, the larrikin–dutiful citizen dichotomy, that reluctant progressiveness, ‘fervent, if understated, nationalism’. ‘For all his nerdiness and prolixity,’ he concludes,

there is something very Australian about him, and the voters recognise it. In a totally unexpected way, Rudd has given them back their Lucky  Country – and this time not in a spirit of irony, but one of self-belief.

Hmmm … But I enjoyed the ride.

This issue also includes the 2009 Quarterly Essay Lecture, ‘Is Neo-Liberalism finished?’ a search for the meaning of what he calls the Great Recession by the chair of the editorial board, Robert Manne. The lecture isn’t as much fun as the title essay, covers some of the same ground, occasionally manages to be incomprehensible when explaining (yet again) how the Great Recession came about. Where MacCallum takes cheerfully bitter potshots, Manne eviscerates in earnest.

And then there’s correspondence about Noel Pearson’s Radical Hope. A number of the correspondents join in Pearson’s left-liberal bashing, and there’s a certain amount of jockeying for position from politicians and activists. Voices from the old Howard Government era talk of Pearson’s pre-eminence as an Aboriginal public voice on the national scene, without mentioning that the deliberate dismantling of ATSIC had destroyed any more organised and representative voice. Christine Nicholls, former principal of Lajamanu School in Yuendemu, is the only educationalist to write a substantial response, and she does a brilliant job of respectfully taking Pearson to task for his straw-man arguments against ideologically driven educationists. The only Aboriginal voice is that of Chris Sarra, who gently chides Pearson for dismissing elements of his own educational work without having ever visited it. Over all, the correspondence confirms that Pearson’s conversation is mainly with conservative white leaders, but it also shows him as eager to do more than simply pontificate as a lone voice.

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Audacity and education

Posted on 14 October 2009 | 3 comments

Noel Pearson, Radical Hope: Education and equality in Australia (Quarterly Essay Nº 35, Black Inc 2009)

qeradicalhopeOur household is the kind where people yell at the television. When Noel Pearson came on screen recently to talk about the subject of this essay, there was yelling. The aroma he acquired from cosying up to John w Howard in a previous era hasn’t yet dissipated, so them that yelled weren’t about to give him the benefit of the doubt when he seemed to be denying the effect of, say, foetal alcohol syndrome of school results. And Pearson’s regular attribution of a multitude of Aboriginal ills to what he calls the middle-class Left isn’t designed to win friends.

It’s harder, though not impossible, to yell at the printed page, and a sustained piece of writing stands a chance of being more carefully reasoned than a TV sound bite, so I approached this Quarterly Essay with cautious optimism. And indeed, there’s a lot of very good stuff in it. There’s quite a bit of deliberate provocation as well, such as:

Over the years I have often told people that there is a rough rule of thumb when it comes to examining the nostrums and prescriptions of the middle-class Left (black and white): whatever they say our people should do, we should look at approximately the opposite, because that will usually be the right thing to do.

I’ve always found it hard to read straw-man arguments, and surely that’s what this is. Coming to the essay pretty much ignorant of current educational debates, I am in no position to evaluate the detailed heart of its argument about what is to be done about Aboriginal inequality in education. I hope that beneath the occasional pugnacity, it plays a useful role. I know nothing, for instance, about Siegfried Engelmann’s Direct Instruction approach to education of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds, in which Pearson places great theoretical and practical store. Pearson portrays him as a lone, successful evidence-based educationalist crying in the wilderness of vested (middle-class Left) interests that constitutes the educational establishment. He may be right. How would I know? Yet Pearson’s account of the DI approach sounds awfully like the explicit and systematic approach to literacy of the National Literacy Strategy., which as far as I know is being assiduously promulgated, even prescribed, by that same educational establishment. It makes me wonder if the lone voice strategy might not be counter-productive, as well as a little disingenuous. As Pearson writes, on page 77:

Many debates about reality and its characterisation are relatively healthy and rational and we can readily agree that they should submit to scientific resolution. It is when interests are strong that irrationality and ideology come to hold an awesome sway, and science, even when it offers illumination, is gamely denied.

Pearson’s interests are strong, and it would be weird if they weren’t. His concern to transform the hideous circumstances facing Aboriginal people on Cape York and throughout Australia is palpable. This essay’s faults come at least in part from that passionate concern. It’s confrontational, demanding and sarcastic, as well as erudite, personal and engaged. While its main thrust is practical, it often broadens out in surprising ways. I love this, from the final paragraphs:

The Enlightenment was not and is not at its core a European illumination: it is a human illumination. Its origins in Europe should not blind us to its human meaning and implications. The Enlightenment forced the Europeans to change their  societies and cultures in fundamental ways. It forced societies and cultures beyond Europe  to make the same change. The Enlightenment never mandated deracination or ethnic or religious assimilation or cleansing – all societies that have made this change  have left space enough for religion and social and cultural diversity. […] Radical hope for the future of Aboriginal Australia … will require the bringing together of the Enlightenment and Aboriginal culture. This reconciliation is not of necessity assimilation: just ask the Jews.

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Me on Annabel on Malcolm

Posted on 3 July 2009 | 2 comments

What might have been a blog entry grew up to be a paid review.

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Guy Pearse re-visions the quarry

Posted on 31 March 2009 | 2 comments

This blog post is retrieved from my earlier blog, Family Life, first posted 31 March 2009. Judith Brett’s Quarterly Essay Nº 78 is in part an update of Guy Pearse’s Nº 33.

Guy Pearse, Quarry Vision: Coal, climate change and the end of the resources boom (Quarterly Essay Nº 33, 2009)

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This essay made me think of Marshal McLuhan’s famous piece about Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Descent into the Maelstrom’. In the Poe story, when a mariner’s boat is wrecked in a giant whirlpool, he manages to survive because he stops to observe the way the vortex works. The water spirals slowly swallow all objects, but some of them return to the surface. The mariner clings to one of these recurring objects and survives. McLuhan offers this as a model for how to meet the challenges of a rapidly changing and potentially destructive environment. In Quarry Vision, Guy Pearce doesn’t single out any obvious floaters, but he certainly takes a clear-eyed look into a maelstrom and, to muddle my metaphor beyond salvage, cuts through a world of spin to argue that clinging to coal is not going to save anyone.

I approached the essay expecting that my virtue in reading such a worthy piece would have to be its own sole reward – but in fact it’s a completely engaging essay, full of pleasures, if it’s possible to speak of something as frivolous as pleasure in such a dire context. The essay argues that we have been lied to, or at least deliberately misled, assiduously and at great expense, by representatives of the big carbon emitters and particularly the coal-miners and exporters.

Not one credible piece of economic research suggests that making deep cuts in emissions by 2050 would cause even a temporary recession, let alone ‘crash’ the economy, or ‘cut GDP’, or send energy prices spiralling, or cause whole industries to shut down or flee our shores. Every serious study of the costs finds that deep cuts would delay the trebling of the economy and doubling of real wages by a few years at most later this century. The same analysis finds that acting sooner generates about a quarter of a million jobs more than would delaying, and many of the steps that reduce our exposure to carbon prices save rather than cost money.

However, you’d know none of this from the apocalyptic language that dominates the political debate.

‘Policy,’ he says, and presents evidence, ‘is contaminated by patronage at every turn.’ The Garnaut Report was full of potential loopholes, carve-outs and escape clauses. The Green paper didn’t stop them up and the White Paper, which is what we’re up to now, continued in the same vein:

It was a surrender to the same forces in whose interest John Howard had governed, but with one important difference. The question of whether emission cuts would occur was now gone, because, unlike Howard, Rudd was agreeing to take on obligations commensurate with a 60 per cent reduction by mid-century. The policy agenda had shifted markedly. How deeply and quickly Australia should cut emissions was still contentious, but quantity and timing were no longer the central issues. The big questions now were to do with the quality and morality of Australia’s emission cuts: where the emissions were cut, who made the cuts, how the cost of the cuts was apportioned, and whether the answers to these questions would be made with the short- or long-term interest of the nation in mind.

The answers that Pearse comes up with are dispiriting. He argues in the end for the ‘unthinkable’ proposition that Australia should phase out coal exports over the next couple of decades. If we were to do that, we would be playing an authentic leading role in the ‘Climate Change War’, on the side of humanity, rather than being a significant player on the other side as we now are and will continue to be under current policies.

It’s hard to believe that an essay that cuts through the bull and obfuscation as clearly as this will not have a powerful effect on the course of events. I’ve written to my local member and to the Prime Minister. I think we can expect a huge increase in the vote for the Greens at the next Federal election.

A footnote: Quarterly Essays are edited by Chris Feik, who does a brilliant job. Like many if not most good editors he renders himself almost invisible. I consider him (I’ve just gone Internet hunting and seen that he’s male, and was or still is ‘a young academic’) one of the unsung heroes of our time.

Posted: Tue – March 31, 2009 at 04:28 PM

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Quarterly Essays

Posted on 2 October 2005 | Leave a comment

[This post first appeared on my old blog on 2 October 2005. I’m making it public in this one in September 2021 because I want to link to it.]

John Hirst, ‘Kangaroo Court’: Family Law in Australia‘ (Quarterly Essay 17)
Gail Bell, The Worried Well: The Depression Epidemic and the Medicalisation of our Sorrows (Quarterly Essay 18)
Judith Brett, Relaxed & Comfortable: The Liberal Party’s Australia (Quarterly Essay 19)

Let me sing the praises of the Quarterly Essay. Published by Black Inc in Melbourne, it’s a series of substantial papers on matters of public interest, generally thoughtful, often polemical and, of the ones I’ve read, always readable. The last three have been historian John Hirst on the Family Law Court, writer and pharmacist Gail Bell on depression and pharmaceuticals, and political historian Judith Brett on the political success of John Howard and the Liberal Party. In a time when public discussion so often consists of sound bites or prolonged slanging matches (culture wars, history wars, poetry wars, not to mention the Latham diaries and the recent political and nearly personal destruction of John Brogden), this series stands out like a beacon.

Not only does each issue present a sustained piece of argument, it also includes correspondence on previous issues. So there have been replies from the people most fiercely criticised by John Hirst, as well as thoughtful additions and contextualisations of his argument; and responses to Gail Bell’s piece that range from defences of Big Pharma to two pieces that argue she didn’t go far enough in her critique.

The Art Student reckons that Judith Brett’s essay is the best thing she’s ever read about Australian political history, and that it should be made into a film or a comic book so as to have the widest possible readership. And QE20, due out in December, can reasonably be expected to have the very best that anyone can come up with by way of rebuttal, expansion, derision. I don’t suppose we’ll hear from John Howard himself, but I’m confident there’ll be something other than the lurid rantings of columnists like Andrew Bolt or Miranda Divine.

It gives one hope for something like a civil society.

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