Inside Story

Spiky questions remain for AUKUS proponents

There is an alternative, but the debate looks like taking some time to shift

Sam Roggeveen 19 March 2024 1610 words

“Deterrence”? British defence secretary Grant Shapps (left) and Australia’s defence minister Richard Marles at Rolls Royce’s nuclear reactor manufacturing site in Derby in November. Dominic Lipinski/PA Wire/Alamy


The debate about AUKUS — the military technology-sharing agreement best known for its promise to supply eight nuclear-powered submarines for Australia’s navy, announced in September 2021 by prime minister Scott Morrison — was initially conducted mostly among defence boffins. But in March 2023 Morrison’s successor, Anthony Albanese, went to San Diego to announce the “optimal pathway” for the deal.

Labor had long endorsed AUKUS, but now a Labor PM was standing beside US president Joe Biden and British prime minister Rishi Sunak to announce how it would be implemented. The political symbolism was sharp; what had previously been endorsed by Labor was now being wholeheartedly embraced.

Soon after, former prime minister Paul Keating appeared at the National Press Club to drop a rhetorical depth charge. He called the Albanese government’s embrace of AUKUS Labor’s “the worst international decision” since Billy Hughes tried to introduce conscription. Suddenly the debate opened up, and since then doubts and criticisms of AUKUS — among them my book The Echidna Strategy — have barely let up. As former Foreign Affairs and Trade secretary Peter Varghese put it during Adelaide Writer’s Week in February, the anti-AUKUS argument is now reasonably complex and sophisticated while the pro-AUKUS position rarely rises above platitudes.

In the two-and-a-half years since the deal was announced, we have not once heard — either from the Morrison government or its successor — what the order for eight nuclear-powered submarines is actually designed to achieve. With neither a prime minister nor a senior minister providing any kind of strategic rationale for the deal, the case for AUKUS has not advanced beyond clichés and truisms about “deterrence.” Apart from pacifists, everyone is in favour of deterrence; the debate is solely about how we deter, and on this point the pro-AUKUS side has barely engaged.

Still, for all the strength of AUKUS scepticism, it seems unlikely to have any perceptible impact on government policy. Foremost among the reasons is the fact that major-party support for AUKUS remains steadfast: neither Labor nor the Coalition is likely to move away from AUKUS because they have nothing to gain by doing so.

AUKUS was conceived by a Liberal-led government, and the Liberal Party typically feels that national security is its electoral strong suit. So, barring a major reversal in the practical implementation of AUKUS (more on that in a moment), it is difficult to see what they could gain by revising what they regard as a signature policy initiative. Former prime minister Scott Morrison recently said that history would record AUKUS as the best decision his government made.

Of course, it’s not unprecedented for subsequent leaders to walk away from policy stances championed by their predecessor. But Peter Dutton was defence minister when AUKUS was conceived so he is closely associated with the policy and will stand by it.

Is Labor support for AUKUS more fragile? A heated debate took place at the party’s national conference in September last year, but ultimately a resolution backing the initiative passed with a comfortable majority. Former Labor leader Kim Beazley was moved to describe AUKUS as a “core Labor value,” evoking a sense of grassroots support and deep historical resonance. Beazley called the conference vote “the most significant move in the party since the 1963 Labor Federal Conference,” which dealt with the establishment of the North West Cape naval communications station.

But there is reason to doubt the sincerity of Labor’s conversion. Before AUKUS, no senior Labor figure had ever campaigned for nuclear-powered submarines. Indeed, support for such subs was a fringe position even in the Australian strategic debate. Then, in September 2021, the Morrison government gave the Labor opposition less than a day’s notice before announcing AUKUS. Labor, fearing a khaki election, instantly threw its support behind the initiative.

By any measure, it was a lightning-fast conversion on a huge policy question. And it seemed to be based largely on political calculation rather than deep principle or historical affiliation. Beazley’s “core Labor value” declaration looked like an attempt at what American political strategists call “astroturfing” — political elites creating an artificial semblance of grassroot activity.

But even assuming support for AUKUS inside the Labor caucus is a mile wide and an inch deep, does that matter for the future of the project? Perhaps less than we might think. Major political questions are never decided purely on principle or on the careful weighing of policy alternatives divorced from party-political considerations. Politicians can change their minds, but they change them faster if arguments align with incentives. At present, that’s simply not the case.

Prime Minister Albanese has spoken openly about his plans to entrench Labor in office for several terms to guarantee its reforms can’t be undone (as was the carbon price) by the Liberals. To win successive elections, he and his senior ministers appear to believe that Labor should never give Australian voters reason to doubt its national security credentials. And the cost of providing that reassurance is, for the moment, manageable.

AUKUS spending is not expected to peak for some years. Of a total project cost of between A$268 billion and A$368 billion, the government expects to spend A$58 billion over the next decade, but with less than a quarter of that sum due in the first five years. In budgetary terms, therefore, the decision is easy. Why offer the opposition a stick with which to beat the government at the next election when avoiding that fate costs the government so little?

Labor doesn’t even have an incentive to encourage debate about the deal by having the prime minister or defence minister give a major address. Policy wonks want such a debate, but who gains? What powerful political force would be quieted by a prime ministerial statement? Critics of AUKUS are unlikely to be satisfied; supporters just want to see the project go ahead.

This reflects two things about the structure of Australian politics: first, the number of people who care about defence policy is tiny, and so government doesn’t feel an urgent need to be accountable; second, the number of key decision-makers in defence and foreign policy can be counted on one hand. Unlike in the United States, no alternative base of power exists in the legislature to encourage accountability.

But political incentives change, and this project will rise or fall on its practicalities. Once a steady drip of news reports about cost overruns and program delays begins, internal critics will emerge. (The latest worry concerns the capacity of US shipyards to fill Australia’s order while keeping the US navy itself supplied with new subs.) There are AUKUS sceptics in the parliamentary Labor Party, but scepticism will need to turn to disaffection and resentment. When ministers and parliamentary secretaries see their budgets sliced while AUKUS is fed, internal grumbling may begin.

What else could crack Labor’s AUKUS consensus? The most immediate threat, if he takes office next year, will be Donald Trump. It’s unlikely Trump even knows what AUKUS is right now, but if he’s confronted with its existence he may reel. Australians remember his blistering response when prime minister Malcolm Turnbull described to him a refugee resettlement agreement that his administration had inherited from Barack Obama. It was a testament to Turnbull’s deft handling of the call that the president didn’t renege on what he described as “the worst deal ever.” Goodness knows what he will make of an agreement that makes the US navy smaller so a foreign navy can grow larger.

Presently, Australia is responding to the prospect of a second Trump term in much the same way as America’s other allies — lots of fretting and crossed fingers but precious little policy change. The assumption appears to be that if Trump wins, allies are in for another rough four years before the situation returns to “normal,” much as it did when Biden replaced Trump.

That interpretation requires a good deal of optimism and a peculiar reading of recent history, yet it remains the prevailing view. It is remarkable to recall that Australia proposed AUKUS to the Biden administration just a few months after the 6 January assault on the US Capitol. Our government was evidently so convinced that this outrage, and the president who had provoked it, were aberrant rather than an expression of enduring change that they almost immediately proposed to his successor the most dramatic upgrade to the ANZUS alliance since it was signed in 1951.


While media and political attention is focused on whether AUKUS can be delivered, in the background lurks a strategic question: even if we can get AUKUS done, is it even a good idea? That’s the issue The Echidna Strategy focused on. Australia’s biggest strategic asset is distance — Beijing is closer to Berlin than it is to Sydney — yet the AUKUS submarine project is effectively an attempt to compress that distance when we should be exploiting it. If China ever wants to project military force against Australia, let it traverse the vast oceans that separate us. There is no pressing reason for Australia to project military power to China’s near seas and onto its landmass.

Such arguments have no purchase on either major party right now, but the real job of books like mine is to open the “Overton window” — to make the unthinkable thinkable. When AUKUS begins to sink under the weight of its misdirected ambition, political leaders will look for new ideas. An alternative defence strategy exists that is prudent and affordable, not weighted with ideological baggage from either extreme, and based on realistic assumptions about the future of Chinese and American power in our region. •

Virtual anxiety

Jonathan Haidt probes the causes of young people’s mental distress with refreshing humility

Nick Haslam Books 18 March 2024 2089 words

“Haidt marshals high-quality evidence for the decline in young people’s wellbeing over the past decade.” Heiko119/iStockphoto


It’s now common knowledge that we are in the grip of a mental health crisis. Stories about rising rates of diagnosis, surging demand for treatment and straining clinical services abound. It is hard to avoid feeling that the psychological state of the nation is grim and getting grimmer.

The truth of the matter is more nuanced. The National Study of Mental Health and Wellbeing, carried out between 2020 and 2022 by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, tells us that 22 per cent of Australians had a mental disorder in the previous twelve months and 43 per cent within their lifetime. Large numbers, no doubt, but no larger than the 20 per cent and 45 per cent figures obtained when the study was conducted in 2007.

But hidden in these aggregated figures is a worrying trend. Among young people aged sixteen to twenty-four, the twelve-month prevalence of mental disorder rose from 26 per cent to 39 per cent, and that increase was especially steep for young women, up from 30 per cent to 46 per cent. When half of this group has a diagnosable mental illness — an underestimate, because the study only counts a subset of the most prevalent conditions — something is clearly very wrong.

A similar story of age- and gender-biased deterioration is told by the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey. When an index of mental health is tracked across iterations of the survey from 2001 to 2021, older and middle-aged adults hold relatively steady but people aged fifteen to thirty-four, and especially young women, show a relentless decline beginning around 2014. The pandemic, the usual all-purpose explanation for recent social trends, can’t be held responsible for a rise in psychiatric misery that preceded it by several years, so what can?

Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation offers a provocative but compelling answer to this question. Haidt, an American social psychologist known for influential books on well-being (The Happiness Hypothesis), moral psychology and political polarisation (The Righteous Mind) and upheavals on US college campuses (The Coddling of the American Mind, written with Greg Lukianoff), argues that some of the usual explanatory suspects are innocent. They don’t account for why declining mental health disproportionately affects young women, why it is occurring now or why the trendline started to dive in the early 2010s after a period of stability.

The prospect of ecological catastrophe, for example, weighs most heavily on younger people but every generation has experienced existential threats. Wars, natural disasters, and economic crises are conspicuous reasons for distress and despair, but world events have always been terrible. It is not obvious why they should disproportionately make young women anxious and depressed while leaving older and maler people unaffected. The stigma of mental illness may have declined so that people have become more willing to acknowledge it, but increases in the prevalence of mental ill-health among young people are not confined to subjective reports but also found in rates of hospitalisation and suicide.

The chief culprit, Haidt proposes, is technological. Smartphones and social media have rewired young minds to an unprecedented degree, replacing “play-based childhood” with “phone-based childhood.” Portable devices with addictive apps and algorithms engineered to harvest attention and expose children to damaging content have wrought havoc on young people’s mental health. They have done so in ways that are gendered and most severely affect generation Z. Born after 1995, these young people are the first to have gone through puberty in the virtual world.

Haidt marshals high-quality evidence for the decline in young people’s wellbeing over the past decade. Graph upon graph show inflection points in the early 2010s when mental health and related phenomena such as feelings of social connection or meaning in life start to trend downward. These trends are not limited to the United States but occur more or less in lockstep around the Western world. Their timing indicates that it is not the internet or social networking sites themselves that are damaging, but the transformation that resulted from the advent of smartphones, increased interactivity, image posting, likes chasing, algorithmic feeds, front-facing cameras and the proliferation of apps engaged in a race to the bottom to ensnare new users.

Haidt argues that the near-universal use of smartphones in children and especially pre-teens is driving the increase in mental health problems among young people. Coupled with over-protective parenting around physical risks in the real world has been an under-protection around virtual risks that leaves children with near-unfettered access to age-inappropriate sites. Like Big Tobacco, the developers of social media platforms have designed them to be maximally addictive, have known about the harms likely to result, have made bad faith denials of that knowledge, and have dragged their heels when it comes to mitigating known risks that would have commercial consequences.

There are many reasons why phone-based childhood has damaging effects. It facilitates social comparisons around appearance and popularity, enables bullying and exclusion, exposes young children to adult-focused material, and serves individualized content that exploits their vulnerabilities. It fragments attention and disrupts sleep, with implications for schooling as much as for mental health. Smartphones also function as “experience blockers,” reducing unstructured time with friends and the opportunities for developing skills in synchronous social interaction, conflict resolution and everyday independence.

Haidt is emphatic that the problem of phone-based childhood is not just the direct harms it brings but also the opportunity costs: the time not spent acquiring real-world capabilities and connections. Added to a prevailing culture of safetyism that attempts to eradicate risk and prescribes structured activity at the expense of free play and exploration, the outcome is a generation increasingly on the back foot, worried about what could go wrong and feeling ill-equipped to deal with it. Well-documented developmental delays in a range of independent and risky behaviours are one consequence, and the rise of anxiety is another.

When many children and adolescents report that they are almost constantly on their phones we should therefore not be surprised that they feel disconnected, lonely, exhausted, inattentive and overwhelmed. Haidt argues that many of these emotional and social effects are common to young people as a group, but some are gendered. Girls are more likely to be entrapped by image-focused networking sites that promote perfectionist norms, decrease their satisfaction with their bodies, and expose them to bullying, trolling and unwanted attention from older men. Boys are more often drawn into videogames and pornography, which foster social detachment, pessimism and a sense of meaninglessness, sometimes combined with bitter misogyny.

Haidt reminds us not to think of children as miniature adults, but as works in progress whose brains are malleable and developmentally primed for cultural learning. “Rewiring” may be an overstatement — brains never set like plaster and cultural learning continues through life — but the preteen years are a sensitive period for figuring out who and what to look up to, a bias easily hijacked by influencers and algorithm-driven video feeds. Older adults can be moralistic about adolescents who won’t disengage from their phones, but when those phones are where life happens, and when the brain’s executive functions are only half-formed, we should understand why shiny rectangles of metal and glass become prosthetic.


What to do? Haidt has a range of prescriptions for parents, schools, tech firms and governments. Parents should band together to encourage free play, promote real-world and nature-based activities that build a sense of competence and community, limit screen time for younger children, use parental controls, and delay the opening of social media accounts until age sixteen. Schools should ban phones for the entirety of the school day, lengthen recess, encourage unstructured play, renormalise childhood independence and push back against helicopter parenting. There is a social justice imperative here, Haidt observes, as smartphone use seems to disproportionately affect the academic performance of low-income students.

Responsibility for intervening can’t be left to individuals and local institutions alone. Governments and tech firms must recognise their duty of care and come to see the current state of affairs as a public health issue, much like tobacco, seat belts, sun exposure or leaded petrol. Tech firms must get serious about age verification and increasing the age of “internet adulthood” at which young people can make contracts with corporations hell-bent on extracting their time and attention. Governments can legislate these requirements, design more child-friendly public spaces, and remove penalties for healthy forms of child autonomy such as going to a playground without a parent, currently criminalised in the United States as “neglect.”

The Anxious Generation is a passionate book, coming from a place of deep concern, but most of it is written with the cool intonation of social science. The work is accessible and clearly intended for a wide readership, each chapter ending with a bulleted summary of key points. There is a refreshing humility about the empirical claims, which Haidt accepts can be challenged and may sometimes turn out to be wrong, referring the reader on to a website where updates on the state of the evidence will appear.

The part social media use plays in causing mental ill-health is in dispute, for example, although the evidence that heavy use is correlated with it is not. Although Haidt offers up studies that support the causal interpretation he acknowledges that where human behaviour is concerned nothing is straightforward. Nevertheless, he is justified is arguing that his “Great Rewiring” hypothesis is now the leading account of the origins of the youth mental health crisis. No other contender appears capable of explaining why things seemed to start going wrong around the globe somewhere between 2010 and 2015.

Critics of The Anxious Generation are likely to argue that Haidt’s hypothesis is simplistic or that it amounts to a moral panic. Both charges would be unfair. A single explanatory factor rarely accounts for something as complex as a major social trend, of course, but identifying a dominant cause has the pragmatic benefit of prioritising interventions. If phone-based childhood is the problem then we have a clear target for possible solutions.

As explanations go, Haidt’s isn’t quite as simple as it might seem in any case. The advent of smartphones and all-consuming social media may take centre stage, but earlier cultural shifts that amplified the sense of risk and promote over-protection set the scene and compounded young people’s vulnerability. Haidt’s account of the elements of smartphone use that are most damaging is also highly specified rather than a wholesale rejection of the virtual world.

The mental health field often extols the complexity of its subject matter, which sits at the jumbled intersection of mind, brain and culture, but that recognition can hamper the search for agreed interventions. The usual calls to boost clinical services are understandable, but solutions that address individual distress in the present fail to tackle the collective, institutional and developmental sources of the problem.

Some proposed solutions, such as efforts to build online social connections, may be ineffective because they fail to foster the embodied, real-world connections that matter. Other supposedly compassionate responses, such as accommodating student anxiety with diluted academic requirements and on-demand extensions, may make anxiety worse by enabling and rewarding avoidance. Haidt arguably overlooks how much mental ill-health among young people is being inadvertently made worse by well-meaning attempts to accommodate it and by backfiring efforts to boost awareness and illness-based identities.

The charge of moral panic is equally problematic and doesn’t stick for three reasons. First, evidence for the harmful consequences of phone-based childhood is now documented in a way that past worries about new technologies were not. Second, Haidt’s proposal focuses on the welfare of young people rather than social decay. Although he argues that phone-based life can cause a form of spiritual degradation, his critique is primarily expressed in the register of health rather than morality. Third, although Haidt articulates a significant threat, with the partial exception of social media companies he is not in the business of lashing villains so much as promoting positive, collective responses and a sense of urgency.

The youth mental health crisis is real, and it shows no signs of abating. The human cost is enormous. If rates of mental illness among Australians aged sixteen to twenty-four had remained steady since 2007, around 350,000 fewer young Australians would be experiencing one this year. The Anxious Generation is vital reading for anyone who wants a sense of the scale of the problem and a clear-eyed vision of what it will take to tackle it. •

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness
By Jonathan Haidt | Penguin | $36.99| 400 pages

Which way will independent voters jump?

The real issues in the US presidential race have been swamped by the big news

Lesley Russell Colorado 15 March 2024 1681 words

Long-distance runner: Joe Biden arrives in Philadelphia from a campaign trip to Atlanta on Saturday. Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP Photo


Months ahead of the parties’ national conventions, the US presidential campaign is already in full swing. Joe Biden and Donald Trump have each secured enough delegates to be sure of their party’s nomination. Trump has been in full campaign mode for months, largely as an offset to his legal woes; Biden’s State of the Union oration was essentially his first 2024 campaign speech.

But behind the hyperbolic headlines — “Trump Racks Up Massive Wins in Super Tuesday GOP Races,” “How Trump Steamrolled His Way to the GOP Nomination” or “How a Fighting Biden Took on the State of the Union” — are the many twists and turns that will determine the campaign’s eight-month trajectory and its outcome in November.

The only thing the two putative candidates agree on is the significance and consequences of this year’s vote. Trump says, rightly for once, that the 2024 election will be the “single most important day in the history of our country.” Biden says the election is “all about whether America’s democracy will survive.”

In the days since Biden’s State of the Union speech, duelling campaigns in Georgia and other swing states have offered glimpses of the two candidates’ strategies for courting an electorate less than enthused by another Biden–Trump showdown. It’s clear that this re-run of the 2020 faceoff will test the limits of campaign financing and political decorum.

The endgame is the pattern of voting in the general election — and, more particularly, in the swing states like Georgia, Michigan, Arizona, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Using polling to make forecasts is complicated by the fact that the winner is the candidate who racks up the most electoral college votes, not the most votes.

Polls offer little in the way of accurate insight at this point in the election cycle. But as their current base of support stands, neither Trump nor Biden can win. The polling averages from FiveThirtyEight and 270toWin have them neck and neck, with their favourability ratings languishing in the mid-fifties.

The votes that will make the difference must be won from independent voters and those party voters who are not strongly committed to either Trump or Biden. Here, despite his age and the general lack of enthusiasm for a second term, Biden seems to have the edge. But he faces problems with some segments of the population: the Democrats’ longstanding advantage with Black, Latino and Asian American voters has shrunk to its lowest point in more than sixty years; his administration’s failure to end the Israel–Gaza conflict has upset young voters and especially Arab Americans and Muslims; and many young people are simply lukewarm about Biden. Nevertheless, the president has consistently gained more than 90 per cent of the Democratic vote in the primaries to date, and even in Michigan, where Gaza war sentiment led many to vote “uncommitted,” he scored more than 80 per cent.

Trump’s base is more galvanised, more rusted on, and smaller. His party’s “Never Trump” contingent remains strong, as seen by the support Haley attracted. On Super Tuesday she received more than two million votes across fifteen states. She pulled 37 per cent of the Republican vote in Massachusetts, 33 per cent in Colorado, 29 per cent in Minnesota, and a surprise victory in Vermont. A week later, after she suspended her campaign, she drew more than 77,000 votes in Georgia (a state Trump lost to Biden in 2020 by fewer than 12,000 votes).

What is rarely pointed out is that Republican state primaries are increasingly a winner-take-all proposition for the convention delegates (a situation cleverly engineered by Trump campaign staff). On Super Tuesday Trump reaped 93 per cent of Republican delegates while winning only around 70 per cent of the vote.

Haley’s continuing support shows that Trump hasn’t been able to defuse his long-term problems with suburban voters (especially women), moderates and independents. These are the voters who cost him a second term in 2020 and could potentially cost him again in 2024.

A key issue for the Trump campaign is where the Republicans who voted for Haley will go in November. Quinnipiac University polling found that 37 per cent of Haley voters would vote for Biden and 12 per cent would stay home. Emerson College polling found 63 per cent of Haley primary voters would vote for Biden in the general election with 10 per cent undecided. Some exit polls have delivered even higher numbers of voters reluctant to commit to Trump.

Trump, who has derided Haley using sexist and racist language, has shown little interest in reaching out to her voters. In January he seemed to reject them outright, declaring that anyone who made a donation to Haley “will be permanently barred from the MAGA camp. We don’t want them and will not accept them.” No surprise then that many of her supporters wonder whether they still have a place in the Republican Party, a perception that will only deepen as Trump, his campaign and his family take control of the Republican National Committee.

Trump’s efforts to appeal to independents have been desultory at best; he seems incapable of moving beyond the rhetoric of stolen elections, woke liberals, the deep state, threats from illegal immigrants and asylum seekers, and his own perceived victimisation. His speeches offer little more than a dark vision for his second term. His embrace of Russian president Vladimir Putin, Hungarian president Viktor Orbán and other authoritarians, his suggestion that he was open to making cuts to Social Security and Medicare, and the persistent efforts of conservative Republicans to undermine women’s reproductive rights won’t win over these independents.

This inability to broaden his support is the biggest threat to Trump’s efforts to reclaim the presidency. But that doesn’t necessarily mean Biden will have an easier time sweeping up the independents and undecideds. Will those concerned about the Israel–Gaza crisis who opted for “uncommitted” in the primaries vote for Biden in the general election, or will they simply stay home? (Given Trump’s vilification of Muslims they are unlikely to vote for him.) That will largely depend on what happens in Gaza between now and November. And can Biden and the Democrats reverse their declining support among minority groups and young voters?

The changing demographics of the United States has seen a decline in the White, non-college educated voters who have been the mainstay of the Trump Republican Party, an increase in politically active young voters, many of whom don’t see either party as dealing with the issues that matter to them, and an increase in racial and ethnic diversity at a time when race is a central political issue.

The Pew Research Center has reported that Biden received more 90 per cent of the Black vote in 2020 while Trump received just 8 per cent. But this year these voters are frustrated with Biden over a range of issues, including the lack of progress on racial justice and the economic impact of soaring inflation.

Latino voters, who make up some 15 per cent of the electorate, are a heterogeneous group politically, with divergent opinions on issues like immigration. A recent poll from the New York Times and Siena College shows 46 per cent of Latino voters supporting Trump and 40 per cent supporting Biden (albeit with a large margin of error).

Recently Trump has touted his support among the Black community, though not always in flattering terms. He does have a growing contingent of Black hip-hop artists among his vocal supporters and most recently resorted to using AI-generated pictures to build his credentials with the African-American community. But there’s little evidence of a major shift in support; a December poll showed only 25 per cent of Black adults had a favourable view of Trump.

Jaime Harrison, the African American chair of the Democratic National Committee, has accused Republicans of promoting “fairy tales about their plan to win over Black voters.” He made particular note of the fact that Trump “pals around with white supremacists.” Just days after the Trump campaign began its overhaul of the Republican National Committee came the announcement that the party is closing all of the community centres it established for minority outreach in California, New York, North Carolina and Texas.


Ideology aside, the issues that will drive voters to the polling booths in November are common to all Americans: the economy and its impact on family budgets, healthcare costs, immigration, gun control and abortion. America’s role in supporting Ukraine and as a potential peacemaker in Gaza will also be important. These issues often play out very differently for Democrats and Trump Republicans: abortion and reproductive rights, immigration policies and gun control are classic examples. Perceptions of other issues, including the economy, interest rates and the outcomes of Biden’s national security and foreign policy efforts, will change — perhaps dramatically — between now and voting day.

For many Trump supporters, policies (or lack thereof) are of little consequence; like Trump, they are not interested in a united country or a bipartisan approach to legislation. They share Trump’s story, described by Biden in his State of the Union speech as one of resentment, revenge and retribution, and, shockingly, many of them embrace his authoritarianism. As one supporter posted on social media, “I’m not voting Republican, I’m voting Trump.”

For Democrats, kitchen table issues also include the erosion of freedoms and the future of democracy in the United States. Historian and presidential biographer Jon Meacham makes this stark statement about America today: “Historically speaking, the forces now in control of the Republican Party represent the most significant threat to basic constitutionalism we’ve experienced since the Civil war. That’s not a partisan point; it’s just the fact of the matter. And I’m not talking about particular policies, about which we can and should disagree. I’m talking about the self-evident willingness of a once-noble party to embrace lies and the will to power over essential democratic norms.”

The months ahead will be some of the most consequential in the nation’s history, with no guarantee this tense situation be overturned or resolved by the vote in November. •

Mr Modi goes to Bollywood… and beyond

How India’s filmmakers have tracked the national mood

Robin Jeffrey 1578 words

Man of the moment: Amar, Akbar, Anthony star Amitabh Bachchan (seated centre left) on 22 January this year awaiting prime minister Narendra Modi’s arrival at the opening a temple dedicated to Hindu deity Lord Ram, built on the ruins of an ancient mosque in Ayodhya. Rajesh Kumar Singh/AP Photo


India’s eighteenth general elections are only weeks away, a thumping victory for Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party is predicted, and I’m watching Bollywood movies from 1977 to remind myself of how much the country’s mood has changed.

That was the year when Indira Gandhi ended her seventeen months of authoritarian rule (“the Emergency”) and called elections she expected to win. It was a make-or-break decision: if she prevailed, her opponents feared she would cement the authoritarianism of the Emergency.

Critics have described the spirit of prime minister Modi’s government during the past few years as “the Emergency you have when you’re not having an Emergency.” Techniques to harass your foes, pioneered by Mrs Gandhi and her cronies, have been deployed by the BJP with the efficiency of modern management and the relentlessness of digital technology.

In the elections of 1977, Indira Gandhi and her Congress party lost decisively to a hastily formed alliance of old politicians, some of whom had been jailed during the Emergency. A varied crew, they included fist-shaking socialists, heavyweight dropouts from Congress and future BJP prime minister Atul Bihari Vajpayee. They formed a government committed to undoing the excesses of the Emergency. India, they promised, would get a new start. Voters seemed to share their hope.

The top box-office film that year, Amar, Akbar, Anthony, had everything a Hindi film of its time needed: big stars, including the young Amitabh Bachchan, music, dancing, car chases, crime, murder, slapstick comedy and a happy ending. It was also cheap: filmed in a month entirely in Mumbai.

The plot carried a message. Three small boys are abandoned and separated. Amar is found and raised by an upright Hindu policeman, Akbar by a kindly Muslim tailor and Anthony (Bachchan) by a Catholic priest. Three filmic hours later, the brothers discover each other and together vanquish the criminals who have caused their distress; the family is reunited; the blind mother has her sight restored; the ne’er-do-well father repents, rejoices at the unity of the family — and is packed off to jail.

You don’t have to be into semiotics to get the message about national unity and “out of many, one.” Amar, Akbar, Anthony was so popular it got remade in three south Indian languages, each with a locally appropriate name change (including John, Jaffer, Janardhanan in Malayalam, the language of Kerala).

Today, a number of recent films and those announced for 2024 pack a different punch. They focus on international enemies working to destroy India. Pathaan, the box office favourite of 2023, is about international terrorists, viruses and cloak-and-dagger struggles between Indian secret agents and evil-doers in the employ of shadowy figures in Pakistan. It has earned hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide.

This year’s previewed films don’t pussyfoot around when it comes to messaging. The new releases include Bastar, focused on the Naxalites, murderous would-be revolutionaries in a rugged district in central India who killed more than seventy paramilitary police in 2010. “Urban Naxalite” is a common term of abuse for human rights activists and critics of the BJP government. In the film’s trailer, a police officer says that those “supporting” Naxalites “are pseudo-intellectuals, Left liberals” and promises to gather them in the street “and shoot them in public view.”

Pro-government? On the contrary, says the producer, it’s “pro-India”: “Our film talks about what is good for India. Now, if the BJP speaks similarly, it is their political stand.”

Another example with a political kick: Swantantrya Veer Savarkar (“freedom warrior Savarkar”). A prolific real-life writer and translator, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883–1966) was imprisoned for years on the Andaman Islands for complicity in plots to murder British officials. He later became a leader of the Hindu Mahasabha and a favourite ideologue of the BJP. Savarkar was never incriminated in the murder of Mahatma Gandhi, but he didn’t much like Gandhi either. Savarkar “does not hate Gandhi but hates non-violence,” says film’s director.

Kunal Purohit, author of H-Pop: The Secretive World of Hindu Pop Stars, an impressive new book on Hindu-supremacism in popular music and publishing, estimates that ten of the films due for pre-election release demonise Muslims and opponents of Hindu ascendancy.

Films like these highlight the political contest going on in Indian popular culture via the country’s digitisation and its almost 900 million broadband subscribers. The BJP and its many subsidiaries are drowning out other voices.


The film business offers another significant angle on electoral politics. The films mentioned above, all in Hindi, come out of Mumbai (Bollywood). But the south Indian film industry, based in Hyderabad and Chennai, has “taken over the commercial and critical reins,” according to one of India’s most experienced film critics. The south, on this view, is where the most original and successful films are being generated.

The south Indian film that made movie people around the world pay attention, and crowds flock to the theatres, is the Telugu-language RRR, set in colonial times. The British and a Muslim prince provide the main villains. It is an expensive production with spectacular fight scenes and box office collections estimated at A$230 million internationally. (“A Netflix top 10 hit in 62 countries,” according to the streaming service, which screens a Hindi version).

South India will be a key focus in the coming elections. Just as its films are enjoying wide success, the region is registering India’s most impressive economic activity and social statistics. The telling number is estimated GDP per person, which is more than four times greater for the southern states than for India’s two most populous states, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in the Hindi-speaking north. Together, UP and Bihar are home to about 25 per cent of India’s 1.4 billion people; the five southern states have 20 per cent. Female literacy, infant mortality and life-expectancy data are all better in the south.

Mr Modi and the BJP have had notable success in only one of the five southern states, Karnataka (capital, Bengaluru), where they won twenty-five (out of twenty-nine) parliamentary seats in 2019. But the BJP lost state elections to the Congress last year and didn’t hold a single parliamentary seat from Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu or Kerala in the 2019 parliament.

On the surface, this inability to win in the south doesn’t matter. The BJP doesn’t need the south to win national elections, and that advantage will grow if a redistribution of seats, which hasn’t happened for fifty years, is carried out next year. The number of seats will be increased and reapportioned on the basis of population. On those calculations, the five southern states together will elect only about fifteen more members than Uttar Pradesh alone.

To people in the south, this looks like power being embedded in regions with poor records in health, education and economic growth. The feckless will be rewarded at the expense of the virtuous. That impression doesn’t fit well with Mr Modi’s frequent proclaiming that his main mission is economic development and material prosperity.

With victories seemingly assured in much of the Hindi-speaking north, the BJP is throwing talent and money at the southern states and at West Bengal. All these states have their own languages written in distinctive scripts, and they don’t regard the BJP’s pressure to use Hindi as the national language of Bharat (the BJP’s preferred name for India) with great enthusiasm.

Opposition leaders around India have as much reason today as in 1977 to be apprehensive about their futures in the event of a thundering victory for the government. Nevertheless, an attempt last year to coordinate opposition election campaigning has fallen apart even before the election dates were announced. Key political leaders in West Bengal, Bihar and Odisha have either aligned with the BJP or, in West Bengal, decided to fight on their own. Elsewhere, the BJP picks off potential adversaries with offers they can’t refuse.

Congress, the only opposition party with national recognition, is frail and easy to deride. Rahul Gandhi, its fifty-three-year-old leader, has few qualifications other than being the descendant of three prime ministers, Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi. His elderly Italian-born mother, Sonia, is still part of decision-making.

A big BJP victory will assure the party of fifteen years of power from 2014 to 2029. It will embolden the party to incorporate in the constitution provisions advocated before independence by the ideologues of Hindu supremacy. One of those goals was a centralised government in which the states would be simply implementers of the national program. Changing from a parliamentary to a presidential system has also been discussed in the past.

The long-term project of the BJP and the Hindu-supremacist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh movement, of which Mr Modi was a member from adolescence, is an India in which all citizens subscribe to a common version of what it is to be a Hindu. Non-Hindus may continue to live in India but they must be prepared to be at the back of every queue and expect no favours from the state. In this way, Bharat will reclaim its pre-Muslim, pre-British glory.

Today, someone making an updated version of Amar, Akbar, Anthony might feel the need to recognise how the spirit of the times has changed. The film would tell how a brave Hindu boy saved his two hapless brothers, his blind mother and his country from powerful internal and external enemies. It might also be a good idea to call the film Modi! Modi! Modi!

“An unfathomable, shapeshifting thing”

Writer Adele Dumont charts trichotillomania — compulsive hair-pulling — from the inside out

Zora Simic Books 13 March 2024 1070 words

Writer Adele Dumont. Stephanie Simcox


When she was a teenager Adele Dumont’s hair was so thick and heavy she felt shame at how it looked undone — “it didn’t work with gravity like other girl’s hair, it took up too much space.” Then, at age seventeen, The Pulling began. From peeling apart split ends — an ordinary ritual for the long-haired — Dumont “started to do this other thing, an arresting thing…” She would pull out individual hairs, “curled and coarse,” stretch them out and inspect them, taking special interest in the “hidden bits” that grew out of the central part of her scalp.

“The whole process was mysteriously painless,” Dumont recounts in her new book, The Pulling. She discovered that the hairs on her head “sit as shallowly as birthday candles on a cake” and “can be removed as effortlessly as a grape can from its stem.”

More than a decade later, Dumont has been pulling out strands and roots of hair from her scalp for so long that she invests in an expensive, custom-made hairpiece, especially designed to blend inconspicuously into the patchy hair that remains. The catalyst is the publication of her first book, No Man Is An Island (2016), an account of her time teaching English to asylum seekers on Christmas Island. Her motivation, she writes, was not “wanting to look nice” on the publicity circuit but the desire “to be able to stop thinking about my hair altogether.”

As in every other essay in Dumont’s finely wrought collection, “The Piece” stands alone, as well as in unison as memoir. The themes of shame and secrecy, evocatively rendered, pervade The Pulling. Entering the building for her first “hair transition” appointment, Dumont “felt the kind of edginess that I imagine a married man might feel visiting a brothel.” She is assigned Andrew, whose “dispassionate” approach and knowledge of her “problem” put her at relative ease. After her partner M, Andrew is “the second person on the planet to witness my scalp in this state: naked and defenceless.”

Dumont’s “problem” has had a name, “trichotillomania,” since 1987, when it was categorised in the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, known as the DSM, under the “dubious heading Impulse-Control Disorders Not Classified Elsewhere.” In DSM V, the current edition, trichotillomania has been reclassified under Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders but, as Dumont notes, there is no medical consensus. Some professionals liken “the disorder to a substance addiction” while others “see it as a form of self-harm.” Like her own attempts to “get my head around the problem,” the condition, writes Dumont, “seems to resist the medical world’s attempt to categorise it. An unfathomable, shapeshifting thing.”

In The Pulling Dumont sets herself the challenge of putting into words what can’t be captured in an official diagnosis. She begins with her family of origin, and an early onset nail-biting habit, suggesting her condition has its roots in some formative trauma, but from there she avoids the obvious route. There is life before The Pulling but not yet after: hers is not a recovery memoir. If there is a dividing line it is circa 2005, when Dumont finds a book in her university library, published in 1989, by a “Distinguished Psychiatrist” who documents cases of clients with “pointless disorders.” She recognises herself in its pages and furtively photocopies the relevant section.

As the outside knowledge accumulates and she comes to know her condition through authorities other than herself, Dumont initially feels more resistance than relief. She “felt robbed” and wanting “to reclaim my singularity, I decided that even if my condition might align to others’ conditions in its generalities, surely how it manifested in me was unique.” Dumont cycles through numerous therapists, theories and key texts and while she finds some solace, insight and direction, she also remains protective of the enduring mysteries, paradoxes and specifics of her condition.

Some of the most exquisite sentences and passages, in a book full of them, detail what it is like for Dumont inside or in the immediate wake of a “ravenous episode.” To give in is a kind of surrender, what she describes as “a turning.” Then comes the “the deepest pleasure and fullest absorption” of being “inside the experience, when the world is reduced to teeth and touch, and taste.” At the end of an episode, Dumont feels “that I’ve been shipwrecked: dazed and conspicuously fragile.”

On the flipside, Dumont speculates on the view from outside, shifting between awe and shame as the dominant registers. Perhaps, from above, it might appear that “my fingers must be moving in accordance with some greater design, like a needleworker’s, or like a spider darting from point to point to build her web.” Elsewhere, she is convinced that her behaviour “must look masochistic, deviant, repulsive.”

The beauty and power of The Pulling resides in how artfully Dumont balances two sometimes competing concerns — filling a gap and sharing a secret. Dumont makes fathomable and palpable a neglected condition estimated to affect around one in fifty people — more than bipolar or schizophrenia. Readers with trichotillomania will surely be drawn in, as will any of us who have or have had a compulsive habit dating back to childhood that began, as it did for Dumont, as “just something that I did.”

Yet Dumont is as much a writer as she is a person with trichotillomania, and accordingly The Pulling exhibits the propulsive and exacting qualities of a book that had to be written and had been brewing for a long time. Here and there, she addresses the reader directly to tell us that this is not easy, or to reflect on her own motivations. “I ought to say,” she writes, “I am finding it hard to tell you, harder than even I anticipated.” In less skilled hands, such self-reflexivity could easily grate, but Dumont succeeds in creating intimacy with her imagined reader and audience. We come to learn what it has meant for the author to carry her secret, and now to share it.

Beyond liberating herself as a writer, Dumont stakes a powerful claim for all people who have been diagnosed with a condition having the authority to tell their own stories and comprehend their own experience. As she persuasively writes, “my not-knowing that my illness existed was a precondition for coming to know it as intimately as I have.” •

The Pulling: Essays
By Adele Dumont | Scribe | $29.99 | 288 pages

Nuclear power, Newspoll and the nuances of polled opinion

Is the Australian’s polling and commentary doing the opposition any favours?

Murray Goot 12 March 2024 6060 words

Big and brave? Opposition leader Peter Dutton promoting nuclear power at the Australian Financial Review Business Summit in Sydney this morning. Bianca De Marchi/AAP Image


Opinion polls emerged in the United States with the rise of “objective” journalism after the first world war — or, more precisely, with the rise of objectivity as an ideology, as Michael Schudson argues in Discovering the News, his landmark social history of American newspapers. Central to the rise of objectivity was “the belief that one can and should separate facts from values.” But “facts,” here, were not “aspects of the world.” Rather, they were “consensually validated” claims about the world, to be trusted because they conformed with “established rules deemed legitimate by a professional community.”

While not mentioned by Schudson, nothing spoke to the rise of “objective journalism” more clearly than the rise of “scientific” polling: the attempt to document “the voice of the people” based on interviews that, in principle, gave every citizen an equal chance of being heard, of saying what they had to say, via questions free of bias, that bane of objectivity.

George Gallup, a figure central to the spread of polling, presented poll-takers, in his polling manifesto The Pulse of Democracy (1940), as people “moving freely about all sorts and conditions of men and noting how they are affected by the news or arguments brought from day to day to their knowledge.” Gallup took this model from James Bryce’s The American Commonwealth (1888), but his own polling, with its set questions and predetermined response categories, was far removed from the kind of observation Bryce favoured

In reality, Gallup followed a news-making model — the model exemplified by press conferences and media releases, where news is made for the press without being controlled by the press. Gallup not only created news, controlling what was asked, how it was asked and when; he also syndicated his results to a broad range of newspapers. Having his polls published by papers whose politics ranged widely shored up his claims to objectivity.

A parallel existed with the Associated Press, America’s first wire service. Since it “gathered news for publication in a variety of papers with widely different political allegiances,” Schudson notes, “it could only succeed by making its reporting “objective” enough to be acceptable to all its members and clients.”

While servicing a diverse range of outlets was central to Gallup in America, this is not what happened in Australia. When Keith Murdoch introduced the Gallup Poll here in 1941 he made sure that the company he set up to run it was controlled by his own Herald and Weekly Times and its associates in various states. Although Australian Public Opinion Polls (“The Gallup Method”) was notionally independent, executives from the Herald and Weekly Times, including Murdoch, could (and did) influence the questions Roy Morgan, APOP’s managing director, asked, including whether they should be repeated from poll to poll.

Whereas the American Gallup boasted subscribing newspapers that were Republican (as Gallup himself may have been), Democrat and independent, none of the newspapers that subscribed to the Australian Gallup Poll are likely to have ever editorialised in favour of federal Labor; for many years, Morgan himself was an anti-Labor member of the Melbourne City Council.

Much of the polling done in America and later in Australia, however, fits a third model: things that the press creates either directly (in-house polling; for example, of a newspaper’s own readers) or indirectly (by commissioning an independent market research firm to ask questions on the newspaper’s behalf). Media products that fit this category range from Clyde Packer’s creation of the Miss Australia contest in the 1920s (also copied from America) and the Australian Financial Review’s endless business “summits” in the 2020s, to the media’s ubiquitous sit-down interviews with politicians and celebrities. This is now the dominant model.

Creating news is the surest route to having an “exclusive” and creating “product differentiation.” If the “exclusive” is produced often enough, is highly valued, and prominently flagged — polling is now featured on the front page — it becomes a way of building “brand loyalty.” Newspapers that regularly commission polls from the same source, or that have a regular but non-financial relationship with a pollster, hope for all of this. Media that don’t commission their own polls — television and radio, especially — are often happy to recycle polls published in the press.

Brand loyalty is a way of building a readership. When it comes to polling, it generally means not citing polls generated by competing brands — especially polls that could raise doubts about one’s own polls. Where different polls produce different — even conflicting — results, this usually means that the rules of objectivity that require journalists to confirm their stories using more than one source are readily abandoned. While some newspapers are more brand-focused than others, journalists consulting their own polls and not others has become standard practice.

In polling, the strength of any brand — the reputation of the poll — depends on the prestige of the news outlet that publishes it. It also depends on the poll’s record, and that record is assessed against the few objective measures that exist: election results and referendums.

Polls that score well on these measures are more likely to be trusted on things other than the vote. That, at least, is the hope of the companies that poll for the press or have their polls publicised by the press. Companies involved in the prediction business try to ensure that their polls come as close as possible to predicting the actual vote — closer, certainly, than any of their rivals.

What pollsters hope to be trusted on, as a result of the accuracy on these measures, is everything else they do for the press — notably, reporting on the popularity of party leaders and taking “the pulse” (as Gallup liked to say) on issues of public policy. More than that, they are after a spillover or halo effect for their market research businesses more generally; financially, this is the point of involving themselves in the not particularly lucrative business of predicting votes. Trust is important because what companies report on matters other than the vote typically cannot be checked directly against any external measure.

Absent any objective check, there is always a risk of polling that panders, consciously or otherwise, to the client’s agenda or the pollster’s preferences. Against this happening, the guardrails erected by industry bodies like the relatively new Australian Polling Council or the old (Market) Research Society are either weak or non-existent — the APC mostly concerned that pollsters explain their methods and post their questionnaires online, a very welcome development but one that stops well short of setting wide-ranging standards in relation to the questions members ask; the Research Society mostly concerned to reassure respondents about the way polling companies protect their privacy.

Newspoll — and other polls

Enter Newspoll, a brand owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Established for a high-end newspaper, the Australian — whose news and views are seen by some as exerting an out-size influence on conservative politics — Newspoll can claim a record of predicting national elections second to none.

In the course of conducting its most recent poll — a fortnightly event that usually grabs the headlines for what it has to say about national voting intentions, leadership satisfaction and preferred prime minister — Newspoll raised the issue of nuclear power. “There is a proposal to build several small modular nuclear reactors around Australia to produce zero-emissions energy on the sites of existing coal-fired power stations once they are retired,” Newspoll told respondents (emphasis in the original). It then asked: “Do you approve or disapprove of this proposal?” Respondents were invited to select one answer: “Strongly approve” (22 per cent); “Somewhat approve” (33 per cent); “Somewhat disapprove” (14 per cent); “Strongly disapprove” (17 per cent); “Don’t know” (14 per cent). In short: 55 per cent in favour; 31 per cent against; 14 per cent not prepared to say either way.

As Newspoll might have anticipated on an issue as contentious as this, its question generated controversy. Unimpressed, the economist John Quiggin proposed — tongue-in-cheek — a quite different way the question might have been worded: “There is a proposal to keep coal-fired power stations operating until the development of small nuclear reactors which might, in the future, supply zero-emissions energy. Do you approve or disapprove of this proposal?”

A question on nuclear power could have been asked in any number of ways: by putting the arguments for and against nuclear power; by taking the timeline for getting nuclear power up and running and comparing it to the timeline for wind + solar + hydro; by asking who should pay (governments, consumers, industry, etc.) for different forms of energy with zero emissions, and how much they should pay; by qualifying the “zero-emissions” solution with some reference to the waste disposal problem; by omitting the words “small, modular” — not just descriptors but, potentially at least, words of reassurance; and so on.

Different questions might still have produced a majority in favour of nuclear energy. A question asked for the Institute of Public Affairs by Dynata, in April 2022, on whether Australia should build nuclear power plants to supply electricity and reduce carbon emissions,” found a majority (53 per cent agreeing), and an even lower level of opposition (23 per cent).

As with Newspoll, the IPA poll raised considerations that invited an affirmative response: “small modular,” “zero-emissions energy,” “on the sites of existing coal-fired power stations once they are retired” (Newspoll); “to supply electricity,” “reduce carbon omissions” (IPA). Not a single consideration in either poll might have prompted a negative response.

The high proportion in the IPA survey neither agreeing nor disagreeing (24 per cent) — an option Newspoll didn’t offer — allowed respondents who actually had an opinion to conceal it, Swedish research on attitudes to nuclear power suggests. So, while the level of opposition recorded by the IPA might have been higher without the “easy out,” the level of support might have been higher too.

Other questions about nuclear power failed to attract majority support. Asked in September by Freshwater “if Australia needs nuclear power” (the precise question was not published), and presented with a set of response options similar to those offered by the IPA, 37 per cent of respondents supported nuclear power and 36 per cent opposed it, 18 per cent saying they were “neutral” and 12 per cent “unsure.” Apart from coal (supported by 33 per cent), every other energy source received wider support: hydrogen (47 per cent), natural gas (56 per cent), offshore wind (58 per cent), onshore wind (61 per cent) and solar (84 per cent).

Asked in the same poll whether “Australia should remove the ban on nuclear power development,” 44 per cent agreed. But asked whether they agreed or disagreed that “Australia does not need to generate any energy from nuclear power,” 36 per cent disagreed. Similarly, no more than 35 per agreed that “the federal government must consider small nuclear modular reactors as part of the future energy mix” — a much lower figure than Newspoll’s, even if the question isn’t necessarily better.

Freshwater also asked respondents to choose between two trade-offs: “Australia builds nuclear power plants meaning some coal power plants are replaced earlier” (44 per cent chose this one) and “Australia does not build nuclear power plants meaning some coal power plants are extended” (38 per cent); 18 per cent were “unsure.” Respondents opposed to both coal and nuclear power were left with only one place to go — “unsure.” But on the poll’s own evidence — 33 per cent supporting coal, 36 per cent supporting nuclear — the figure of 18 per cent appears to underestimate this group considerably.

Another question on nuclear power, this time asked by RedBridge, is said to have shown a 35–32 split over “the idea of using nuclear to provide for Australia’s energy need.” As yet, however, neither the question nor any figures have been posted on its website.

Yet another question, asked in February by Resolve for the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age, also failed to show majority support for nuclear power. Told that “there has been some debate about the use of nuclear power in Australia recently” and asked for their “own view,” respondents split four ways: “I support the use of nuclear power in Australia” (36 per cent); “I do not have a strong view and am open to the government investigating its use” (27 per cent); “I oppose the use of nuclear power in Australia” (25 per cent); and “Undecided” (15 per cent).

In reporting this “exclusive survey,” David Crowe, chief political correspondent for the two papers, made no reference to the Newspoll published the previous day. This, notwithstanding that in reporting the Resolve poll Crowe gave pride of place to “mining billionaire” Andrew Forrest’s attack on the Coalition’s nuclear policy — a policy the Australian suggested had received a “boost” from the Newspoll. Nor did Crowe refer to any other poll.

On one reading, most respondents (61 per cent in the Resolve poll compared to 39 per cent in Newspoll) had “a strong view” (the respondents who declined to say “I do not have a strong view…”), those without “a strong view” either being “open to the government investigating” the use of nuclear power or “undecided.” More likely, the question didn’t measure how strong any of the views were — some of those without strong views being “open to the government investigating its use,” others joining those who harboured strong views (respondents Resolve didn’t directly identify) to indicate either their support or their opposition to nuclear power.

Effectively, the Resolve poll rolled three questions into one — one, about support or opposition to nuclear power; another about the strength of these opinions; and another about “the government investigating” the “use” of nuclear power. But since responses to one of these questions would not necessarily have determined responses to any other, Resolve’s shortcut obscures more about public opinion than it illuminates; a respondent with a strong view, for example, might still have been “open to the government investigating its use.”

In October 2023, Resolve asked another question — this one reportedly commissioned by the consulting firm Society Advisory, and run “exclusively” by Sky News. The result suggested a degree of openness to nuclear power that was even higher than that indicated by Resolve’s poll for the Age and Sydney Morning Herald. Asked if “Australia should rethink its moratorium (ban) on nuclear power to give more flexibility in the future,” half (49 per cent) of the respondents were in favour, less than half that number (18 per cent) were against, opposition to “flexibility” requiring some strength, with an extraordinary 33 per cent “unsure” — a sign that this question too was a poor one.

Not only do answers depend on the question, they also depend on the response options. In an extensive survey — not just a one- or two-item poll — conducted in October–November 2023, the British firm Savanta asked respondents “to what extent, if at all,” they supported or opposed using nuclear energy “to generate electricity” in Australia? While 40 per cent said “strongly support” or “tend to support,” 36 per cent said “strongly oppose” or “tend to oppose,” 7 per cent said “Don’t know,” and 17 per cent said they “neither support nor oppose.”

As with the Resolve poll for the Age and Sydney Morning Herald, Savanta’s response options — which included “neither support nor oppose” — reduced the chance that its question, however worded, would yield a majority either in favour of nuclear energy or against it; almost as many opposed nuclear energy as supported it, a quarter (24 per cent) choosing to sit on the fence. In the Newspoll, where 55 per cent approved and 31 per cent disapproved, there was no box marked “neither approve nor disapprove.” If there had been, then almost certainly Newspoll would not have found majority support either.

The Savanta survey also shows what happens to support for a single option — here, nuclear power — when respondents are given a range of options. Asked to think about how their “country might shift its current energy generation mix” and given a list of five alternatives, only 23 per cent nominated “nuclear energy”; 41 per cent, almost twice as many, nominated “large-scale solar farms.” Of the rest, 15 per cent nominated “onshore wind farms,” 6 per cent “gas carbon and storage (CCS),” and 4 per cent “biomass from trees.”

Newspoll made no attempt to ascertain whether the public had heard of “small modular nuclear reactors” much less what the public knew about such things. In the Guardian, the proposal was described as “an uncosted Coalition thought-bubble”; in the Lowy Institute’s Interpreter, former deputy Reserve Bank governor Stephen Grenville noted that there were “just two operational SMRs, both research reactors” and that work on what “was expected to be the first operational commercial SMR” had “been halted as the revised cost per kWH is uneconomic for the distributors who had signed up.” Elsewhere, an academic specialising in electricity generation described SMRs as “not, by any stretch of the imagination, what most people would consider small.”

On what the public knows — or, more accurately, on how much it thinks it knows — the Savanta survey is again useful. When asked what they had heard of nuclear energy, few (8 per cent) said “I have not heard about this energy option” or “don’t know.” But just 18 per cent said “I have heard about this energy option, and know a lot about how it works.” Most said “I have heard about this energy option, and know a little about how it works” (41 per cent) or “I have heard about this energy option, but don’t know how it works (33 per cent).

In a poll conducted by Pure Profile, reported in May 2022, 70 per cent said they didn’t understand “the difference between nuclear fission and nuclear fusion.”

… and the Australian

Keen to publicise the result of its Newspoll — a result the paper openly welcomed — the Australian’s reporting of the poll and its commentary around it was tendentious.

The distinction between respondents’ having a view and their having a “strong” view was one it mostly ignored or fudged. The paper’s political editor Simon Benson, reported in Crikey to be “responsible” for the poll, ignored it. He repeatedly represented “majority” support as “strong” support. The fact that pollsters themselves regularly make this mistake shouldn’t make it any more acceptable. If support is a metre wide, it isn’t necessarily a metre deep.

The headline in the print edition — “Powerful Majority Supports Nuclear Option for Energy Security” — fudged the distinction. In itself, 55 per cent is not an overwhelming majority; in 2017, same-sex marriage was supported in the nationwide “survey” by 62 per cent. In itself, 55 per cent is hardly a “powerful” number — one that politicians ignore at their peril; in the lead-up to the same-sex marriage decision, both John Howard and Tony Abbott made it clear that they wouldn’t consider anything less than 60 per cent in favour to be a number that the parliament would have to heed. Had 55 per cent (not 36 per cent) “strongly” approved nuclear reactors, the Australian would have had a defensible case. But even in polls that offer a binary choice, “strong” majorities are rare.

Rather than representing a “powerful majority” in favour of the “nuclear option,” Newspoll’s figures might equally be said to show that most respondents (61 per cent) did not feel strongly one way or the other — a majority that the Australian would not have wanted to call “powerful.”

A highlight, Benson argued, was the fact that respondents aged eighteen to thirty-four — “the demographic most concerned about climate change” — was the demographic most likely to support nuclear power, 65–32. “There is no fear of the technology for most people under 40,” he concluded. This line was one that impressed shadow climate change and energy minister, Ted O’Brien, when he discussed the poll on Sky News.

It also resonated with opposition leader Peter Dutton. Attacking the prime minister for being out of touch with public opinion, which he was reported to have said was “warming to nuclear power,” Dutton noted that nuclear power was “supported by a lot of younger people because they are well-read and they know that it’s zero emissions, and it can firm up renewables in the system.”

The news that “NewsPoll [sic] showed a majority of young Australians supporting small-scale nuclear power generation,” even prompted a discussion of the pros and cons of nuclear power — not the pros and cons of the polling — on the ABC.

But eighteen- to thirty-four-year-olds as the age group most favourably disposed to nuclear power is not what Essential shows, not what Savanta shows, and not what RedBridge shows. In October’s Essential poll, no more than 46 per cent of respondents aged eighteen to thirty-four supported “nuclear power plants” — the same proportion as those aged thirty-six to fifty-four but a smaller proportion than those aged fifty-five-plus (56 per cent); the proportion of “strong” supporters was actually lower among those aged eighteen to thirty-four than in either of the other age-groups.

In the Savanta survey, those aged eighteen to thirty-four were the least likely to favour nuclear energy; only about 36 per cent were in favour, strongly or otherwise, not much more than half the number that Newspoll reported.

And according to a report of the polling conducted in February by RedBridge, sourced to Tony Barry, a partner and former deputy state director of the Victorian Liberal Party, “[w]here there is support” for nuclear power. “it is among only those who already vote Liberal or who are older than 65.”

In the Australian, the leader writer observed that “public support for considering nuclear power in Australia is rising as the cost and implications of meeting the decarbonisation challenge becomes more real.” But Newspoll had never sought to establish what respondents think are the “cost and implications of meeting the decarbonisation challenge” so it could hardly have shown whether these thoughts have changed.

Benson’s remark, on the Australian’s front page, that the poll showed “growing community support” for nuclear power was also without warrant; “growing community support” is something that the poll does not show and that Benson made no attempt to document. Since the question posed by Newspoll had never been asked before, and since polled opinion is sensitive to the way questions are asked, “growing community support” is one thing the poll could not show.

Subsequently, Benson cited Liberal Party polling conducted “immediately after the [May] 2022 election loss” which “had support at 31 per cent.” The question? Benson doesn’t say. Is it really likely, as Benson believes, that in a “short space of time,” as he describes it — less than two years — support for nuclear power could have jumped from 31 per cent to 55 per cent? The considerable shift in polled opinion on same-sex marriage that Wikipedia suggests happened sometime between 2004 and 2007 is hardly likely to have happened since 2022 in relation to nuclear energy.

Peta Credlin, Australian columnist and Sky News presenter, argued the growing-support line by stringing together: a poll conducted in 2015 (by Essential, though she didn’t identify it as an Essential poll), which had support at 40 per cent; the IPA poll (which it was safe to name) from 2022, which had support at 53 per cent; and the Newspoll, which had it at 55 per cent. Not only was each of these conducted by a different pollster, hence subject to different “house effects”; each had posed their own question.

Had the Australian wanted to see whether support really was growing it might have considered re-running one of the questions it had asked years before — or, preferably, re-run more than one. But perhaps the point of the polling was not to show that support was growing but to create the impression that it was growing — that it had a momentum that might leave Labor, “in its fanatical opposition to nuclear power,” as Benson wrote, stranded on “the wrong side of history.”

This was not the first time the Australian has interpreted the results of a Newspoll as heralding a turning point on this issue. In 2007, shortly before prime minister John Howard announced that the Coalition would set up a nuclear regulatory regime and remove any unreasonable impediments to the building of nuclear power plants in Australia, the Australian told its readers that there had been a “dramatic shift” in support for nuclear power. The basis of its claim: questions asked by Newspoll — two in 2006, one in 2007. (In those days Newspoll was a market research company, not a polling brand whose field work had been outsourced first to YouGov and more recently to Pyxis.)

The questions asked in 2006 were not the same as the question asked in 2007. In May and December 2006, Newspoll told respondents: “Currently, while there is a nuclear reactor at Lucas Heights in Sydney used for medical and scientific purposes, there are no nuclear power stations being built in Australia.” It then asked: “Are you personally in favour or against nuclear power stations in Australia?” The majority was against: 38–51, in May; 35–50, in December.

In March 2007, Newspoll changed the question, and framed it quite differently: “Thinking now about reducing gas emissions to help address climate change,” it asked, “are you personally in favour or against the development of a nuclear power industry in Australia, as one of a range of energy solutions to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions?” On this, opinion was fairly evenly split: 45–40. The majority were not against; in fact, there was a plurality in favour. The Australian’s interpretation: in just four months, Dennis Shanahan and Sid Marris concluded, the attitude of Australians to nuclear energy had “dramatically reversed.”

Not so. After commissioning Newspoll to ask the 2006 question again, in April 2007, the Australia Institute found that the level of support for “nuclear power stations being built in Australia” was 36 per cent (35 per cent in December 2006), the level of opposition was now 46 per cent (previously, 50 per cent), and the “don’t knows” were now 18 per cent (previously 15 per cent). In short, whereas opposition had exceeded support by fifteen percentage points, 50­–35, it now exceeded support by ten points, 46–36 — a decline of five points, but no reversal, dramatic or otherwise.

This time around, both the Australian Financial Review and the Sydney Morning Herald have asked questions similar to the one Newspoll asked in February, but in polls of their readers not in a public opinion poll. Asked, in July 2023, whether Australia should “consider small nuclear reactors as one solution to moving away from fossil fuels?,” the Financial Review’s readers favoured “consider[ing]” the idea, 58–30. Asked, in July 2023, whether “small nuclear power reactors should be part of Australia’s energy mix,” the Herald’s readers opposed the idea, 32–55. Even if these questions had been included in national polls, the Australian might have baulked at citing the results of either, since it would have given oxygen to another brand.

There is evidence of a growth in support for nuclear power between June 2019 and March 2022, but there is no convincing evidence that points to “growing support” in the two years since. When the Lowy Poll asked respondents, in March 2022, whether they supported or opposed “removing the existing ban on nuclear power,” 52 per cent said they supported it, an increase on the level of support in March 2021 (47 per cent). And in September 2021, when Essential asked respondents whether they supported or opposed “Australia developing nuclear power plants for the generation of electricity,” 50 per cent said they supported nuclear power, a sharp increase on the level of support (39 per cent) it reported in June 2019. However, when Essential asked the question again, in October 2023, the level of support hadn’t moved.

The only evidence for a recent shift comes from Resolve. In October 2023, when Resolve first asked the question it asked in February 2024, 33 per cent (compared with 36 per cent in February) supported “the use of nuclear power” and 24 per cent (23 per cent in February) opposed it. (Nine Entertainment appears not to have previously published Resolve’s result for October.) Its February poll represents an increase of four percentage points in the gap between the level of support and the level of opposition, from nine points to thirteen.

But a shift of four points is well within the range one might expect given the vagaries of sampling — the “margin of error” that pollsters regularly parade but just as regularly ignore. Non-sampling error — a much bigger problem than pollsters acknowledge — also might have played a part, especially given a question as complex and confused as the one Resolve asked. Errors of both kinds are compounded by the widespread use by pollsters of opt-in rather than probability-based panels.

Jim Reed, who runs Resolve, is reported as saying that voters “were increasingly open to the potential of nuclear power now the Coalition was advocating for existing technology in large-scale plants.” According to Reed, support has “swung towards at least openness to nuclear power.” But Nine did not reveal what change, if any, Resolve had detected since October in the number without “a strong view” and “open to the government investigating its use (27 per cent in February).” Support, Reed added, was “weak… at the moment simply because people aren’t being asked to approve an actual site.” Even if he had measured strength, which it appears he hadn’t, one could equally imagine support becoming weaker, not stronger, once voters were asked to “asked to approve an actual site.”

What sort of voters did he think were now supportive or at least “open’? “We’ve got a new generation of younger people who are quite positive towards nuclear power,” Reed said. Was this “new generation” evident in October or did it only become evident in February? If it was evident in October, was it responsible for February’s four-point shift? Nothing in what Nine published allows us to say.

While Reed restricted himself, largely, to interpreting the actual data, in the Australian the commentary strayed much further. It wrote, for example, of “the costs and risks of renewable energy” having “become clearer.” But it offered no evidence that those costs and risks had become clearer to the public — not surprisingly, since these too were things about which Newspoll had not asked.

Leveraging the Newspoll result to predict that “most Australians would back a move to small scale nuclear power,” the headline in the online edition of the Australian ignored another distinction — not between strong and weak opinion but between polls that showed un-mobilised opinion and polls that showed mobilised opinion; so, too did Sky News. Any “move to small-scale nuclear power” would be politically contested, and once contested opinion might shift.

Subsequently, Benson ventured a more sober assessment of the Coalition’s prospects of carrying the day. “For Dutton to win the argument,” an argument that would take “courage” to mount, “any Coalition energy policy must be framed in a cost-of-living context that can demonstrate how nuclear power will deliver cheaper and more reliable power into the future,” he wrote. For Dutton to position nuclear power as “a central component” of his energy policy, Benson declared, was “as big and brave as it gets.”

Others went further. In a rare note of dissent within News Corp, James Campbell, national weekend political editor for Saturday and Sunday News Corp newspapers and websites across Australia, called the idea of Dutton “going to the next federal election with plans to introduce nuclear power” as “stark raving mad.” One thing the Coalition should have learnt from the Voice referendum was that “support for anything radical in Australia shrinks the moment it hits any sort of concerted opposition.” And, he added, “there’s the unity problem. Do you really think Liberal candidates in ‘tealy’ places are going to face the front on this?”

Benson, meanwhile, had back-tracked. Pointing again to the distribution of opinion among eighteen- to thirty-four-year-olds, he advanced a quite different assessment: “the onus is now on Labor to convince Australians why we shouldn’t have nuclear power.” Chris Kenny, the Australian’s associate editor, thought “the nuclear argument could play well in the teal seats where there is an eagerness for climate change and a high degree of economic realism.”

If Benson was right the first time, however, and the Coalition needs to take care over how it frames the debate, then the Savanta data suggest that it may face a few challenges. Asked what impact nuclear energy would have on their “energy bills,” about a third (35 per cent) of its respondents said it would make their bills “much cheaper” or “slightly cheaper,” less than a third (28 per cent) thought it would make them “much more expensive” or “slightly more expensive,” but more than a third (38 per cent) said they either didn’t know or thought it would make “no difference.”

In the Essential poll, conducted around the same time, respondents saw little difference in “total cost including infrastructure and household price” between three energy sources: “renewable energy, such as wind and solar” (38 per cent considering it the “most expensive” option; 35 per cent, the “least expensive”), nuclear power (34 per cent considering it the “most expensive” option; 34 per cent, the “least expensive”), and “fossil fuels, such as coal and gas” (28 per cent considering it the “most expensive” option; 31 per cent, the “least expensive”).

Supporters of nuclear energy may also have to address some of the concerns Benson didn’t mention. In the Savanta study, 77 per cent were either “very concerned” (45 per cent) or “fairly concerned” (32 per cent) about “waste management”; 77 per cent were either “very concerned” (47 per cent) or “fairly concerned” (30 per cent) about “health & safety (ie. nuclear meltdowns, impact on people living nearby)”; and 56 per cent were either “very concerned” (23 per cent) or “fairly concerned” (33 per cent) about the “time it takes to build.”

In another poll, this one conducted by Pure Profile in the first half of 2022, respondents were asked how they would feel if a new nuclear power station were built in their city. Around 50 per cent said they would feel “uncomfortable,” more than a quarter “extremely uncomfortable”; just 7 per cent would have felt “extremely at ease.”

It would be reassuring to think that any newspaper that wanted its polling taken seriously would need to commission better polling than the polling the Australian was so keen to promote. But the Newspoll results were taken seriously by a rival masthead. “The Newspoll published in the Australian,” the political editor of the Australian Financial Review, Phillip Coorey wrote, “found there was now majority support for the power source.”

A week after its poll was published, and its results — with a nod to the Coalition — described as “powerful,” the Australian’s front page led with another “exclusive,” this time courtesy of the Coalition: its “signature energy policy” to be announced “before the May federal budget” would include “a plan identifying potential sites for small nuclear reactors as future net zero sources.” The following day, Benson wrote that Newspoll had “demonstrated strong support for the proposal that Dutton is working on announcing soon.” But the policy Dutton was working on, apparently, was not the policy Newspoll had tested. “The Coalition energy plan,” Benson revealed the same day in another front-page “exclusive,” was “likely to include next-generation large-scale nuclear reactors — not just the small-modular reactors.”

A newspaper that has a position on nuclear power and thinks of polls as an objective measure of public opinion should make sure that the questions it gets (or allows) pollsters to ask, and the results it gets journalists to write up, look fair and reasonable to those on different sides of the debate. In effect, this was the discipline George Gallup placed on himself when he signed up newspapers with divergent views.

Even if a newspaper wanted to use its polling to gee-up its preferred party, it might also think about using its polling to identify some of the risks of pursuing a policy it backed — risks that no party wanting to win an election could sensibly ignore — not just the opportunities to pursue that policy.

Whether Michael Schudson left polling out of his account of objectivity because it didn’t fit with his argument about objectivity as an ideology, or because he didn’t think it a part of journalism — neither journalism nor market research being a profession in the sense that law or medicine are professions — or simply because of an oversight, is unclear.

Better, more comprehensive, polling wouldn’t end the political debate or the debate about the objectivity of the polls. Nor should it. Nonetheless, it might be a good place from which to progress these debates.

Of course, for those who don’t want to foster a debate about the policy or about the polls, any plea for do better is entirely beside the point. •

Too little, too late

In the tortured history of America’s relationship with Israel there has scarcely been a more fraught moment

Tony Walker 11 March 2024 1518 words

Red line? Joe Biden campaigning in Atlanta on Saturday. Peter Zay/Anadolu via Getty Images


Five months into the Gaza war and on the eve of Ramadan, one thing is clear. Progress towards resolution of an historic conflict is not at hand.

We may get a temporary ceasefire and the release of some hostages in exchange for some of the 4500 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, but we are unlikely to see a resumption of Middle East peace efforts scarred by years of failure.

Israel’s pursuit of the Hamas leadership — notably Yahya Sinwar, the political chief on the ground in Gaza, and military commander Mohammed Deif — will likely continue until both men are found, dead or alive. That’s assuming Sinwar and Deif are still in Gaza itself, which is far from clear.

In the meantime, the world is mobilising to funnel humanitarian assistance into Gaza by land, sea and air. The American air drops into Gaza represent an extraordinary spectacle: on the one hand, Washington continus to arm Israel with munitions used to cause death and destruction among Palestinians; on the other, it is seeking to circumvent Israeli restrictions on the supply of aid across the strip’s land borders.

In the tortured history of the Middle East and America’s complex relationship with Israel — going back to Dwight Eisenhower presidency in the fifties, when pressure from Washington brought an end to the Suez crisis — there has scarcely been a more confounding moment.

In 1956, Eisenhower brokered a halt to what was known as the “tripartite aggression” after the nascent state of Israel had joined Britain and France in confronting Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez canal. In some ways that was a high point of America’s playing an honest-broker role in the Middle East, matched by Jimmy Carter’s mediation of the Camp David Accords in 1978, which ushered in a cold peace between Israel and Egypt.

In the years since then, constructive US influence in the Middle East has waxed and waned depending on circumstance, with sporadic interventions such as President George H.W. Bush’s push to kickstart a peace process in the wake of Gulf War I.

Bill Clinton tried but was let down by poor preparation for a Camp David II summit in 2000 between Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Arafat deservedly got much of the blame for the failure of Camp David II, but Barak, who refused to meet Arafat one-on-one, and Clinton’s feckless Middle East negotiators were also culpable.

Judged against the performance of his predecessors in managing a Middle East crisis, and depending on how the Gaza war ends, history is unlikely to be kind to Joe Biden. As things stand, the fair judgement is that Biden, with his sights firmly on his own re-election prospects, has been far too indulgent of Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu.

Biden might argue that his strategy of not allowing questions to arise about Washington’s support for the elimination of the Hamas leadership will prove to be correct, both politically and strategically. But his tardiness in calling for a humanitarian ceasefire, and his sanctioning of repeated US vetoes of UN Security Council resolutions demanding such a pause, has left him wide open to criticism that he has acted as Netanyahu’s enabler.

Belatedly, the US president appears to have realised both the political costs for him domestically, where many in his Democrat base are outraged, and the concomitant damage to America’s international reputation. He has consequently begun to step up his criticism, in public and private, of a war that has filled TV screens with shocking images of civilian casualties and deprivation.

This has taken far too long.

In remarks picked up last week by a “hot mic” after his State of the Union address, Biden told a Democrat legislator that a “come to Jesus” moment was approaching in his relations with Netanyahu. He made it clear he would regard an Israeli assault on Rafah at the southern end of the Gaza Strip — where about half Gaza’s 2.3 million population are huddled — as the crossing of a “red line.”

Interviewed, Netanyahu rebuffed the president, saying he would not be deterred from pursuing the Hamas leadership at risk of adding further to Gazan deaths and injuries.


In all the history of a blood-drenched Israel–Palestine conflict one date stands out: 4 November 1995. That was the evening on which Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was shot by an Israeli zealot opposed to peace with the Palestinians.

Not only did Yigal Amir assassinate Rabin, he also destroyed progress on the “two-state solution,” towards which Israel’s fallen leader and Arafat were groping via implementation of the Oslo Accords signed on the White House lawn in Clinton’s presence in 1993.

Among the bleak consequences of the Rabin assassination was the coming to power of Netanyahu, leader of the nationalist Likud bloc. To say Netanyahu has been a blight on Israeli and Middle East politics ever since would be an understatement.

In his years in power, either as prime minister or opposition leader, Netanyahu has contrived to stymie legitimate peace efforts to the point where any kind of peace in our time, even if the Gaza conflict subsides, has come to resemble a mirage.

Netanyahu may well be consigned to history if and when the war in Gaza ends and elections in Israel are held, but his malign influence will endure in the form of an explosion of settlements in the Occupied West Bank and a less obvious transfer of Jewish settlers into Arab East Jerusalem.

By latest count, Israel has turned the West Bank into a Swiss cheese of settlements and settler outposts, with something like 200 settlements and 220 outposts on land occupied in the 1967 war. All are illegal under international law since they involve a transfer of members of the victor’s population into territory seized in war.

In all, some 500,000 settlers are now living in the West Bank and 250,000 in East Jerusalem, a total of about 10 per cent of Israel’s population.

Even as late as this month, in the midst of the Gaza war, the ultra-right Netanyahu government, whose leader is beholden to extremist elements, has continued approving new settler housing in the Occupied Territories. This could hardly represent a more pointed affront to international efforts to calm the situation, given the fact that settler violence in the West Bank has spiralled since the 7 October Hamas pogrom on Gaza’s boundaries.

Behind all this is an assumption that Netanyahu is hoping to hang on to leadership, and avoid jail on corruption charges, pending a return to the White House of a president who could be expected to look more favorably on his tenure. But there is a long way to go between now and January 2025, when Trump might get his hands on power and thus loosen restraints, such as they are, on an Israeli government.

In the meantime, there is much loose talk these days about a “two-state solution.” This is glib posturing: anyone who knows anything about the Middle East understands that we are very far indeed from a realistic consideration of two independent states, one Israeli, one Palestinian, living side by side.

When next you hear a politician talking about a two-state solution without any realistic prospect of such an outcome coming about, or of that politician actually doing anything about it, reach for the smelling salts. In reality, there is barely a pulse detectable in America, or among its allies, of a willingness to exert real pressure on Israel to engage realistically with the Palestinians towards a two-state solution.

Such is the depth of animosity and mistrust — and, yes, raw hatred — between Palestinians and Israelis that, short of divine intervention, or the arrival of an Israeli or Palestinian Nelson Mandela, or preferably both, there is little cause for optimism.

In fact, there is hardly any cause at all, not least because the Israeli right is adamantly opposed to a two-state outcome, leaving aside the likelihood of civil conflict if any leader in Israel proposes the dismantling of settlements and moves towards negotiations on a Palestinian state — even if there was a Palestinian entity capable of assuming leadership responsibility across the West Bank, and Gaza.

This might be hard to accept for the two-state-solution industry among academics, commentators and politicians groping for an off-ramp for the world’s most confronting conflict. But there has scarcely been a bleaker moment in a history burdened by failure and a feeble US presidency.

If there is a counterpoint to Biden’s weak hand, played weakly, it is Ronald Reagan’s example when he picked up the phone in the Oval Office in 1982, responding to what he was seeing on his television screen, and rang Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin.

In its invasion of Lebanon to rid that country of its Palestine Liberation Organisation presence, Israel was using its airforce fighters as “flying assassination squads” to pound Palestinian positions in Beirut.

“Menachem, this is a holocaust,” Reagan said. The Israeli offensive ceased.

Contrast that with Biden, who can’t even persuade Netanyahu to faciliate aid shipments into the Gaza Strip. This is both shameful, and farcical. •

The free market’s brilliant frontman

Milton Friedman brought wit and energy to his self-appointed task, but how influential did he prove to be?

John Edwards Books 3175 words

Money matters, but how? Milton Friedman in San Francisco in 1989. Chuck Nacke/Alamy


Echoing Karl Marx’s dictum, the great Chicago economist George Stigler once said of his friend and colleague Milton Friedman that while Stigler only wanted to understand the world, Friedman wanted to change it. It’s a remark pertinent to the legacy of Friedman, whose attempts to change our world, successful and otherwise, are the theme of his latest biographer, Jennifer Burns, in Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative.

Witty, smart, zealous for intellectual combat, Friedman enjoyed the University of Chicago classroom but reached well beyond it. Born in 1912, he was already a prominent economist by his early thirties. He won the Nobel Prize for economics in 1976, and continued to advocate his views until his death thirty years later. Through his Newsweek columns, television appearances, relentless cultivation of powerful friends, and frequent travel, he magnified the considerable influence he earned as an economic thinker. It was actually Stigler who came up with the line that “if you have never missed a flight you have wasted a lot of time at airports” but it was Friedman who most strikingly embodied the idea. Gifted with immense energy and verve, he hustled.

Readily conceding some of his big ideas didn’t work, Burns argues Friedman was nonetheless responsible for much of the shape of the world today. He created, she argues, modern central banking, floating exchange rates, and the “Washington consensus” on a universally applicable model of market economies. If she is right it was a considerable achievement for an economist who never ran a government department or held political office, and whose central theory, like that of Karl Marx, turned out to be just plain wrong.

And wrong it was. His big theory was that the rate of inflation — or more broadly nominal income — is always related to the rate of growth of the money supply. It was a claim with important implications. For Friedman, it meant a market economy was inherently stable except for variations in the money supply. If the money supply contracted it could cause a depression. If it expanded too quickly, it could cause inflation. Since the money supply could be controlled by government, it was government that was responsible for inflationary booms and deflationary busts. A capitalist economy would be stable if the money supply grew at a steady rate consistent with low inflation and reasonable output growth.

Friedman’s conviction was sustained by his 1963 finding, with Anna Schwartz, that the US money stock had plummeted during the great depression of the 1930s. Their observation stimulated debate, though it didn’t prove that a fall in the money stock caused the depression. After all, 9000 US banks had failed during the Depression, and the biggest component of money measures is bank deposits. It’s hardly surprising the quantity of money declined.

Put to the test by Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker in 1979, Friedman’s theory turned out to be wrong. To quell inflation, the Federal Reserve announced money growth targets aligned with Friedman’s rule. The targets proved very difficult to achieve. The US central bank did succeed in forcing up interest rates, however, creating back-to-back recessions and dramatically reducing inflation. Meanwhile the money supply continued to increase at much the same rate as before. Contradicting Friedman, interest rates mattered in controlling inflation; the money supply did not.

Though some have concluded that the swift rise in the money supply and the subsequent increase in inflation during the Covid epidemic bore out Friedman’s prediction, it didn’t. The episode was an even more telling repudiation. From 2020 to 2023 the US money supply (measured as M1, which is mainly bank transaction deposits) rose by 400 per cent, the result of the Federal Reserve creating cash to buy bonds and lend freely to banks and business. Over the same period US prices rose by 18 per cent, or less than one twentieth of the increase in the money stock.

(It is true, as Friedman maintained, that inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. In a certain sense this must be true, since inflation is by definition about changes in the value of money. But changes in the quantity of money need not and evidently do not result in equivalent changes in inflation or nominal income.)

Once followed with eager interest by economists and market analysts, the money supply numbers these days are rarely mentioned. Friedman’s conception of the relationship with inflation survives in elderly conservative haunts (including the pages of Australia’s Quadrant magazine) and among some financial markets people.

It was still a widely discussed variable when I was working on a doctorate in economics in the US in the early eighties. Yet in later years on the Reserve Bank board I can’t recall the money supply being seriously mentioned, ever. Nor in an earlier four years as an economist in the office of the treasurer and then the prime minister. Nor yet was it taken seriously when I was working subsequently as an economist in financial markets. Though dutifully published by central banks, the money supply numbers contain no information useful for predicting inflation or nominal income growth.

But then some of Marx’s central ideas were also wrong. Demand hasn’t proved always to be less than supply, workers haven’t become increasingly poor, and the labour theory of value, which he adopted, has long been superseded by better ways of explaining prices. Yet Marx undoubtedly exerted great influence on the world. While conceding he was wrong on the central point of the “monetarism” he espoused, Burns argues that Friedman was similarly influential.

By 1979, when the central monetarist idea began to fail, Friedman had already given his famous 1967 presidential address to the American Economic Association in which he challenged many of his colleagues’ focus on a short-run trade-off between inflation and unemployment. He succeeded in reorienting economic thinking back to a long run in which there was no trade-off and therefore not much room for stabilising the economy with government spending.

More than monetarism, that address changed scholarly economic thinking. The short-run trade-off survives today in economics teaching, but coupled now with a long-run story in which there is a certain minimum unemployment rate — often disputed — consistent with stable inflation.


Intelligent, well-researched, scrupulous, balanced and clearly written, Burns’s is an excellent biography. Her archival work on Friedman’s relationships with Chicago colleagues, Federal Reserve governors, presidential candidates and presidents is thorough, fresh and deeply interesting. Even so it credits Friedman with more than seems to me reasonable.

Much of Friedman’s reputation was based on a wonderful stroke of professional luck in the late 1960s. As Burns tells it, he observed an increase in the rate of growth of the US money supply and predicted an increase in inflation. In his 1967 address he argued there was no stable relationship between inflation and employment. When people observed that inflation was rising they would increase their wage demands and businesses would increase prices, taking inflation higher. When inflation took off in the late 1960s Friedman claimed to be vindicated. When unemployment also rose in response to a slowing economy, Friedman was doubly vindicated. He had predicted both rising inflation, and unemployment, and by the early seventies both were apparent.

It was also true, however, that the Johnston Administration was financing both the war in Vietnam and its ambitious Great Society program of social spending and infrastructure. Federal spending rose from 16 per cent of GDP in 1965 to 19 per cent in 1968, with almost all of the increase funded by an increased deficit. Inflation rose from 1.6 per cent in 1965 to 5.5 per cent in 1969. During the next decade, helped along by a tenfold increase in oil prices, inflation and unemployment would increase very much more. Even so, the increase at the end of the sixties was a disorienting shock, one that burnished Friedman’s repute as an economic seer. Through the seventies, a decade of high inflation and an intermittently rising unemployment rate, Friedman’s reputation grew.

They were his best years. By the early eighties, with Volcker’s disinflation efforts demonstrating that a money supply target was a lot harder to achieve than Friedman supposed — and unnecessary to combat inflation — his professional reputation lost some of it shine. Even at Chicago, a new school of “rational expectations” pioneered by younger economists was displacing Friedman at the centre of classical economic thinking. At the same time, though, his public reputation became more lustrous with popular books and a television series lauding capitalism, markets and the freedom Friedman argued capitalism encouraged.

Friedman could claim some singular successes, as Burns points out. He was an advocate of floating exchange rates at a time when orthodoxy predicted global chaos if exchange rates were not fixed against each other and the price of gold. When the big market economies were forced to move to floating rates from the end of the 1960s, Friedman was proved right. Markets adjusted, and more importantly monetary policy could refocus on targeting inflation rather than the exchange rate.

Friedman could claim considerable credit not only for arguing in favour of floating exchange rates, which have become nearly universal in major economies, but also for several proposals that for one reason or another were not widely adopted. One is school vouchers, a government payment which would allow parents to choose their children’s school. Another is the negative income tax, which in Friedman’s version would replace other welfare payments with a single payment.

It is harder to praise Friedman alone for widely shared ideas that also proved useful. For example, Burns credits Friedman for insisting on the role of prices as the central mechanism in a market economy. But in this respect he was by no means unique. He deployed a style of economic analysis that Adam Smith called the invisible hand and was most coherently developed by the British economist Alfred Marshall in the 1890s. The technique was used by Marshall’s pupil Keynes and taught at Harvard in much the same form as at Chicago. It is still taught today and remains one of the most powerful tools in economics. Friedman was good at it, but not as good as his contemporaries and colleagues, Stigler and Gary Becker, or many other microeconomists of his era.

Friedman did successfully contest the supremacy of fiscal policy over monetary policy, a lingering legacy of Keynes’s advice for dealing with deep slumps such as the Great Depression. The fiscal emphasis was rooted in Keynes’s notion that the circumstances of the Depression and the fear it engendered meant lower interest rates would not make much difference to spending. It was the “liquidity trap” in which people conserved cash rather than buy things or invest. Direct government spending was a better option to sustain demand and jobs. This aspect of Keynes’s thinking dominated economic thought in the United States, particularly among supporters of Roosevelt’s New Deal. Friedman insisted on the important role of central banks, a reorientation that remains.


Friedman’s enduring contribution, Burns argues, was to remind the economics profession that money matters. She is certainly right, even if the particular mechanism he had in mind proved to be wrong. Even so I am not at all sure of her argument that Freidman resurrected interest in money among economists, or that it had ever ceased to be of interest. After all, Keynes wrote his Treatise on Money before the General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, and the General Theory has much to say about money and interest rates. John Hicks’s famous simplification of the General Theory, still taught as the ISLM equations, is all about interest rates, the public penchant to hold money, and the quantity of money. Friedman himself acknowledged the contributions of an earlier American monetary theorist, Irving Fisher.

Burns also credits Friedman with an important role in creating the “Washington consensus,” the nineteen nineties notion that began as a description of a widespread change of economic policies in South America away from import replacement. Friedman made some contribution, though not as important as that of his trade theory colleagues. Japan, then Korea, then Taiwan, then most of Southeast Asia had in any case focused on export strategies decades before Chicago economists, including Friedman, advised Pinochet regime in Chile to adopt one.

Generalised with Thomas L. Friedman’s The World is Flat into a view that democracy, capitalism and economic globalisation had become the more or less universally agreed elements of human societies, it moved well beyond Friedman’s scope. Friedman certainly welcomed it, but did he create it? A world of liberal market economies had, after all, been an American foreign policy ideal since the end of the second world war. The creation of the modern global economy rested on successive GATT trade rounds, the European common market, the reconstruction of Japan and Germany and other changes Friedman may have applauded but had nothing to do with him. He welcomed China’s accession to World Trade Organization in 2001 but was not an important player in removing the US veto. China’s economic success with considerable state ownership and direction ran opposite to Friedman’s prescriptions. On the Washington consensus, there is anyway today no consensus.

As he became more involved in Republican politics, Friedman’s moral compass became unreliable. Supporting Barry Goldwater’s campaign for the presidency, Friedman opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act. His argument, according to Burns, was that people have a right to racially discriminate if they wish. With economics, you need to know when to stop.

His fans claim Friedman’s ideas also had a big impact on Australia. According to economist Peter Swan, speaking at a Friedman tribute in Sydney in 2007, Friedman’s ideas arguably spurred not only “the demolition of the Berlin Wall, the demise of the Soviet Union and of communism [and] the rise of Maggie Thatcher in the UK” but also the “magnificent success of the early Hawke–Keating government,” which “freed up the financial system, floated the dollar, and deregulated and privatised much of the economy. And Friedman’s ideas surely laid the foundations for the great prosperity enjoyed by Australians under the Howard government.”

Putting aside his suggestions about the Berlin Wall and the demise the Soviet Union, Swan’s attribution of the success of the Hawke and Keating governments to Friedman is hard to see. Writing about those governments, researching the archive of Keating’s files, I cannot recall coming across Friedman’s name once.

The Hawke and Keating governments were indeed adherents of what was then broadly known as economic rationalism, but it is fanciful to credit Friedman. It was just regular economics. The Hawke government put in place an Accord with the trade unions which, with the cooperation of the wage arbitration tribunal, restrained the growth of wages. That idea was anathema to Friedman. The Hawke and Keating governments legislated tariff cuts, long advocated by Australian economists and drawn from mainstream economic thinking that long preceded Friedman. (Influenced by Bert Kelly, Whitlam had also been a tariff reformer.) Friedman was an advocate of the sort of privatisations effected by the Hawke and Keating governments, but so were many other prominent economists.

There is perhaps more of a Friedmanite influence in financial deregulation. Australia’s efforts were in some respects more thoroughgoing than in the United States, but somewhat later — as was the float of the currency. In Australia, as in Britain and the United States, deregulation was prompted by the increasing success of unregulated financial businesses, cross-border competition and the opportunities offered by computing and communications technologies. Friedman advocated financial deregulation but, again, so did others.

And while Australia’s Reserve Bank continued with monetary targets until 1985 the operating instrument and the real focus of policy was always the short-term interest rate. The bank anyway had no more success than other central banks in meeting its money targets. The targets were seen as aspirational projections rather than outcomes that had to be attained. Not long after the float of the Australian dollar, the bank (and the government) dropped what had by then become fictional monetary targets. As the bank’s then deputy governor, Stephen Grenville, pointed out in a canonical 1997 paper, by the late eighties it was widely recognised that the relationship between money and nominal income had broken down. He approvingly quoted a remark of the Bank of Canada governor: “We didn’t abandon monetary targets, they abandoned us.”

For all that, Burns rightly points out that Friedman could claim a good deal of the credit for many of the characteristics of contemporary central banking. One is explicit targets, though now expressed as an inflation range rather than a rate of growth of money. Another is openness, expressed as public information about the monetary policy decisions of the central bank, and its economic forecasts. A third might be the greater independence of central banks from the rest of the government. In the United States all three were in varying degrees absent from the Fed when Friedman began drawing attention to the role of money and monetary policy from the later 1950s onward. He could claim to have had a big influence on central banking, and for the better.

Freidman’s most thorough intellectual biography is the magnificent two volume study by Edward Nelson, an Australian economist working at the Federal Reserve in Washington. At over 1300 pages Nelson’s Milton Friedman and Economic Debate in the United States 1932-1972 (University of Chicago Press, 2020) demonstrates in detail the range of Friedman’s professional impact in the long-running disputes between economists broadly aligned with Keynesian views, and those adhering to the Chicago classical tradition.

As Nelson noted in 2011, some of Friedman’s views have been put to unexpected uses. The then Fed chair Ben Bernanke cited Friedman’s criticism of inactivity of the central bank during the Great Depression to justify the large-scale intervention of the Fed in the 2008 financial crisis. But it is also true that the 2008 crisis was caused by a grotesque failure of financial businesses to control risks. Alan Greenspan’s misplaced confidence that financial markets would correctly price the risks of mortgage securitisation, the most expensive error in the history of central banking thus far, had a distinctly Friedmanite or at least Chicago ring.

Perhaps Friedman’s most enduring legacy is his support for the notion that market economies usually work reasonably well. They occasionally crash but by and large the price mechanism, the invisible hand, guides efficient decisions much better than state control of prices, labour and capital. Friedman argued for this view but it was, after all, the fundamental tenet of economic theory as developed in Western Europe and Britain from the eighteenth century onward, and not a view that Friedman either invented or much improved. A brilliant advocate, an important scholar — that should be enough for one very distinguished career in economics, without also being held responsible for the shape of the world in the second half of the twentieth century. •

Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative
By Jennifer Burns | Farrar Straus Giroux | $59.99 | 592 pages

Prescient president

On the Middle East, renewable energy, American power and much else, Jimmy Carter was ahead of his time

Mike Steketee 8 March 2024 2543 words

“Sheer relentlessness”: Jimmy Carter with Egyptian president Anwar Sadat (left) and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin (right) after the signing of the Egypt–Israel peace treaty on 26 March 1979. Granger Archive/Alamy


Forty-five years ago an American president took a great gamble. He invited the prime minister of Israel and the president of Egypt to the United States to negotiate a Middle East peace agreement.

Ambitious? Yes. Cyrus Vance, president Jimmy Carter’s secretary of state, called it “a daring stroke.” Foolhardy? Many thought so, including members of Carter’s staff.

Failure was a real possibility and would reflect badly on Carter, already struggling with a perception that he lacked authority. Egypt and Israel were sworn enemies who had been fighting wars since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.

Carter took Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat to Camp David, the presidential retreat in the Maryland mountains outside Washington, and kept them there for the next thirteen days. A media blackout prevailed until an agreement was reached. Kai Bird, author of The Outlier, a 2021 biography of Carter, described his approach as “sheer relentlessness.”

Sadat and Carter wore down an intransigent Begin until he succumbed, agreeing to a peace treaty with Egypt, including relinquishing control of the Sinai Peninsula, taken from Egypt in the 1967 war, and the dismantling of Israeli settlements there.

The agreement also included the election of a self-governing Palestinian authority in the West Bank within five years, together with (according to Carter’s detailed record) a five-year freeze on Israeli settlements there. Within three months, Israel started on a major expansion of West Bank settlements, with Begin denying the freeze had been part of the official agreement and Carter telling his staff that Begin had lied to him.

The peace treaty with Egypt, the strongest Arab state, stuck, although it cost Sadat his life. He was assassinated in 1981 by members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, who condemned him as a traitor for the Camp David accords.

Carter’s hopes for a broader Middle East peace have proved elusive ever since, although he could clearly see the consequences. Near the end of his presidency he wrote in his diary, “I don’t see how they” — the Israeli government — “can continue as an occupying power depriving the Palestinians of basic human rights and I don’t see how they can absorb three million more Arabs in Israel without letting the Jews become a minority in their own country.”

Nevertheless the accords were a notable achievement and unimaginable in the context of the Middle East politics of recent decades. Carter reaped a political dividend but also paid a cost: relations with the enormously powerful pro-Israel lobby in the United States were never the same again. They had not expected an American president to act as an honest broker.

Carter’s single term in the White House is generally rated among the less impressive in the presidential rankings. Yet his presidency has undergone a re-evaluation given his significant achievements in foreign and domestic policy, which look all the more substantial from today’s perspective.

In the tradition of the best political biographies, Bird gained access to volumes of material, including the copious personal diaries Carter kept as president as well as those of important figures in his administration. To learn that senior members were eating sandwiches at an important meeting in the cabinet room may not be vital to our understanding but it does point to a notable attention to detail.

Reading the narrative from the inside confirmed much of what I observed from the outside as a foreign correspondent in Washington during most of the Carter presidency. But it did so in much starker relief.

For example, the tensions between secretary of state Vance, the diplomat, and national security adviser Zbigniew Brzeziński, a cold war warrior, were evident at the time, but not their depth. Bird provides instances of what he called Brzeziński’s “highly manipulative” approach; Vance called him “evil, a liar, dangerous.”


Carter, a peanut farmer from small-town Georgia with a distinctive southern drawl, was an improbable candidate for the White House. He was a practising Baptist for whom, unlike many politicians, his religion was more than a veneer.

In a south where the echoes of the civil war still resonated and segregation continued in practice if not in name, he took a stand against racism. Yet he also was a skilled politician, elected as governor of Georgia despite his reputation as not being a typical white southerner and pragmatic when he thought he needed to be, including by downplaying his anti-racist credentials.

Still, running for president was a huge leap. He wasn’t taken seriously until he won the New Hampshire primary, and even then he was viewed with scepticism by leading members of the east-coast Democratic establishment. “He can’t be president,” said former New York governor Averell Harriman. “I don’t even know him!”

Sceptics dismissed him as self-righteous. His promise to voters that “I’ll never lie to you” prompted his friend and adviser Charles Kirbo to comment, perhaps not completely in jest, “You’re going to lose the liar vote.” But he came across to voters as sincere and authentic. And then, as now, coming from outside Washington was an advantage.

Circumstances played a large part: his Republican opponent was Gerald Ford, the sometimes hapless vice-president who had served the balance of president Richard Nixon’s term following Nixon’s resignation over Watergate. Even then, Carter won only narrowly.

In elite Washington, Carter’s team of knockabout southerners were often dismissed as hicks. But, like Carter, they were not easily deterred.

Carter brought a luminous intelligence, idealism and diligence to the White House that stands in stark contrast to the era of Trump. He argued that the world was not so easily categorised in traditional American black-and-white terms — that there was more to foreign policy than a contest between the United States and the Soviet Union. He preached against the “inordinate fear of communism” that had led to Washington’s embracing of some of the world’s nastiest right-wing dictators. The Vietnam war, he said of this approach, was “the best example of its intellectual and moral poverty.”

Bird writes that Carter rejected “any reflexive notions of American exceptionalism. He preached that there were limits to American power and limits to what we could inflict on the environment.” America didn’t go to war during Carter’s presidency — an exception up to that time and since.

He elevated human rights in foreign policy. It earned him derision from hardheads but it enhanced America’s reputation abroad, its so-called soft power.

Like any politician, though not as often, he compromised and backtracked when he judged that politics required it. Against his better instincts, he approved development of the MX missile, an expensive boondoggle championed by defence hawks, writing in his diary that he was sickened by “the gross waste of money going into nuclear weapons.”

In the wake of the OPEC oil embargo, when he was trying to persuade Congress to pass legislation to restrict energy consumption and provide funding for alternatives such as wind and solar, he diarised that “the influence of the oil and gas industry is unbelievable.” To set an example, he put solar panels on the White House roof and predicted that within two decades 20 per cent of the nation’s energy would be generated by solar power. He hadn’t count on his successor, Ronald Reagan, who removed the solar panels as one of his first acts as president, nor the ideological climate wars that followed.

While those actions were triggered by the energy crisis, he was receptive to the emerging issue of climate change. Just before leaving office, he released a report from his environmental think tank predicting “widespread and pervasive changes in global climatic, economic, social and agricultural patterns” if the world continued to rely on fossil fuels. It was a prescient warning almost half a century ago.

Carter’s domestic reforms included deregulation of sectors of the American economy, including banks and airlines, thereby increasing competition and reducing prices, though also bringing negative consequences. Consumer regulations led to mandatory seatbelts and airbags and fuel efficiency standards — something Australia is finally getting around to introducing almost half a century later. Environmental laws were passed to reduce air and water pollution; highly contested legislation locked up a large part of Alaska as wilderness and national parks, preventing oil and gas exploration.

In foreign policy, the Panama Canal treaties relinquished American control of the canal, returning sovereignty to Panama. Carter completed the normalisation of relations with China started under Nixon and negotiated an arms control agreement with the Soviet Union.

Other reforms proved to be harder sledding. Legislation on health reform that Carter thought could pass Congress was judged inadequate by Democratic liberals such as senator Edward Kennedy, who championed comprehensive national health insurance and used it as a platform to unsuccessfully challenge Carter for the Democratic nomination in 1980. It would take another thirty years for Barack Obama’s administration to enact significant, if still not comprehensive, healthcare reform.

Carter was never completely accepted by the traditional Democrats that people like Kennedy represented. It came down to suspicion about his Southern roots. Too conservative for northern Democrats, he was too much of a liberal for many southern Democrats and Republicans.


By 1979, with Americans waiting in long queues to buy petrol and paying what were then exorbitant prices for the privilege (US$1 a gallon), Carter’s presidency was at risk of sliding into oblivion. Against the almost unanimous advice of his staff, he decided on another Camp David retreat, this time a domestic summit, inviting some of the nation’s leading citizens to come up with ideas for the nation’s future. What was unusual then seems extraordinary now.

Over ten days a parade of “wise men” travelled to Camp David to diagnose the nation’s ailments and remedies. As with the Begin–Sadat summit, the rest of the nation was kept in the dark by a media blackout.

Carter emerged to give an address to the nation like none other. Sounding more preacher than president, he said America faced a fundamental crisis of confidence that no amount of legislation could fix. Americans were losing their faith in the future, worshiping “self-indulgence and consumption.”

Taking the side of the people while lecturing them at the same time, he said he no more liked the behaviour of a paralysed Congress pulled in every direction by special interests. The immediate test was beating the energy crisis, on which he announced a series of initiatives taking in a windfall profits tax on the oil industry to finance the development of domestic sources of energy, including coal and a national solar energy “bank.” (His focus was on cutting dependence on imported oil, rather than climate change.) He announced plans for rebuilding mass transit systems and a national program for Americans to conserve energy.

Contrary to the fears of his hard-headed advisors, the speech was a great success, reflected in surges in Carter’s approval ratings of 11 per cent in one poll and 17 per cent in another. He was able to convey that most precious of political commodities — sincerity.

But these and other achievements were overwhelmed late in his term by the Iranian hostage crisis. Its origins lay in the Islamic revolution and the toppling of the Shah, who the CIA effectively had re-instated as ruler of Iran in 1953 following the previous Iranian government’s nationalisation of the oil industry. Concerned by the risk to Americans in Iran, Carter resisted efforts to allow the Shah to seek refuge in the United States; but he eventually succumbed to pressure from David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger and other establishment figures to allow him in on the pretext of urgent medical treatment.

Two weeks later, Carter’s worst fears were realised when Iranian students stormed the US embassy in Tehran and took sixty-six hostages. When diplomacy failed, Carter authorised a complex and risky rescue mission involving ninety-five commandos, a C-130 transport plane and six helicopters. A series of mechanical failures and accidents, including a collision between one of the helicopters and the C-130, resulted in the mission being abandoned.

The hostage crisis plagued the remainder of Carter’s term, reinforcing perceptions of him as a weak president. It subsequently became clear that the campaign team for Republican nominee Ronald Reagan worked behind the scenes with Iranian representatives to delay the release of the hostages, promising a better deal if he won the election. Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, had negotiated freedom for thirteen of the hostages the previous year and told Carter years later that he had rejected approaches from Reagan officials offering an arms deal if he could delay the release of those remaining.

The hostages were released on the day after Reagan’s inauguration following his landslide win in the 1980 election. Soon after taking office, the new administration, despite publicly maintaining Carter’s embargo on arms sales to Iran, secretly authorised Israel to sell military equipment to Iran.

The hostage crisis was not the only reason for the relatively rare election loss by a first-term president. Carter’s support was sapped by the 1970s ailment of stagflation — high inflation and stagnant economic growth — together with the energy crisis. Reagan, the former Hollywood actor, had an appealing personality and a now-familiar slogan: “Make America great again.”


James Fallows, speechwriter for the first two years of the administration, says that Carter invented the role of former president. He certainly had an active four decades of public life following the presidency, with the 110-strong staff of the Carter Centre in Atlanta working on human rights, preventive health care, election monitoring and international conflict resolution.

Carter raised millions of dollars for a program that virtually eradicated guinea worm, a parasitic disease that had disabled and disfigured 3.5 million people a year in Africa and India. His centre helped distribute twenty-nine million tablets in Africa and Latin America for the treatment of river blindness, another disease caused by a parasitic worm. “Americans got used to seeing this ex-president, dressed in blue jeans with a carpenter’s belt, hammering nails into two-by-fours for a house under construction by a team of volunteers for Habitat for Humanity,” Bird writes.

In the 1980s, he spoke out about the concerns he had developed about the Middle East when he was president but he had judged were too dangerous to express publicly. “Israel is the problem towards peace,” he said, citing particularly the expansion of settlements on the West Bank. Accused of bias, he responded that “a lot of the accusations about bias are deliberately designed to prevent further criticism of Israel’s policies. And I don’t choose to be intimidated.” In 2006, he published his twenty-first book with the provocative title, particularly then, of Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, earning him epithets such as “liar,” “bigot” and “anti-Semite.”

By then Carter had been awarded the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize for “decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights and to promote economic and social development.”

After he was diagnosed with cancer in 2015 he said, “I’d like for the last guinea worm to die before I do.” Nine years later, aged ninety-nine and in palliative care, he is still going, if not strongly — a metaphor for a lifetime of indefatigability. •

Gap years

Obfuscation and delay are blocking efforts to tackle Indigenous disadvantage

Michael Dillon 1643 words

Indigenous Australians minister Linda Burney speaking on the Closing the Gap annual report in parliament last month. Mick Tsikas/AAP Image


Governments acknowledge year after year that policies designed to close the gap aren’t working, yet they refuse to allocate the intellectual, financial and political resources that would make a difference. Instead, they devote enormous bureaucratic and political resources to managing the perceptions of the wider electorate, raising and then dashing expectations in First Nations communities and laying the foundations for deeper distrust and disengagement.

The problem is clear in the latest Closing the Gap annual report, a masterful example of sophisticated political management and bureaucratic obfuscation. This tightly organised combination of new and previous policy commitments, 2023 achievements and key actions for 2024 purports to outline the Commonwealth’s strategic priorities for the next year. But closer analysis reveals deep-seated flaws in policy design, strategic omissions and evasions and a deep-seated lack of ambition, all wrapped in a slick presentation replete with selective case studies, graphics, some useful governance charts and an avalanche of uninformative facts and figures. There is nothing strategic about this document.

The previous government was more inclined to blame the victim, cut funding and pursue punitive policies. It reshaped the Closing the Gap architecture, reconstituting and expanding its targets. Most importantly, it created a new National Agreement on Closing the Gap that directly engaged First Nations in shaping policy while shifting the bulk of political and policy responsibility — and future blame — to the states and territories.

For Labor, the failure of the Voice referendum has exposed a deficient policy framework and diminished its preparedness to pursue substantive reform. In desperation, it has fallen back — holus bolus — on the previous government’s policy architecture.

Despite their tactical and ideological differences, both major parties have used excessively complex bureaucratic processes, extremely low transparency, high-flown promises and the tactical politicisation of specific issues to divert attention from more important underlying issues. Their guiding principles appear to be to deflect, defer and delay.

A fundamental problem with the national agreement is that its policy architecture is extraordinarily over-engineered. It was designed not by a single committee of state, territory and Commonwealth bureaucrats but by negotiations between that committee and a committee of Indigenous representatives. The asymmetric power imbalance inevitably produced an imperfect structure.

It is hard to believe that the government negotiators didn’t see the ramifications of the extraordinarily complex structure that emerged from the negotiations. It created multiple choke points at which multi-party consultation and coordination is required, encouraging a culture of inertia and stasis.

To take just one important example, the agreement identifies nineteen targets and four priority reforms and allocates responsibility for implementation to eight state and territory jurisdictions along with the Commonwealth and the Australian Local Government Association. The Coalition of Indigenous Peaks — which itself has a nascent federal structure in each state and territory — is also ostensibly an equal partner.

No line of sight nor responsibility exists between any one target and any one government or minister: responsibilities and accountability are shared across a highly complex geographical and sectoral matrix involving layers of mainstream and Indigenous-specific programs. National-level data is deficient across all targets and all four priority reforms, at least partly because the targets themselves have been poorly chosen and loosely specified. Most importantly, the targets are not aligned with dedicated investment strategies.

The four priority reforms at the heart of the agreement would best be seen as overarching frameworks. But they have been broken down into arbitrary elements to be measured and reported on, notwithstanding the vagueness of these elements and their poor fit with existing data. Instead of bringing macro-level strategic coherence the four priorities have been converted into arenas of micro-focused navel-gazing.

While the agreement requires each jurisdiction to publish an annual report and develop an on-going implementation plan, the joint council that manages its operation decided some years ago to shift to annual implementation plans, adding a further layer of process. Instead of being a roadmap laying out each jurisdiction’s multi-year pathway to each target, the plans merely recount innumerable actions and funding decisions, most with limited timeframes.

The latest Commonwealth implementation plan lists sixty-five commitments of varying significance; state and territory plans are generally much more complicated. A requirement that jurisdictions explain how they would “close the gap” has been transformed into a requirement to publish a profusion of meaningless facts and intentions to develop plans.

By combining that latest implementation plan with its annual report the Commonwealth has signalled its unwillingness to develop and lay out a longer-term roadmap. Its decision-making is very much at odds with the recent Productivity Commission review of Closing the Gap, which recommends that implementation plans reflect a more strategic approach.

Any serious attempt to lay out such a roadmap would involve two elements that are seemingly anathema to the Australian government. First, the Commonwealth would need to establish a framework to coordinate the disparate and largely inadequate efforts of the states and territories. This is a glaring hole in Closing the Gap’s architecture and desperately needs attention not just from the Indigenous Australians minister but also from the treasurer, the finance minister and the prime minister.

Notwithstanding its potential to give First Nations people access to policymaking, the national agreement has formalised a regression across the federation towards the inertia last experienced before 1967. Labor would face few insurmountable obstacles if it resolved to reverse direction and effectively coordinate government efforts to deal with Indigenous disadvantage across the federation. A failure to do so will risk Closing the Gap imploding under its own weight.

The second element of a realistic and effective roadmap would be an estimate of the size of the multi-year investments required. This would facilitate better decision-making, assist in placing the myriad demands on governments in perspective and assess the financial costs — the imputed shortfalls in funding, in other words — that First Nations Australians continue to bear.

Unfortunately the Commonwealth’s latest implementation plan appears designed to preclude even modest reforms like these.


Many other questions and issues aren’t dealt with in the Commonwealth’s plan. There’s space here to look at just two of them.

The Community Development Program provides income support and job search for around 40,000 participants in remote Australia. This year’s Closing the Gap annual report lists a total 1950 new jobs employment placements/jobs created under CDP. Even so, the prime minister announced that the government was “moving on” from the “failed Community Development Program” and establishing a Remote Jobs and Economic Development Program to help community organisations create 3000 jobs over three years in remote areas, at a cost of $707 million. This funding for real jobs in regions where employment opportunities are scarce or non-existent is welcome and long overdue. Unfortunately, it is pathetically unambitious. And what is the future for the 37,000 CDP participants? Will they continue in a “failed” program?

A second example: the report lists ninety-eight actions from last year’s implementation plan and reports on their status. Most are mere process matters. Nine are listed as delayed; one as “stopped.” The latter is target 9b, relating to remote essential services infrastructure (though that’s not spelt out in the report). The target, which was approved by ministers in August 2022, states:

By 2031, all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander households:

• within discrete Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities receive essential services that meet or exceed the relevant jurisdictional standard

• in or near to a town receive essential services that meet or exceed the same standard as applies generally within the town…

Last year the Commonwealth declared that “delivering on Target 9b will provide vital infrastructure to support liveable, safe, sustainable and healthy communities for all First Nations peoples… The initial focus for the target will be on the development of a new Community Infrastructure Implementation Plan, in collaboration with the National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation (NACCHO) and key stakeholders.”

Why then, without explanation, has work on the implementation plan for “vital infrastructure” been stopped? Perhaps the Commonwealth fears a remote infrastructure implementation plan would encourage the states to demand increased Commonwealth funding. So much for mobilising all avenues and opportunities to overcome the entrenched inequality faced by too many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.


All in all, the latest Closing the Gap report makes for depressing reading. It comes across as a convoluted box-ticking exercise, overflowing with plans, partnership committees, good news stories and the like. It makes no serious attempt to look behind the available data to acknowledge and reflect on the challenges of those families caught up in extreme poverty, cycles of alcohol-and drug-induced despair, youth suicides, and the trauma of extraordinary rates of incarceration and unfathomable out-of-home-care rates for Indigenous children.

The report’s implicit agenda is to defer committing financial resources, and delay making difficult decisions. Sure, governments can’t solve all the nation’s problems, but it is inexcusable that, where governments do invest, resources don’t flow equitably.

The Closing the Gap process is perhaps the most useful way to bring these problems to the nation’s attention. Its success will require vision, political commitment and a preparedness to think through the policy issues and make decisions commensurate with the size and severity of the challenges. The Albanese government, like the government before it, has so far failed on all counts.

In his 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King Jr. famously wrote that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.” It is time the government commissioned an independent strategic review of the Indigenous policy domain, akin to the recent 2023 Defence Strategic Review, aimed at bringing a much greater degree of discipline, rigour and, most importantly, urgency to a worsening crisis blighting the life opportunities of many tens of thousands of First Nations citizens.

The fact that the depth and severity of this crisis is largely invisible to most Australians increases the responsibility on governments to act; it is not an excuse or rationale for inaction. •

Ben Chifley’s pipe

A stalwart supporter of the Labor leader emerges from history’s shadows

Anne-Marie Condé 7 March 2024 2324 words

“As you say, good pipes are very scarce these days”: a signed photo of Ben Chifley in 1948. National Library of Australia


I once had the task of combing through a digitised file of letters to prime minister Ben Chifley held by the National Archives of Australia. Clicking away, I noticed one from a man named W.H. Reece, sent in August 1946.

“Would you please send me one of your pipes that you may have laid aside and you will not be likely to be using again,” wrote Mr Reece. “If it should be a bit strong, no matter. I know of a process that will overcome that. I have not been able to get a decent pipe for years.”

A quick glance was enough to tell me that this was not what I was looking for. But I printed the letter out for a closer look anyway. The writer was an aged pensioner, he said, twenty days short of seventy-five years, living alone in New Norfolk, Tasmania. He has raised a family of six daughters and three sons. All of the sons had served in the recent war, he added, with one still with the occupying force in Japan.

Reece had “battled for Labour” since he joined the Amalgamated Miners Union in 1889. “I started in poverty and I’m ending ditto, but I’ve no regrets and have no apologies to offer for my support of the ‘Grand Old Labour Movement.’”

If Mr Chifley were to visit Hobart during the forthcoming federal election campaign, and if Reece is spared that long, he promises to be in the audience. He is very optimistic that the Chifley government will be returned with a strong majority (it was). “I wish you and your good colleagues all the good luck that wishes can express.”

I was busy that day and so, having studied the letter for a few minutes and enjoying a giggle about the pipe thing (what was that all about?) I tossed it aside and moved on. Fortunately, the pile I tossed it into was the “do not throw out under any circumstances” pile, where it stayed until the inevitable desk clean-up late last year when, at last, Mr Reece finally had my full attention.


This is my favourite thing, the deep study of a single archival record. It could be a letter, a telegram or a bunch of postcards discovered in a junk shop. It is remarkable what can be gleaned from seemingly insignificant clues, especially now that these clues can be run through so many newly digitised sources. Becoming deeply immersed in someone else’s life, trying to see the world through their eyes, must be my form of meditation.

Why this Mr Reece though? What is it about him in particular? Partly it was his surname that guided my hand that day towards the “do not throw out” pile rather than the recycling bin. I grew up in Tasmania and I remember my parents talking about the redoubtable Eric Reece, a former long-time Labor premier known as “Electric Eric” because of his ardent support for hydroelectric projects. Surely it had to be the same family.

But mainly I was captivated by what I perceive as a yearning on Reece’s part to stay connected with the world. It’s unintentionally expressed, but it’s there. Looking back over his long life, this proud and, I think, lonely man tells of the things that most matter to him: his work, his family and the labour movement. Not only that, he also imagines Labor’s next victory even if he is not alive to see it.

And the pipe thing? Chifley made his pipe a signature accessory and was rarely seen without one, but it does seem awful cheek to expect him to simply hand one over on request. Chifley wrote back: “Dear Mr Reece, thanks for your letter… I am sorry that for the present I haven’t a suitable pipe to send you. As you say, good pipes are very scarce these days.” (Actually Chifley usually had several on hand, gifts from family and well-wishers.) “I was interested to read of your lengthy support of the Labour Movement. You must have many memories to look back on.” And he signed off with best wishes.

Reece didn’t get his pipe but I doubt he was disappointed. Pipe smoking was a companionable habit the two men shared but Reece’s request, I suspect, was just an opening gambit. It has been said of Chifley that he used the lighting of his pipe as a stalling tactic while he thought through a response to a problem. And so, preliminaries over, Reece felt perfectly free to address his prime minister as an equal, one Labor man to another, to tell his story.

The letter wasn’t really about the pipe, and — fair warning — this essay is not really about it either.


William Henry Reece (often known even in official records as Will Harry Reece) was born in 1872, and he was indeed an uncle to Eric Reece. Fortunately for me, there is a biography of Reece the younger, Jillian Koshin’s Electric Eric: The Life and Times of an Australian State Premier (2009).

Koshin’s book begins with an examination of the Reece family’s working-class origins in mining towns in the northeast and west of Tasmania. The discovery of minerals — gold, silver, copper, tin — in the 1870s brought a sudden and massive economic boom to the colony based on interstate investment, higher export income, higher wages and increased incoming migration. In his 2012 history of Tasmania, Henry Reynolds describes the 1880s as one of Tasmania’s “sunniest” decades.

Patriarch Owen Charles Reece established himself as a miner in the 1870s but was frequently on the move looking for work. Koshin is at pains to show how the wealth that enriched investors and beautified the cities rarely trickled down to the poorest folk who had laboured to produce it. Across three generations, even in so-called good times, little changed for the Reece family.

Owen and his wife Jane had fourteen children but the first three, triplets, died in infancy. Jane was thirty-eight when she died in Scottsdale hospital giving birth to twins, who also died. Owen was left a widower with nine children to raise; our man Will (“I started in poverty…”) was the eldest. A few brothers down the line was George, eventually to become the father of Eric, who was born in 1909.

The Reeces’ lives were characterised by insecure and dangerous work and the strain and expense of constantly moving from one primitive slab-and-shingle hut to another in remote and isolated settlements. Because these clusters of dwellings were expected to be temporary, authorities would rarely invest in public amenities. Close-knit families relied on one other.

Out of these struggles emerged a writer, Marie E.J. Pitt. Originally from Victoria, she was married to a miner, William Pitt, and for about a decade beginning in the 1890s went with him to mining settlements in the northeast and west of Tasmania. They had four children, one of whom died.

Scribbling by lamplight, Pitt wrote of “an austere land of mountain gorges of ice and snow, and raging torrents of creeping mist and never-ending rain.” The land spoke another language, “superb in its silence, appalling in its melancholy grandeur.” Her pen was also driven by anger. This is how she begins her poem “The Keening”:

We are the women and children
Of the men that mined for gold:
Heavy are we with sorrow,
Heavy as heart can hold;
Galled are we with injustice,
Sick to the soul of loss —
Husbands and sons and brothers
Slain for the yellow dross!

Over nine more bitter stanzas she attacks mine owners, politicians and churchmen for having averted their gaze from the misery right in front of them. “The Keening” was published in 1911, but by then the Pitts had moved to Victoria because William had contracted miner’s phthisis. He died in 1912.


Will Reece, his siblings, nieces and nephews were among those children of the men that mined for gold. All the Reece men became union men. Poetry aside, trade unionism was the practical agent of change, the structure within which to advocate for safer working conditions, better wages and political representation.

Reece was a seventeen-year-old apprentice blacksmith at the tin mine in Ringarooma when he joined the Amalgamated Miner’s Union in 1889, the year of its formation in Tasmania. For some reason, though, he broke away from the family and left the mines behind. His parents were married with Baptist rites but Will appears to have converted to Catholicism, a most unusual thing to do in those sectarian times, and certainly enough to cause a family rift.

From the late 1890s he roamed through several agricultural districts in the northeast and in 1909, at St Mary’s, he married a woman named Catherine Cannell. In 1912 they went south to New Norfolk, a town nestling in the Derwent valley thirty-five kilometres northwest of Hobart. The landscape was far kinder than anything Will Reece had known growing up, and here the family settled for good.

Literate, articulate and gregarious, Reece would join anything. He played cricket and football, would swing an axe at a local woodchopping event and was always ready to chair a meeting, MC a church fundraiser or write a letter to an editor about some local grievance. Forced in 1915 to give up blacksmithing because of an accident, he opened a photographic studio; it failed, and he was declared bankrupt in 1921.

Clearly this man had bucketloads of self-belief. He stood twice, unsuccessfully, for the municipal council and then, undeterred, turned to state politics and was a candidate for Labor in the elections of 1919, 1922, 1925 and 1928. He failed each time.

Meanwhile he became an organiser for the Australian Workers’ Union, and here he found his métier. His nephew’s biographer noticed Will Reece signing up shearers, shed-hands, miners, labourers and roadmen across the state, including in mining centres on the west coast. New heavy-industry projects provided fresh fields for the AWU, and there was Will Reece, visiting the new carbide factory at Electrona in the south and the hydroelectricity works at Waddamana in the central highlands. With regular reports (this one is typical) he made himself well-known to the readers of the AWU’s national paper, the Australian Worker.

But the 1930s brought reversals. In 1931, more than a quarter of Tasmanian trade unionists were unemployed because of the depression. All the Reece men let their union membership lapse. Will Reece returned to manual labour and in 1934, aged sixty-two, was severely injured in an explosives accident while quarrying for gravel. He sustained burns to his face and temporarily lost his sight. In 1935 his wife Catherine died suddenly, leaving him with a clutch of children and teenagers.

In 1939 Will’s fifty-year commitment to the labour cause was celebrated at a special meeting of the New Norfolk branch of the Labor Party. Local MP Jack Dwyer spoke Reece’s work to “uplift” the condition of the masses. Many of the privileges now enjoyed by the workers were due to his efforts, Dwyer noted, and the party was much indebted to him.

At about that time Will’s nephew Eric was embarking on his own (in his case spectacularly successful) political career. After failed attempts in 1940 and 1943, Eric was elected Labor member of the state House of Assembly in November 1946. He was in office as premier between 1958 and 1969, and again from 1972 to 1975, and was federal president of the Labor Party between 1952 and 1955.

His formative years had been similar to his uncle’s: he’d worked in mines and on farms from his early teens — joined the AWU at fifteen — spent most of the 1930s depression unemployed — got a job at the Mount Lyell copper mine in 1934 — was appointed organiser for the AWU there in 1935. Strangely, there does not seem to have been a strong association between uncle and nephew. In his 1946 letter to Ben Chifley, Will could have mentioned Eric as a promising youngster to keep an eye on, but he does not.

Still, Will and Eric Reece — and Ben Chifley as well, of course — were haunted by memories of hardship, and all strove for the same things: economic growth, full employment, increased standards of living, and social welfare for those who needed it.


There was nothing in Eric Reece’s makeup to prepare him for the social upheavals and cultural shifts of the 1960s and 1970s. He had grown up believing that the state’s natural resources — its water, timber and minerals — were there to be used for the common good. Famously, he rode roughshod over opposition to the hydroelectric scheme in southwest Tasmania that was to flood Lake Pedder in 1972–73.

Where some people wept at Pedder’s beauty, Eric Reece was belligerent and autocratic. In 1966 he taunted his opponents with the remark that Tasmania’s southwest contained only “a few badgers, kangaroos, wallabies, and some wildflowers that can be seen anywhere.” (Badgers? Did he mean wombats?) Tough old trade unionists like Reece knew what destitution looked like and were lit with a determination to do more than just overcome personal hardship; they were committed to structural reforms to improve the lives of all working people.

By this time, however, there had begun a great grinding of gears in progressive politics as young, idealistic, tertiary-educated people drifted away from Labor to the green movement. While this also happened elsewhere, perhaps the grinding came earlier in Tasmania.

Will Reece didn’t live to see any of this. Perhaps, as promised, he made it to Hobart in September 1946 to hear Ben Chifley’s two-hour campaign speech given to a capacity crowd at the town hall. “The whole country is prosperous,” Chifley declared that night. “That is the first ideal we have, and we go to the people on that record.”

Labor’s election loss in 1949 and Chifley’s death in 1951 must have saddened Reece. He died in 1953, with his boots on (so to speak) I hope, and his certainties still intact. •

Victors’ justice?

A major new book revisits the moral and legal ambiguities of the Tokyo war crimes trial

Tessa Morris-Suzuki Books 4 March 2024 1645 words

Haunted proceedings: Japan’s wartime prime minister Tojo Hideki (to left of centre, with headphones) during his war crimes trial in January 1948. Keystone-France/Alamy


Now is a good time to be reassessing the Tokyo war crimes trial. Across East Asia and the world, the postwar global settlement is crumbling. This process has been very evident in Japan, though it has unfolded quietly there and attracted surprisingly little attention in the English-speaking world. Internationally, debates continue to rage about the definition of war crimes and processes for bringing war criminals to justice.

The Allies’ trial of Japanese wartime political and military leaders was intended to lay the foundations of a new, peaceful and democratic Japan by punishing the militarists who had led the country into a disastrous conflict. The notion that victors could judge the vanquished evoked controversy, both within Japan and internationally; yet in the late 1940s the pioneering Japanese feminist Kato Shizue could confidently write that “intelligent Japanese long ago decided that the punishment of the war criminals was inevitable, and they think the verdicts were just.”

Today, feelings are very different. Japanese conservative politicians (including prominent members of the present government) rail against what they label the “Tokyo Trial View of History,” which they blame for instilling a darkly masochistic view of the nation’s history in the minds of the Japanese population. The late prime minister Shinzo Abe was particularly emphatic in denying that the men convicted by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East should be regarded as criminals. The seven who were executed for war crimes following the Tokyo trial — as well as others convicted and given lesser sentences — are among those commemorated in the Yasukuni Shrine, where right-wing politicians and some senior military officers go to honour the spirits of the dead. As political scientist Gary J. Bass argues in his monumental new book Judgement at Tokyo, “the Tokyo trial misfired and fizzled,” revealing “some of the reasons why a liberal international order has not emerged in Asia, despite the wishes of some American strategists.”

The paradoxes at the heart of the Tokyo trial began to be visible well before the International Tribunal opened its hearings on 3 May 1946. Bass’s book starts by guiding readers through the concluding stages of the Pacific war and the impassioned debates among allied leaders about the treatment that should be meted out to the vanquished. (US secretary of state Cordell Hull was among those who initially favoured summary executions of Hitler and Japan’s wartime prime minister, Tojo Hideki.) A central figure in the early part of Bass’s narrative is Henry Stimson, US secretary of war at the time of the defeat of Germany and Japan, who played a key part in creating the conceptual framework that underlay both the German Nuremberg war crimes trials and the Tokyo trial.

In Nuremberg and Tokyo, the wartime leaders of the defeated nations faced three classes of criminal charge. Class A was the crime of waging (or conspiring to wage) aggressive war; Class B covered the war crimes set out in the existing Geneva Conventions, including mistreatment of prisoners of war; and Class C encompassed crimes against humanity. The difficulties lay in Classes A and C. There were no legal precedents for prosecuting people for waging aggressive war, nor for crimes against humanity, and even within the victorious allied nations some leading legal commentators were concerned that the trials were imposing newly invented laws retrospectively on the defeated.

The horrors revealed at Nuremberg helped to embed the notion of crimes against humanity both in public consciousness and in international law. But in Tokyo the key charge (though not the only one) was the crime of waging aggressive war — an offence for which no one had ever been prosecuted before the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials, and for which no one has been prosecuted since.

As Bass vividly shows, unease and disagreement about the moral and judicial basis of the International Tribunal’s proceedings haunted the Tokyo trial. Even Sir William Webb, the acerbic Australian judge who presided over the International Military Tribunal, privately questioned whether waging aggressive war could be treated as a crime, though he managed to suppress these doubts sufficiently to concur in, and hand down, the tribunal’s guilty sentences on all the twenty-five defendants who survived the trial. (Two died during the proceedings, and another was found mentally unfit to be tried.)

A further obvious paradox of the Tokyo trial was the fact that Emperor Hirohito, in whose name the war had been fought and hundreds of thousands of Japanese soldiers had gone to their deaths, never appeared in court. By the time Japan surrendered, the US government had decided that it would be politically expedient to retain the emperor as symbolic leader of the new Japan. Despite protests from Australia, he remained immune from prosecution.

Judgment at Tokyo, though, is not a dry analysis of judicial principles and legal arguments. It is a vivid blow-by-blow account of the trial, filled with colourful characters and moments of farce as well as tragedy. The Tokyo tribunal, though dominated by the colonial powers, was more international than its Nuremberg counterpart. Its eleven judges represented the United States, Canada, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand, the Soviet Union, China, India and the Philippines, and each judge brought with him (they were all men) his own experiences, professional training and personal prejudices. They spent their time in war-devastated Tokyo living an isolated existence in the Imperial Hotel, and relations between them were often tense. Chinese judge Mei Ruao took a deep dislike to Indian judge Radhabinod Pal; the British judge, Lord William Patrick, was derisively dismissive of his Filipino counterpart, Delfin Jaranilla. They were united, it seems, only in their shared aversion to the court’s president, William Webb.

Yet this is not a simple litany of fractiousness and failure. What the Tokyo trial achieved, in very difficult circumstances, was the collection of a mass of vivid and often searing evidence of the horrors of war, including of many conventional war crimes: among them, the massacres and mass rapes of civilians in the Philippines and China, the mistreatment and killing of prisoners of war, and the brutal forced labour inflicted on tens of thousands of Southeast Asians and of allied prisoners of war on the Thai–Burma Railway and elsewhere.

While taking readers through this evidence, Judgement at Tokyo also points out the silences: most notably, the absence from the trial of any serious discussion of Japan’s use of biological warfare in China. The US and Soviet authorities were well aware of this dark story but made sure that it was kept out of the trials because they were busy trying to obtain knowledge of Japan’s biological techniques for their own purposes.

Bass explores not only the events of the trial itself but also the subsequent destinies of the judges — particularly the very different fates of Mei Ruao and Radhabinod Pal. Mei, who had been appointed to the court by the Chinese Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek, decided hesitantly to return to mainland China in 1949 and throw in his lot with the new People’s Republic of China. Ironically, he fell foul of the communist authorities because of his fierce criticism of Japanese war crimes at a time when China’s government was trying to improve the country’s political relationship with Japan. He was publicly condemned during the Cultural Revolution and died soon after — only to be elevated to the status of national hero under current Chinese leader Xi Jinping, whose nationalist rhetoric echoes Mei’s own insistence that China should never forget the wartime horrors inflicted on its people by Japan.

The Indian judge Pal, on the contrary, famously wrote a dissenting judgment that sweepingly rejected the right of the International Tribunal to judge the defendants. (Later, he also questioned the Nuremberg judgements and the reality of the Holocaust.) Pal’s lengthy statement of dissent made him the hero of the Japanese right, who feted him on his later visits to Japan and have cited his judgement ever since as justification for their own revisionist views of the war.


Judgement at Tokyo is based on a mountain of court records, government archives and interviews with the descendants of the judges and defendants, and Bass skilfully weaves all this together into a fascinating narrative. Despite the scale and scope of the book, though, there is one odd lacuna. It barely mentions a crucial counterpoint to the Tokyo trials: the story of the 4000-odd Japanese soldiers and military auxiliaries who were found guilty of Class B and C war crimes in trials held throughout East and Southeast Asia and the Pacific, of whom almost 1000 received the death sentence.

As Utsumi Aiko and other Japanese scholars have pointed out, these were the most tragic of the war crimes proceedings, for many of those who received the harshest sentences were low-ranking auxiliaries — some of them drafted from Japan’s colonies of Taiwan and Korea into the violent world of the Japanese wartime military only to be abandoned to their fate by the collapsing military machine that had recruited them.

As Gary Bass shows, the Tokyo trial had far-reaching implications for Japan and its Asian neighbours. Its fundamental flaw was its shakily based attempt to define the waging of aggressive war as a crime. The spectre of double standards and retrospective justice raised by this concept has never been laid to rest. This in turn allows historical denialists today not only to dismiss the trial as “victors’ revenge” but also, by extension, to whitewash the history of the war and depict the Tokyo defendants as innocent martyrs to a just cause. And the growing influence of that denialism, as Bass trenchantly observes, risks shackling Japan to a narrative of the war that is both “morally odious and historically dubious.” •

Judgement at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia
By Gary J. Bass | Picador | $39.99 | 912 pages

Dunkley’s Rorschach test

It’s the interpretation rather than the result that will have real-world effects

Peter Brent 1 March 2024 1029 words

Continuity candidate: Peta Murphy’s would-be successor Jodie Belyea with prime minister Anthony Albanese in Frankston today. Morgan Hancock/AAP Image


On the evidence, Sussan Ley seriously lacks political judgment. Still recovering from her declaration five weeks ago that a Coalition government would repeal the government’s rejigged Stage 3 tax cuts — a clunker that would have lumbered the opposition with a massive, complicated target all the way to election — on Thursday afternoon the deputy Liberal leader posted an odious message on the site formerly known as Twitter.

Having happened to watch question time that day, I can attest that she (or her staffer) was fully on song with the opposition’s chief theme: that Melburnian women should be terrified of being assaulted by convicted sex offenders — foreign (ie. dark-skinned) ones to boot — released into the community by the Albanese government.

It’s a very Peter Duttonesque message, but he and his team usually deliver it with more subtlety — it sticks better if recipients have to join a few dots — and, crucially, with deniability. By blundering in with the quiet bits out loud, Ley made it more obvious, if not necessarily more objectionable.

It’s all part of the Dunkley frenzy, of course. As with all federal by-elections seen as contestable between the major parties, this one, caused by the death of Labor MP Peta Murphy, has gone from being cast as a useful indicator of how the parties are “travelling” to something incredibly important in its own right: massive tests for the prime minister and opposition leader.

Whenever I write about a by-election I devote some words to explaining why these events are useless predictors of anything and why they only matter because the political bubble believes they do. Readers familiar with these observations can skip the next few pars.

There are two main reasons. The first is that the sample, while huge, is neither random nor scientifically weighted. It’s just one electorate. At the 2022 general election a national 3.7 percentage point swing comprised a spread of 151 seat swings, from 14.2 points to Labor in Pearce (Western Australia) to 7.2 points to the Liberals in Calwell (Victoria). (The 8.3 points to the Lib in Fowler (New South Wales) was bigger, but that was an independent–Labor contest and the two-party-preferred figure comes from an Electoral Commission recount for purely academic purposes.)

So even at a general election, one seat’s swing will rarely approximate the national one.

But perhaps more importantly, by-elections (except in the rarest of cases) are not about who will form government. It’s true that a proportion of the electorate — probably still a majority, but a shrinking one — will always vote for a particular major party out of loyalty, but for the rest the triviality of the contest liberates them to act on other impulses. “Sending a message” is tried and tested (see tweet above).

Candidates also make more of a difference at by-elections. So might the weather. Low turnout is a feature of this genre, worth potentially a couple of percentage points one way or the other.

Still, by-elections do end up being important, precisely because the political class believes they are. They can influence the future, particularly leaders’ job security, but only because of how they’re interpreted. (Would we have ever seen a Bob Hawke prime ministership if Liberal Phillip Lynch had not resigned in Flinders in 1982?)

The magic number here is the margin: 6.27233 per cent to be precise. A swing to the opposition above that figure would shake parliament’s walls, generate shock and awe in the press gallery and even, perhaps, send Labor’s leadership hares out for a trot. After the Voice “debacle,” Anthony Albanese fails another electoral test!

A swing to the government would similarly damage Peter Dutton, rendering his chances of surviving until the next election worse than they are now. And anything in between will be energetically spun by both sides and their media cheersquads.

So what can we say about Dunkley? Antony Green’s page is up, and I’ve followed his lead when calculating average swings by restricting the time period to 1983 onwards. But I’ve also excluded by-elections caused by section 44 of the Constitution — of which we had a slew around six years ago — because in all of them (or at least those with identifiable with two-party-preferred swings) the disqualified MPs ran again. These deserve their own category given that the absence of the personal votes of sitting MPs is the big driver of the difference between swings in opposition-held seats and government-held seats.

That leaves twenty-three by-elections in the past forty-one years with two-party-preferred swings. In the ten opposition-held seats (including Aston and the low-profile Fadden last year) the average swing was an almost negligible 0.8 points to the opposition.

Those caused by resignations by government MPs (eleven in total, the most recent in Groom in 2020) average to a much bigger number, 7.6 points to the opposition. And when they’re brought on by the death of a government MP — it’s a tiny sample of two (Aston 2001 and Canning 2015) — the swing is 5.5 points to the opposition. If we include that pair with the resignations we get 7.2 points to the opposition from thirteen events.

(There were no opposition by-elections caused by death with two-party-preferred swings in that period.)

So you might want to use that 5.5, which would see Labor retain the seat, or 7.2, which wouldn’t. Or you could slot in any other number, because another feature of by-elections is that they’re unpredictable.

The graph below shows Labor two-party-preferred votes in Dunkley since 1984. To adjust for redistributions, notional swings are subtracted from results going backwards. The blue dots show the actual vote at each election; the fact that so many are below the orange line reflects a 2018 redistribution that favoured Labor by an estimated (by the AEC) 2.5 points after preferences.

The big gap between the orange and red lines from 1998 to 2013 (particularly from 2001) is largely because of the big personal vote built up by the energetic Liberal Bruce Billson, first elected in 1996. He ended up in Tony Abbott’s shadow cabinet and then in cabinet; he was subsequently dropped by new prime minister Malcolm Turnbull in 2015 and retired at the 2016 election. See the dramatic narrowing between red and orange at that election with the absence of his name on the ballot.

Dunkley was retained by the Liberals’ Chris Crewther, but the aforementioned redistribution saw the electorate going into the 2019 poll as notionally Labor. In that year Victoria was the only state to swing to the opposition, and Murphy (who had also contested in 2016) took Dunkley (or retained it vis-à-vis its notional position) with a swing slightly above the state average. If Crewther generated a sophomore surge in that single term, it was counteracted by other factors, perhaps including the Labor candidate and campaign. Murphy seems to have enjoyed a surge in 2022, registering a swing well above the state average. Which takes us to where we are now, and that margin of 6.3 points.

Note that the orange line is above 50 per cent in 1998, 2010 and 2016. All else being equal, this suggests Labor would have won on the current boundaries in those years. All else ain’t equal, and the assumption gets more questionable the further back we go because of demographic changes and compounding errors in those post-redistribution estimates of notional margins. (Notional margins are rather hit and miss. For one thing they can’t take into account postal votes; for another they ignore personal votes in booths from neighbouring electorates.)

But it is reasonable to believe that Dunkley, as it is defined today, would probably have been won by Labor in 2010 and 2016. So although Dunkley was long held by the Liberal Party it’s not really accurate to call it a natural Liberal seat.

Other factors?

Federal electorates tend to be pulled by state tides. One element is the standing of those second-tier governments, and while Victoria’s Labor government under new premier Jacinta Allan is still ahead in opinion polls, the leads are more modest than under Dan Andrews. Put less clinically, Andrews was an accomplished communicator, including on behalf his federal counterparts, and he is gone.

Working the other way, Victorian Liberal leader John Pesutto still seems as pitiably bogged down by his party’s right wing as he was eleven months ago during Aston.

Then there’s the personal vote. On the evidence, which isn’t substantial, Murphy had a good one. (The bigger her personal vote, the worse for Labor’s chances on 2 March.)

The Liberal candidate is the Frankston mayor Nathan Conroy, who should bring a ready-made personal vote in parts of the electorate. Labor’s Jodie Belyea has long been involved in the local community but from reports lacks his profile. As noted above, attitudes to candidates can matter a lot at by-elections.

Conroy drew the top ballot spot and Belyea the bottom. That’s got to be worth a point or two for the Liberal overall.

Dutton is reported to be spinning “that a swing of between 3 per cent and 5 per cent would be a respectable outcome,” which suggests his party is expecting something bigger. YouGov, with a small sample, puts the Liberals on 51 per cent after preferences (about a 7 point swing). Polling before by-elections, including surveys conducted by the parties, is notoriously rubbery.

Anything can happen at by-elections, but if forced to choose I would tip a Liberal victory. If that does eventuate, the media frenzy about Labor’s leadership, including whispers from unnamed party sources, will not be for the faint-hearted.

December’s “one-term government” sightings will certainly make a comeback. •

Further reading, in alphabetical order

• ABC’s aforementioned Antony Green
Kevin Bonham
Pollbludger (William Bowe)
Tallyroom (Ben Raue)

A dynamic of acceptance and revolt

Why the extraordinary Jack Lindsay deserves to be better known

Paul Gillen Books 27 February 2024 3409 words

Jack Lindsay (left) — shown here in 1957 with Meanjin editor Clem Christesen at Castle Hedingham in Essex — was “diametrically opposed to all closed systems.” University of Melbourne Archives


Few people have known so much about so many things as Jack Lindsay. Even fewer have published so much. Lindsay grew up in Brisbane in the early years of the twentieth century, moved to Sydney in 1921, and then embarked on a sixty-year career as journalist, publisher, poet, critic, translator, novelist and historian. Living in England after 1926, he produced an astonishing number of books that found readers around the world; in a multitude of direct and mediated ways he made a major contribution to mid-twentieth-century culture and thought. Thirty-five years after his death comes Anne Cranny-Francis’s Jack Lindsay: Writer, Romantic, Revolutionary.

Well-known to Lindsay enthusiasts, Cranny-Francis has written articles and organised conferences about his life and work, maintains a website, arranged the publication of his “political autobiography” The Fullness of Life and edited a volume of selected poems. In this first book-length single-author study of Lindsay’s life and work she has hit on an elegant solution to the problem of the hyperactively full life of her subject. He was someone whose works demand attention to his ideas, and whose ideas demand attention to his life. Jack Lindsay is structured around a core of six chapters, each dedicated to Lindsay’s book-length studies of English authors: John Bunyan (1937), Charles Dickens (1950), George Meredith (1956), William Morris (1974) and two on William Blake (1927 and 1978). This frame is filled in with chapters that provide biographical and intellectual context and discuss his other relevant works, helping the reader to understand, without being overwhelmed, how Lindsay’s approach to writing was influenced by his experiences and ideas.

This structure works well to illuminate Lindsay’s eclectic, self-fashioned life-philosophy, with its associated preoccupations, values and imagery: the struggle for unity, culture as expressive work, the archetype of death and renewal. The system evolved over time, but many elements were present from the first.

Inevitably Cranny-Francis omits or barely glances at much of Lindsay’s output. She makes barely a mention of his forty-three novels and seven biographies of artists. It would be hard to guess from it that Lindsay’s most cited study is about alchemy in Roman Egypt, or that the one most discussed by academics is a historical novel set in the British civil war.

Depending on what counts as a book, Lindsay published about 160 in his lifetime, as well as hundreds of articles, stories and poems. About a half of his writing was historical and biographical, a quarter fiction, and the remainder criticism, social theory, translations, polemics and poetry. Most of his publications were concerned with the past, usually the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. Lindsay’s classical training is apparent in the eclectic character of works in which history, mythology, philology, archaeology, anthropology, aesthetics and philosophy are seamlessly blended.


All of Lindsay’s mature writing was underwritten by a self-fashioned philosophy or credo. Its most fundamental principle was what Cranny-Francis describes as the “embodied connectedness” of things. He often called it “vital unity,” “wholeness,” “Life” or “the fullness of life.”

In Lindsay’s thought the concept of vital unity assumes as many guises as energy does in physics. One of his symbols for it was Dionysus, the mysterious deity of wine and rebirth, leader of a disorganised band of enthralled creatures — satyrs, maenads, nymphs, centaurs, Pan the god of shepherds — who found no place on Mount Olympus. Another symbol was the figure of “the people,” which he sometimes called “the folk,” and occasionally “the masses,” each term with its particular political inflection. Human unity implied solidarity, equality, ethical responsiveness and mutual aid.

As Cranny-Francis observes, Lindsay extends the idea of unity to all spheres of human activity, including the natural world. John Bellamy Foster, noting Lindsay’s evocations of a “patient earth… ‘eternally reborn’ through labour and ritual practice,” identifies him as a forerunner of Marxist ecology.

Lindsay found the origins of the idea of unity in Plato, or even further back in Parmenides and Pythagoras, but a slightly less distant inspiration was the sixteenth-century excommunicated priest Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), who melded Renaissance humanism with materialism. Lindsay was stirred when he encountered Bruno in the early 1930s, subsequently writing a novel about him (Adam of a New World, 1936), and translating De la causa, principio e uno (Cause, Principle, Unity, 1962). Later he would claim that reading Bruno led him directly to Marxism.

Lindsay’s intense awareness of the interconnectedness of the living world had implications for his everyday life. Cranny-Francis quotes from an episode in The Fullness of Life during his years with the poet Elza de Locre in the early 1930s, when he lived in desperate poverty.

A local farmer had gifted a couple of rabbits to them as a neighbourly gesture. Confronted with the reality of having to skin and disembowel the animals before cooking, Lindsay found himself unable to proceed. He contemplates the economy of death on which a meat-eating society is based, particularly when social organisation has reached a point where meat protein is no longer essential to the diet: “One’s symbiosis with the earth is therefore in terms of unceasing violence and murder; and one knows, deep in one’s being, that one lives only by a system of blood-victims.”

“A communist society which is not vegetarian,” he concluded, “seems to me a hopeless contradiction.”


The young Lindsay called the absence of unity abstraction or dissociation; later, under the influence of Hegel and Marx, he favoured the word alienation. He argued that alienation has always been present in human life and has always provoked resistance. Throughout history that resistance has taken many forms — initiation rituals, shamanic flights, alchemy, art and poetry, and political revolt. The struggle against alienation shapes people’s relationships with one another and the world, motivates the protests of the wretched and exploited, and underlies attitudes to nature. Great thinkers and creative artists throw light upon its diverse manifestations.

Blake’s prophetic books explore the “world of false consciousness, of alienation,” according to Lindsay, and he praised Dickens for “the discovery of dissociation and the alienation of man from his fellows and his own essence, the stages of struggle against the dissociative forces, and the intuition (uttered in symbolic forms) of the resolving unity.”

Lindsay regarded religion as both a product of alienation and a form of protest against it. His vision of the world was also infused with hope for a fulfilment somehow always just out of reach. In a letter to Edith Sitwell on her conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1955 he confessed to having been at times “very close to the catholic creed… indistinguishable perhaps from ekklesia of the faithful — the people who are Christ.”

Affinities between his system and Christianity are not difficult to uncover: sin as alienation, humanity crucified, Life the Eucharist, Paradise a vision of love and freedom. He was familiar with such syncretisms in the Ancient World: in a book about Roman Egypt he references a tomb in the Roman catacombs of Pretextatys on which Dionysus is identified with the Lord Sabaoth, the Lord of Hosts, and burials in the Vatican Necropolis of Christians who also worshipped Isis and Bacchus.

Alienation has become all-pervasive in the modern world, chiefly because of money and science. Following Thomas Carlyle, Lindsay often referred to the institutions and customs associated with money as the “cash-nexus.” From all the possible elements of human relationship associated with the exchange of goods, money abstracts a single factor, that of utility, and makes the remainder redundant. The dehumanisation implicit in the use of money reaches its apogee with capitalism, which turns life itself into a commodity. In his study of William Morris he declares that “a genuinely new society can be born only when commodity-production ends, and with it division of labour, money, market-systems, and alienation in all its many shapes and forms — above all alienation from labour.”

The other powerful alienating factor of modernity is the scientific method stemming from Galileo and Descartes, which Lindsay consistently attacked as “mechanical,” “divisive” and “quantitative.” Cranny-Francis notes that “Lindsay returns repeatedly… to Blake’s criticisms of science and the post-Enlightenment rationalism on which it is based.” Lindsay was not at all opposed to scientific inquiry, nor wholly dismissive of the achievements of post Enlightenment science. But in Marxism and Contemporary Science (1949) and a later trilogy on alchemy, astrology and physics in Greco-Roman Egypt he refused to separate knowledge of “nature” from other kinds of knowledge. There is a single interconnected world, and all ways of knowing it are likewise interconnected. The “sciences” discussed in Marxism and Contemporary Science are not physics, astronomy or chemistry, but biology, anthropology, art criticism, psychology and history.

For Lindsay, decisive proof that contemporary science has taken a wrong turning was the atomic bomb, the culmination of alienation’s will to self-destruction. Today he would no doubt make the same criticism of the digital revolution and genetics.


But there is a nagging problem with alienation, though Lindsay, more of a poet than a philosopher, seems never to have addressed it, and neither does Cranny-Francis. It parallels the problem of evil in religions that postulate a benign creator. Where does alienation come from? How can the world be a vital unity and at the same time a site of struggle against division?

Some cosmologies have an explanation. An idealist can say that the world of the senses is a flawed copy of a perfect and eternal world that is glimpsed only in thought. The unity is “above,” the struggle “below.” But Lindsay was trenchantly opposed both to idealism and to hierarchy. For him mental and spiritual phenomena are autonomous, but in the final analysis dependent on matter. Cranny-Francis mentions his debt to the Sydney-born philosopher Samuel Alexander. Alexander was an early twentieth-century advocate of emergence, the theory that complex systems produce attributes and activities that do not belong to their parts. Could emergence explain the origin of alienation? It isn’t clear how.

At a psychological level, though, Lindsay’s biography provides a paradigm case of a conflict between longed-for unity and actual division. Lindsay’s father was the writer and artist Norman Lindsay, one of Australia’s best-known humourists and artists in the first half of the twentieth century, notorious for his sexual libertarianism and hostility to Christianity. Cranny-Francis dwells sensitively on Jack’s difficult relationship with Norman. “The story of father-son relationships threads through all of Lindsay’s writing, fiction and non-fiction,” she writes. When Jack was nine years old, Norman left his wife and three sons. The fatherless family moved to Brisbane, where young Jack lived in a state of genteel but disorganised impoverishment, loved but neglected by his vague and increasingly alcoholic mother until her sister’s family finally took charge and sent him to school. Unsurprisingly, the theme of a lost birthright appears often in Lindsay’s novels and histories.

Norman renewed contact with his son only after his academic achievements had earned him scholarships to Brisbane’s elite Grammar School and the University of Queensland. Lindsay, ecstatic to be restored to his famous father’s attention, was Norman’s devoted acolyte for the next decade. Then they fell out bitterly.

Norman’s entire life was a fierce act of will to sustain the exhilarating freedom of his adolescence, when he had followed his older brother out of a shabby mined-out gold town to marvellous Melbourne and lived in careless poverty, pursuing a self-directed course in drawing, reading, flaneuring and witty companionship until Jack’s conception brought that delightful life to a sudden end. For the rest of his life Norman acted out his ambivalence, alternately praising and denouncing his son. In 1967 he wrote to him, “I can’t help but laugh when I think of what our biographers are going to make of the break and reunion of our relations. They will have to do the best they can with its human dramatics for it is quite impossible for them to realise the compulsions behind them.”

Jack Lindsay did not have children until his late fifties. He was an anxious, self-critical parent, and never ceased to yearn for his father’s distracted attention.

Turn for a moment I say
Turn from your obdurate place
In that clarity of stone,
That terrible folly of light,
Turn for a moment this way
Your abstracted face.

Lindsay understood the importance of this personal history for his literary career, confessing to a close friend that “if my parents hadn’t parted I doubt if I should have become a writer at all.” Cranny-Francis suggests that his description of William Morris also applies to himself:

From one aspect there never was a more impetuously frank man than Morris; he lives restlessly in the open and follows his convictions out without concern for the consequences to himself or anyone else. From another aspect he appears a hidden figure, moved by a passion of which the multiple effects are plain but the central impulse obscured. I suggest that along the lines I have sketched we can bring the man and the artist into a single focus, and see the way in which his personal dilemma was transformed into a dynamic of acceptance and revolt, of deepening insight into the nature of his world and into the ways in which the terrible wounds of alienation can be healed.


A succession of recent British scholars has sought to recover Lindsay as a forerunner of practitioners of cultural studies, an influential field of interdisciplinary research instigated by British theorists — among them Richard Hoggart, Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams — in the 1970s. Although they didn’t reference Lindsay, the founders of cultural studies were almost certainly familiar with some of his work, and there are strong points of similarity in their ideas. In particular, they all affirmed the political significance of culture.

Marx had suggested a base–superstructure model of social formation, according to which economic relationships ultimately determine the organisation of politics, law, religion and creative expression. The implication was that economic interests always trump cultural factors. The practical effect was to concentrate efforts to build socialism in workplaces, which in effect meant and trade unions. This left little place for cultural creators. Like cultural studies, Lindsay steadfastly rejected that model.

Another tenet of cultural studies that Lindsay anticipated was the idea that significant cultural change comes from “below.” Lindsay believed that plebeian practices and values, and their fraught and contradictory clashes with the practices and values of ruling elites, are the major source of cultural innovation. He made the point forcefully in a letter to his friend and fellow critic Alick West:

The concept is that culture is created by the expropriators, fundamentally expresses their position and needs, and has no close relation to the concrete labour-processes and the producing masses. I should like to suggest that something like the reverse is the truth. The people are the producers and reproducers of life, and in that role are also the begetters of culture in all its shapes and forms — though in a class-divided society the ruling class expropriates culture.

Lindsay’s view stemmed from the conviction — shared with Ruskin and Morris — that work and aesthetic production had once “been harmoniously united, and that they still ought to be, despite the general movement towards degradation and mechanisation.” Before commodity production alienated workers from the products of their labour — in this historical sketch uncommodified slavery is conveniently forgotten — work was done in order to create both necessary means of living and pleasing or profound emotions. Each was a joyful undertaking. Once, communal work had always been accompanied by singing and chanting. Understanding this had motivated William Morris to take on, in Lindsay’s dated language, “the full political and social struggle which alone could have as its aim the achievement of brotherhood and the ending of commodity-production.”

In A Short History of Culture Lindsay traced the essential identity of art and work back to the movement of bodies in space. From the classicist Jane Harrison he took the observation that the repetitive, rhythmic behaviours that create the necessities of life — poundings, liftings, plantings, weavings, cuttings, stalkings, throwings — are shared with dancing. Like her, he considered dance to be the primal kind of cultural creativity. Citing another book of Lindsay’s criticism, After the Thirties, Cranny-Francis writes:

Lindsay identifies in dance the rhythmical control of movement that characterises human activity and being. It bodily enacts the purposive behaviours that enable the group to maintain social coherence, engaging them through the rhythm of the breath: ‘Body and mind are thus keyed together in new adventurous and interfused ways.’ The dance becomes an exploration of the embodied being required to achieve a specific purpose, such as a hunt. It lifts the dancer (and observer) into the realm of ‘pure potentiality’ where ‘desire and act are one’; where the bodily disposition required to engage successfully in a particular activity is achieved and communicated. In this process, Lindsay argued, human beings imaginatively engage aspects of everyday life and rehearse the modes of being, thinking and acting that enable them to achieve their needs and desires. For Lindsay this is the role of culture in the formation of being and consciousness, whether it be the ritual art of early societies or contemporary literature, visual art, theatre and dance.


If communism means opposition to capitalism and desire for a future free of oppression and exploitation, Lindsay was certainly a communist. No one seems to know exactly when he joined or if he ever left the British Communist Party, but he was actively affiliated with it from the late 1930s until at least the 1970s. MI5 put him under surveillance. He stayed in the party when it demanded he recant his ideas, and again after Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin’s brutality in 1956. There is no doubt about the strength of his allegiance. But was Lindsay a Marxist communist? He certainly called himself one. Cranny-Francis, along with just about everyone else who has written about him, takes it for granted.

Yet there are grounds for wondering about Lindsay’s Marxism. What kind of Marxist converts on account of a Renaissance philosopher? Marxism profoundly shaped his thinking but it was not Lindsay’s foundational postulate. He came to it as a plausible derivation from a more fundamental constellation of ideas about culture and history that he had already arrived at. Some of his creed was shared with Marxism, some was dissonant with it. If, in the manner of a party apparatchik, one were called on to prepare a list of his heresies, it would be an easy brief: he largely discounts or ignores economic forces, flirts with idealism, sees revolutionary potential in “the people” rather than “the working class,” and has a Romantic, even reactionary, understanding of Communist aims.

Late in life, Lindsay began to concede the point. The Crisis in Marxism (1981) is highly critical of most prominent twentieth-century Marxist theorists, particularly Adorno and Althusser. In one of his last essays he declared that he was “diametrically opposed to all closed systems,” including Lenin’s. “I have found all Marxists, orthodox or not, to be hostile.” Among an eclectic list of influences ranging from Keats to Harrison to Dostoyevsky, only two Marxists appear: Lukacs, and Marx himself.

In a sense, of course, debating whether Lindsay was “really” Marxist is as futile as debating whether Mormons are Christian or Alevis Muslim. In another sense, though, it matters. As long as Lindsay is seen as first and foremost a Marxist, his ideas remain submerged beneath the complexity and weight of a hundred and fifty years of Marxist theorising. To perceive what is most original in his thought, it needs to be disentangled from what has become a distracting integument.


Promised a scholarship to Oxford after he graduated from the University of Queensland but told that he would have to wait a year, Lindsay refused to enrol. For most of his life the lack of a higher degree and his oppositional politics would have made it difficult if not impossible to work as an academic. He gave no sign of wanting to. Even his most esoteric books were not aimed primarily at academics, nor did they please many of them. Ironically, today it is chiefly they who keep his memory alive. Anne Cranny-Francis’s book is no exception, but it deserves a broader readership. We need not agree with Lindsay’s controversial opinions to hope that this remarkable thinker will become better known. •

Jack Lindsay: Writer, Romantic, Revolutionary
By Anne Cranny-Francis | Palgrave Macmillan | €119.99 | 416 pages

“Am I the one who’s missing something?”

A returned soldier’s belief in American virtue and progress is shaken

Nick Haslam Books 983 words

Returned soldier Brent Cummings finds himself in a vanishing middle. Sebastian Doerken/fStop Images/Alamy


Brent Cummings — “a white male pickup-driving ex-soldier living in a Georgia county where in 2016 Donald Trump received 71 per cent of the vote” — might not seem a sufficiently interesting protagonist for a biographical study. Stereotypes of race, gender, occupation and region pile up to create an expectation that he is one of Hillary Clinton’s deplorables. As author David Finkel puts it:

He’d been born in Mississippi in 1968 and lived there in his formative years, so obviously he was a racist. He’d been raised in New Jersey, where he played centre on his high school football team, and then went on to play rugby in college, so of course he was brutish and crude. He had spent twenty-eight years in the US Army and had been in combat, so surely he had killed people.

Obviously, of course and surely, Brent Cummings eludes these reductive inferences. In An American Dreamer, Finkel, a Pulitzer Prize–winning writer for the Washington Post, unfurls Brent’s inner complexities and outer contradictions.

Brent appeared fifteen years earlier as an army major in Finkel’s The Good Soldiers, an embedded account of the 2007 troop surge in Iraq, and Finkel’s long connection to him has built the foundation for a work of gripping intimacy. An American Dreamer gets inside Brent’s skull, and those of his wife Laura and neighbour Mike, to capture the emotional landscape of contemporary American life from three diverging vantage points.

Brent is now working stateside at a college with his retirement from the army looming. His soul is troubled. He feels his country has lost its way in the last couple of decades, as if he’s come “out of one war and into another” against enemies on the home front. In a revealing slip, he remarks that the earlier time “felt… clean. No that’s not the right word… It’s slipping.”

What the pollutant might be is not clear to him. Trumpism is part of it. Despite being “probably more Republican than Democrat, probably more conservative than liberal,” he loathes the man for his egotism, ill-discipline and bullying more than for his policies. But the problem runs deeper: Brent has lost confidence in his country’s goodness and shared purpose. “Everything was fraying. That’s what it felt like.”

Brent’s concerns have more to do with meaning than with material or political realities. His belief in American virtue and progress is shaken, and while that abstract dream is disintegrating a real one disturbs his sleep. Not the post-traumatic image of desert horrors we might expect but a chorus of mocking voices from a profound darkness.

His sense that the ground has shifted under him is reinforced by a series of bafflements. He is shocked by the lack of support he receives from colleagues when he challenges the use of a confederate flag on an insignia, upset by activist attacks on his beloved military, appalled by the unthinkable assault on the Capitol. He finds himself in a vanishing middle where the mental habits of a lifetime, grounded in ideas of honour and fair play, have lost their traction. “Am I the one who’s wrong? Am I the one who’s missing something?”

Laura and Mike play second and third fiddle to Brent, but Finkel gives voice to them with the same empathic immediacy. Laura’s main register is anxiety rather than disorientation. She fears violent crime, feels a rising sense of menace in her neighbourhood and worries about the fate of her intellectually disabled daughter when she is no longer around.

Mike, for his part, overlays fear with anger, going full-bore MAGA while railing against the “socialist and communist” treachery of the Democrats. Why Mike, a quadriplegic of modest means, would set aside his early doubts about Trump and come to see him as his infallible saviour is a mystery. His political conversion creates tension with his neighbours, a microcosm of the severing of connections that has played out across the country.

Finkel is a wonderful guide to the inner terrain of his characters. He shows rather than tells, keeping their dialogue and the private thoughts behind it direct and relatable. Brent in particular is brought to vivid life through confrontations with events that confound him. Very occasionally these episodes seem a little forced, notably in the parallels between an encounter with the security wall on a visit to Jerusalem and Trump’s border wall. Mike’s characterisation can also appear ever so slightly two-dimensional by comparison with Brent’s, but the book as a whole is a triumph of compassionate and sympathetic attention.

Finkel inhabits Brent in a rare way, better than a life-long friend could hope to do. More a finely tuned recording instrument than a buddy, he makes no attempt to elevate Brent, hide his flaws or turn him into a morally instructive Everyman. He is an ordinary guy, standing somewhere on the slippery hump of the political bell curve, but he is also a creature of a specific time, place and tradition, not just a symbol of averageness. Witnessing his puzzlement at how things have changed, we might wonder how much his sense of loss comes from occupying a political centre that cannot hold and how much it is a sign that he is getting older and his generation is being unseated.

We hear so much about the growing polarisation of American life. Books like this one help to humanise the conflict, not only by plucking individuals from their political tribes but also by exploring the quieter emotional dimensions of their experience. Beyond the primal fears and hatreds, Finkel suggests, there are people seeking solutions to big, existential questions about purpose, meaning, legacy and value. An American Dream shows us that behind all the yelling and distrust and there is vulnerability and hope. •

An American Dreamer: Life in a Divided Country
By David Finkel | Scribe | $36.99 | 256 pages

Back to the office: a solution in search of a problem

Managers need to recognise that the best way to dissipate authority is to fail in its exercise

John Quiggin 23 February 2024 1581 words

“The failure of ‘back to the office’ prefigures a major realignment of power relationships at work.” Ken Hawkins/Alamy


Authority is powerful yet intangible. The capacity to give an order and expect it to be obeyed may rest ultimately on a threat to sanction those who disobey but it can rarely survive large-scale disobedience.

The modern era has seen many kinds of traditional authority come under challenge, but until now the “right of managers to manage” has remained largely immune. If anything, the managers’ power has increased as the countervailing power of unions has declined. But the rise of working from home and, more recently, Labor’s right to disconnect legislation pose unprecedented threats to the power of managers over information workers — those employees formerly known as “office workers.”

To see how this might play out, it’s worth considering the decline of another once-powerful authority, the Catholic Church. In the early 1960s, following the development of reliable oral contraception, the leaders of the church had to decide whether to accept the Pill as a permissible way for married couples to plan their families. Pope John XXIII established a pontifical commission on birth control to reconsider Catholic doctrine on this topic.

It was a crucial decision precisely because marriage and sex were the most important areas in which the authority of the Church remained supreme and precise rules could be laid down — and generally enforced — among the faithful.

Most people, after all, have no trouble observing the commandments against murder, and other sins like anger, pride and sloth are very much in the eye of the beholder. But the rules regulating who can marry whom and what kind of sexual behaviour is permissible are precise and demanding, to the point that the term “morals” is commonly taken to imply sexual morals. The official celibacy of priests, who thereby showed even more restraint than was demanded of ordinary Catholics, added to the mystique of clerical power.

By the time the commission reported in 1966 John XXIII had been replaced by Pope Paul VI. The commission concluded that artificial birth control was not intrinsically evil and that Catholic couples should be allowed to decide for themselves about the methods they employed. But five of the commission’s sixty-nine members took the opposite view in a minority report.

In the encyclical Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI made his fateful rejection of all forms of artificial contraception. As an attempt to exercise and shore up authority it failed completely. The realities of raising large families and dealing with unplanned pregnancies were far removed from the experience of priests and theologians. And the church’s evident demographic motive (the desire for big Catholic families to fill the pews) further undermined the legitimacy of the prohibition.

Previously loyal Catholics ignored Pope Paul’s ruling, in many cases marking their first step away from the Church. Doctrines restricting marriage between Catholics and non-Catholics, including the requirement that children be raised as Catholics, also became little more than formalities commanding at most notional obedience.

The breakdown of clerical authority set the scene for the exposure of clerical child abuse from the 1990s on. Although accusations of this kind had been around for many years, the authority of the church had ensured that critics were silenced or disbelieved.

It is hard to know for sure what would have happened if Pope Paul had chosen differently. The membership and social standing of Protestant denominations, nearly all which accepted contraception, have also declined, though not as much as a Catholic Church that pinned its authority on personal morality. Humanae Vitae’s attempt to exercise papal authority succeeded only in exposing its illusory nature.


In the struggle over working from home and the “freedom to disconnect” we’re seeing something similar happen to the authority of managers.

Following the arrival of Covid-19 in early 2020, working from home went from being a rare indulgence to a general necessity, at least for those whose work could be done with a telephone and a computer. Hardly any time was available for preparation: in mid March, Scott Morrison and Anthony Albanese were still planning to attend football matches; a week later, Australia was in lockdown.

Offices and schools closed. Workers had to convert their kitchen tables or (if they were lucky) spare bedrooms into workstations using whatever equipment they had available. And, to make things even tougher, parents had to take responsibility for the remote education of their children.

Despite the already extensive evidence of the benefits of remote work, many managers expected chaos and a massive reduction in productivity. But information-based work of all kinds carried on without any obvious interruption. Insurance policies were renewed, bills were issued and paid, newspapers and magazines continued to be published. Meetings, that scourge of modern working life, continued to take place, though now over Zoom.

Once the lockdown phase of the pandemic was over, workers were in no hurry to return to the office. The benefits of shorter commuting times and the flexibility to handle family responsibilities were obvious, while adverse impacts on productivity, if any, were hard to discern.

Sceptics argued that working from home, though fine for current employees, would pose major difficulties for the “onboarding” of new staff. Four years into the new era, though, around half of all workers are in jobs they started after the pandemic began. Far from lamenting the lack of office camaraderie and mentorship, these new hires are among the most resistant to the removal of a working condition they have taken for granted since the start.

Nevertheless, chief executives have issued an almost daily drumbeat of demands for a return to five-day office attendance and threatened dire consequences for those who don’t comply. Although these threats sometimes appear to have an effect, workers generally stop complying. As long as they are still doing their jobs, their immediate managers have little incentive to discipline them, especially as the most capable workers are often the most resistant to close supervision. Three days of office attendance a week has become the new normal for large parts of the workforce, and attempts to change this reality are proving largely fruitless.

The upshot is that attendance rates have barely changed after more than two years of back-to-the-office announcements. The Kastle Systems Back to Work Barometer, a weekly measure of US office attendance as a percentage of February 2020 levels, largely kept within the narrow range of 46 to 50 per cent over the course of 2023.

This fact is finally sinking in. Sandwiched between two pieces about back-to-the-office pushes by diehard employers, the Australian Financial Review recently ran up the white flag with a piece headlined “Return to Office Stalls as Companies Give Up on Five Days a Week.”

This trend, significant in itself, also marks a change in power relations between managers and workers. Behind all the talk about “water cooler conversations” and “synergies,” the real reason for demanding the physical presence of workers is that it makes it easier for managers to exercise authority. The failure of “back to the office” prefigures a major realignment of power relationships at work.

Conversely, the success of working from home in the face of dire predictions undermines one of the key foundations of the “right to manage,” namely the assumption that managers have a better understanding of the organisations they head than do the people who work in them. Despite a vast literature on leadership, the capacity of managers to lead their workers in their preferred direction has proved very limited.

The other side of the remote work debate is the right to disconnect. The same managers who insisted that workers should be physically present at the office in standard working hours (and sometimes longer) also came to expect responses to phone calls and emails at any time of the day or night. The supposed need for an urgent response typically reflected sloppiness on the part of managers incapable of organising their own work schedules to take account of the need for work–life balance.

Once again, managers have attempted to draw a line in the sand. Opposition leader Peter Dutton has backed them, promising to repeal the right to disconnect if the Coalition wins the next election. It’s a striking illustration of the importance of power to the managerial class that Dutton has chosen to fight on this issue while capitulating to the government’s broken promise on the Stage 3 tax cuts, which would have delivered big financial benefits to his strongest supporters.

Can this trend be reversed? The not-so-secret hope is that high unemployment will turn the tables. As Tim Gurner (of “avocado toast” fame) put it, “We need pain in the economy… and employees need to reminded of who is boss.” US tech firms have put that view to the test with large-scale sackings, many focused on remote workers. But the other side of remote work is mobility. Many of those fired in the recent tech layoffs have found new jobs, often also remote.

In the absence of a really deep recession, firms that demand and enforce full-time attendance will find themselves with a limited pool of disgruntled workers dominated by those with limited outside options.

Popular stories — from King Canute’s attempt to turn back the tide (apparently to make fools of obsequious courtiers who suggested he could do it) to Hans Christian Anderson’s naked emperor — have made the point that the best way to dissipate authority is to fail in its exercise. Pope Paul ignored that lesson and the Catholic Church paid the price. Now, it seems, managers are doing the same. •

Russia’s war against Ukraine: a longer view

With the full-scale invasion entering its third year, the stakes remain high

Mark Edele 22 February 2024 1546 words

Members of the Veryovka Ukrainian National Honoured Academic Folk Choir performing on 31 January outside an apartment block damaged by Russian shelling in Borodianka, Kyiv region. Pavlo Bagmut/Ukrinform/Future Publishing via Alamy


Russia has been waging war against Ukraine for ten years now, if we start the clock back in 2014 with the illegal annexation of Crimea and the invasion of Ukraine’s east. The war remained geographically contained for its first eight years, though, and when the conflict became frozen life went on largely as normal in Kyiv, Lviv and elsewhere in unoccupied Ukraine, even if soldiers kept dying at the frontline.

This state of affairs came to an abrupt end with Russia’s all-out invasion on 24 February 2022. Not only did the fighting reach deep into Ukraine’s heartland, but life far behind the frontline also became militarised. Russia frequently bombards civilian infrastructure as well as cities in a type of terror warfare intended to break the will of Ukraine’s defenders. There is no longer any hinterland.

How long will this slaughter last? In August last year I warned against overly optimistic expectations, writing that “supporters of Ukraine’s democracy should prepare themselves for long-term, costly support.” Another six months on it is even clearer that patience and endurance will be needed if we want to see Ukraine survive and strive. We have to stop thinking in terms of short and decisive campaigns. This war has become a war of attrition.

Like Vladimir Putin, we need to think in the geographical and historical categories of what historian Timothy Snyder has memorably called the “bloodlands” — the vast territories between Russia in the east and Germany in the west, with Ukraine in the middle. This viewpoint expands the time horizon dramatically. The last three wars fought in this region were far from short campaigns. The first world war’s “eastern front” lasted from August 1914 to March 1918. The wars of the Romanov succession began in Central Asia in 1916 and elsewhere in 1918, only ending, depending on the region, in 1920, 1921, 1922 or even 1923. The German Soviet war — constantly invoked by Putin both in the run-up to the war and during Russia’s continuing cultural mobilisation — extended from the (northern hemisphere) summer of 1941 to the spring of 1945.

Hence, the normal duration a full scale military conflict in this part of the world seems to be three to four years. Ukraine has survived two so far.

But it’s not just the region’s history that suggests a long haul. Once battle lines are fully entrenched, conventional war takes time. The first world war’s western front was bogged down in costly trench warfare, with massive casualties but little territorial gains, for four years.

By the time the second world war rolled around, military specialists in all armies had found the technical means to overcome trenches, barbed wire and machine-gun emplacements. And yet it took the Allies close to a year after the invasion of Normandy in 1944 to defeat Germany, a country under assault from the east by the steamroller of the Red Army, from the south by the United States, British Empire forces and the Free French, and from the air by indiscriminate attack by the combined power of the US and British air forces. Both Ukraine and Russia are in much stronger positions today.

Historical analogies are miserable predictors. But they matter when historical actors think in and through them. Putin is an avid reader of history, constantly pondering where he fits in. He thinks in categories and time-spans informed by Russia’s historical experience.

While he didn’t expect Ukraine to resist so effectively and survive the initial onslaught, he had long prepared his country for a drawn-out conflict with the outside world. One indicator is the effort his regime spent on making Russia’s food system relatively independent of outside supplies. At a time when everybody praised the virtues of globalisation and international networks of trade and mutual dependence, Putin insisted Russia should be able to feed itself.

As a recent study points out, this is the kind of food system you build when you expect a long-term confrontation that might throw your country back on its own resources. Putin embarked on it over decades, at a time when barely anybody in Europe could imagine a war of this magnitude on the continent.

Putin also entrenched his dictatorship, also an anticipation of war. First came the slide towards authoritarianism that began on the first day of his presidency. More recently came its acceleration. The death last week of opposition figure Alexei Navalny is just the latest escalation of a massive crackdown that began in 2021 and quickened with the start of the all-out war in 2022. Russia is now a full-blown dictatorship.

Thus entrenched in the Kremlin, Putin expects the democracies of Europe to have the shorter breath. The way Ukraine has become a political football in US domestic politics might well feed this expectation.

We need to appreciate that this is Putin’s theory of victory: to pound Ukraine with artillery and air attacks; to bleed the defenders white by sacrificing large numbers of his own citizens; and to wait until “the decadent West” loses interest and returns to business as usual, depriving Ukraine of the weapons and economic support it needs to defend itself.

As things stand, he might well be proven right. As I wrote a year ago about the then unlikely prospect of a Russian victory:

Winning the war would require Russia to ramp up its military production and mobilisation of manpower and increase the quality of its training and leadership. It could do that over the long run, just as the Soviet Union did during World War II… It could do so particularly if some of the countries which today are sitting on the fence decide to defy the United States, NATO and the European Union and circumvent or ignore sanctions; the United States reverts to isolationism; NATO disintegrates into squabbles between its members; and the European Union implodes among disagreements between old and new, and rich and less prosperous nations.

This pessimistic scenario has not yet come to pass. Yes, Russia currently has the whip hand. It has massively increased its armaments production, found ways around sanctions and continued to field large numbers of men while avoiding all-out mobilisation. Meanwhile, the United States has shaped up as the weakest link in the chain of democracies supporting Ukraine.

But Russia has not won yet. Ukraine still has “a viable theory of victory,” as two leading military analysts recently wrote. Its military has become expert at war by attrition, which it fights intelligently, minimising its own losses while maximising the enemy’s. Supplied adequately, it will become even better at this terrible art, denying Russia victory and eventually turning the tide.

For this to happen, though, Ukraine needs the continued support of the outside world: from NATO countries, from the Europeans and from friends further afield, such as Australia. But these friends need to appreciate that this war is now a war of attrition. And those wars are not won in a day or a season.


What about negotiations? A strong commitment to long-term support should unite all friends of Ukraine, no matter whether they think that ultimately the war will end in Kyiv’s forces retaking all occupied territories, if necessary by military means (the current official Ukrainian position), or in a negotiated settlement of some sort, with compromises on both sides.

There are indeed models for a negotiated peace which, while painful, might satisfy Ukraine and guarantee its safety rather than simply giving Russia breathing space to rearm for the next assault or the chance to insist on Ukraine’s unconditional capitulation. The much-discussed “West German” solution is one such proposal. It proposes that Ukraine be divided into a democratic west with some of its eastern territories occupied or even annexed by Russia. The west would be integrated into NATO and the European Union and developed with a massive aid program similar to the Marshall Plan. This is certainly not an acceptable solution for either side at the moment, but it might well become one once exhaustion eventually sets in.

The key term here is “eventually.” Negotiating now only aids Russia in its imperialist and anti-democratic goals. Forcing Ukraine to negotiate at a moment when, with delayed and insufficient support from its democratic friends, it is on the defensive amounts to asking a democratic nation to surrender to a dictatorship. Negotiations are best held from a position of strength. If not backed by the ability to resist and indeed to inflict damage, talks with a militarily stronger opponent quickly lead to a loss of territory and sovereignty.

The Ukrainians learned this lesson in 1918 when they signed the first treaty of Brest–Litovsk with the Germans and Austrians, who subsequently occupied the country and squeezed out food reserves to feed their own war effort. The Russian Bolsheviks learned the same lesson shortly thereafter, when, devoid of the fighting force they themselves helped dissolve, they had to sign a punishing peace with the Germans just to get out of a war they could no longer fight. And, in an instance of remarkable historical justice, the Germans learned the same lesson in 1919, when they could do nothing but sign the famously unfriendly Versailles treaty.

Ukraine needs to be helped to avoid such a situation and negotiate from the position of strength, if a negotiated settlement will indeed end this war. •

Life and death in China’s rustbelt

How did this candid drama series make it past the censors?

Antonia Finnane 1431 words

On the case: Chen Minghao, Fan Wei and Qin Hao in The Long Season.


The beginning is slow, the story is bleak, the hero is growing old and doddery, and there are no heroines, only victims. Yet China’s top-rating drama for 2023, The Long Season (Manchang de jijie), is gripping viewing.

In Australia it is available only on YouTube, with sometimes hilarious computer-generated subtitles. As long as viewers bear in mind that “the cavalry in the birch wood” means “Captain Ma in the town of Hualin” the story will carry them effortlessly along from its gentle beginning to its bitter-sweet ending.

The Long Season is based on an even bleaker novel, Yu Xiaoqian’s The Cutting Edge of Winter. The story centres on an elderly man’s dogged search for whoever killed his son nearly twenty years earlier. The cold case investigation, with its post-industrial social criticism and #MeToo edge, mixes grim subject matter with moments of levity and ends with a message of hope. Imagine the cast of the BBC’s New Tricks in a Ken Loach movie and you’ll get the picture.

The setting is a rustbelt town in northeast China called Hualin, hometown to our ageing hero, Wang Xiang (Fan Wei), and the site of an ailing steel factory. The series is filmed in split time, the events of 1997–98 shown in flashback from 2016. Wang, once a “model worker” who drove a freight train for the factory, is now a taxi driver. His college-educated brother-in-law, Gong Biao (Qin Hao), used to work in the factory’s office; he drives a taxi too. When a chance event involving Gong’s taxi leads Wang to suspect that his son’s killer has resurfaced, the two men join forces with retired cop Captain Ma (Chen Minghao), who investigated the original case.

Much of the series’ popularity rests on the relationship between these three characters. Their dealings with each other range from bumbling strategising to resigned philosophising. Variously single, widowed and on the edge of divorce, they are in the process of coming to terms with the lives they’ve had. Their pursuit of the case, and its link with Gong’s taxi, seems at one level like a dramatic realisation of this process.

They all struggle to maintain control over their lives. Wang has prostate problems. Gong is diabetic. Health problems among people in the town and the cost of treating them make up a minor but persistent refrain. Director Xin Shuang’s father was dying while he was making the series. His close observation of the challenges of old age and the cost of hospital care may have informed his treatment of these topics.

Juxtaposed with the character-driven treatment of the three men — middle-aged in 1997, getting old in 2016 — is a plot-driven story about the younger generation. Wang’s son Yang (Yitie Liu) is a budding poet. The girl he loves, Shen Mo (Teresa Li), is a medical student with a troubled background who plays piano in a nightclub to support herself. Shen’s deaf-mute brother and his business partner run a home-made cinema showing videos on a clapped-out television. Their lives interact, often violently, with those of other young people adrift in the ruins of socialism.

Confronted with the fraying of the social fabric, the parents cling desperately to the known world of lifetime employment in a factory where workers were the masters. In one of many references to that disappearing world, episode six has Yang’s mother, Meisu, reflecting on how different life was for them.

“Our generation was used to being organised,” she says. “At home, there were lots of children, and we obeyed our parents in everything. In the collective when we grew up, we had to listen to our leaders. We’ve always felt that there’s a circle surrounding us. All our lives we just walked in that circle and no one stepped outside of it for any reason, not even to put a foot on a coin.”

By 2016, the lives of the young people have either come to an end or come to nothing. With its focus on older men struggling on in a landscape significantly devoid of women and children, the series forces reflection on what the society has done to itself.

Out of this Pandora’s box hope wings its way in episode twelve. There is justice — the corrupt manager of the steel factory gets his comeuppance — and there is a woman, a former factory worker, who offers Wang the possibility of someone with whom to “pass the days.” In a remarkable scene performed by the accomplished Fan Wei, Wang talks to her indirectly about that possibility, glancing at her occasionally in the rear mirror of the taxi he is driving.

There is also a child: Wang’s younger son, born in 1997, his origins unexplained until the very end of the series. And there is a future that lies in (where else?) Beijing, China’s centre of wealth, culture and politics, as Wang more than once states. The long-dead elder son never got there but the younger son will.


Reviewing the series for Foreign Policy, James Palmer asks “how did this brilliant Chinese rust belt noir get made under Xi?” The answer surely lies in its redemptive conclusion. At the end of the final episode the camera returns viewers to the cornfields that greeted them at the beginning of the series. The narrow-gauge railway along which the factory train once ran is still there. Wang stands by the track with a beatific visage as the train once more chuffs into view, his younger self at the controls. “Look forward,” old Wang calls to him. “Don’t look back!”

The media in the People’s Republic of China has tried to make this the central message of the series. For the Global Times, The Long Season “meets Chinese people’s demand for quality productions that deliver positive messages, such as the theme of the show: ‘Move on, don’t look back.’”

Yet the ending doesn’t feel quite right. With its series of betrayals, the story’s logic points to an alternative conclusion, the one Yu Xiaoqian wrote for the novel. There, readers discover that decades earlier, on the very day he was to be nominated a model worker, Wang witnessed the sexual abuse of a minor. Like a time-delayed bomb, his failure to report the crime precipitated the series of events that led to his son’s death. The novel ends not with him smiling in the cornfields but being forced to jump to his death.

Viewers can be grateful to the scriptwriters for leaving them with a gentler final scene. But the benign ending suggests, if not the hand of the censor then at least a process of self-censorship.

The fact that Yu Xiaoqian himself was one of the scriptwriters brings to mind the fate of Lao She’s 1939 novel Rickshaw Boy. In 1945 this profoundly pessimistic story about the failure of Republican-era Beijing to meet the modest aspirations of a rural migrant was issued in English translation with the unauthorised addition of two extra chapters and a happy ending.

Lao She was disheartened by the bowdlerisation of his work in the United States, but worse came when the Chinese-language original was savagely redacted during the revolutionary upsurge under Mao in the 1950s. The 1955 edition omitted one and a half chapters of the original, all sexual references, and some other incidental material. Lao She approved these alterations and apologised for the novel’s lack of optimism.

Optimism — “joyful socialism,” as it has been termed — is a hallmark of Chinese communism. On the small screen it is better expressed by China’s top-rating series in 2022, Daughter of the Mountains, the dramatisation of the true story of Huang Wenxiu, a village girl who makes it all the way to university in Beijing before returning home to participate in programs of poverty alleviation.

Unlike in The Long Season, where the Communist Party is hardly evident, in Daughter of the Mountains it is front and centre. Huang is a party member who rises to the position of local party secretary. She meets her death tragically in a car crash on a mountain road, one of the many slated for repairs under infrastructural plans for the region. But this is by no means a devastating finale, for Huang leaves a legacy of hope for a better future. In real life, her father paid tribute to the Communist Party for all the opportunities it had offered his daughter.

That two such very different series should have received equally high ratings in China says much about the divided self that China is today. •

How’s he travelling?

It depends on how you ask the question

Peter Brent 987 words

Back on top: Anthony Albanese with Tanya Plbersek at the the launch of St Mary’s Cathedral College Parliament in Sydney yesterday. Bianca De Marchi/AAP Image


As 2023 came to an end commentators’ knives were out for Anthony Albanese. Almost to a person, the scribblers declared him and his government adrift, tired and out of touch — you only had to look at October’s Voice referendum, the response to the High Court’s detainee decision and the ever-present cost-of-living crisis. There were even murmurs of a “one-term government.”

January’s rejigged Stage 3 tax cuts announcement — warmly received in voterland, it seems, and made an ostentatious meal of by the opposition — has turned a new page. Now the political class has all but unanimously declared the return of the prime minister’s mojo. Albanese is in control again, looking and acting confident. But the Dunkley by-election on 2 March could change all that, of course, potentially dramatically.

So what’s the point of these incessant, whiplash-inducing analyses of how the parties and leaders are “travelling”? At core they must be about the next election; they can have no purpose otherwise. But once we’ve voted, this term of government will be viewed through the lens of the 2025 result and all today’s twists and turns will be forgotten. The caravan will move on to how the next election is shaping up.

One popular school of thought sees the media’s incessant horse-race adjudications as self-fulfilling. It is in a party’s interests to be described as being on track for electoral victory because the happy vibes will help it get there. With apologies to Sting, I don’t subscribe to this point of view. The narrative certainly influences reality, even around the edges of opinion poll results, but its effects on elections are usually minor and unpredictable.

The idea matters a lot to politicians and their staffers, though, partly because many of their jobs are dedicated to generating good reviews and partly because those reviews can ultimately affect their professional survival.

Peter Dutton, who was always facing a battle to remain Liberal leader for the full term, went into the summer break looking rather happy, but now he’s biting his nails about Dunkley. Albanese, who as prime minister enjoys more institutional fortification, would be harder to shift in the event of a bad result, but government MPs and staffers still imbibe the commentary. No leader enjoys forlorn troops and nervous backbenchers.

Judgements about how the participants are travelling are largely driven by opinion polls — and most of all, far ahead of the others, by Newspoll in the Australian. The tendency reached a nadir of sorts back in 2015 when Malcolm Turnbull talked about Tony Abbott “losing” all those Newspolls. (Albanese borrowed that formulation on the ABC’s 7.30 this month to point out his government has never “lost” one.)

The first Newspoll of 2024, in early February, found 62 per cent believed the government “did the right thing” by rejigging the tax cuts, with just 29 per cent saying they “should have kept their promise and implemented the tax cuts without changing them.”

Voting intentions and personal ratings were virtually identical to Newspoll’s final 2023 survey, which is widely seen as evidence the government didn’t “take a hit” for breaking that election promise. Along with the problems the decision caused (and will continue to cause) for the opposition right through to the next election, and along with the fact that the government was taking control of its destiny, the figures were enough to make it a “win.”

Just between us, though, Labor was a bit lucky with Newspoll’s phrasing. The fact that the changed policy represented the breaking of an ironclad, repeated promise was hidden in one of the responses, the one very few people nominated.

When another pollster, Redbridge, conducted a big survey at about the same time, it posed several questions about those Stage 3 tax cuts. The first (on page 21) simply asked if the government should stick to its repeated promise not to change them; it received a slight plurality in support of sticking with the cuts designed by the Coalition. The second (page 26) described the reported changes and asked about approval; this time the rejigged policy received large support, rather like that found by Newspoll.

All these pollsters’ questions are valid; the point here is that different wording can produce different headlines. A Newspoll question that resembled Redbridge’s first one would have generated very different perceptions about how the changed policy had been received by punters.

Redbridge also found a decrease in the government’s two-party-preferred support from 52.8 per cent in December to 51.2 per cent in February. Yet despite this “swing” the survey was reported very positively for the government in News Corp tabloids. Perhaps it can be difficult to break from the press gallery consensus.

Note that the prime minister is a bare relic of the figure, a year ago, who could do no wrong. How might voters have reacted if he’d announced these changes back then? He might well have taken that “hit” from those sky-high poll numbers. We’ll never know.


Broken election promises are as old as politics itself. From electors’ point of view Albanese is now just another politician; perhaps he had already become one last year. All prime ministers end up like that. “My word is my bond” is henceforth a punchline, like “Honest John” Howard in a previous era.

Like his predecessors, the prime minister is relying on the allure of incumbency: yes, I’m less than honest at times but I get the job done; I make the hard calls for the nation, and that’s what matters.

He even trotted out, also on 7.30, the sense of “trust” reclaimed by both Howard (in 2004) and Gillard (2012). “Australians,” he told Sarah Ferguson, “can trust me to be prepared to have the strength to take the right decisions that are needed.”

It was an overly long sentence, with spits, starts, lulls and twists, but he got there eventually. Rather like the government’s path to Stage 3 Mark II. •

Lord Salisbury’s message for the housing ombudsman

… and the housing ombudsman’s message for Australia

Peter Mares London 20 February 2024 3160 words

Britain’s pathbreaking 1884 royal commission into working-class housing was launched by Conservative PM Lord Salisbury (centre). Illustrated London News/Alamy


“Complaints have the ability to reveal the truth,” says England’s housing ombudsman Richard Blakeway. And the truth, as he sees it, is that Britain’s social housing system has lost focus, particularly on the intimate connection between housing and health.

Blakeway receives a lot of complaints. More than one in six people in England live in social rentals (compared to fewer than one in twenty in Australia). That’s about four million households, and Blakeway’s office is the place to go if they have a beef with their landlords, whether those institutions are not-for profit housing associations or local councils.

In 2022–23, the ombudsman made 6590 orders and recommendations designed to make things right for residents, including £1.1 million (A$2.1 million) in compensation. The call on Blakeway’s services is escalating at a phenomenal rate. “This financial year we’re up 91 per cent for formal investigations,” he tells me in an online interview. “We’re trending towards 10,000 formal investigations a year.”

Demand will grow even faster if the ombudsman is empowered to extend its services to another 4.4 million households in the private rental market, a change Blakeway would welcome. Most private tenants can’t currently access the free, independent, impartial redress his office provides, but a Renters Reform Bill could make his office the single venue for managing conflicts without the need to go to court.

Blakeway took up his role in 2019. His previous experience included serving as London’s deputy mayor for housing (when Boris Johnson was mayor) and as a director of the government housing agency, Homes England. Answering my questions, he is thoughtful and considered, and not prone to strong statements. In official verdicts on the failures of social housing providers, though, he is more direct.

Last July, for instance, he delivered a scathing judgement on the consistent failings of London’s largest social landlord, L&Q, which provides homes to a quarter of a million people. He found L&Q demonstrated little empathy in responding to residents’ complaints and in some cases was overtly dismissive, heavy-handed and lacking in respect. He ordered the organisation to pay £142,000 in compensation and apply 500 remedies including apologies and repairs. He has been equally critical of other big housing providers.

Resolving individual cases, though, only achieves so much. In a new report analysing complaints by vulnerable tenants, the ombudsman identifies patterns of landlord failure around attitudes, respect and rights. A fundamental reset is needed, he writes, and a royal commission into housing and health is the way to do it.


Remarkably, the ombudsman reaches back to the 1880s for inspiration. The Royal Commission on Housing of the Working Classes was, he writes, the “only inquiry of its kind to explore the relationship between housing and public health.” The commission was set up in 1884 by Conservative prime minister Lord Salisbury, who appointed himself — along with the Prince of Wales, former union leader Henry Broadhurst and several others — as one of its its members.

Salisbury believed that government-sponsored housing initiatives were vital to improve morality and health — a view criticised by the Manchester Guardian, among others, which described it as “state socialism pure and simple.” Despite the critics, the commission’s report produced “an explosion of transformative government-backed interventions, from council homes to garden suburbs.”

Britain’s subsequent tradition of regarding housing as a health issue saw significant housing developments led by health ministries. The ambitious 1919 Housing Act, for instance, which made housing a national responsibility, is generally called the Addison Act in reference to Dr Christopher Addison, the health minister who introduced it. After the second world war, Labour’s health minister Anuerin Bevan not only created the National Health Service but also, as minister responsible for housing, oversaw the construction of more than a million new dwellings in five years.

Public inquiries like Britain’s 1884 commission have also played an important role in Australia. Most notable is the Commonwealth Housing Commission initiated by postwar reconstruction minister Ben Chifley in 1943. Its report concluded that “a dwelling of good standard and equipment is not only the need, but the right of every citizen” and recommended that the national government “sponsor a government-financed housing programme.”

Up to that point, federal engagement in what was seen as a state issue had been limited. The commission provided the impetus for Commonwealth–state housing agreements over subsequent decades. While the scale of its ambition was never realised, more than 14 per cent of dwellings completed nationally between the end of the war and 1956 were built as public housing.


Richard Blakeway’s call for a royal commission “to reimagine the future of social housing” in the twenty-first century echoes similar calls in Australia. A 2021 report by the UNSW City Futures Research Centre argued for a royal commission to tackle “the scale and complexity” of the housing problem. More recently, the Centre for Equitable Housing urged the federal government to review its many and disparate housing-related outlays and bring them together in a single portfolio with clear objectives.

But both England and Australia are awash in reports from a succession of inquiries and housing research. Is the problem really a lack of data? Or is it a lack of political will?

One barrier in both countries is a basic disagreement about how to move forward. Proponents of the supply side argument say planning restrictions are limiting home building, driving up prices and rents. For them, the solution lies in looser planning and zoning rules to free up private development. Build more housing and rents will fall.

The contrary position is that market players have no incentive to build the type of homes that low-income earners can afford, especially when the tax system encourages investment in housing as an asset rather than a public good. The corollary of this critique is that government must reform taxation to reduce speculation and invest more public funds in low-rent housing.

These views are not mutually contradictory, and some action is happening on both fronts, but the supply-side argument seems to hold more sway with governments in both countries. In its 2019 election manifesto, Britain’s Conservative Party promised that it would lift residential construction to make sure 300,000 new homes are built annually in England. As parliament approaches the end of its term, completions are falling short of that figure, with about 234,000 new dwellings added to the housing stock in each of last two financial years. In a new initiative, secretary of state Michael Gove hopes to turbocharge development by compelling councils to speed up approvals for home building on former industrial or “brownfield” sites.

In Australia, the Albanese government aspires to deliver 1.2 million homes over five years, spurred by incentives to streamline planning and zoning rules at state and local levels. To hit this target developers would need to increase construction from 40,000 to 60,000 dwellings per quarter. Expert observers like Alan Kohler doubt the industry can build at such an unprecedented rate, particularly in current market conditions.

Investment in social housing has surged in Australia thanks to federal Labor’s Housing Australia Future Fund, or HAFF, and renewed state government initiatives. But after decades of neglect these projects won’t be enough to put roofs over the heads of Australians with unmet housing needs, including the 175,000 households on state and territory waiting lists for social housing.

In England, almost 1.3 million households are waiting for social housing, a dire statistic that manifests in clusters of tents pitched on the pavements of central London. In some parts of the city, more than one in ten children and teenagers live in temporary accommodation and are effectively homeless.

The Tory government says it has invested £11.5 billion since being elected to fund an affordable homes programme. It has just doubled a low-cost loan scheme from £3 billion to £6 billion to enable providers to build an extra 20,000 dwellings.

Historically, though, these numbers appear modest. In the thirty-five years after the second world war, local authorities and housing associations built 4.4 million dwellings; by 1981 almost a third of the English population lived in social housing. The share has halved in the decades since, not because demand has fallen but because there are far fewer socially provided homes. This month, the magazine Inside Housing reported that the number sold or demolished in England last year was nearly three times greater than the number completed.

An alliance of England’s largest housing associations has urged Michael Gove to invest £15 billion annually over the next decade to build 90,000 homes a year, a third of them in London. But having just lost two seats to Labour in recent by-elections and facing a wipe-out at the next election, prime minister Rishi Sunak is more inclined to woo voters by cutting taxes than by investing billions in public services.

Labour, meanwhile, is playing a cautious hand. It has promised the “biggest boost to affordable housing for a generation” but not the funding to match. Anxious to appear economically responsible, Labour has just scaled back the £28 billion green investment plan that was to be a central plank of its election manifesto. If Keir Starmer becomes prime minister, a big spend on housing looks unlikely.


As waiting lists for social housing grow, tenants lucky enough to have a subsidised roof over their heads can still find themselves in dire circumstances, reminiscent of the conditions that gave rise to Britain’s first housing inquiry in the 1880s.

In December 2020, in a case that’s become emblematic of the problem, two-year old Awaab Ishak died from a severe respiratory condition caused by persistent mould in the council home his family rented in Rochdale north of Manchester. Mould — one of the systemic problems identified in the ombudsman’s files — is also recognised as a major health threat to tenants in Australia.

Awaab’s parents had been complaining about the mould since 2017 but the local authority failed to act, saying the problem was caused by the family’s “lifestyle.” The ombudsman found many cases of social landlords adopting an accusatory approach rather than investigating other possible causes.

“Health and housing are closely aligned,” says Blakeway, “but the system doesn’t necessarily respond in that integrated way. There’s a real risk that complaints are treated in a kind of transactional way or become personalised. The risk is that they are treated in isolation, and you lose thematic qualities that complaints have, or you don’t do a root cause analysis.”

One housing worker told the ombudsman that tenants who challenge providers are “seen as troublemakers to be quashed.” This view gels with management’s dismissive response to Grenfell Tower residents who warned of urgent fire safety problems ahead of the 2017 inferno that killed seventy-two people.

Community outrage at Awaab’s death has prompted Michael Gove, the minister responsible for housing, to include Awaab’s Law in a new Social Housing Regulation Act. Landlords will now be required “to investigate and fix reported health hazards within specified timeframe.” But whether local authorities and housing associations have the resources to make quick repairs is another question.

More than one in ten dwellings in the social rented sector fail to live up to the Decent Homes Standard, the government benchmark for minimum housing conditions. And the English Housing Survey found that almost two-thirds of tenants who complain to their landlords are not happy with the response.

Tenants told the ombudsman that social landlords were quick to inform them about increased rents and service charges but poor in communicating about all other matters. Not surprisingly, this created a perception that social housing providers are “only interested in money, rather than the condition of their homes or the landlord/tenant relationship.”

An expert panel concluded that communication between tenants and their social landlords is hampered by the high turnover of stressed frontline housing workers. The panel’s Better Housing Review also found that tenants lack a strong voice and face-to-face contact with staff. Blakeway’s research confirms this finding: residents told his office that a simple knock at the door can help to maintain and improve the landlord/tenant relationship.


Funding shortfalls undoubtedly underpin these problems, and the housing crisis has been compounded by the perfect storm of Covid, Brexit, higher interest rates, labour shortages and supply chain bottlenecks. But Blakeway sees other factors at play too.

With around 2000 councils and not-for-profit associations providing social housing in England, a great variability is inevitable. Understandably, the providers’ focus has been on increasing housing supply, but Blakeway says that’s rarely balanced by consideration of what to do about ageing houses and flats in urgent need of upgrades.

He believes that providers hold to a fixed view that social housing is better than any alternative on offer to low-income tenants in the private rental market, which leads them to neglect residents’ needs.

Then there are long-term societal shifts. “If nothing else had changed,” says Blakeway, “the current population in social housing would have got older, above the national average.” That means more vulnerable residents, often concentrated coastal and rural areas.

Housing providers need to think about how to respond says Blakeway: “What does that mean for our services, for adaptations, for understanding of issues like dementia?”

This demographic transition has coincided with residents’ growing understanding of what they can demand under recent human rights, equality and care legislation. The ombudsman says housing providers haven’t done enough to modify residents’ homes in line with these laws. This has been exacerbated by cuts to other government supports. “Social landlords will very clearly say that they feel like they become a surrogate for social and health services,” says Blakeway. “That’s because they are one of the most visible and immediate touch points.”

To survive financially, housing associations are also compelled to become savvy commercial operators. Torus, for instance, claims not only to be the largest affordable housing provider in northwest England, but also “one of its biggest and fastest-growing developers and commercial contractors.” One Housing describes itself as “a group of complementary businesses driven by a clear social purpose, with a charitable housing association at its core.” Alongside social and affordable housing, it offers homes for private rent and private sale.

A lack of funding has forced providers to sweat their assets, a strategy the Better Housing Review panel said “is fast reaching its limits.” The expert panel worried that commercial considerations are distracting providers from their core purpose of providing “decent, safe homes for those who can’t afford the market.” It warns that mergers to achieve economies of scale run the risk of “working to KPIs more related to business efficiency” rather than “complex indicators such as tenant experience and satisfaction.”

Blakeway says consolidation in the social housing sector is driven by noble ambitions but notes organisations become more reliant on processes and systems as they grow. “If a resident doesn’t fit into the neat box or their issues are more complex than the system can cope with, that’s where we can see things being fractured and people through falling through gaps.”


In a 1942 pamphlet, Housing the Australian Nation, prominent Melbourne social reformers F. Oswald Barnett and W.O. Burt surveyed the appalling housing conditions experienced by Australia’s working classes and called for much greater government investment than previously imagined. Health was at the top of their concerns. Without better housing, they worried, efforts to improve health would be “seriously retarded.”

Today, the evidence is even more compelling. In England, the research group BRE calculates that it costs the National Health Service an annual £1.4 billion to treat people made sick by poor housing. Yet there are relatively inexpensive and cost-effective ways of dealing with the major risks: insulation to counter excessive cold, hard-wired smoke detectors to alert residents to fires, handrails to cut the risk of falls, ventilation to minimise mould and damp.

BRE estimates that spending to reduce these hazards would quickly pay for itself in savings to the NHS. In the private rental sector, the payback time would be between eight and nine years; in the social housing sector it would be twelve to thirteen years. (Social housing tales longer to generate a positive return because overcrowding is a major hazard and is more expensive to fix.)

The costs of poor housing go beyond healthcare to include such things as lost earnings for those who fall ill and those who must care for them. BRE calculates that total annual cost to society of leaving people living in poor housing is around £18.5 billion. As well as generating NHS savings, fixing housing hazards would create jobs, reduce energy costs, lower carbon emissions and improve property values.


Looked at this way, public investment in housing seems like a no-brainer, whether as a way of improving lives or as a prudent fiscal move. As the housing crisis deepens, the social and economic price we pay further outstrips the cost of action.

Australia is moving down a similar path to England where, in the 1980s, not-for-profit housing associations began taking on a role traditionally played by local government. Since 2006, the number of dwellings owned or managed by Australia’s not-for-profit providers has more than tripled, mostly thanks to stock being transfers from public housing authorities.

Funding from the HAFF and state programs to build new dwellings will increase the size of the not-for-profit sector and raise pressure on providers to consolidate to achieve efficiencies.But as in England, there is a risk that commercial imperatives could distract from the core business of providing decent homes for Australians priced out of the private market. This is more likely to happen in the absence of consistent public funding and clear government direction.

England has also had sixteen housing minsters in the fourteen years since the Conservatives took office. As the Better Housing Review panel commented, this revolving door means “a lack of consistent and strategic thinking and action.” Yet the panel insists that government cannot outsources its obligations and must remain “fully accountable for the provision of decent housing nationally,” just as it remains responsible for health and education.

Like England, Australia lacks a coherent housing strategy and consultations to develop one have proved disappointing. For almost a decade, Coalition governments in Canberra insisted that housing was a state matter. While this has changed under Labor, we still have a housing minister with no housing department. As the Centre for Equitable Housing argues, the lack of a dedicated department or a consolidated housing budget statement makes impossible to properly shape or evaluate public policy.

Housing ombudsman Richard Blakeway thinks a royal commission could help solve England’s housing challenge and revive understanding of the close connection between decent homes and good health. Housing, he says, is a complex problem where solutions must be built on expertise, impartiality, independence and a long-term perspective — all things that a royal commission has the potential to deliver. Australia’s problems might be different, but they are just as serious. Perhaps here, too, it’s worth considering a public inquiry with the capacity to probe, publicise and make recommendations. •

Collateral damage

Yang Hengjun’s sentencing shows a Chinese security apparatus largely oblivious to foreign relations concerns

Hamish McDonald 15 February 2024 2552 words

“It’s less about Australia and more about them,” says the Lowy Institute’s Richard McGregor.


A leader of the Australian Labor Party is building improved relations with the People’s Republic of China out of the shambles left by his Coalition predecessor. But there’s a fly in the ointment: an Australian writer playing at spies who’s got himself locked up by the Chinese secret service.

Australian citizen Yang Hengjun’s arrest, imprisonment and suspended death sentence for espionage could draw comparison with the case of Francis James, the eccentric publisher of the Sydney church newspaper the Anglican, who Gough Whitlam managed to spring from a Chinese jail in 1973 after convincing Beijing he was a harmless prankster.

But the two cases are quite dissimilar, especially as the comparison doesn’t give Yang credit for his genuine efforts for liberal reform in China.

As recounted by Japan-based ex-diplomat Gregory Clark, who covered the Francis James case for the Australian, James had concocted an entirely fictitious account of travelling to the Chinese nuclear test site at Lop Nor in Xinjiang and sold it to the London Sunday Times in 1969. After he was exposed by Derek Davies of the Far Eastern Economic Review as having skirted around rather than visited China, James invented another preposterous story and then went openly to China in November 1969. He was promptly arrested as a suspected spy.

Why so reckless? Getting arrested was deliberate, Clark conjectured. “Get into China via the Canton Fair, behave suspiciously, get arrested dramatically and mysteriously, and the world will have no choice but to believe that here indeed is a person who could once have roamed the secret nuclear installations of northwest China,” he wrote.

“True, being arrested by the Chinese police in those days was no joke,” Clark went on. “But he has a plan. Because he behaves outrageously and courts arrest, the Chinese will quickly realise he is a harmless eccentric playing games and throw him out of the country. Being expelled from China will add even more to the James legend.”

But things don’t quite work out that way. “The Chinese decide that he is not mad or playing games, that he really is on some secret spy mission. What James thought would be a short-term escapade ends up as incarceration and interrogation for four years. The joke very nearly ends up as a tragedy.”

Yang’s case could very well turn into a tragedy. His death sentence has been suspended for two years on condition he doesn’t re-offend. How he might spy from a prison cell is a mystery, but Chinese security would no doubt find some evidence if it wanted to. And Yang, fifty-eight, has a large lesion on one of his kidneys that could be renal cancer, treatable if operated on in time. In a previous high-profile case, that of detained Nobel Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, Chinese authorities allowed liver cancer to develop beyond hope of treatment.

Despite five years of detention and hundreds of interrogation sessions, China’s Ministry of State Security could only come up with one plausible accusation of espionage. This involves an operation thirty years ago, in 1994–97, when Yang was working for the ministry itself as an undercover officer in Hong Kong as the territory’s handover from Britain to China was approaching. Back then, according to the limited summary of evidence released with the verdict, Yang passed on forty documents containing Chinese secrets to Taiwan’s intelligence service.

But Yang had long told confidants that his superiors in State Security gave him the job of opening contact with Taiwan operatives to help ensure a smooth transition and had been happy with his trading some low-level information to win confidences. So pleased with his performance had his superiors been that they let him go to Washington with his then wife for two years as a visiting fellow at the Atlantic Council, a think tank, while still on the ministry’s books.

The resurrection of the Hong Kong episode suggests that Yang’s interrogators found no evidence of espionage in the decades since, unless it has been withheld. So the arrest must have been for something else. And the answer surely lies in the evolution of Yang’s career as an academic researcher, popular fiction writer and political blogger, and how State Security, as guardian of the Chinese dictatorship, saw his work as a challenge and threat.

Early on, Yang certainly teased the ministry: not something that should be done lightly given it is perhaps the largest intelligence agency in the world, with an estimated 110,000 staff encompassing foreign intelligence, domestic counter-intelligence and increasingly cyber and industrial espionage. It even has its own think tank, the Institute for Contemporary International Relations, to engage with foreign counterparts and release open-source assessments. At its favoured hotel in central Beijing, troublesome figures are invited in for a “cup of tea” as a warning.

Reflecting the ministry’s staid, bureaucratic character, its cadres are supposed to be pillars of communist rectitude. At the insistence of its former political master, premier Zhou Enlai (the leader Whitlam prevailed on to release James), it has forsworn “honey traps” (sexual entrapment) and doesn’t seem to go in for overseas “wet jobs” (assassinations), at least according to John Byron, the pseudonymous co-author of Claws of the Dragon, a book based on the personal papers of Kang Sheng, Mao Zedong’s spy chief and orchestrator of his purges.

Yang tried to liven up that dour image with a trilogy of spy novels published in Hong Kong and Taiwan around 2004–05. According to those who’ve read them, they contain the mix of sex and murder found in spy books about Western intelligence services. The hero, a Chinese named Yang, is a double-agent in a vicious war between the State Security and the CIA. Smuggled copies gained a wide readership in China.


Yang joined the ministry’s elite intake as a brilliant graduate of Shanghai’s Fudan University, one of the country’s best foreign-studies schools. He received the Hong Kong assignment after a posting to the foreign department of Hainan’s provincial government.

But his role ended with his Washington sojourn. In 1999 his then wife, a professional interpreter and translator, gained a skilled migration visa for Australia. Yang emigrated too, as her dependent. The move appears not to have been a “defection.”

In Australia, as well as writing his spy books, Yang plunged back into academic study, supported by his wife, first at the University of New South Wales and then at the University of Technology Sydney, where he gained a PhD in 2007 for a thesis on political messaging on the Chinese internet, then subject to tightening surveillance and blocking.

Research contacts enabled Yang to develop a huge following for his Chinese-language blogs discussing political reform, says his UTS doctoral supervisor, Feng Chongyi. The large following gained him some income but he also relied on hospitality from friends and contacts. At some point his marriage broke up.

Although his spy books had been “too sensitive for China,” Feng tells me, Yang continued to travel in and out of China, by then as an Australian citizen. One awkward moment came on a visit to Guangzhou in 2011, when local police officers detained him. Uprisings were then sweeping the Middle East in the Arab Spring and China’s security apparatus had been told to nip any local buds. With help from Julia Gillard’s government, Feng got Yang released after four days on the condition that his detention was not publicised.

At their peak, says Feng, Yang’s blogs were followed by about a hundred “Yang Groups” in some fifty Chinese cities. But with Xi Jinping’s ascension as Communist Party secretary in October 2012 the atmospherics started changing. Xi methodically purged all rival factions, including the Shanghai faction of former leader Jiang Zemin and the Communist Youth League faction of predecessor Hu Jintao (who was later frogmarched out of the 2022 party congress that gave the green light for Xi’s indefinite rule).

Xi also cracked down on civil society: lawyers, academics, media outlets, non-government organisations. With his blogging career faced with ever-tightening controls, Yang became noticeably more cautious in what his writing and speaking, according to a foreign correspondent he used to meet in Beijing. His high-level party contacts, including former vice-president Zeng Qinghong, a key lieutenant to Jiang Zemin, were themselves on the outer.

Yang had also embarked on a relationship that raised questions among his following. His new wife, Yuan Ruijuan (also known as Yuan Xiaoliang), had been labelled a “patriotic blogger” — or, more disparagingly, a wumao (fifty-cent warrior) for the half-yuan these bloggers were supposedly paid for each post supporting the official line. Her reputation sat uneasily with Yang’s long-time aim of political opening. Some wondered whether Yang had been playing both sides of China’s internal divide.

Nonetheless, Yang was in the sights of State Security. The contacts he had made with Zeng Qinghong, a former vice-premier who had been a key lieutenant of Jiang Zemin, would have been enough to ensure that. “The CCP reforming wing under Zeng embraced globalisation whole-heartedly and pushed for alliance with the West,” says Feng. “Zeng even went so far as to find an exit for the CCP.”


In March 2017 Feng Chongyi was himself detained during a research trip in Guangzhou. Before pressure from Canberra and his university secured his release, Feng says he was questioned intensively about Yang’s activities and connections. “They said: Women hui shoushi ta! We will get rid of him!” Feng recalls.

Feng then helped Yang get a two-year visiting fellowship at New York’s Colombia University, his income to be augmented by informal daigou trading of American luxuries to China. After the fellowship ended in January 2019, Yang and his second wife, heading back to Australia, made the fateful decision to visit relatives on the way. Unlike Francis James, it was not a showdown gesture: Yang must have thought the State Security officers in his intake, by then in senior ranks, would keep a lenient eye on him.

“I told him not to go back to China,” says Feng. “He said, if they want to take me, they would have done it long ago.”

Yang’s arrest may partly have been precautionary, aimed at silencing a potentially influential figure ahead of two big anniversaries coming up in 2019: the centenary of the 4 May 1919 student uprising over the foreign concession ports reaffirmed in the Versailles Treaty, and the thirtieth anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre.

China’s relations with US-aligned nations were already spiralling downwards. A month earlier, Canada had arrested Huawei’s heiress-apparent Meng Wanzhou on a US warrant for breaking sanctions on Iran. In return, two Canadians working in China had been arrested, effectively as hostages. Members of the Five Eyes intelligence group, which includes Australia, were blocking Huawei from their 5G mobile networks on suspicion the technology could be used for Chinese espionage or sabotage. The party and State Security had added to the deteriorating atmosphere with a new intelligence law requiring all Chinese citizens and enterprises to cooperate with intelligence services when asked.

In Australia, Malcolm Turnbull’s government had enacted new laws on foreign influence while Yang was in New York. A month after his detention Canberra blocked the Chinese businessman Huang Xiangmo, a permanent resident, from re-entering Australia because of payments to politicians allegedly to build pro-China sentiment.

Yang was in contact with Australian officials preparing the anti–foreign influence crackdown. In New York he appears to have engaged with Boxun, a US-based website and news aggregator that promotes democracy and human rights and exposes alleged corruption in China. Blocked in China itself, Boxun has been subject to cyber-attacks attributed to Beijing. Its founder, Meicun “Watson” Meng, has strongly defended Yang against his latest charges.


Yang’s harsh sentence has undermined the feeling in Canberra that relations with China, though never expected to be warm, were at least unlikely to deliver more shocks. The hope, no doubt, was that Yang would be released after sentencing for time served.

To Canberra’s China hawks, the sentence suggests that Beijing wants Australians to be a bit afraid. And the court’s two-year good behaviour: did that apply to the Australian government, they wonder, as well as Yang?

But Richard McGregor, the China specialist at Sydney’s Lowy Institute and author of widely praised book, The Party, plays down the idea that Beijing is sending a message to Australia. “It’s less about Australia and more about them,” he tells me. “On the one hand, the MSS [State Security] is likely largely indifferent to the deleterious impact Yang’s verdict will have on relations with Australia. But you could imagine that State Security deliberately demanded the harshest sentence possible as a warning to pro-democracy activists that they are risking their lives.”

For State Security, foreign relations are mere collateral damage. So is economic confidence. After a revised anti-espionage law introduced last July expanded the range of activities that can be considered espionage, raids targeted US-linked consultancy and due-diligence firms.

As the well-informed Hong Kong journalist and academic Wang Xiangwei has pointed out, State Security has gone public with its warnings, launching a WeChat account last August. “Since then, it has boldly asserted itself not only on espionage matters but also on national and international topical issues ranging from China–US relations to economic subjects, including one in which it warned against badmouthing China’s economic growth prospects,” Wang wrote.

Then, late last year, State Security put out posts blasting people who were bearish about China and “badmouthing” China’s economic growth prospects, Wang said. A few weeks later, in late January, it laid out ten conditions — mainly concerning national security, state secrets and anti-espionage law — that could lead to questioning by its agents.

State Security is unlikely to be doing this without Xi’s firm approval. Minister Chen Yixin is a longtime associate of Xi — so close that he is believed to be working on a new chapter of “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era,” the official ideology that ranks Xi with Mao. A “pillar” of state security seems likely to join existing pillars of the economy, diplomacy, military, environment, legal affairs and culture in the official document.

Without a signal from Xi, no one in Beijing is likely to resist the expanded ministry. “In any political system it’s difficult to push back against the internal security service,” says Lowy’s McGregor. “Eventually with wolf-warrior diplomacy there was a top-level political intervention and it largely stopped. So far, the MSS’s role seems very much in line with the direction Xi Jinping has set for the country. The only incentive in China is to exceed what you think the leader wants.”

In the meantime, Anthony Albanese is no Gough Whitlam, and Xi Jinping is no Zhou Enlai, and for the China of 2024, unlike in 1973, the Russians are its second fiddle and the Americans fearful of its rise. The best hope for Yang appears to be an effort to stress his precarious health and, unfairly as it may be, downplaying the seriousness of his challenge to the Party.

The MSS cadres are unlikely to know James Thurber’s 1939 story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” or the 1947 Danny Kaye movie, but they might have seen the 2013 remake with Ben Stiller. •

Voices off

What does the experience of the Ngaanyatjarra community tells us about the bipartisan promise of regional Voices?

Tim Rowse Books 3130 words

A United Aborigines Mission vehicle in Ngaanyatjarra country, Warburton Ranges, c. 1958–61. Mervyn Young/State Library of Western Australia


Lost amid the polarities of the Voice campaign was a more muted message: not only Labor but also the Coalition believes the gap will only be closed if governments listen to regional Voices. The referendum was defeated by a No campaign that included a promise by the Liberal Party to legislate Voices across the regions.

If these Voices are to be among the next government initiatives to deal with Indigenous disadvantage then we would be wise to study their history — for the idea is not new. For that reason, Max Angus’s new book, Too Far Out, an “administrative history” of the Ngaanyatjarra community of Western Australia, couldn’t be more timely.

The Ngaanyatjarra community — 1542 kilometres northeast of Perth, 750 kilometres northeast of Kalgoorlie, 560 kilometres northeast of Laverton, 1050 kilometres southwest of Alice Springs and (by my estimate) 2200 kilometres from Canberra — is remote from any recognised administrative centre. Imagine a London borough governed by officials living and working in Budapest with oversight from officials in Bucharest.

As a “nation for a continent” (in the words of Australia’s first prime minister) “remote” is what Australia does: assuming responsibility for all corners of this land is our sovereign project. Since the early twentieth century, the Ngaanyatjarra have become interlocutors of Australia’s three-level state; less and less are they “too far out.” They have been Australian citizens since 1948 (and British subjects before that). They have become literate in English, and were fully enfranchised in 1984. Many would call themselves Christian, and their homeland has been of intermittent economic significance. They have been statistically visible — on the wrong side of the gap — since the 1970s. How their homeland became a governable region is the story that Angus, a former professor of education, wants to tell.

Until 1873–74, when William Gosse, Ernest Giles and John Forrest began to map cross-continental routes, no European had entered the region. An imagined Laverton-to-Oodnadatta stock route would have passed through but it never came into existence; only in the early twentieth century did prospectors venture there and humanitarians begin considering how the denizens of this arid interior might be protected.

From South Australia’s Christians came a proposal, in 1914, to declare reserves — “sanctuaries” — on each side of the border with Western Australia. Would the Commonwealth join them in its adjacent southwest corner of the Northern Territory? After years of negotiation the three contiguous Central Australian Reserves were gazetted in 1920–21 and this “inviolable” region of interacting desert peoples came under three colonial authorities.

But officials in Perth, notionally responsible for the welfare of the Ngaanyatjarra, had no program and no knowledge. In the 1930s, from Mount Margaret Mission near Laverton, pastor Rod Schenk and schoolteacher Mary Bennett peered east and hoped that Perth would not license the Ngaanyatjarra homeland to graziers and gold-seekers. Motor cars were replacing camels but there were still no roads. The Ngaanyatjarra were reported to be “gentle and well mannered” and evidently “contented and well fed.”

The WA government refused tenure in the region to all but missionaries. After Schenk established a mission at the Warburton range, near the reserve’s western edge, in 1934, he persuaded the government to extend the reserve boundary further west to include a permanent Euro-Australian presence, the United Aborigines’ Mission under William and Iris Wade.

With the state stinting the money needed to feed the desert people attracted to the mission, Ngaanyatjarra people, encouraged by the Wades, began competing for the government bounty on dingo scalps with “doggers” already active in the Western Desert. The state government sought to regulate the mission’s scalp dealings, and in 1947 visiting police observed the Ngaanyatjarra hunters breeding dingos for scalp harvesting. (In the mid sixties, anthropologists began learning of a dingo dreaming track starting at a site known as Nanku.)

By then, Australian governments were imagining Indigenous Australians’ secular pathway to economically independent citizenship. Officials wondered if the mission was giving the Ngaanyatjarra enough to eat and whether it was right to house children in dormitories. Native affairs commissioner Stanley Middleton (1948­–62) was committed to “assimilation,” even for the most distant and “primitive” people, but the policy raised a question: could a Christian mission on an inviolable reserve be an instrument of its residents’ progress?

Warburton mission’s government subsidy increased, but it was calculated on the assumption that many who frequented the mission were living as hunter-gatherers and dingo farmers rather than reliant on the mission. But the government began considering a plan to close the Warburton mission and transfer residents 200 miles to Cosmo Newberry, a settlement acquired by the missionaries in 1953 to train children with state government support. Warburton mission found an advocate in Bill Grayden MP, however, who persuaded the Legislative Assembly to set up an inquiry into the welfare of “natives” in the Laverton–Warburton Ranges region. Having found the people at Warburton to be in a depleted condition, the committee recommended that the government subsidise a pastoral enterprise for the Ngaanyatjarra.

A dispute ensued: visitors in 1957 (including a young Rupert Murdoch) debated how well or how badly off were the Ngaanyatjarra, what remedies they were entitled to, who was responsible for delivering assistance and whether English should replace Ngaanyatjarra as the region’s lingua franca. The records assiduously consulted by Angus suggest that the Ngaanyatjarra had no independent voice in these debates.

Meanwhile, the “inviolable reserve” was being subjected to excisions. The Commonwealth’s weapons testing program required it to establish an observation post within the reserve — Giles Weather Station, with connecting roads — and the WA government opened a third of the reserve (7500 square miles) to International Nickel of Canada in 1956. The Ngaanyatjarra thus became a “problem”: in order to protect them, authorities now had to exclude them from places where Commonwealth and company employees — in small numbers — were residing. Middleton hoped that the Commonwealth would assume responsibility for developing all of the Central Reserves; South Australia, for its part, initiated a pastoral enterprise at Musgrave Park, later known as Amata, in 1961.


To begin with, the Ngaanyatjarra are in the background of Angus’s story, but he is able to move them steadily to the foreground. The more their homeland was encroached on, the more their remaking of their life became visible to colonial authority and thus to the historian.

Some 450 residents were counted at Warburton in 1962. They were increasingly dependent on the food the mission provided. The following year a patrol officer reported that the Ngaanyatjarra were using their homeland’s recently graded tracks — even purchasing their own truck from sales of copper ore found near the mission. At this point it becomes possible for Angus to name individual Ngaanyatjarra.

A man called Tommy Simms had discovered the copper, and by 1961 the mission was managing the earnings derived by a small number of men from mining the ore and sending it to British Metals in Perth. The government wanted to develop the enterprise on a commercial footing, but the mission sought to defend its own interests and assure a degree of Ngaanyatjarra control. Western Mining offered to partner with the men, the government approved, and Simms became the first Ngaanyatjarra with the means to purchase his own vehicle (a Toyota and a Bedford truck).

In 1966 the government licensed Western Mining to prospect within the reserve and form partnerships with Simms and other individuals. Between forty and sixty men were involved in mining by 1967; in keeping with Western Desert people’s now well-known respect for “autonomy” within a continuously negotiated “relatedness,” those with tenements preferred individual partnerships with Western Mining to a cooperative. Others participated as employees. Would copper ore pave the way to the future governments hoped for?

But the Ngaanyatjarra easily disengaged from copper mining: the land was unevenly mineralised, the work was tedious, hunting remained an attractive alternative, and the mission would still feed them. “Their deep attachment was to the Ngaanyatjarra people and lands,” writes Angus, “not to a mining corporation or to a Western lifestyle.”

By the time Western Mining decided it was no long profitable to work with Ngaanyatjarra, one in ten Warburton residents had become eligible for the social security payments that now made up two-thirds of the community’s income. In 1969 the payments, previously made collectively, began being paid to individual recipients. The change was conceived and defended as a step towards “citizenship,” but it wrecked the mission’s system of communal provision.

Prospects of further income from the mining of nickel (around Wingellina) and chrysoprase had to be weighed against a growing official concern for the protection of sacred sites whose locations were being revealed to researchers during the 1960s by Ngaanyatjarra. They wanted income from mining, but in ways that respected country.


By this time, a new federal Office of Aboriginal Affairs was looking at how employment could be brought to the region in ways that aligned with local interests. An inquiry proposed that a new, federally funded Central Reserves Trust representing Ngaanyatjarra and neighbouring peoples would gradually assume control of the three reserves, re-establish Warburton mission as a planned township, develop tourism and horticulture, and permit Aboriginal prospecting. Before that happened, the Commonwealth demanded that Ngaanyatjarra land excised for mining be returned to the reserve. Western Australia complied in February 1972, while also amending its own legislation to allow a minister to approve exploration within the reserve.

Where did Warburton mission fit into this plan? Around Australia, Christian missions were relinquishing administration to Aboriginal councils. The WA government considered that its agencies — including the new (1972) Aboriginal Affairs Planning Authority — were better suited to administering Commonwealth investment in the reserves. The missionaries agreed, with misgivings, to confine themselves to “spiritual and linguistic” work. Administering the food supply — the children’s dining room and the store — devolved to Ngaanyatjarra, who were unprepared for the role. They were equally unprepared when a new Warburton Community Inc. introduced unfamiliar modes of governance in mid 1973. It was “a difficult period for all concerned,” writes Angus, but the policy of self-determination was politically irreversible.

For these policies and plans to work as “development,” much depended on which of the proliferating authorities and visitors the Ngaanyatjarra — the intended workforce and clientele — felt comfortable with. Visiting tradesmen were unfamiliar with the Ngaanyatjarra’s opportunistic approach to employment — intermittent and punctuated by spells on unemployment benefits. The local labour markets that worked in some Australian regions seemed not to apply in Ngaanyatjarra country. Teenagers rejected the daily discipline of school attendance and some residents refused to cooperate with nurses employed by the Australian Inland Mission. Blasting for the construction of a hospital upset the custodians of the Marla so much that visiting workers demanded police protection.

By 1975 Warburton was becoming known as a hostile environment for non-Ngaanyatjarra. For reasons cultural and logistical, it was proving difficult to police Warburton from Laverton. One of the Commonwealth’s responses was to assist Ngaanyatjarra to decentralise. The four resulting “homeland” communities — Wingellina, Blackstone, Warakurna and Jameson, each with its own white community adviser — were all places where Ngaanyatjarra had interacted with “whitefellas”: all were on the road network that prospectors and weapons researchers had created since the 1950s.

People from Docker River (a welfare settlement established in the Northern Territory in 1968) and Amata (a South Australian settlement established in 1961) also moved to the four communities. The Central Reserves were being repopulated using resources deliberately or inadvertently provided by a variety of non-Aboriginal intrusions. Their viability was based largely on welfare payments, as Angus writes, for the federal Department of Aboriginal Affairs “had given up pretending that some large-scale economic enterprise, leading to regular paid work, was just around the corner.”

As public health practitioner David Scrimgeour tells it in his recent book, Remote as Ever, a cohort of whites with relevant skills was emerging from southern capital cities to work alongside these Western Desert people. They believed that self-determination could work as long as it was re-spatialised according to Aboriginal wishes and resourced according to their rights as citizens. For Indigenous nations living almost entirely on imported food, the “smoothly operating well-stocked store” was each new community’s foundational institution. Schools and clinics (each with itinerant staff) followed. Able to move among Ngaanyatjarra’s five communities, people occupied their homeland with fewer material constraints; but it was difficult to service “communities” so transient.

The 1967 referendum had created the potential for intergovernmental relationships to change in ways that could work to the advantage of Ngaanyatjarra. The Commonwealth sought to treat the entire Central Reserve as a single “tri-state” object of reformed administration. Decisions in Canberra meant that the Ngaanyatjarra began to look more to the local Department of Aboriginal Affairs office in Alice Springs and less to state officials in Perth. WA government agencies increasingly faced demands from community advisers who answered to Canberra.

Empowering the Commonwealth at the expense of the states caused tensions among non-Indigenous officials. A major Commonwealth innovation in 1977 was to lump unemployment benefits into a single payment to each community — the Community Development Employment Projects, or CDEP, schemes.

When their expectations were not met, Ngaanyatjarra were sometimes violent towards service providers, making policing (where, how many, what methods) a policy issue in the late 1970s. Christian evangelism (including a “Christian Crusade” in 1981) and new by-laws in Warburton reduced but didn’t stop alcohol abuse and petrol-sniffing. Angus argues convincingly that outbreaks of “lawlessness” preceded the 1970s transition to “self-determination.” But the question remained: could the institutions of self-determination reduce the frequency and severity of such “turbulence”?

A certain level of turmoil did not stop the Ngaanyatjarra and their neighbours to the east from collective action using the Commonwealth’s and South Australia’s land rights policies. The formation of the Pitjantjara Council, the continuing interest of mining companies in the reserve’s nickel, and the pro-mining stance of WA premier Charles Court stimulated the formation of the Ngaanyatjarra Council in March 1981. In well-publicised lobbying, the council demanded inalienable freehold title to the WA portion of the Central Reserve.

An inquiry initiated by a subsequent premier, Labor’s Brian Burke, recommended in 1984 a way to legislate land rights. With claimable land amounting to 47.2 per cent of Western Australia’s total area, the Liberal Party argued, as it would in 2023, against “a set of rights which will be attributable to one small group of our population,” and it had the numbers in the Legislative Council to defeat Labor’s bill.

Burke’s government was impressed by the mining industry’s public relations campaign and lobbied for the Hawke government to abandon its planned national land rights bill. Would the Ngaanyatjarra accept a ninety-nine-year lease and the prospect of a nickel mining town (with jobs for Ngaanyatjarra) instead? The Ngaanyatjarra suggested that the government use existing legislation to lease the reserve land and other desired portions to a new body — the Ngaanyatjarra Land Council — some land portions with ninety-nine-year, others with fifty-year leases. Mining companies would apply to the land council, not the mines minister, for permission to explore, with a right to take any refusal to independent arbitration. Visitors could apply to the land council for permission to enter land under lease.

This 1988 deal, which Angus describes as “a masterfully executed compromise,” has lasted through several changes of government.

Because roads are an essential part of the Ngaanyatjarra’s adaptation, it mattered that, not being rate-payers, they could not vote in shire elections. When the franchise was extended to all adult residents, voter turnout among Ngaanyatjarra was much higher (40 per cent in May 1987) than among all other voters in the Shire of Wiluna, which extended to the west. Recognising that the shire was now two regions distinguished by need, revenue base, economic activity and cultural outlook, the WA government split the Shire of Wiluna in half and established the Shire of Ngaanyatjarraku in the eastern portion in July 1993.


This belated municipal enfranchisement of the Ngaanyatjarra was by then paralleled in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, or ATSIC. Replacing the Department of Aboriginal Affairs in 1989, ATSIC was made up of elected regional councils with responsibility for certain Commonwealth programs. At first, ATSIC comprised sixty elected regional councils; after amalgamations for the second round of elections in December 1993, there were only thirty-five. Ngaanyatjarra objected to being amalgamated with neighbours to their west (Martu) and south (Spinifex mob) and took legal action against the electoral process that chose the Western Desert Regional Council. Their objection — not wanting to be represented by strangers — remains a familiar theme of Indigenous Australian politics. Warren Mundine — campaigning against the 2023 referendum — cited the Ngaanyatjarra as an ally in his critique of the Voice co-design process proposed by Marcia Langton and Tom Calma.

“By the mid-1990s,” Angus concludes, “the Ngaanyatjarra Council could justifiably claim that the region had become self-managing within the state and Commonwealth legal frameworks.” He lists formally incorporated enterprises (transport, stores) the Ngaanyatjarra have developed through collective action.

In an afterword, he briefly takes the story to the present. He condemns the Howard government (1996–2007) and its successors for modifying, then abandoning, the single most important financial basis of “self-management,” the CDEP. An older set of expectations regained authority in government and to some extent among the wider public: the Ngaanyatjarra would develop (must develop) into job-seekers (with “work-like habits”) despite their region still having almost no labour market (other than that provided by the CDEP).

In his valuable ethnography of the social and linguistic practices that have evolved within Ngaanyatjarra transactions with governments, The Dystopia in the Desert, former Ngaanyatjarra employee Tadhgh Purtill argues that the community, its advisers and distant public servants have tacitly agreed never to confront the tensions between the different practical senses of a word that all feel obliged to use: “development.”

Ethnography yields an account of something on which all governance rests: embedded, routinised ways of describing Ngaanyatjarra circumstances. As Purtill observes, talk and text can be seen as enacting a kind of political truce. That is, they shield the fantasy of remote Aboriginal assimilation from a reality test it could not survive. Purtill’s point of view is elusive; he seems, at times, to be a whistle-blower unmasking a systemic rort of public funds. Yet in his account of mutual complicities the reader can see an adaptive structure, a buffer against the ongoing (and potentially lethal) chaos that is settler colonial authority in its liberal democratic form.

Well advised and adept, the Ngaanyatjarra litigated against the smashing of the CDEP in 2021. They won a $2 million payment and a government promise to negotiate a new framework of public financial support. Angus concludes his book wondering how that will work out in a political system that equates centralised decision-making with administrative rationality. There is a Ngaanyatjarra voice, but it is nothing without an attentive listener. •

Too Far Out: An Administrative History of the Ngaanyatjarra Homelands
By Max Angus | Hesperian Press | $66 | 295 pages

Jokowi’s high-wire succession

Prabowo Subianto’s likely electoral hole-in-one this week holds risks not only for his enemies

Liam Gammon Jakarta 14 February 2024 903 words

Third time lucky: presidential candidate Prabowo Subianto (left) and his running mate Gibran Rakabuming Raka campaigning in Bandung, West Java, last week. Algi Febri Sugita/Zuma


As Indonesians prepare to cast votes for a new president today, the question isn’t whether defence minister Prabowo Subianto will win, but how.

Prabowo and his running mate, president Joko Widodo’s eldest son Gibran Rakabuming Raka, need to get more than 50 per cent of the vote to avoid a late June run-off with the second-placed candidate. Opinion polls put them just above this threshold, or tantalisingly close to it.

Jokowi, as the current president is known, hopes to extend his dynastic foothold in the system by supporting the Indonesia Solidarity Party, or PSI, which is trying to enter parliament for the first time under the leadership of his second son, Kaesang Pangarep. PSI’s ubiquitous television adverts feature Kaesang’s image alongside that of his father, with the slogan “PSI is Jokowi’s party.”

This is no doubt news to Indonesia’s Democratic Party of Struggle, or PDI-P, which for now still counts Jokowi as a member. But a breakdown in president–party relations in 2023 accelerated Jokowi’s shift of support to Prabowo, capped with the appointment of Gibran as his running mate. PDI-P’s candidate, former Central Java governor Ganjar Pranowo, has seen his support collapse over the three-month campaign period as Jokowi’s supporter base has followed the president’s lead and defected to Prabowo.

The irony is that Jokowi’s betrayal of PDI-P in favour of Prabowo and his son’s candidacy has worked almost too well for the president’s own good. Ganjar has been overtaken for second place by former Jakarta governor Anies Baswedan, a government critic who maintains ties to conservative Islamic opposition groups and is now attracting support from progressives who see him as the candidate best placed to challenge the Prabowo–Widodo alliance. But polls show Prabowo with a huge lead in a head-to-head with Anies, and PDI-P, despite its anger with Jokowi, would likely endorse Prabowo in a second round in exchange for an advantageous deal on representation in Prabowo’s cabinet.

But Jokowi is understandably not eager to see a four-month run-off campaign that would offer Anies a platform to dial up criticisms of his policy legacy and his government’s erosion of democratic norms. Efforts by Jokowi to use the levers of state to drum up support for Prabowo have become a major point of controversy in the media. Both Ganjar’s and Anies’s campaigns have alleged behind-the-scenes intimidation of voters, donors and campaign workers by police and other officials.

A more above-board mode of government favouritism is occurring in plain sight. During the campaign, Jokowi has wheeled out close to US$1.3 billion worth of cash transfers and food aid, justified as an emergency response to El Niño–related disruptions to food security. Nobody sees it as anything other than a well-timed attempt to boost goodwill towards the administration — and by extension, to Prabowo and Gibran.

Jokowi wants to reduce the risk of an unexpectedly tight run-off to zero, but a hole-in-one for Prabowo isn’t without its downsides if Prabowo enters office with too forceful an electoral mandate. No non-incumbent president has won a multi-cornered contest without a run-off since the introduction of direct presidential elections in 2004.

Not only does Prabowo have a strong chance of scoring an unprecedented first-round victory. His personal-vehicle party, Gerindra, could also beat PDI-P for first place in the legislative elections — allowing it by custom to claim the strategic speakership of parliament. If all breaks well on election day, Prabowo could become the most authoritative incoming president in the democratic era.

For Jokowi, such a landslide would only bring forward the point at which Prabowo no longer owes him anything. One son in the vice-presidency and the other as the head of a minor parliamentary faction would offer him only limited avenues to push back against any effort by Prabowo to sideline the Widodos in the course of asserting his authority over the political elite.

There remains uncertainty over the ends to which that authority might then be put. Prabowo’s 2024 campaign has been premised on continuity with the Jokowi era. His television advertisements and campaign speeches have featured Gibran prominently, listing off the hugely popular social programs that have been built by the Jokowi administration and promising to continue and expand them.

Yet the hallmark of Prabowo’s political career has been shifts in his political persona and alliances to serve his presidential ambitions. In 1997–98 he posed as a bitter-ender for former president Suharto’s foundering dictatorship, forging links with a rising Islamist civil society as part of his manoeuvring to succeed his then father-in-law. In the post-reformasi era he reinvented himself as a Sukarnoist ultranationalist, then later posed as a friend of political Islam in his two unsuccessful presidential campaigns against Jokowi.

More than twenty years of trial and error have now led Prabowo to mimicry of Jokowi’s secular, technocratic populism, with very successful results. But nobody — including Jokowi — can assume that this persona will hold fast if, or when, Prabowo has at his fingertips the powers of the overbearing presidency Jokowi has created, with the added bonus of a strong electoral mandate Jokowi helped him earn.

Prabowo has lately become proud of talking about how much he has learnt from Jokowi while serving as his defence minister since 2019 — and as PDI-P knows all too well, nobody but Jokowi is a better teacher of the art of the double-cross. •

We’re not at war. We’re at work

Former Washington Post editor Martin Baron reflects on Trump, Bezos and the challenges of journalism

Matthew Ricketson Books 3733 words

“For all the speculation that Bezos would use the Post to exercise influence, I never saw any evidence he had or would,” writes Martin Baron, seen here interviewing Jeff Bezos in Washington in 2016. April Greer/Washington Post via Getty Images


Martin Baron’s name may not ring a bell, though you probably remember Liev Schreiber’s gravel-voiced portrayal in the film Spotlight. Baron edited the Boston Globe when the newspaper’s investigative team, Spotlight, disclosed the extent of clerical sexual abuse of children in the city. Even when they found evidence of one priest having molested fifty children, that was not enough for Baron. He told them:

We need to focus on the institution, not the individual priest. Practice and policy. Show me the church manipulated the systems so that these guys wouldn’t have to face charges. Show me they put those same priests back into parishes time and time again. Show me that it was systemic, that it came from the top down. We’re going after the system. I think that’s the bigger story.

The team, led by Walter Robinson, kept digging and eventually revealed not only the shocking extent of the abuse but the lengths to which the church hierarchy went to protect the abusers. The team’s 600-plus stories during 2002 eventually led to the resignation of Boston’s archbishop, Bernard Law.

The dramatisation of these events, Spotlight, was released in 2015 and won the Academy Award for best picture. Perhaps even more than All the President’s Men, it is a film that makes journalists feel proud of what their work can achieve.

Less than a decade later, though, Spotlight feels like a relic from a bygone era. Since 2015 the size and influence of the legacy news media have diminished markedly within a media ecosystem in which the majority of people in the United States and Australia get their news from social media.

As Brian Stelter documents in his books Hoax (2020) and Network of Lies (2023), news from established outlets like the New York Times sloshes around the internet alongside the toxic swill from Fox News and elsewhere. This tsunami of news and opinion is further polluted by torrents of misinformation and disinformation on social media, whether it’s about vaccines, the 2020 US presidential election or the Voice referendum.

Into this changed, and changing, environment comes Collision of Power, Baron’s memoir of a forty-five-year career in journalism that took him from the Miami Herald via the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times to eleven years editing the Boston Globe and eight years as executive editor of the Washington Post. He stepped down from that last posting, aged sixty-seven, in February 2021.

Baron has spent his entire career in newspapers and is resolutely old school in his belief in the continuing value of public interest journalism and orthodox notions of journalistic objectivity. Collision of Power reads as something of a collision between the world he grew up in, inspired by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s 1970s reporting on Watergate for the newspaper he eventually edited, and a world in which countless journalistic disclosures about Donald Trump’s manifest unfitness for office made not a jot of difference to his supporter base.

Does this mean Baron’s memoir should be consigned to the dustbin of history along with the dinosaurs of print? Well, unlike many journalists’ memoirs, this one is not marinated in tales of derring-do and all-night drinking marathons. Baron spent most of his career as an editor rather than on-the-road journalist and his book is all about the work.

I only know that Baron rarely drinks because he said so after winning the 2016 Christopher Hitchens prize, and then only to compare himself with the famously lubricated Hitchens and make a larger point — that they might have approached life differently but they shared the same journalistic values. But he does wryly acknowledge the accuracy of Schreiber’s portrayal of him in Spotlight as “humourless, laconic, and yet resolute.”

The three main threads running throughout Collision of Power are flagged in its subtitle: “Trump, Bezos, and the Washington Post.” Baron was appointed executive editor of that newspaper in 2013, a time when Donald Trump’s name was still good for a laugh, courtesy of Barack Obama, at the annual White House correspondents’ dinner. He stepped down the month after Trump left office still proclaiming he had won the previous November’s election.

Baron reflects that the Post, like the rest of the mainstream news media, had underestimated Trump’s appeal to many Americans. After the 2016 election he resolved to devote more resources to getting reporters out across the country to tap into ordinary people’s experiences and concerns. He also concedes that the Post put too much weight on Hillary Clinton’s slipshod secrecy about her emails during her presidential campaign.

Before the election, Baron and his journalists had learnt how Trump dealt with the media — how he alternated between feeding them stories and gossip, as he had done for years as a New York property developer, and threatening to cut off access or, worse, if he became president, change the libel laws to make it easier for public figures to sue journalists. As Trump railed about “the fake news media” and levelled personal insults at individual journalists, Baron stressed that “We’re not at war with the administration. We’re at work.”

The “work” was published continuously, including in a multi-authored book, Trump Revealed, that covered many aspects of the candidate’s life, from real estate to allegations of sexual harassment, and from his business ventures to his television career. The newspaper’s fact-checking unit tracked Trump’s runaway capacity for exaggeration and deceit, finding that during his presidency he told 30,573 lies.

When the Post’s David Fahrenthold decided to test Trump’s self-seeded reputation as a philanthropist, for instance, he found fallow ground. The Trump Foundation had received US$5.5 million but claimed to have pledged US$8.5 million to various causes. Notoriously, one donation made by Trump was for a portrait of himself that Fahrenthold’s citizen sleuths on social media found in his Florida golf resort. Fahrenthold also broke the story of the notorious Access Hollywood tapes.

Throughout the Trump presidency, the Washington Post and the New York Times competed hard to break stories that would hold Trump and his staff to account. The sheer number of important disclosures they made is easy to forget, partly because there seemed no end of chaos in the Trump administration and partly because no matter what Trump did he was exonerated because the Republicans had the numbers in the Senate. Almost without exception, they refused to examine issues on their merits and voted out of blind, fearful loyalty to Trump.

Baron’s careful recounting of the many scandals of the Trump administration is both a salutary and a dispiriting experience for the reader. Salutary because we may have forgotten how damaging Trump’s presidency was to so many (remember the one million–plus US deaths from Covid-19?) and dispiriting because he continues to evade responsibility for his actions.

As Trump heads towards the Republican nomination for the 2024 election, the various court cases brought against him are mired in process, delays and appeals. Baron’s memoir reminds us that it was the Post’s reporter Amy Gardner who broke the story that led to one of the most serious post–2020 election cases: how Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, received a phone call from Trump urging him to “find” enough votes to reverse Joe Biden’s narrow victory in the southern state.

According to the recording Gardner obtained, Trump said to Raffensperger: “All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have.” Trump faces thirteen criminal charges for trying to undo the Georgia result.

Baron’s acute awareness of the threat posed by a second Trump presidency explains why he feels compelled to go over events in such detail. What he doesn’t reflect on is how and why Trump has been able to recover from the ignominy surrounding his 2020 loss. It is a commonplace of commentary to say that Trump’s rise is a symptom of disease in the Republican Party. But has there ever been a symptom so potent and deep-seated, given that the Republican Party is now the Trump Party in all but name?

The media’s role in aiding and abetting Trump’s rise from the ashes of 2020 is something Baron could also have reflected on. Trump is an attention magnet, and the news media has been unable to resist the pull of a figure who sees politics in the hyperventilating, hypermasculine style of pro wrestling. Unable but also, perhaps, unwilling: Les Moonves, the chairman of the CBS television company, infamously said in 2016 that Trump’s rise “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”

The evidence is in on the “may not be good for America” part, so it is truly galling to see the news media rushing to cover Trump’s every recent move in classic horserace style. Left behind at the starter’s gate is context, history or a strong enough sense of the grave risk to democracy.

As New York journalism professor Jay Rosen says, the organising principle for the news media as it covers the 2024 presidential election should be “not the odds, but the stakes.” That is, “not who has what chances of winning, but the consequences for our democracy, given what’s possible in this election.” He points to a 2023 piece by Brynn Tannehill in the New Republic as an example of “stakes commentary” whose analysis is both plausible and terrifying. It’s well worth reading.


Collision of Power’s second thread is Jeff Bezos’s surprise purchase in 2013 of the Washington Post from the Graham family, which had owned it since 1933. Like many other media outlets, the Post was struggling to adapt its business model to survive commercially in the digital media age.

One of the world’s richest men (he was worth US$25 billion at the time), Bezos bought the paper out of his own pocket for US$250 million rather than through the company he founded, Amazon. According to Baron, he did so out of a commitment to sustaining public interest journalism.

Bezos’s motivation and plans for the paper attracted a lot of scepticism at the time. Why would a leader of one of the global tech behemoths that had laid waste to the print media’s business model want to buy one of these financially ailing newspapers? Would he allow the Washington Post to report without fear or favour on Amazon, especially given the company’s long history of stonewalling journalists probing its hostility to labour unions, to take one example among many? Would he be an interventionist proprietor?

Soon after buying the paper, Bezos met staff in the “windowless, cavernous and thoroughly charmless ‘community room’” next to the newspaper’s auditorium and fielded questions, including one from famed veteran investigative reporter, Bob Woodward: “How and why did you decide to buy the Post?” (“Hardball,” cracked another journalist.) Bezos answered that he had asked himself three questions before making the decision. Was the newspaper an important institution? Yes, of course. Did it have a future? Yes, in the right circumstances. Did he have anything to contribute, especially as he lived on the opposite coast, in Seattle? Yes, he could provide “runway”; that is, long-term investment that would allow time for experiments to succeed or fail.

And on the question of the newspaper’s coverage of him and his company? “Feel free to cover Amazon any way you want. Feel free to cover Jeff Bezos any way you want.” According to Baron, the newspaper did just that. Its resolve was tested in 2019 when the National Enquirer revealed Bezos had been conducting an affair with a media personality, Lauren Sánchez, including sending her “dick pics.” Baron says the Post covered the issue professionally but acknowledges it could not quite nail down whether the National Enquirer’s story was a political hit job.

The Enquirer, known to be close to Donald Trump, is a supermarket tabloid that engages in “catch and kill”: using a legally enforceable non-disclosure agreement, it buys exclusive rights to “catch” the damaging story from an individual before “killing” it for the benefit of a third party. Trump had been pursuing a vendetta against Bezos and what he called “the Amazon Post.”

On the question of proprietorial interference, though, Baron is adamant: “Bezos never interfered in the Post’s journalism during my seven years plus under his ownership, even if coverage of Amazon put the company in an unfavourable light. For all the speculation that Bezos would use the Post to exercise influence, I never saw any evidence he had or would. I got the sense Bezos relished the challenge of turning around the Post.”

Not that Bezos initially understood exactly how journalism is produced. Like Fred Hilmer, the management consultant who was Fairfax Media’s CEO between 1998 and 2005, Bezos was, and is, obsessed by metrics. He wanted the newspaper’s online website to devote more of its resources to “aggregating” other outlets’ stories into shorter pieces with clickbait headlines, and he wanted each story done in fifteen minutes.

Baron could see the idea’s commercial savvy — it was a “bargain-basement way to profit off the work of others” — but found it intensely annoying that the readers he wanted to consume the newspaper’s original reporting would be drawn in by these “digital gillnets.”

Bezos separated journalists into two categories: those whose work had a “direct impact on the product” (reporters) and those who had an indirect impact (editors). Hire more of the former and fewer of the latter, Baron was told, but he resisted. He believed good editors were essential to “directing and coordinating coverage and ensuring that it meets our quality standards.”

Baron tussled with Bezos on these issues throughout his tenure. He came to appreciate Bezos’s genuine insights into improving the company’s efficiency, and he welcomed Bezos’s commitment to deepening and broadening coverage by hiring more journalists. The number of political journalists at the paper doubled during Baron’s time there, and before the 2016 election an eight-person “rapid-response investigative team” was established. In time, improvements in how the paper’s stories were packaged and delivered to readers reaped rewards in both reach and subscription numbers.

Bezos also came to appreciate the particular role newspapers play in society and the particular culture a newsroom needs if its staff are going to publish stories that anger and upset powerful people, including presidents. When Ben Bradlee, a legendary predecessor of Baron who oversaw the paper’s coverage of the Watergate scandal, died in 2014, Bezos was not planning to attend the funeral until he received an email from Bob Woodward reminding him not only of Bradlee’s importance in the paper’s history but also that he was “the soul of the institution that’s now yours.” Bezos attended, and afterwards described it as an “awakening” for him.

The new owner imbibed the example of Katharine Graham, publisher between 1963 and 1991, whose steadfast support of the paper during Watergate earned her the ire of the Nixon administration, which planned payback by encouraging its allies to challenge the licences of the Graham family’s television stations.

Trump initially tried charming Bezos before asking him to use his position to secure favourable coverage. When Bezos rebuffed his demands, Trump launched a ferocious campaign against Amazon. He claimed the company should pay higher postal rates for its goods and more tax — a bit rich coming from someone who had boasted about not paying much tax.

Partly because of Amazon’s public unpopularity, many underplayed what Trump was doing. Baron, however, cites a 2019 article by Jonathan Chait in New York magazine: “The story here is almost certainly a massive scandal, probably more significant than the Ukraine scandal that spurred impeachment proceedings. Trump improperly used government policy to punish the owner of an independent newspaper as retribution for critical coverage.”


Running alongside commercially oriented discussions are sharpening challenges to Baron’s sense of journalistic ethics. In the third thread in Collision of Power he discusses his stewardship of an important newspaper during what has been, and continues to be, a difficult period for the news media. He illustrates the challenges with detailed accounts of the cases of Wes Lowery and Felicia Sonmez.

Lowery won a Pulitzer for his reporting on police shootings in 2015; Sonmez was a breaking news reporter. Both fell foul of the newspaper’s social media policy by tweeting their views on various controversies, including Trump’s racist comments about four progressive congresswomen of colour (Lowery) and sexual assault allegations against high-profile sports stars and other journalists (Sonmez).

Lowery left the newspaper and began speaking out about what he saw as the bankrupt nature of objectivity in journalism. Last year he wrote a thought-provoking essay, “A Test of the News,” for the Columbia Journalism Review in which he highlighted how journalists from diverse backgrounds are feeling increasingly frustrated and disenchanted by how news stories are chosen and framed from what Lowery sees as a predominantly upper-class, white, male perspective.

The lack of diversity in American (and for that matter Australian) newsrooms has been a problem for many years. In 1971, according to the American Journalist Project, just 3.9 per cent of those working in newsrooms were Black. By 2013 the percentage figure had still only nudged up to 4.1.

Journalistic objectivity has also been the subject of controversy for many years. Historically, journalists and editors liked to think their decisions about news selection were arrived at dispassionately. At best they were discounting, and at worst they were oblivious to, the values — personal, cultural and ideological — underpinning their decisions. Even the language of the newsroom, with its talk of “a nose for news” or, more formally, “news values,” gives the game away. Whose nose, what values?

Behind the cloak of objectivity are hidden all sorts of journalistic shibboleths. The horserace coverage of electoral contests, for instance, has been analysed in the academic literature since at least 1980, but the news media seems unable or unwilling to recognise the problems of reporting politics as if it were a sporting event.

Another example: people in positions of power and authority, especially presidents and prime ministers, are accorded at least 50 per cent of space in news items simply because of their status. When an allegation is made against them, they must be asked for a response. When president George W. Bush built the case — spurious as it turned out — to invade Iraq in 2003, he was able to game the journalistic requirement for balance. Donald Trump, of course, has pushed that game several moves down the board.

Objectivity in a scientific sense is unattainable. Journalists are human beings. The news media industry’s relentless pushing of the idea that news reporting can be objective has simply sent an open invitation to everyone to play spot the bias.

What journalists can and should pursue is an objective method of verification, as is cogently outlined in Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel’s essential guide, The Elements of Journalism. At its simplest, this means seeking out all perspectives on an issue, especially a contentious issue, and reporting viewpoints dispassionately. Drawing on a range of views blunts a journalist’s tendency to serve up their biases or simply opine.

That doesn’t mean accepting any and every view. As the quote variously attributed to Jonathan Foster and Hubert Mewhinney has it: “If someone says it’s raining and another person says it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both. Your job is to look out the fucking window and find out which is true.”

First published in 2001, Kovach and Rosenstiel’s book has been revised three times to keep up to date with trends and debates, including on newsroom diversity. They cite a Black business executive, Peter Bell, who says arguments for greater diversity in newsrooms presuppose that all Black people or all women think alike. “What is the Black position on any given issue? The answer, of course, is that there isn’t one.”

Conversely, a Black journalist, Nikole Hannah-Jones, says the rage she feels about racial injustice drives her reporting. Rather than the word objectivity, she talks about meticulous research, evidence and transparency as guiding principles that strengthen her storytelling.

For Kovach and Rosenstiel, “Independence from faction suggests there is a way to produce journalism without either denying the influence of personal experience or being hostage to it.” As much as greater diversity along racial, gender or gender-identity lines is needed, they argue that newsrooms also need intellectual and ideological diversity.

In 1971, 26 per cent of American journalists identified themselves as Republicans, 36 per cent as Democrats and 33 per cent as independents. By 2013, the number of Republicans had dropped to 7 per cent while the number of Democrats had fallen slightly to 28 per cent and the number of independents had risen to 50 per cent.

In practice, according to Kovach and Rosenstiel, this means “on the crush of deadline, journalists often expect everyone in the newsroom to think the same way rather than embracing debate inspired by personal background… It has been safer to default to a vision of journalistic consciousness that pretends politics doesn’t enter into it.”

Baron, for his part, supports the need for greater newsroom diversity and has seen the benefit of journalists using social media for their work. But he is also a socially conservative person for whom the story is what matters, not him or his opinions. As much as anything, that was what he disapproved of when Lowery (whose work he greatly admired) took to Twitter.

This is a valuable book by a self-effacing but outstanding editor. It is no small irony that, having been inspired by the newspaper’s Watergate reporting, Baron seems blind to the fact that Woodward and Bernstein were the first newspaper journalists to become celebrities. It was their book, All the President’s Men, and the film adaptation starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman (with Jason Robards as Bradlee) that created the Watergate legend.

The horse known as the unheralded journalist has long since bolted. The doors of the stable containing the social media horse were also flung open several years ago. The question now is whether media outlets and their journalists can find the balance between opinion and reporting and between free speech and company loyalty. •

Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and the Washington Post
By Martin Baron | Flatiron Books | $74.99 | 548 pages

Obama’a healthcare legacy

The Affordable Care Act really is a big deal — but is it a winner for Joe Biden?

Lesley Russell 12 February 2024 1789 words

Joe Biden and Barack Obama on the day in March 2010 that the House of Representatives passed the Affordable Care Act. Alex Wong/EPA


At the signing of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, Joe Biden was caught on an open microphone telling president Barack Obama that the bill was a “big deal.” (There was actually an additional, more colourful word in the then vice-president’s pronouncement.) Thirteen years on and plenty of evidence is showing just how right Biden was — and how he has made Obamacare an even bigger (expletive) deal. Despite continuing opposition from federal and state Republican lawmakers, indeed their outright rejection, it continues to improve healthcare access for millions of Americans.

By the beginning of 2024 a record-breaking 21.3 million Americans had signed up for health coverage through Obamacare’s health insurance exchanges — five million more than a record high at the same time last year. Intriguingly, the largest increases have come in Republican-dominated states. In Florida, one in four people under the age of sixty-five are enrolled in an exchange plan; in Georgia, Texas, Utah and South Carolina the figure is more than one in ten.

Much of the recent increase can be attributed to the unwinding of Covid-era rules that made it easier to gain access to Medicaid, the healthcare scheme for people on low incomes. Under Biden, marketplace subsidies for health insurance premiums have been increased and eligibility widened, although this enhanced assistance will expire after 2025 without an extension from Congress. The administration has also boosted publicity about how the insurance exchanges work — publicity substantially reduced under Donald Trump — and removed a glitch that deprived some families of subsidies.

Fourteen years on, the data show that Obamacare is increasingly doing what Obama and the Democrats wanted — not just providing the security of health insurance but also reducing income inequality and racial disparities in healthcare. It has reduced the out-of-pocket costs of preventive healthcare for all Americans and the burden of medical spending on families, particularly those on low and middle incomes. America still doesn’t have the universal coverage standard in other wealthy nations, but some states, including Massachusetts and New York, are getting close.

Trump and Republicans in Congress couldn’t repeal Obamacare in 2017 largely because it had become too popular. It’s even more popular now. Around 60 per cent of Americans support the healthcare law and the figure is even higher for some of Obamacare’s specific provisions, including protections for pre-existing health conditions.

When Trump vowed late last year to “never give up” his call for Obamacare’s repeal — claiming it is “too expensive, and otherwise, not good healthcare” and promising to come up with “a much better, and less expensive, alternative!” — he was offering a campaign gift to Democrats. The promise, which Trump has made frequently since his 2016 campaign without ever detailing a replacement, has contributed significantly to Republican electoral defeats since then. On this issue he has failed to attract a groundswell of support even among Republicans: polling last December by independent healthcare analysts KFF showed that only 32 per cent of self-identified Republican voters considered it very important for candidates to talk about the future of Obamacare, compared with 70 per cent of Democrats.

But that same polling indicates voters are eager to hear the presidential candidates discuss healthcare affordability. Eight in ten voters describe this topic, and the future of Medicare (the federal insurance program for older people) and Medicaid, as “very important.” They regard access to mental healthcare as a healthcare priority too, along with prescription drug costs, gun violence, the opioid crisis, abortion and climate change. (The pandemic barely makes it to the list — only 22 per cent of those surveyed said it was very important.) All these issues and more show up among Biden’s election commitments, whereas Trump’s election statements are vague or absent. (A recent article from KFF Health News outlines what a second Trump presidency could look like for healthcare based on Trump’s previous record.)


Abortion, gun control, immigration, LGBTQ rights and climate change — all issues relating to health — are now seen as “litmus test” issues that drive voting choices. Ironically, though, the most potent policy decisions in these areas in recent years have been made not by elected politicians but by the courts, with the US Supreme Court, now dominated by conservative Trump appointees, as the final arbiter.

This sort of policy rule-making has not always worked well for Trump, Republicans or voters. A classic example is the US Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the federal guarantee of abortion rights. This ruling delivered Trump and Republicans one of their most significant victories and one of their biggest political vulnerabilities.

Americans’ support for abortion is now at a record high; 69 per cent believe abortion should be legal in the first three months of pregnancy and 61 per cent think that overturning Roe v. Wade was a “bad thing.” Voter anger over abortion restrictions was widely credited with Democrats’ wins in the 2022 midterm elections. This is expected to be the case again in 2024, with abortion on the ballot in many states, even those where abortion rights are legally enshrined.

When asked which party best represents their views on abortion, more people say the Democratic Party (42 per cent) than the Republican Party (26 per cent). Women of reproductive age and young voters see abortion as a factor galvanising them to vote — and American women consistently vote more often than men. Some analysts believe angry Republican women could spell trouble for the party vote in 2024.

Litigation over abortion restrictions and access to reproductive health services is nevertheless proceeding in many Republican-controlled states, and the US Supreme Court is set to rule before November 2024 on two cases involving reproductive rights and healthcare: one on access to mifepristone, the pill used in more than half of US abortions, and another on emergency, life-saving abortions in hospital emergency departments.

Both Trump and his surviving rival in the primaries, Nikki Haley, struggle to articulate a coherent position on abortion that is acceptable to both conservative Republican Party officials and voters. Biden, by contrast, has put reproductive rights squarely in the middle of his re-election campaign. He has committed to enshrining abortion rights in federal law and has issued an executive order aimed at strengthening access to contraception.

The Affordable Care Act and its regulations guarantee coverage of preventive services, including birth control and contraceptive counselling, at no cost for women with health insurance. In 2020 the US Supreme Court upheld a Trump administration regulation that allowed employers with religious or moral objections to limit the birth control cover provided by Obamacare. Last month the Biden administration released proposed rules that would remove the moral exemption but retain the religious exemption, potentially restoring free contraception coverage to 126,000 women.

Abortion and contraception in the United States — a country where maternal and infant mortality rates and healthcare and pharmaceutical costs are shamefully high — are often economic decisions rather than moral or ideological ones. Even in some of the most conservative states with very few abortion services, rates of legal abortions are high. Access to reproductive healthcare services is crucial for many women, regardless of political affiliation, and especially those who are poor. Reproductive health researchers at the Guttmacher Institute say 75 per cent of American women seeking an abortion are either in poverty or just above the poverty line.

It’s worth noting that over the past forty years the sharpest drops in abortion rates have been under Democratic presidents, presumably because of their greater focus on delivering comprehensive healthcare services.


A study released in September 2023 by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace provides an interesting insight into partisanship more broadly in the United States. Since the Tea Party era there has been almost no policy overlap between the two major parties in Congress (and the situation grows more partisan by the day). Among voters, by contrast, considerable agreement exists even on hot-button issues like abortion and guns.

But voters’ policy views are not strongly held and the American political system doesn’t easily allow them to express their policy preferences. What is strongly held is a sense of identity: what is referred to as emotional or affective polarisation. Voters don’t like people from the other political party — largely based on misbeliefs, misinformation and misperceptions — and will alter their policy preferences to match their partisan identities. In this respect, media like Fox News and Newsmax are seen as having a bigger impact than social media and political campaigns.

The fate of the Affordable Care Act sees two key issues — rising economic pressures and the polarisation of politicians and voters — come together. The act was initially very unpopular because of poor messaging from Democrats and misinformation and disinformation from Republicans and the conservative media. Confusion about a complicated law that took years to come into effect was widespread. And many Americans didn’t realise that the Affordable Care Act (which they liked) was the same as Obamacare (which they despised and/or feared), though those who benefited soon became supporters.

The situation in Florida (an increasingly Republican state) exemplifies the split. Florida has far more people enrolled in Obamacare’s federal health insurance marketplace than any other state. Floridians, bombarded with misinformation from then governor Rick Scott (“everyone now realises that Obamacare was a terrible notion”) and from current governor Ron DeSantis (who wants a healthcare plan that would “supersede” Obamacare), were initially loathe to take up government-subsidised health insurance, deriding it as “socialism.”

But Medicaid has never been expanded in Florida, which ranks among the five most expensive states for healthcare, many local employers don’t offer health insurance, and many retirees are younger than sixty-five and not yet eligible for Medicare. Obamacare offers affordable options for all these groups. Its increasing uptake and popularity has been driven by Republican-leaning Hispanics in the Miami area, where it’s described as “ingrained in the community” and the Obama campaign logo is routinely used to promote insurance.

Despite all this, a November poll showed Florida’s Hispanic voters backing Trump. While only 30 per cent of those surveyed indicated they would “definitely” or “probably” vote for Biden, 36 per cent opted for Trump. Results like these suggest that emotional polarisation will continue to drive voting patterns in November, even if this risks the loss of healthcare insurance and associated benefits.

On the upside, the Affordable Care Act no longer faces quite the same existential threat that once loomed. Despite Trump’s renewed threats, the scheme’s popularity continues to increase and Republican hostility is fading. It has become deeply embedded in the US healthcare system. (It would be no easy task to untangle its provisions from Medicare.) And it will be hard to sell voters a promise to take away the health insurance they know and value — even if there is a replacement, with all its own complicated and time-consuming details. •

Lost in the post

Britain’s Post Office scandal, kept alive by dogged journalism and a new drama series, still has a long way to run

Peter Mares London 1607 words

Galvanising: Toby Jones and Julie Hesmondhalgh in Mr Bates vs the Post Office.


It’s a David versus Goliath struggle that began a quarter of a century ago and is again generating daily headlines. One of Britain’s most venerated institutions, the Post Office, falsely accused thousands of its subpostmasters of cooking the books. Around 900 were prosecuted, 700 convicted and 236 jailed. Hundreds more paid back thousands of pounds they didn’t owe, had their contracts terminated, lost their livelihoods and often their life savings, and had their reputations trashed.

There was no fraud. The postmasters’ lives were destroyed because of faults in the Post Office’s Horizon computer network. But much like Australia’s robodebt system, Horizon was regarded as infallible. Attempts to raise the alarm were ignored; people who sought help were hounded for non-existent debts. As in Australia, those whose lives were turned upside down struggled to gain the attention of established media outlets; it was individual journalists and smaller publications that kept digging and probing, and refused to accept Post Office spin.

It wasn’t until January this year that prime minister Rishi Sunak conceded it was one of Britain’s greatest-ever miscarriages of justice. He has committed his government to a “blanket exoneration” of hundreds of wrongfully convicted individuals and promised them “at least £600,000 in compensation to rebuild their lives.”

Three compensation schemes have already been set up and around one hundred convictions overturned by appeal courts. A public inquiry led by a retired High Court judge began hearings in February 2021 and is likely to continue at least until September this year. In the meantime, many former postmasters remain destitute or seriously out of pocket. They are waiting not only for redress but also for the full truth about what went wrong in the executive ranks of the Post Office.

While details continue to dribble out, so far no senior managers have been held to account, though former Post Office chief executive Paula Vennells has offered to hand back the CBE she was awarded in 2019.

Vennells said she was “truly sorry for the devastation caused to the subpostmasters and their families, whose lives were torn apart by being wrongly accused and wrongly prosecuted.” Whether or not Vennells loses her gong is up to King Charles. The union representing Post Office employees reckons if she were truly remorseful then she’d offer to repay her performance bonuses as well.

Solicitor Neil Hudgell told a January hearing before the parliament’s business and trade committee that the Post Office spent £100 million “defending the indefensible” through the courts yet he has clients who are still waiting on reimbursements of a few hundred pounds. He said the contest between postmasters and Post Office was characterised from the start by an inequality of arms. “You are facing this big beast in the Post Office, with all the machinery that sits behind it,” he added. “You have some poor person who is being accused of doing something hideous who does not have that.”

On top of the financial losses comes the psychological toll. Hudgell says his firm has more than a hundred psychiatric reports for clients diagnosed with depressive illnesses, including post-traumatic stress disorder and paranoia. At least four former postmasters are thought to have committed suicide, and more than thirty have passed away while awaiting justice in their cases.


The saga goes back to 1999, when the Post Office began rolling out a new computerised accounting system to its thousands of branches and sub-branches, many of which operate as franchises run by subpostmasters. Essentially, the subpostmasters are independent contractors delivering services under an agreement with the Post Office. Many also operate a shop, cafe or other small business on the side.

As in Australia, people go to their local post office for much more than stamps and parcels. Branches offer banking and bill payment services, and handle applications for passports and other critical official documents. Subpostmasters play a central role in villages and small towns. They are often trusted as advisers and confidants, especially for older, less digitally connected citizens. To be accused of putting their hands in the till was a mortifying experience.

The new Horizon computer system, developed by Fujitsu, was meant to make it easier for postmasters to balance their books. But problems were evident from the start. In 1998, Alan Bates invested around £60,000 to buy a shop with a post counter in the town of Llandudno, in north Wales. After Horizon was introduced, discrepancies quickly appeared in his accounts, and Bates found himself £6000 short.

“I managed to track that down after a huge amount of effort through a whole batch of duplicated transactions,” he recalled. Meticulous record keeping enabled Bates to show that the problem lay with the computer system and was not the result of carelessness or fraud. Still, in 2003, the Post Office terminated his contract, saying £1200 was unaccounted for.

Unlike other postmasters, Bates was not prosecuted or forced into bankruptcy, but the injustice and the lost investment cut deep. Post Office investigators insisted that he was the only subpostmaster reporting glitches with the computer system, but Bates was certain that there must be others. He was right. RAF veteran Lee Castleton challenged the Post Office in court after it suspended him over an alleged debt of almost £23,000. In the first instance, the Post Office failed to show up at court and he won. Months later, the Post Office raised the case to the High Court. Castleton represented himself, lost, had costs awarded against him and was rendered bankrupt.

Castleton managed to convince a young journalist at the trade publication Computer Weekly to investigate. Rebecca Thomson found six other examples of people who’d been accused of stealing from the Post Office, including Alan Bates, who had tried a few years earlier to interest the same magazine in his case.

National newspapers and broadcasters failed to pick up Thomson’s 2009 story. “It really did go out to a clanging silence,” Thomson told the Sunday Times in 2022. “I was super-ambitious, and I was disappointed and a bit confused about the fact that there had been so little reaction to the story, because I still continue to feel like it was incredibly strong.”

What Thomson achieved, though, was to confirm Alan Bates’s hunch that he was not alone. Bates reached out to other subpostmasters in Thomson’s story and discovered they’d been told the same thing as him: no one else has had a problem with Horizon, you’re the only one. This Post Office mantra was a bare-faced lie.

Bates and his newfound allies founded the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance with the aim of “exposing the failures of Post Office, its Board, its management and its Horizon computer system.” Their campaign for truth and justice is the subject of the four-part television drama Mr Bates vs the Post Office, starring Toby Jones as Alan Bates, that aired on British TV in January.

The series put the scandal and the ongoing public inquiry firmly back in the headlines (Rishi Sunak’s belated response to years of revelations came a few days later) but it would not have been possible without fourteen years of dogged, dedicated journalism. Since Thomson broke the story in 2009, Computer Weekly has published about 350 follow-up articles on the issue. Separately, freelance journalist Nick Wallis has pursued the story since 2010, at times relying on crowdfunding to finance his work.

In 2010, Wallis was working at a local BBC radio station when a flippant response to a tweet put him in contact with Davinder Misra, the owner of a local cab company, who told him his pregnant wife had been sent to prison for a crime she didn’t commit. Seema Misra had been convicted of theft and false accounting and sentenced to fifteen months jail. The Post Office claimed she had misappropriated almost £75,000 from her branch in West Byfleet in Surrey.


With roots stretching back to 1660 and the reign of Charles II, the Post Office is in many respects a law unto itself. It doesn’t have to jump through the hurdles of police investigations or case reviews by a public prosecutor to launch prosecutions. It has huge resources to employ top silks to represent it. Against its might, people like Seema Misra didn’t stand a chance.

Unaware at the time of Thomson’s article in Computer World, Wallis decided to investigate. He has been writing and broadcasting about the Post Office scandal ever since. He has been a producer, presenter or consultant on three episodes of Panorama, the BBC’s equivalent of the ABC’s Four Corners, he has written a book, The Great Post Office Scandal, he made a podcast series, and he maintains a website dedicated to continuing coverage of the story.

Wallis also acted as a consultant on Mr Bates vs the Post Office. He told the Press Gazette he was “blown away” by the program and what it had achieved. Yet he stressed that it is Bates and the other postmasters who should take the credit for getting the scandal into the open and convictions overturned.

Seven screens Mr Bates vs the Post Office in Australia this week. If you can put up with the ad breaks, the series is well worth watching. It’s an engaging, heartwarming story of decent, ordinary folk standing up against the powerful and the entitled and eventually winning against the odds. If you want to understand the story more fully, though, and to hear directly from those most affected — people like Alan Bates, Seema Misra and Lee Castleton — then I’d recommend The Great Post Office Trial, Nick Wallis’s podcast for BBC Radio 4. It’s a compelling tale that shows what good journalism can achieve. •

Ashes to ashes

Will burgeoning cricket franchises kill the institutions they rely on?

Rodney Tiffen 9 February 2024 1761 words

A players’ market? The Hobart Hurricanes’s Tim David catches out Brisbane Heat’s Paul Walter during a Big Bash League match at the Gabba last month. David will play in seven different competitions this year. Matthew Starling/Alamy


One of cricket’s hallowed traditions is the prediction of its imminent demise. The centrepiece of the dismal forecasts is usually the growing dominance of shorter forms of the game over test matches, the perceived equivalent of a retreat from Mozart to the Monkees. Of all sports, men’s cricket followers tend to fear that the game — and the world for that matter — is on a downward spiral.

As recent summers go, this has been a relatively successful one for Australian cricket. The test matches have kept fans’ attention, the crowds have been good and the television audiences robust. But the season also brought with it the most ominous sign yet of an existential threat.

The team South Africa sent to New Zealand to play the test series was very much a second eleven. Why? Because it wanted to give priority to its own relatively new Twenty20 competition. South African officialdom ordered all players with deals to play in the SA20 to stay home. They cancelled a one-day series with Australia a year earlier for the same reason.

Twenty20 matches have been played since 2003 between countries and domestically, but the format took what turned out to be a radical new turn when the Indian Premier League, or IPL, emerged in 2008. That league’s ten city-based franchises bid against each other for players’ services, with each team allowed several international players. It has become by far the richest cricket competition in the world: last year the media rights for 2023–27 sold to Viacom18 and Star Sports for US$6.4 billion, making the value of each match US$13.4 million. Its contracts with leading players dwarf their payments from official sources.

(Most women’s contests, by contrast, have been short-form matches, and nearly all cricketing nations have well-established domestic and international Twenty20 calendars for women. The franchise model — Australia’s Women’s Big Bash for instance, which began in 2015 — is also popular, although only in 2023 did a women’s competition become part of the IPL; the prices paid for leading players immediately soared into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, a welcome boost for traditionally underpaid players.)

None of IPL’s fast-multiplying imitators — including Australia’s Big Bash League — has reached anything like its heights. Age journalist Greg Baum says that at least twelve domestic Twenty20 competitions now exist, not only in South Africa but also in the Caribbean, Pakistan, the United States and the United Arab Emirates.

Many of these competitions have teams owned by IPL franchises: all six South African teams, for example, and three of the six teams in the UAE’s ILT20. As IPL franchises set up more satellite operations, they may gain even more commercial leverage and be able to offer multi-competition or even year-long contracts to players.

For the players, these competitions offer new and lucrative opportunities. For several — especially from poorer countries where official payments are much lower — the competitions promise a lucrative twilight for their career, tempting them to retire from test cricket earlier.

But they are also shaping players’ careers much earlier. Already some players — from the West Indies, for example — give priority to the new competitions over test cricket. Increasingly, they can have a professional career while only occasionally interacting with the sport’s established structures. Australia’s up-and-coming twenty-six-year-old, Tim David, will play in seven different competitions in 2024, four of these non-Australian. Former England batsman Alex Hales is on the books of six clubs around the world; in those circumstances, being loyal is playing for only one club in any given competition.

The accelerating profusion of franchise-based competitions presents challenges for the mainstream cricket industry, which has already faced and only partially overcome two other challenges.

The first of these, already alluded to, is the balance between the format that brings in the most income and spectators — limited-over “white ball” cricket — and higher-status “red ball” test cricket. The second is the increasing dominance of audiences for international sporting events over those watching domestic competitions. Even though domestic competitions are crucial to the viability of the sport, some have suffered a decline in both audiences and income. Australia’s Sheffield Shield is a dramatic example: its crowds are a fraction of what they used to be, and it receives only fleeting attention in the media.

Cricket Australia’s response has been less than convincing. The Sheffield Shield now plays five rounds from early October to the beginning of December, has a nine-week hiatus, and then plays five final rounds in February and early March. A final eventually comes, anti-climactically, in late March, only to be broadly ignored by the nation’s media and a sporting public by now focused on football. It must rank as one of the most bizarre professional sporting fixtures in the world.

Australia’s answer to the IPL, the Big Bash League, has two fundamental weaknesses compared with the original. The first is that the best and best-known Australian players are rarely able to participate because of overlaps with test matches. David Warner, for example, one of the biggest drawcards in Australian cricket, didn’t play in the BBL for nine years, has played far more IPL than BBL matches, and has almost certainly made far more money playing for the IPL than for Australian teams.

The second structural problem is that overseas stars come and go depending on the other financially rewarding commitments they have, and are often missing at the season’s crunch time. Already this year, Brisbane Heat captain Colin Munro and teammate Sam Billings and the Sixers’ James Vince have all abandoned the BBL, and missed its final round, to join their ILT20 teams in Abu Dhabi.

Discontent with such weaknesses has even been expressed by the sport’s broadcaster. In 2022, in an unprecedented legal action, the Seven Network sought to get itself out of its $450 million broadcast deal by arguing that Cricket Australia had failed to deliver the BBL at the contracted quality and had thus depressed viewer numbers. Peace has apparently since been restored.

Cricket Australia is certainly subject to conflicting cross-pressures, but the fixtures for the Sheffield Shield and BBL strongly suggest that it has failed Sports Scheduling 101. Its main response has been to pack the cricket calendar ever more tightly, loading it up with too many events of little significance.

After the fifty-over World Cup finished in 2023, Australia played India in a series of Twenty20 matches. But most of each team’s best players were rested. It was still called an international fixture, but I wonder if any cricket fans can remember, or care, who won. Quantity is no substitute for quality; what’s needed is not more matches but more structured, meaningful contests.


What makes the challenge even more difficult is the fact that cricket’s problems are occurring amid rapid changes in the larger media–sport complex. The ever-increasing growth of gambling is the first of these problems: especially online gambling, which can cross national jurisdictions. In just three years from 2018 to 2021, legal sports wagering in the United States grew from less than US$5 billion in bets placed to US$57 billion. More than a million gambling ads were aired on Australian free-to-air TV and radio last year, with an unknown number more on pay TV and streaming services.

Apart from the human problems associated with gambling, cricket has had particular problems with corruption — namely match fixing and spot betting — associated with illegal gambling. In private leagues with weak checks and balances these problems could easily increase.

The second recent trend is “sportswashing,” a term that was selected by the Language Council of Norway as its 2021 word of the year. Sportswashing refers to the effort to improve one’s image, or redirect public attention away from human rights abuses and other shortcomings, by sponsoring global sport spectaculars. Wealthy Saudi Arabia, a noted human rights offender, has made significant inroads into tennis, golf and soccer. (The Saudis might also be using their financial muscle to create continuing profit flows from these sports.) So far the major Middle Eastern involvement in cricket has come from the United Arab Emirates.

The media part of the media–sports complex is also in flux. Streaming services increasingly assert themselves in what was the preserve of free-to-air and pay TV services. Amazon recently reached a deal with the International Cricket Council for the exclusive broadcast rights to ICC games in a deal spanning 448 live games in 2024–27. None of these games is on Australia’s anti-siphoning list, which primarily covers games played in this country. But Australians — probably along with people in the other participating countries — will have to pay to watch the next cricket World Cup. It may make the broadcasters and the ICC money, but it could substantially reduce the viewing audience.

Tackling this mix of problems will require concerted international action by the cricketing nations, but here too obstacles exist. Test cricket seems to be viable in England, Australia and India but much more fragile elsewhere. Moreover, one country, one vote doesn’t prevail in international cricket policymaking. India now accounts for 80 per cent of international cricket revenue, so any solution must be acceptable to it; equally, though, any lasting solution must also see funds flowing to the poorer countries.

In the immediate future the proliferation of franchise-based domestic Twenty20 competitions will play havoc with cricketing schedules. While past and present champions will solemnly declare their continuing commitment to test cricket, cricketers from other countries and those not quite in the top echelon will vote with their feet.

Within these manufactured contests, the dynamics are yet to become clear. How much team spirit will be generated in a group of players brought together by commercial opportunity? Despite the profusion of fan merchandise, how involved will spectators be in competitions between recently created franchises? Rather than traditional rivalries built up over decades, these may be soulless contests. “Ever since I was a child I wanted to play for the richest franchise” doesn’t quite have the same resonance as “Ever since I was a child I wanted to represent my country.”

All these competitions are essentially parasitic structures (as indeed was Kerry Packer’s World Series cricket in the 1970s). Feeding off the talent nurtured by the representative institutions, they offer undreamt-of riches to the most marketable stars. But they do nothing to build the future of the game. If the balance of power — financial and political — between the representative institutions and the franchises swings too far, the problems are likely to be more severe than the sound of members at Lords spluttering into their gin and tonics. •

Sit right back and you’ll hear a tale

Packed with back story, a generation of TV themes showed producers to be taking music more seriously

Andrew Ford Music 1492 words

Calypso or sea shanty? Bob Denver in Gilligan’s Island. CBS/Getty Images

“A fiery horse with the speed of light, a cloud of dust and a hearty ‘hi-yo Silver!’”


Jon Burlingame’s book, Music for Prime Time: A History of American Television Themes and Scoring, begins, as any baby boomer would hope, with the final galop from Rossini’s William Tell overture, known to that generation as the signature theme of The Lone Ranger. In fact, as Burlingame points out, even before its fame in the American TV series that ran from 1949 to 1955 with repeats well into the 1960s, Rossini’s music had introduced The Lone Ranger on radio for two decades.

The theme served three purposes. First, it was memorable — hearing the music all these years later, I still think of the masked avenger before the Swiss freedom fighter. Second, television programs went to air at a certain time of the week (The Lone Ranger, for me, was Saturday tea time) and the music served as an alarm call. It even began with a fanfare of trumpets and French horns that could summon you from another part of the house. Today, when many people watch “linear” television only for news bulletins, news themes still often begin with some sort of fanfare.

The third purpose of the Rossini was that it was cheap, and this was a hangover from radio days. It was some time after the advent of radio before anyone thought to employ composers to write themes or incidental music, and it was the same with television. In the short term, much of the music came from stock recordings, and they weren’t always of the highest quality — the trumpets and horns were never quite together at the start of The Lone Ranger. Burlingame’s book tells us that sixty-seven of the eight-nine cuts of incidental music in the series were classical pieces by the likes of Liszt and Tchaikovsky together with a library of generic “Western” music by uncredited studio composers. Most of it had been recorded in Mexico in the 1940s.

By the mid 1950s, television drama was taking music more seriously and this involved drafting film composers to ply their trade in the new medium. Accordingly, Bernard Herrmann, who had composed the theremin-heavy score for The Day the Earth Stood Still in 1951, was invited to supply the theme for the first season of The Twilight Zone eight years later and came up with a score consisting of drifting minor-key harmonies and dreamy harp arpeggios, not unlike his contemporaneous score for Vertigo.

But this is not the theme most people associate with The Twilight Zone, the one with the famous four-note ostinato on an electric guitar. That came the following season (the theme was changed to underline the fact that these were new episodes) and was the result of someone editing together two scraps of library stock. Their composer, the Frenchman Marius Constant, was unaware his music had been used, let alone edited, let alone turned into a theme, and his name never appeared on the credits. As Burlingame explains, it wasn’t until the 1980s that the composer realised how significant his music had been. Having dinner with some American friends, he dropped into the conversation that he had written the theme for The Twilight Zone.

“There was a moment of stunned silence, followed by an enthusiastic outburst,” Constant recalled; “it was as if I had confessed to having written Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.” The anecdote alone demonstrates how important TV had become in people’s lives.

Burlingame’s excellent book, which is full of such stories, is a nostalgia trip, no doubt about it; but it is also what its author intended: “a history of a vastly underappreciated realm of American music.” Divided into television genres — Westerns, detective series, sci-fi, drama, comedy, news, cartoons and so on — it charts the rise in importance of the sound of television and the role of the composer. As soon as composers were attached to projects, music began to establish, from the outset, the pace of the show — the powerful swagger of Fred Steiner’s Perry Mason theme, say, or the five-in-a-bar hell-for-leather of Lalo Schifrin’s Mission: Impossible. With words added, the theme could prime new viewers with details of a show’s dramatis personae; it could even provide the backstory. This was particularly true in the case of comedies.

“Flintstones! Meet the Flintstones!” was the viewer’s invitation, in 1960, to “have a gay old time” with “the modern stone-age family.” Many thousands of years later (in 1963), the family of the future was afforded more specific introductions: “Meet George Jetson, his boy Elroy, daughter Judy… Jane, his wife.” In the 1970s, prime-time cartoon comedies went out of fashion, but when they returned with a vengeance in the form of The Simpsons (1989–) the opening sequence was a nod to both those earlier shows. Danny Elfman’s theme, though it had dispensed with lyrics, borrowed the rising melodic line of “Meet George Jetson,” while, in a pointedly ironic reference to the Flinstones’ trip to a prehistoric drive-in, which is how that show began each week, we saw the Simpson family rushing home to sit on the couch and watch themselves on telly.

“Come ’n listen to my story ’bout a man named Jed,” was the first line of a song with words and music by Paul Henning, the creator–producer of The Beverly Hillbillies (1962–71). The banjo-accompanied song told viewers, at the start of each episode, why and how “a poor mountaineer” and his family had ended up in a Beverly Hills mansion, without which knowledge the show wouldn’t have made much sense. As another producer, the screenwriter Sherwood Schwartz, remarked, “a puzzled audience cannot laugh.”

Schwartz himself was obliged to come up with the theme song for Gilligan’s Island (1964–67) ahead of CBS’s commissioning the show because the president of the company believed it was impossible to give enough backstory for a new viewer. Schwartz was no songwriter, but he stayed up late and wrote a calypso-style number (the island, after all, was in the Caribbean) that at least satisfied the studio. Later, working with composer and music director George Wyle, Schwartz developed the familiar shanty-esque song — “Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale” — that provided an introduction to all the characters and a recap of the “fateful trip” that had led to their predicament.

“Here’s the story of a lovely lady,” was the start of a hyper-efficient lyric that explained how the “lady” in question and her “very lovely daughters” had grown acquainted with “a man named Brady” and his sons, and in no time at all (in fact, fifty-eight seconds) become The Brady Bunch (1969–74). You could start watching any of these shows mid-season and know all you needed to know by the time the opening credits are over.

In The Addams Family (1964–66) we scarcely needed the “kooky/spooky/ooky” words to let us know what was going on because lined up on our screens, as if for a family photograph, was the family itself. They weren’t smiling, they snapped their fingers ominously, and really that, together with the sound of the harpsichord, did the job. Perhaps most radical, though, was All in the Family (1971–79), in which Archie and Edith Bunker (Caroll O’Connor and Jean Stapleton) sat at a piano each week and sang their theme song (“Those Were the Days”) to the studio audience and to camera. The longer she did it, Burlingame relates, and the more laughs she got, the more raucously off-key Stapleton would sing.


When the first edition of Burlingame’s book appeared in 1996, it ended with a lament that the great days of television were gone, while hoping they might one day return. Almost on cue, cable TV hit its stride, with streaming not far behind. In some ways it seemed as though television music was starting again from the same place.

The Sopranos (1999–2007), eschewing the score its creators believed would manipulate the viewer, opted for existing music (not classical this time, but pop). Stock music was also back, Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm (2001–) using a twenty-five-year-old library track he had first encountered on a California bank commercial. But composed music was changing, too, the new widescreen televisions taking us closer to the characters and drawing subtlety from composers, even in signature themes. With no need of fanfare-style tunes or (in the age of bingeing) songs that filled in the backstory, David Carbonara’s mesmerising Mad Men (2007–15) theme, the creeping menace of Hildur Guðnadottir’s score for Chernobyl (2019) and Siddhartha Khosla’s wittily compelling music for Only Murders in the Building (2021–) would all have seemed a little underdone in TV’s first golden age.

Is the second golden age already fading? It could be. Certainly the theme is now at the viewer’s discretion, for as the opening credits roll on your favourite show, the streaming service on which you’re watching it will invite you to “skip.” If it’s your third or fourth episode of the evening, you might well be tempted. •

Heritage hunting

A great number of migrants left China’s Zhongshan county for Australia — but the traffic wasn’t always one way

Antonia Finnane 1698 words

Employees of Sydney’s Wing Sang and Co., produce merchants, in 1930. Mar Leong Wah (front row, second from left), also known as Harry Mar, left Sha Chong for Australia in 1921 and became a leader of the Australian Kuomintang in the 1930s. City of Sydney Archives


In 2015, aged eighty-seven, Jimmy Mar set off from his home in Sydney on a journey back to the village of his birth, Sha Chong, in southeastern China. He had last seen it in 1931, the year his widowed mother decided the place was not for her and decamped with her children to Hong Kong.

Accompanying Jimmy on the journey were sundry family members, including three sons and two nephews. They were in search of the family home that Jimmy’s father, Mar See Poy, had left in 1914 and to which he returned after being deported from Australia in 1926. The moment when Jimmy approached the front door, recalls his nephew Phillip, “was remembered [by all] as an emotional ‘high point.’”

Jimmy’s is one of several stories about Chinese immigrants and their hometowns told in a new collection of essays, The China–Australia Migration Corridor. The corridor in question is a virtual one, constituted by the movement of people to and from Sydney and what is now the municipality of Zhongshan, in Guangdong province, where Sha Chong village is located. The stories have a number of common elements: more than one generation, an extended lapse in time between migration and return, a “house-hunting” quest — which is central to the book’s heritage theme — and the “affect,” or emotional content, of the journeys. Jimmy’s has all these characteristics.

The book is an outcome of the Heritage Corridor project, launched in 2017 by Ien Ang and Denis Byrne at the University of Western Sydney. Ang brings to this project a long history of engagement with migration, race and identity. Byrne is an archaeologist working in the field of critical heritage studies. Together with anthropologist Phillip Mar (Jimmy’s nephew), historian Michael Williams, research fellow Alexandra Wong and PhD student Christopher Cheng (now graduated), they have been collecting stories of return as part of an investigation of Australian-Chinese built heritage. The nine chapters in the book, to which the entire research team has contributed, are concerned with memories and material remains almost in equal measure.

The book’s publication follows closely on that of Byrne’s 2022 monograph, The Heritage Corridor: A Transnational Approach to the Heritage of Chinese Migration. Both books are concerned with the migration corridor “as a transnational field of material heritage.” With the concept of the corridor, Byrne takes aim at both the idea of a national heritage bounded by the nation-state and the related top-down definition of heritage. Focusing on the flow of people and money between Sydney and Zhongshan, the project’s researchers have kept an eye on grassroots heritage-making at both ends of the corridor.

Zhongshan, which covers an area considerably larger than Sydney, is part plains, part hills. It used to be called Xiangshan, meaning “fragrant hills”: hence the title of Michael Williams’s informative opening chapter, “Villages of the Fragrant Hills.” Its present name, as a footnote by Williams tells us, is a legacy of its most famous emigrant, “Father of the Republic” Sun Yatsen (1866–1925), also known as Sun Zhongshan. Sun was founder of the Kuomintang, or KMT — the Chinese Nationalist Party, to give it its English name — which was China’s governing party in the years 1928–49. The place that bears his name is the only one of 2000 or so Chinese counties to have been named, like Sydney, after a historical figure.

Zhongshan was a major source of migrants to Pacific Rim countries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, accounting for perhaps a plurality of Chinese residents in New South Wales and Queensland before and during the White Australia era. In their chapter “Zhongshan in Sydney’s Chinatown,” Ang and Wong note the dominance of Zhongshan natives in the Sydney branch of the KMT, founded in 1921. KMT party members met (and still meet) in built-for-purpose headquarters at 75–77 Ultimo St, Sydney, constructed in 1921 by Robert Wall and Sons. Locally, the party probably served in lieu of a native-place association for Zhongshan people; internationally, it was also headquarters of the Australasian KMT, the party’s regional branch.

The Sydney building has a counterpart in the party’s Victorian state headquarters in Little Bourke Street, Melbourne, which features a facade designed by Walter Burley Griffin. Support for the KMT was strong in both cities but rested on different native-place foundations. In Melbourne, Zhongshan immigrants were well outnumbered by natives of See Yup, a cluster of four districts geographically contiguous with Zhongshan but distinguished by language sub-group and local-place networks.

With strength in numbers, high profiles in Sydney Chinatown’s commerce and politics, and considerable prominence in the business history of China itself, the Zhongshan migrants and their descendants were a natural focus for the Heritage Corridor project. The decision was facilitated by the fact that Michael Williams’s 2018 book, Returning Home with Glory: Chinese Villagers Around the Pacific, 1849–1949, also focused on Zhongshan, provided ready-made foundations for this differently themed project.

Like Williams’s pioneering book, the project foregrounds the home district of the migrants — the place to which they sent money and letters and to which, before the second world war, they not infrequently returned. They typically came from the poorer villages of the hills, which in the first half of the twentieth century sent abroad up to one in every three of their able-bodied males. With their skewed sex ratios and untended fields, these “sojourner villages” (qiaoxiang) became the beneficiaries of overseas remittances and the source of further migration.

A high degree of mobility is a well-known feature of Chinese migration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Emigrant men periodically returned home for family reasons; a son born in China might then, in his turn, come to Australia as a student or to help in the family business. This was partly an effect of White Australia–era immigration restrictions, which produced a strange pattern of migration in which a family might be in Australia for three generations before anyone was actually born there. The Ma (Mar) family, represented by several people interviewed for this book, is an example.


If these accounts of comings and goings are the warp of the book, then “heritage-making” is its weft.

Byrne distinguishes rather sharply between “heritage from above” and “heritage from below”: the former is evident in the national and state registries of heritage sites; the latter is exemplified in the “quest for the ancestral house” in the course of which “old houses are brought forward into the landscape of the present.” But something exists between “heritage from above” and “heritage from below.” The examples of Sydney’s Kwong War Chong building, discussed by Ang and Wong, and the Ma and Kwok family mansions of Zhongshan discussed by Byrne himself, show that local government in both countries has a significant role in preserving historical buildings, even if — in the case of Sydney at least — the intervention followed community lobbying.

Nonetheless, the book’s accounts of heritage-making as a grassroots social process are persuasive. Returning to the ancestral village and finding the ancestral home, Byrne argues, means inscribing the past in the present. This reading is given force by the fact that the process, in very many cases, involves communicating meanings from one generation to the next. When Mabel Lee went to Zhongshan in the late 1970s it was because her father wanted to go: “He would say, ‘If you don’t take me, I’ll be dead.’” Gordon Mar and his brothers took his mother back in 1997, at her insistence, after she was diagnosed with terminal cancer: “She felt it was her duty to bring her sons back to the village to be acknowledged.”

The other aspect of heritage-making concerns the material sites of meaning: the village, the house, sometimes even objects within the house. The buildings described and discussed range from commercial buildings in Dixon Street to “remittance houses” and schools in Zhongshan, built with money sent or brought back to China. Byrne presents a useful typology of these houses, which at the upper end were palatial. The same is true of schools, the focus of Christopher Cheng’s PhD research. Photos of multistorey buildings with porticos, columns, and cupolas show the ambitions of the donors.

Read from cover to cover, The China–Australia Migration Corridor leaves a strong impression of buildings in Sydney, on the east edge of one continent, juxtaposed with buildings in Zhongshan, in the southeast corner of another. For Byrne, these two clusters represent the two ends of the transnational corridor. Yet they also seem to define a period of history. In her chapter on “(Un)making Transnational Identities,” Ang repeatedly refers to a sense of closure in the Zhongshan–Sydney connection. Kam Louie, born in Zhongshan in 1949, is the only one of a family of many siblings ever to have returned to his home village, and his own children show no interest in going. For Gordon Mar, a one-off visit “seems to have reinforced his Australianness rather than his Chineseness.”

Like everyone else interviewed for the book, Louie and Mar are at the tail-end of a history of chain migration and eventual settlement that began under the Qing dynasty in the middle of the nineteenth century. The return to Zhongshan, accompanied in some cases by renewed investment in the ancestral village, followed the huge historical rupture created by war and revolution in China. When a new history of Chinese-Australian journeyings is written to cover subsequent migration, it will mostly be about people from other parts of China whose lives have been shaped by different historical circumstances.

This is an engaging collection of essays that makes an important contribution to the field of Chinese-Australian history. Like all good scholarly books, it opens up new research questions. The concept of “corridor” powerfully evokes the historical connections between Zhongshan and Sydney, but a corridor has walls. Who benefited from Zhongshan networks? Who was left outside those notional walls? How did other native-place connections operate in Sydney’s small Chinese community? Did native-place cleavages inform political cleavages? And in this small community, with its limited number of women of Chinese birth or parentage, who married whom? •

The China–Australia Migration Corridor: History and Heritage
Edited by Denis Byrne, Ien Ang and Phillip Mar | Melbourne University Press | $40 | 288 pages

Red flags

Communist or not, postwar refugees from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe attracted the attention of Australia’s security services

Ebony Nilsson 8 February 2024 2338 words

Enemy alien? Surveillance photo of Lidia Mokras, one of the “displaced persons” who became the object of security service interest. National Archives of Australia


Jakob came of age in occupied Germany’s American zone not long after the second world war had ended. Living in a refugee camp, he heard rumours about what happened to people like him — a teenager wrenched from his home to become a forced labourer in Nazi Germany — if they returned to their homeland, which was now part of Soviet Ukraine. He chose resettlement in the West instead.

When the International Refugee Organization sent him to faraway Australia in 1948, it probably sounded like an adventure. But the nineteen-year-old found himself doing back-breaking work in an isolated mine surrounded by dense Tasmanian forest. He would later tell government officials that it was “200 years behind European working conditions.”

After a year, Jakob decided he was finished with capitalist Australia and would return to the Soviet Union. Many of his peers were unimpressed by his decision — it even sparked a brawl during which he was stabbed. But his pro-Soviet migrant friends considered him a true patriot. Celebrating with them and a little drunk, the young refugee boasted that he would give the Soviets intelligence on Australia and go to Korea to fight the Western capitalists.

Unbeknown to Jakob, his audience of friends and acquaintances that night included two spies: a Soviet MVD colonel and an undercover agent for the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, or ASIO. Concerned by their informant’s report, Australian security officers began keeping an eye on Jakob. They followed him all the way to the docks when he sailed for the Soviet Union. Dissatisfied with the West and full of praise for his Soviet homeland, he was considered a threat to Western security.

This is not the familiar refugee story told in countries like Australia: a story of desperate, hard-working migrants who gratefully become loyal contributors to their new homeland. Jakob had certainly been desperate — he became a forced labourer at just fourteen — and, for the most part, he had worked hard in Australia. But the war and displacement produced complex, shifting identities that didn’t simply disappear when the shooting stopped. And life in the West didn’t always live up to its promises.

The second world war had left forty million or more people displaced in Europe. Some wanted nothing more than to return to their homes, but for others, particularly those from now Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe, the home they had left no longer existed. As the International Refugee Organization worked to solve this “refugee problem,” thousands of Russians who had lived through the war in East Asia were being displaced by China’s communist revolution.

Most of these refugees, whether in Europe or China, were stridently anti-communist. Many had good reason to be, having lived as exiles after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution or through the Stalinist terror of the 1930s. The views of “White Russians” and Eastern Europeans who considered their homelands “captive nations” would fit neatly into the West as the fresh storm clouds of the cold war built on the horizon. Increasingly, each Soviet refugee was a propaganda victory for the West: these were individuals choosing freedom, expressing hatred of communism by voting with their feet.

Some, however, harboured more ambivalent views. A few could even be called “Red”: communists, socialists, trade unionists or, most commonly, pro-Soviet patriots who were proud of the victorious Red Army and their homeland’s achievements since the communist revolution. “Displaced persons,” known as DPs, were resettled primarily in countries that now defined themselves as the anti-communist West, with the largest contingents going to the United States, Australia, Canada and Israel.

The lives and experiences of anti-communist DPs — the refugees who became model migrants in the West — have been chronicled in the rich scholarship on postwar migration that has proliferated since the 1990s. Yet Soviet refugees with left-wing views, DPs like Jakob who did not fit the model, have remained essentially invisible.

Surveillance and the persistent shadow of espionage were central parts of their lives in the West. Former or current Soviet citizens who were Russian speakers and left-wing sympathisers threw up multiple red flags for Western intelligence organisations, which often struggled to understand their traumas, experiences and intra-community politics. Many had been socialised in the Soviet Union, their political views shaped by complex lives in Europe and China.

In the cold war West, their ideas took root in new ways. Ideological convictions — that the world could be better and fairer, or that the worker’s lot was difficult — mingled with personal ones, shaped by memories of lost homes, murdered family members or forced labour. These ideas made them potential threats, forcing them to negotiate the incursions of state security into their everyday lives.

In many ways, it is because these refugees loomed so large in the eyes of intelligence agencies that we struggle to catch sight of them. The lives of “ordinary” people are often difficult to locate in official records, but that marginalisation was compounded by cold war anti-communism and surveillance.

Left-wing Soviet DPs had particular cause to recede from view by lying about their politics and backgrounds or simply keeping their own counsel. They knew they were being watched; most were aware that both the state and other migrants regarded them with suspicion; very few recorded their experiences. History maintains a sense of irony, though: the very surveillance dossiers that marginalised these migrants can now provide the historian with a window into their worlds.

Intelligence agencies are notorious for their secrecy and reluctance to reveal the details of even decades-old operations. When they do reveal information, it is typically on their own terms and in the service of their public image — take, for example, the declassification of the CIA’s Canadian Caper operation, which formed the basis of the film Argo.

In some cases, researchers can appeal to legislation. In the United States, the Freedom of Information Act provides a well-trodden path to accessing FBI and CIA files. A similar provision in Canada allows requests for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s files. But both have, to differing degrees, proven limited in recent years. Britain’s MI5 is subject to very few access measures, releasing files only as it chooses. Further, its release policy targets higher-profile individuals, leaving the files of more ordinary subjects unknown and unknowable for historians.

By comparison, access procedures in Australia are quite liberal. A dedicated application process via the National Archives of Australia provides greater access to security files if one is sufficiently patient. These dossiers are still redacted, equivocal and frustrating, but they provide unique glimpses of a left-wing presence among the DPs. Presumably, similar migrants ended up elsewhere in the West.


Though they had chosen life in the West rather than the East, and in some cases had experienced the worst that Soviet communism had to offer, these migrants continued to align themselves with the political left. For the most part, they were not activists. They tended not to join Australian political parties and their ideas did not often fit neatly under labels like “communist,” “Marxist” or “Trotskyite.”

Their views were idiosyncratic patchworks rather than refined political doctrines, reflecting lives lived across East and West in turbulent times. Their experiences of Soviet terror and state support, Nazi and Japanese occupation, concentration camps and forced labour often informed their understanding of the twentieth century’s prevailing political philosophies more than books or manifestos. Their politics played out at street-level: in living rooms, church halls, night clubs, theatre groups, factory floors and discussions over glasses of wine (or vodka) at parties.

Though some refugees chose Australia specifically for its distance — the furthest they thought they could get from the Soviets — the cold war arrived there, too. By 1948, as the revolution in China compounded still-heightened fears of invasion by neighbouring Asian countries, anti-communism gained a firm foothold in Australia.

As the historian David Lowe has written, the cold war was “Australianised” with settler-colonial anxieties about maintaining white racial homogeneity and preventing territory loss. Australia saw itself as part of the English-speaking world but was surrounded by a decolonising Asia-Pacific region with a growing socialist and communist presence, and so sought the security of close ties with Britain and the United States.

One result was the formation of ASIO in response to American concerns about Australia’s lax security and a Soviet spy ring in Canberra. Domestically, the cold war flared in 1950–51 as Australian troops were shipped to Korea and prime minister Robert Menzies attempted to ban the Communist Party. A referendum on the ban saw the public drawn into an increasingly heated debate about communism, national security and civil liberties.

Similar tensions were sparked in 1954 by the defections of Soviet officials (and spies) Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov — an incident soon christened the Petrov affair. Vladimir Petrov had socialised extensively among Soviet migrants in Sydney and many of them waited with trepidation as ASIO investigated and a royal commission enquired.

Both moments were cold war watersheds for Australians, a time when debates about communism and espionage hit close to home. But they hit even closer for Soviet refugees as their homelands and the ideologies they had lived under and knew intimately were discussed in daily newspapers and nightly news broadcasts. Many of the refugees knew Petrov personally; the affair played out in their lives in distinctive ways, providing new, rich layers to our history of this event.

The Petrov affair’s most iconic and enduring moment — Evdokia Petrov, her husband having already defected alone, being escorted across Sydney’s airport tarmac by two Soviet couriers — was heightened by thousands of anti-communist Eastern European migrants. They turned out to protest what they saw as the forcible return of a terrified Russian woman to a dire fate in the Soviet Union. Many had themselves felt at risk of a similar fate, in Europe’s DP camps, and arrived with placards and raised voices to warn Australians and their government of the Soviet Union’s cruelty.

These anti-communist exile groups existed alongside and often in conflict with smaller communities of left-wing migrants. For some, joining a left-wing group related more to opposing diaspora norms — their vitriolic anti-Soviet rhetoric and strong attachment to the church — than cold war politics. Less conservative social mores and better entertainment often helped too, especially for young refugees. But whether they intended it or not, many were then cast into cold war conflicts.

Sydney’s left-leaning Russian Social Club brought DPs into the orbit of the broader Australian left and the Petrov affair. A corresponding Social Club was also set up in Melbourne, in 1952, though it seems to have been short-lived. These clubs facilitated migrants’ connections with Soviet embassy officials stationed in Australia, who were often working covertly as spies. A host of left-wing Jewish organisations were also established by, or drew in, postwar migrants, such as the Jewish Councils to Combat Fascism and Anti-Semitism in Sydney and Melbourne, the Volkscentre in Darlinghurst and Kadimah in Carlton.

Left-wing migrants often participated across multiple groups and sometimes became involved with Australian-run organisations as a result. The typical “communist front” groups which proliferated across the West — Australia–Russia societies (later renamed Australian–Soviet friendship societies) and peace councils — were also hubs for left-wing Soviet refugees. The Melbourne friendship society even had, for a time, a DP as chairman. These clubs facilitated migrants’ connections with Soviet officials but also attracted Australian surveillance, and thus, interactions with spies on both sides.

Most put down roots in Australia, establishing themselves in new communities and becoming neighbours, friends, fellow churchgoers and colleagues of both other migrants and those born in Australia. Some shifted between communities, burying their earlier years, and some became more conservative with age. Most were naturalised, giving up Soviet passports or statelessness in favour of Australian citizenship — though, again, they pursued this in order to access specific benefits, rights or stability just as often as a desire to become Australians.

With naturalisation, they became Australian voters. Soviet refugees’ voting patterns are near impossible to ascertain, but both Labor and Liberal parties tried to some extent to cultivate migrant votes. Few of the left-wing group (even if pro-communist) appear to have associated directly with the Communist Party of Australia, but some refugees joined or maintained connections to the Labor Party.

But not everyone settled down. Australia was not typically a refugee’s first choice, and some moved on to other countries, such as Canada or the United States. Some never made it past the two-year work contract, deported for absconding from their assigned employment. Others did their best to get themselves deported: one way to obtain a cheap ticket back to Europe.

The other way, for Soviets, was voluntary repatriation. The Soviet Union wanted its “stolen” DPs back and Soviet citizens who wanted to return could often do so at Soviet expense. Repatriation figures were only ever a tiny fraction of the tide of Westward migration during the early cold war — between 1947 and 1952, some twenty-eight Soviet DPs returned from Venezuela, twenty-two from Argentina, sixteen from Canada, nine from South Africa and only two from the United States. Nevertheless, they reflected the fact that life in the capitalist world could also be harsh, especially if you were a refugee.

In Australia, the two-year work contract was often a catalyst and some, like young Jakob, left soon after completing it, homesick and dissatisfied. Others remained longer, even decades, before making the decision to repatriate. China Russians could also return if they secured the appropriate paperwork, though the Soviets likely would not foot the bill. Nevertheless, some did repatriate.

But whether they chose to stay in Australia or not, many Soviet refugees lived through the early years of the cold war in the West. As these battle lines were drawn, they had to pick a stance: leave politics behind and remain quiet, become anti-communist “cold warriors,” or accept the surveillance and suspicion that came with life as a pro-Soviet “enemy alien.” •

This article is adapted from Ebony Nilsson’s new book Displaced Comrades: Politics and Surveillance in the Lives of Soviet Refugees in the West, published by Bloomsbury Academic.