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The History Wars
by Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clark
Melbourne University Press, 2003, 274pp, $29.95, ISBN 0 522 85091 X
Reviewed by Greg Melleuish

It is odd for an author to entitle a book The History Wars when he believes that the 'warriors' are to be found only on one side. In reality when Stuart Macintyre talks about the History Wars what he really has in mind is something like the Barbarians against the Innocents. Saint Stuart the knight in shining armour seeks manfully, and in his eyes against the odds, to prevent the massacre of the History Innocents by the evil Barbarians from the op-ed pages.

In other words this book is not a work of scholarship. It is a highly ideological and polemical book and must be treated as such. Its primary arguments are derived from the pro-Communist polemics of the Cold War. Macintyre is a former Communist and this book demonstrates that you can take the boy out of the Party but you cannot take the Party out of the boy. 'History Warrior' hearkens back to the term 'Cold War Warrior' just as the overall structure of the book is based on the idea that the History Warriors are engaged in a new bout of McCarthyism. Australian historians are the contemporary equivalent of the Hollywood producers and actors of the 1950s. They are decent blokes and blokettes just going about their business of historical inquiry who have been unfairly persecuted by fanatics from outside the profession.

Macintyre's response to my criticism of the book in The Australian on 3 September illustrates this point. He refuses to name me or to acknowledge that I am a professionally trained historian with a substantial publication record. To do so would be to admit that there is a genuine History War going on amongst historians, which is in fact the case. Instead he prefers to imply the false idea that I was somehow put up to write the article by the newspaper's editor.

Anyone who has existed within academia knows that to portray it as a world of innocents is a sick joke. Historians, like other academics, often go in hard. Their preference is to do their dirty work in secret by ensuring that research with which they disagree does not receive funding or that the fruits of that research never appears in print. In fact the 'History Warriors' have done the Australian community a big favour by ensuring that controversial ideas are not snuffed out behind the walls of the Politburo but receive proper debate and discussion. To bring such debates into the open is not, as one historian recently put it to me, 'to foul the nest' but to introduce liberal values to a group that needs to become more open to a diversity of views.

But apparently this is too much for Stuart Macintyre who would prefer that only historians certified by people like him (and he does certify a lot as an examiner of PhD theses) should be allowed to speak on historical matters. Fortunately history does not belong to academic historians despite the scorn that they sometimes pour on those operating outside the university. Historical debates are by their nature public debates. It is wrong to try to exclude some from participating in them.

In a sense this is what Macintyre as the self-appointed shop steward of the history profession is trying to do in this book: argue the case for a closed shop in historical debate. The real problem with such a view, as with any idea of intellectual protection, is that its consequence is a closed shop of ideas. The history profession in Australia does possess a degree of diversity, but that is not necessarily the case with those engaged in Australian history.

Too often the agendas of the study of Australian history are driven by contemporary political concerns. Macintyre demonstrates this by his praise of Paul Keating and the Keating agenda in this book, and by his use of Keating to launch the book. In this he is following in the footsteps of Manning Clark who engaged in obsequious praise of Gough Whitlam. Keith Windschuttle has pointed out that contemporary political concerns have driven the study of Aboriginal history along roads designed to bolster those concerns. New Zealand political scientist Mark Francis has demonstrated that the history of Australian republicanism has been distorted by the need to prop up the case for an Australian republic.

The willingness of people like Macintyre to subordinate the quest for historical truth to contemporary politics is illustrated by Macintyre's view on oral history as evidence for Aboriginal history. Now we all know that memory can be a treacherous ally. There are people in Tasmania who 'remember' Merle Oberon growing up there even though the documents prove conclusively that she spent her youth in India. Such cases are not uncommon. Nevertheless Macintyre, like many of his compatriots, wants to make Aboriginal memory equivalent to the documentary records made by the officials of European Australia. He is happy that the National Museum has an exhibit on a massacre of Aboriginals that is reputed to have taken place in 1826 despite the lack of any documentary evidence. An oral tradition 180 years old should be good enough.

His defence of oral history leads him into making one particularly silly statement. Claiming that historians have always relied on memory he cites the speeches of Thucydides as an early example. Would we, he indignantly claims, reject Pericles' Funeral Oration on the grounds that it is 'uncorroborated by original documents'. It is a pity that Macintyre had not read Thucydides before making this claim. Thucydides makes it clear that he is not reporting his speeches verbatim but is recording what the speakers would and should have said. In fact some parts of his History, such as the Melian Dialogue, are probably made up. Thucydides is to be taken seriously not because he was taking shorthand notes at the speech but because as a member of the Athenian elite he understood the mindset that animated it. One only hopes that the intellectual arguments that Macintyre uses in training the next generation of Australian historians are higher in quality than this one.

At the end of the book Macintyre, following one assumes the good old traditions of academic life, accuses the History Warriors of obeying Rafferty's rules, caricaturing their opponents and impugning their motives and of being bullies. Of course Macintyre has not engaged in any such activity in writing this book.

The fact is that Macintyre is a long time participant in the History Wars; he is as much a 'Warrior' as those whose motives he impugns. In 1989 I responded to an earlier round of the History Wars that involved the Institute of Public Affairs and Macintyre by writing that it was wrong to see Australian history as either 'bad' or 'good'. History is made by complex people, people like ourselves, whose motives are often mixed and who can sometimes create tragedies without realising what they are doing. It is time that academic historians like Macintyre stopped using history as a means of demonstrating their moral superiority over us mere mortals and began to explore the complex humanity of those who came before us.

Turning Off the Television: Broadcasting's Uncertain Future
by Jock Given
UNSW Press, 2003, Sydney, 328pp, $44.95, ISBN 08686 405 00
Reviewed by Andre Stein

Jock Given, one of Australia's foremost electronic communications academics, has produced an extraordinarily well-written book on digital broadcasting policy in Australia. Given, whose previous roles include a stint in the Australian federal bureaucracy and as Director of the University of New South Wales' Communications Law Centre, has a gift for telling a complex story in an easy-to-read and entertaining manner.

Turning Off the Television covers ground since Given's first book on broadcasting policy, published in 1998, which dealt with the initial policy decisions which eventually gave rise to Australia's highly convoluted and complex digital television legislation.

One of the things that makes Given's latest book so delightful to read is that it is structured so well, placing developments in digital broadcasting in domestic political and economic contexts both in Australia and overseas. Given starts by discussing the tech boom which created a number of young paper millionaires and the subsequent crash which destroyed their prospects of an adult lifetime of leisurely retirement.

As Given illustrates, the IT boom was important, because it showed how difficult it can be for companies to make money out of new technology-something not lost on media companies worldwide, including in Australia. And it was in the context of sour tech-sector investments, with which nearly all of Australia's large media players were involved, that Australia's digital broadcasting legislation was developed.

The book then time-warps back to the 1920s and progressively follows the history of broadcasting policy in Australia, the UK and the USA through to the 1990s when digital reception technologies became commercially available. In addition to this sweeping overview he effortlessly weaves in an easy-to-understand description of digital technology and the technical options which presented themselves to digital broadcasting policymakers.

As Given points out, digital broadcasting has the capacity to revolutionise the business models used by analogue free-to-air broadcasters and the relationship between television stations and viewers (which traditionally, has always been a direct one). In the case of digital broadcasting, the direct relationship between broadcasters and audience has been interposed by digital receivers (set-top-boxes or digital televisions) which have effective control over what services, vanilla or enhanced, are offered by the 'idiot box'. Hence the concern among broadcasting companies over the finer details of equipment being sold and the subsequent battle over proprietary versus open software standards for application interfaces contained in digital television receivers.

The book is not all technical, however. Several broad themes arise from Given's detailed and often wryly amusing description of policy decisions. First, broadcasting has never been seen as a 'free market' by governments, and has regularly attracted significant intervention, whether as licensing decisions, spectrum planning and allocation, and most significantly in Australia and the UK, large-scale funding of public broadcasters who compete with the private sector for viewers' and listeners' ears and eyeballs.

Second, broadcasting policy has been highly politicised, attracting intense lobbying from incumbents, potential entrants and other communications sectors who are affected by broadcasters use of spectrum. If anything, Given underplays the lobbying frenzy which went on behind the scenes (and occasionally in public) to secure the outcomes of the digital television decisions of 1998 and 2000 which added another level of regulation on an already highly regulated industry.

Ironically, the television industry, both free-to-air and the pay-TV sector, as Given notes, were not particularly unhappy with these regulated outcomes given that their incumbent status was largely protected. Subscription television was protected from any multi-chanelling by the free-to-airs and the free-to-airs were protected against new entrants using 'datacasting' licences to provide free-to-air broadcasting services.

This is the third important theme that arises from Given's analysis-that the power of incumbency in industries in general and broadcasting in particular has had a significant impact on regulatory decisions of governments and legislatures. The book documents efforts by incumbents both in Australia and overseas to restrict the number of radio and television licences. This continues to this day, with public policy arguments boiling down to the protection of incumbents' revenue, as is demonstrated by the Australian legislative moratorium on the issue of new free-to-air television licences until 2007.

Given recognises the power of incumbency and the fact that Australian broadcasting has been heavily regulated, but his solution to this is fine-tuning of existing regulation (and in some cases adding further regulation) rather than whole-scale deregulation of the broadcasting market.

The book argues for enhanced powers for the regulators such as the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and the Australian Broadcasting Authority. In Given's world these 'independent' regulators would administer rules relating to access to digital infrastructure and, more ominously, to ensure that 'the social and cultural benchmark of diversity' is met. The idea that governments should be given yet more power to decide what constitutes 'diversity' and to police these 'standards' is yet another example of creeping cultural socialism that has infected Australian public policy debate.

For those who have questioned the usefulness of cultural engineering through broadcasting policy, Given's arguments provide a useful sample. He states that 'universal accessibility' to media outlets by the public is unlikely to be achieved 'without constantly adapting market interventions'. This sounds suspiciously like a blank cheque for government intervention in the media sector for rather nebulous purposes.

Given does not stop there. He favours retention of cross-media rules and further restrictions for those whose companies are involved in digital television. Under a Given regime, both geographic and infrastructure ownership restrictions would apply.

These arguments for reregulation are not new. Given reflects the view of a large number of those on both sides of politics in Australia and overseas who see diversity of ownership intrinsically linked to diversity of opinion and who hold the view that the one cannot exist without the other. This may be conventional wisdom, but like so much conventional wisdom it arises from woolly thinking.

The media is a business, and people watch television, listen to radio and read newspapers to be entertained and obtain different points of view. Those media products which don't provide what their viewers, listeners or readers want quickly wither and die (unless of course, you are a public broadcaster sustained by endless taxpayer funded nourishment from the public teat).

Given's central planning tendencies aside, this book is a delightful guide to the history of broadcasting policy in Australia in the 20th century and the first few years of the 21st. It should be read by all those involved in or interested in the media sector in Australia. Most of all, Turning Off the Television illustrates why restrictive regulation of the media by government is ludicrous, and, bizarrely, why some seek to implement further regulatory restrictions to correct this aberration.

The Liberal Archipelago: A Theory of Diversity and Freedom
by Chandran Kukathas
New York, Oxford University Press, 2003, 292 pp, $82.95, ISBN 0 19 925754 X
Reviewed by Andrew Norton

Chandran Kukathas's The Liberal Archipelago is a contrarian book. Recent liberal (well, left-liberal) writers support special rights for minority groups to protect their culture, but believe groups should give their members liberal rights. Kukathas takes the opposite view. Minority groups should not be given special rights, but they can run themselves illiberally. If their members don't like it, they can leave. To understand why these contrary conclusions are reached we have to go back into liberalism's history.

Kukathas returns liberalism to one of its original principles, toleration. Liberalism emerged in the late 17th and early 18th centuries as a response to European religious conflict. John Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) is the most famous argument for toleration from that time, though Kukathas rates more highly Pierre Bayle's Philosophical Commentary (1708). Since this early period toleration has been a way of preserving peace. Forcing diverse groups into a common culture causes conflict, including violent conflict. Putting up with each other, advocates of toleration say, is the better option. Kukathas argues that this is not merely a compromise; it comes to be internalised in basic norms governing social relations.

Toleration also respects liberty of conscience, which Kukathas argues is an important value. He notes that human beings are disposed to act according to conscience, and that there is 'anguish' in acting unconscionably. Sometimes death is preferred to acting against conscience. Accordingly, people should not be forced to act against conscience.

Later versions of liberalism support toleration, but not as a first principle. Kukathas quotes the late John Rawls, whose A Theory of Justice is the most cited work of liberal philosophy from the second half of the 20th century, as saying 'the degree of tolerance accorded moral conceptions depends on the extent to which they can be allowed an equal place within a just system of liberty.' Justice is Rawls' first principle, not toleration.

Other liberals, like Kukathas's main intellectual adversary, the Canadian political theorist Will Kymlicka, value toleration only to the extent that it supports autonomy, a high value for Kymlicka and many other contemporary liberals. Kymlicka sees a group's culture as providing the necessary context for choice. To preserve that context, the culture must be at least tolerated, and possibly positively assisted. On the other hand, Kymlicka argues that liberalism is committed to individuals having the freedom to question and challenge their communities. This means that practices like restricting religious freedom or denying education to girls would not be tolerated.

Because Kymlicka sees toleration as a derivative principle, it is not an argument against intervening in illiberal groups if a first principle, like autonomy, is threatened. As Kukathas sees toleration as a first principle, it is a justification for leaving illiberal groups alone, respecting their liberty of conscience and preserving the peace.

A lot turns on the relative merits of conscience and autonomy, and one of the most interesting parts of The Liberal Archipelago is its critique of autonomy. Kukathas argues, contrary to much philosophical opinion, that an unexamined life is worth living. He gives as an example a Muslim fisherman in Kelantan (in Malaysia, Kukathas's place of birth). The fisherman may have little ability to evaluate his beliefs, lacking knowledge of the world beyond his immediate locality, but nevertheless be physically comfortable, have family and friends, take pride from his skills, and meaning from his religion. Kukathas suggests that it might make sense to argue that the fisherman has an interest in insulating himself from challenges to his worldview, rather than an interest in challenging it.

Freedom of association plays a central role in Kukathas's theory. Unlike freedom of speech, freedom of association is valuable for people who are not interested in freedom. By combining with others, people can live according to their conscience and their beliefs, whether these were freely chosen or not. With the strong form freedom of association in Kuthathas's liberalism, those in the association set its rules, and can enforce them on the association's members. Those who don't wish to comply leave or are excluded.

These associations are the source of the archipelago metaphor in the book's title. A liberal society is the sea, and the associations are the many small islands of the archipelago. The society is liberal because it respects freedom of association and exit, people creating 'islands' and moving between them, not because each of the islands is structured according to liberal principles.

Most liberals would agree that freedom of association and exit are necessary organising principles of associational life in a liberal society; Kukathas is unusual in thinking them sufficient as well. I agree with him more than most, in that I believe that illiberal associations ought to be tolerated within a liberal society (or archipelago). Not every association has to meet the benchmarks of the liberal state. They can discriminate against people on religion, race, sex, and all the other characteristics covered by modern anti-discrimination law. They can limit or abolish freedom of speech within their association. They can restrict who else their members associate with. Human well-being can take many forms, and not all are compatible with liberal principles.

But I part company with Kukathas in two ways. Though exit can be costly and difficult, it should be a real option if the overall society is to be liberal. What constitutes a real option depends on a society's particular circumstances, but in modern Western countries it means at minimum that everyone must be educated, and that there be must be alternative sources of sustenance (these need not be provided by the state, but a liberal state would ensure that they were available).

Where exit is impractical or undesirable, I support minimalist regulation. For example, where associations refuse medical care, I believe intervention is warranted for children or others incapable of making and acting on informed choices. If parents fail to adhere to minimal standards of care, the state ought to be able to exit the child. The danger is that without effective rights of exit and without regulation the liberal archipelago could became, in a phrase Kukathas quotes, a 'mosaic of tyrannies'. Kukathas defends his theory against objections along these lines. While he rightly points out the state's history of failed intervention, this history highlights the need for caution in intervention, rather than showing it is never justified.

Though I cannot adopt a pure version of Kukathas' theory, it is a welcome alternative to some forms of contemporary liberalism. It does not demand that liberalism go 'all the way down', structuring all aspects of society. It respects people's lives as they are actually lived, rather than demanding that they be lived according to abstract principles.

It was also good to see that although this is an academic text, the Kukathas wit has been banished to the footnotes, rather than banished altogether. You might need to have read Rawls' A Theory of Justice to get the line about the missionary position being preferred to the original position, but better an in-joke than no humour at all.

Man of Honour: John Macarthur Duellist, Rebel, Founding Father
by Michael Duffy
Sydney: Macmillan Australia 2003, 376pp, $35, ISBN 0732911788
Reviewed by D.J. Goodsir-Cullen

There is palpable enthusiasm in this well written and widely researched book. It has a freshness and approachability reminiscent of popular historical biographies of previous generations. One immediately recalls the first biographer of Macarthur and fellow journalist M.H. Ellis as the epitome of such approachable historical tomes, but Duffy's biography is free from both Ellis's bias, especially against Governor Bligh, and the preoccupations, prejudices and pomposity of contemporary historical scholarship.

The book is elegant in its simplicity of style and suggestive of a direct 18th century manner of speaking. In one chapter Duffy recalls how a character began to 'spit and piss blood' (p.31). Later, Duffy approvingly introduces Alexis de Tocqueville's theory about the similarities between the growth of nations and individuals. In both cases, Duffy is direct and immediately understandable. I don't want to labour the point about style but so much historical scholarship today is bogged down by an established ideology that includes its own language, assumptions and jargon, all of which precludes communication with a wide audience.

While on the subject of style, I cannot help making two points about the format of the book. It seems to me that Duffy is so opposed to academic political correctness and habits that it has led to an anarchic referencing and quotation system. I would have preferred more traditional referencing along the lines of footnotes, endnotes or even one of the American systems. In addition, all extracts from sources are italicised rather than enclosed in quotation marks or indented. These are perhaps petty irritations but I found them disconcerting. Had he conformed this much to scholastic usage it would have made the book even more fluent and powerful as an academic exercise.
Despite the gentle echo of 18th century style and his broad scholarship, Duffy the publisher, columnist and polemicist is never far from the surface of the work. Regularly, the early 19th century action is frozen and Duffy the 21st century commentator emerges as if from behind a gum tree to comment on contemporary issues arising from Australia's infant years, such as the failed republic referendum of 1999. Indeed, Duffy does not provide a complete life of Macarthur but stops at the Rum Rebellion and this is instructive of Duffy's purpose for writing the biography.

Duffy wants Australians to review the early history of the settlement and take a more positive view of Australia's story. Hitherto in the popular imagination the difficulties and horrors of convict life have assumed too much prominence. Instead, Duffy argues, we should talk about the positive development from ex-convicts to beneficiaries of the 20th century welfare state: 'By seeing the convicts as victims and the free colonists as predominantly vicious and insignificant we trivialise our past, and cut ourselves off from much of the complexity and richness of our origins' (p. 129). Duffy finds the origins of Australian egalitarianism, mateship, and nationalism in the early 19th century.

Sometimes Duffy's desire to re-educate leads him to impossible suggestions such as his effort to rename the Rum Rebellion the 'Bligh rebellion'. For a mildly populist writer like Duffy he must realise this term is fated never to be taken up-the Rum Rebellion it is and shall remain, just as the NSW Corps ever will be the Rum Corps. Duffy's attempt at shifting the focus of the matter is understandable but also a little too close to the unbalanced portrayal of Bligh in the Ellis biography to warrant approval.

Duffy furnishes the reader with a sound understanding of 18th century English life-the very culture in which the Australian nation germinated-and he uses this to present a convincing appraisal of Macarthur's role in the development of Australian institutions and society. Perhaps paradoxically and certainly controversially, Duffy traces the origins of much of democratic Australia to the actions of men such as Macarthur, whom many historians have for a long time dismissed as self-serving exploiters of the convict and land grant systems. I think he is right to revise the popular view of these men and women and his comments on this are welcome and refreshing.

In his effort to provide a solid understanding of the culture from which early Australians emerged and in which Australian institutions were founded, Duffy makes much of the code of honour. This is an important but little understood and hardly explored aspect of 19th century life.

Australian historians are very shy about discussing class. With the notable exception of Paul de Serville in his extensive studies of gentlemen in colonial Port Philip and Victoria, the code of honour has largely been ignored even though it is central to an understanding of the relationships between leading figures in Australia's early history. Duffy points out that the Bligh imbroglio, with its greed and apparently petty disputes between egotists, has always seemed absurd to subsequent generations. However, when Duffy posits the code of honour as a pivotal issue, suddenly the matter is clearer.

A very small number of British historians have started something of a fashion to investigate 18th century gentlemanly conduct but no similar group exists in Australia. Since the death of Martin Boyd Australia has lacked even a novelist able to record the lives of our modern bourgeoisie. It can only be hoped that because of the insights provided and his easy shifting between the 19th and 21st centuries, works like Duffy's will encourage serious historical analysis of Australia's forgotten leaders. This potentially rich narrative awaits both its fictional diarist and a sound historian.

There is a steady interest in early New South Wales among a few dedicated Australian scholars and Duffy's book adds to that good company.

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