Book Reviews
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What’s Wrong with the Liberal Party?
by Greg Barns
Melbourne University Press, 2003, 274pp, $29.95
ISBN 0 522 85091 X
Reviewed by Michael Keenan

Most news literate Australians will be familiar with Greg Barns. He enjoys enormous media exposure as a former ‘Howard Government Insider’ turned fierce critic whose negative views of federal government policy led to him being stripped of his endorsement as a state Liberal candidate in Tasmania. Barns starts his narrative with his experience of being disendorsed. In February 2002 the Tasmanian Liberal Party voted to take this action in response to his crime of, in his own words, speaking out ‘loudly and often against the Federal Liberal Party government of John Howard for its policies and practices towards the asylum-seekers who populate our detention centres’.

That a political party should decide to disendorse one of its candidates who had spent his time attacking his own, rather than opposing, parties strikes Barns as evidence of his main argument. Barns believes the Howard-led Liberal Party has become ultra-conservative and turned its back on the ‘progressive liberalism’ that he champions. The party has done this for electoral advantage by securing the votes of One Nation sympathisers and a group Barns labels the ‘new-territories materialists’, but which might be better known as aspirational voters or, colloquially, as battlers. These voters live in the outer suburbs of Australia’s main cities, identify themselves as working or lower middle class, and felt so alienated by the Keating Government’s agenda that they switched their votes to Howard in the 1996 electoral landslide.

Barns struggles to hide his contempt for this group and the book is littered with patronising references that let you know that Barns doesn’t feel their collective political views count for much. Barns believes that they are inherently racist, something he claims is ingrained in Australian culture and a factor the Howard-led Liberal Party has played on for electoral advantage. This is evidenced by the policies pursued towards illegal immigrants, the Tampa and ‘children overboard’ affairs, and a resistance to integration with Asia. Barns argues that Howard has exploited these people’s fears to build a new constituency for the Liberal Party from voters who would traditionally vote Labor.

Howard is presented as a ruthless manipulator of the dark side of the Australian character, exploiting relatively simple people for his own political survival and in the process destroying diversity within the Liberal Party. Barns sees the lack of public debate over government policy from within the Parliamentary Liberal Party as evidence of Howard’s domination and the decay of the collective intellectual capacity of Liberal parliamentarians and the extermination of the ‘progressive’ wing. He appears blind to the political consequences that would inevitably flow from a free-for-all of Coalition MPs airing their differences with the government in public. In Barns’ view, it was the period between 1983 and 1993 when the party ‘witnessed its most fertile intellectual debates and greatest cultural evolution’. Astonishingly, he makes no attempt to reconcile this with the five electoral defeats suffered by the party during this time.

Barns constantly refers to the loss of intellectualism within the Liberal Party throughout his narrative. He believes the party’s current ideological bent is a result of ‘a lack of intellectual rigour and diversity in debate’. Those people who share Barns’ views—he identifies Malcolm Fraser, Ian McPhee and Peter Baume among others—have ‘fine minds’. They are ‘progressive’, ‘compassionate’, ‘principled’. Those who hold a contrasting view—Tony Abbott and Nick Minchin are relentlessly singled out—are ‘henchmen’, ‘populist’, ‘racist’, and ‘xenophobic’. Howard is chastised for not ‘employing more academics in his office’. Peter Costello apparently hasn’t employed anyone with a doctorate. Even think tanks like the The Centre for Independent Studies and the Institute of Public Affairs are singled out for not celebrating diversity and for sharing the Howard Government’s ‘intellectual siege mentality’.

At the end of this book it is hard to escape the feeling that very little has actually been said. There is little evidence supporting the unoriginal arguments Barns pursues apart from personal experience and anecdote. Chapters and facts seem to sit randomly without substantial links to the overriding thesis. For example, chapter three deals with the Liberal Party’s apparent obsession with Paul Keating yet chapter four suddenly begins with the woes afflicting the National Party without any obvious links or clues as to how either of these contribute to the arguments Barns seeks to make. His use of quotes is also mystifying. Barns will often quote writings or speeches and then draw dramatic conclusions that a person less passionate about the arguments might find difficult to justify.

The views Barns holds are clear, but a journal article might have proved a sufficient vehicle in which to make them. This is what makes What’s Wrong With the Liberal Party? such a frustrating read. Many of the questions Barns floats are timely and relevant, particularly seeking answers to the Party’s current dismal showing in all States and Territories, but his treatment of them is superficial if they are addressed at all. The passion with which he holds his views is obvious, but it seems to blind him to the need to present a credible case in support of his conclusions.

Corrupting the Youth: A History of Philosophy in Australia
by James Franklin
Sydney: Macleay Press 2003, 465pp, $59.95
ISBN 1 876492 08 2
Reviewed by Amalia Matheson

‘Oh! Gossip is charming! History is merely gossip . . . But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.’ So goes one of Oscar Wilde’s famous aphorisms. Wilde may well have enjoyed being a member of the Sydney libertarian movement, the ‘Push’, had time and nature coincided.

And this book really is charming—an exceptional history, but largely a ‘history’ according to Wilde’s definition. That is to say, it is not the book one expects to find judging by the impressive cover and size of the publication, something we all do though we say we shouldn’t. What we expect is a full and technical account of Australian philosophy per se, the fine detail of the thought and ideas our philosophers specialised in and taught (a book that still needs to be written).

What we actually find is a comprehensive, very interesting, extremely readable, sometimes ‘scandalous’ history of the lives of Australia’s philosophers. This is particularly disappointing as the Preface begins with such important and large questions that promise so much: ‘Does life have meaning, and if so what is it? What can I be certain of, and how should I act when I am not certain? . . . Why should I do as I’m told?’. Important questions indeed. ‘They are questions that may be ignored, but they don’t go away.’ True. Yet the book largely ignores these important philosophical questions, and I was still left with them when I finished it.

The philosophy is not entirely absent, though. It makes important cameo appearances here and there to provide some context and background, a milieu for the high drama and political excitement of Australia’s 20th century intellectual lifestyles (!). And the scandal is there, too: chapters on the ‘Gross Moral Turpitude’ of the Orr Case, a bastard and fraud intellectual who scammed the University of Tasmania and others besides, only to end up at the High Court of Australia hopelessly challenging a verdict against him for seducing a female student (very important to the development and progress of Australian philosophy); and not to forget the suspicious ‘murder’ case involving CSIRO boffins, Bogle and Chandler, and two bodies by the Lane Cove River, New Year’s Eve 1962. Chandler was saved from the rabble press only by the closed circle and tight lips of the ‘Push’. As Wilde may have exclaimed: ‘Scandal!’

Episodes like these in the book, including the rather lengthy description of John Anderson’s affair with an emotionally unstable and unpromising young female philosophy student, serve to make this book more of a gossipy personal biography of the central figures employed in philosophy in the 20th century (which no doubt helps to sell copies)—but is tedious because it is so lacking in relevance to a work of this potential, scope and importance.

The book seems not to know if it is meant to be a scandal sheet or a comprehensive study of the history of Australian philosophy. Amused by the former I kept hoping the book would turn into the latter with the passing of each chapter.

Another weakness lies in the over-use of the personal accounts of just a few well-known Australians—Donald Horne chief amongst them. The many lengthy quotes from The Education of Young Donald are presented as some sort of ‘last word’ on the mid-century experience of youth and Sydney University (despite Horne being ‘no philosopher’). The fact that Donald Horne’s career has been as a Sydney-centric, left-wing social commentator and national cynic does much to skew the view.

This over-reliance works by intention or otherwise to discount the mainstream, regular majority of middle-sort-of-Australia that was surviving, learning and living in other parts of the country through the upheavals of World War II, anti-Communism and the explosion that was ‘The Sixties’. The few references to and quotes from more conservative (even if embryonically so) identities—like Peter Coleman, John Kerr and Garfield Barwick—make for just a few interesting counterbalances, but regrettably not enough.

In fact, one of the main letdowns of this book—yet entirely in keeping with its nature—is that it largely concentrates on Sydney University and its notorious identities to the exclusion of the rest of Australia—to the point where Melbourne University must be given its own chapter seemingly to redress the imbalance. Primarily a vehicle for Sydney University and the ‘Push’, the book gives starring roles to Germaine Greer, Richard Neville, Wendy Bacon et al. and their libertarian antics in Australia and London.

It is true that Sydney did dominate the philosophical and academic scene in Australia for practically the whole of the 20th century (perhaps still), but it also became isolated academically, not just from the rest of the country’s universities but also from the rest of the international philosophical community. Franklin makes this point several times, particularly in relation to Anderson and many of his protégés who followed him into teaching. To think of Sydney as representative of the whole of Australian philosophy is to think of a fishbowl as illustrative of the whole of the sea.

As for the title of the book ‘Corrupting the Youth’—the predictable reference to the trial of Socrates—even Franklin seems to grow tired of the number of times the fate of Socrates is wheeled out either to defend or condemn another ‘free-thinking’ intellectual with wandering hands or a mouth like the bottom of a birdcage. It is certainly tedious, barely scandalous with or without the attendant moralising, particularly as it is well accepted that Socrates was actually condemned to death for being too close to several notorious anti-democrats soon after democracy was re-established in Greece.

The ‘corruption of youth’ was a vague and trumped up charge to justify the murder. Principles of freedom of philosophical thought or speech weren’t really on trial. It was pure politics that mattered then. I dare say it is politics that matters most now in this history of Franklin’s. Politics . . . and of course religion too.

Certainly religion (its philosophy and its politics) acts as one of the main themes throughout the book, although it too gets off on the wrong foot early on in the piece when Franklin states ‘the Australian colonies were planned foundations of the age of Enlightenment, in which there was never an established church.’ There is an argument here, perhaps somewhat semantic, as to whether the Church of England was the ‘established church’ of Australia’s colonies as colonies of England. Moreover, I was under the impression that Australia was largely established as a penal colony to empty the slums of London and remove the prison hulks clogging the Thames, and that the principles flourishing under the ‘age of Enlightenment’ barely got a look in in this brutal outpost of Empire.

There are many wild (even Wilde) statements in this book—it is full of opinions and therefore exudes the personality, interests and appealing intellect of the author. That’s what makes it such a truly interesting exposé of Australia’s 20th century intellectual class and a pleasure to read. While it promises to be ‘more’ and could so easily have delivered, it does what it does brilliantly. As Wilde also said: ‘Anyone can make history. Only a great man can write it.’ I certainly think it a great read; as to the rest, readers must make up their own mind.

A Perilous and Fighting Life: From Communist to Conservative,The Political Writings of Professor
John Anderson
by Mark Weblin (ed)
Melbourne: Pluto Press 2003, 292pp, $29.95
ISBN 1 864032 480
Reviewed by Jim Packer

Forty years after his death, John Anderson remains Australia’s most notable philosophical thinker. Anderson was to 20th century Australian philosophy what William James was to philosophy in the United States and Bertrand Russell in Great Britain, and the continued republication of his work comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with its quality. This most recent republication of writings, concerned mostly with political agitation and the purposes and significance of Marxist thinking, is marked by Anderson’s preoccupation with ‘freedom’ and ‘enterprise’ that even in the darkest days of his flirtation with Sovietism (or ‘proletarianism’ as he later called it) distinguished his approach to socialism from that of every prominent figure in the Australian left of his time.

Mark Weblin has attempted a representative selection, and it includes the most memorable of Anderson’s polemics and political analyses from the time of his arrival in Sydney in 1927 to the year after his retirement from the University in 1958. But A Perilous and Fighting Life excludes the pieces that most forcefully express Anderson’s adoption of ‘history as the story of liberty’ (and ‘the perilous and fighting life’) as his personal credo. For although the latter part of this book includes some important political pieces from the late period, Weblin’s decision to republish no material from previous anthologies means that we need to refer to key journal articles republished in Studies in Empirical Philosophy and Art and Reality to understand both the deeper philosophical purposes behind Anderson’s shift from the ‘left’ to the ‘right’, and his attitudinal shift from social to cultural activism. (The reader of Weblin’s collection should consider supplementing it with ‘Marxist Philosophy’, ‘Marxist Ethics’, ‘Freudianism and Society’, ‘The Meaning of Good’, ‘The Servile State’ and ‘The One Good’ from Studies, as well as Anderson’s once-notorious ‘Art and Morality’, republished in the 1982 collection of Anderson’s writings on aesthetics edited by Graham Cullum and Kimon Lycos, Art and Reality.)

Anderson, when a Marxist, was a Marxist of a rather peculiar sort. First and foremost he was a philosopher, and the philosophy on which he cut his teeth in the University of Glasgow of the early 20th century was the Absolute Idealism of Caird, Latta and Henry Jones. As an Hegelian, Anderson was never particularly tolerant of those ‘Hegelians’ whose use of the ‘dialectic’ to carve up History as a portable and preachable commodity had left Marxism with the dubious honour of knowing more about the future than it was prepared to understand about the past. This probably explains the relative freedom with which Anderson pursued aesthetics and ethics. Though not as powerful a thinker on aesthetic and literary criticism as he was in general philosophy, Anderson never espoused the blinkered and barren ‘necessitarianism’ that Marxist historiography (and ethics and aesthetics) imposed upon its adherents.

Even at the time of what Weblin calls his ‘communist’ phase, Anderson repudiated Hegel’s identification of ‘philosophy’ with ‘the history of philosophy’ (that is, ‘progress’). But Hegel’s general position on History was more complex than that of ‘dialectical materialism’, and Anderson remained Hegelian enough to see in the philosophy of Hegel’s favourite Greek thinker, Heraclitus, the grounds for genuine historical thinking. For Heraclitus strife and conflict rule human affairs; politics is the outcome of the tensions between humans at the limits of their power. History, by implication, is the story of such tensions and limitations. In history, power is contingent on fluctuations in the fabric of these tensions and limitations, and liberty—the major theme in Anderson’s political writing after 1940—necessarily lives, in the expression of Benedetto Croce, ‘a perilous and fighting life’:

If anyone needs persuading that liberty cannot exist differently from the way it has lived and always will live in history, a perilous and fighting life, let him for a moment consider a world of liberty without obstacles, without menaces and without oppressions of any kind; immediately he will look away from this picture with horror as being something worse than death, an infinite boredom. (Croce, History as the Story of Liberty)

Weblin has been researching Anderson and his ideas since the early 1990s and he provides in the introduction and postscript to A Perilous and Fighting Life a balanced consideration of the phases of Anderson’s political-intellectual trajectory as well as of its importance to Australian intellectual life today.

Anderson began his Australian career as an influential figure in the Communist Party of Australia (CPA). As he moved away from the Stalinist rigidities of the Party in the mid-1930s (he was never a Party member), he became a significant force in the foundation of Sydney Trotskyism, until by the early 1940s his philosophy of historical conflict dismissed that ‘servile’ part of Marxism in which history had an ‘end’ and conflicts either came to an end or could be made manageable. At the same time (in fact, at exactly the same time), Anderson’s political activism was so overtaken by his concern about the ‘decline of culture’ that he increasingly repudiated the ‘levelling’ tendencies of the doctrines of his previous political life and consequently all but ceased to be a major force on the Australian political-intellectual scene. This change had run its course by 1946, and accounts for the final ‘phase’ which Weblin describes as ‘anti-Communist’ and ‘conservative’.

It is true that Anderson became an anti-Communist. In fact, he influenced a couple of generations of anti-Communists, and for this feat he has been awarded the left’s badge of lifelong disdain (a majority decision; never a unanimous one). But it could not have been otherwise. The CPA of the 1920s presented itself as ‘democratic’ and ‘pluralist’. It tolerated Anderson’s philosophy of ‘ways of life’; his conception of a dynamic proletariat challenging the ‘dominant ruling class’—much of Anderson’s rhetoric of the early Australian period was of a ‘dominant ruling class’—and even, perhaps, his anti-‘totalism’. Unfortunately Anderson really did believe in pluralism, and genuinely despised ‘ruling class ideology’ and the ‘totalism’ of not only the ‘bourgeois state’ but also of states as such. (One of his later repudiations was of the possibility that any state could be totalistic.)

His fellow communists, on the other hand, believed in strong organisation and Bolshevik principles of rulership. It was arguably they who betrayed the principles guiding Anderson’s politics, long before he moved towards the position Weblin defines as his ‘democratic phase’ and beyond. Anderson, in any case, had never been prepared to lay cultural activity on the Procrustes bed of ‘social levelling’; his commitment to culture became politically transparent by 1945, by which time his political activism had been fully replaced by cultural activism by way of a theorisation of pessimism.

Subsequently, in the period Weblin defines as Anderson’s ‘conservative’ phase, his open criticism of ‘democratic illusions’ had become as much an attack upon politics as the resolution of ethical imbalances as upon democracy itself.

[T]hinking is an active process, and . . . if we do not continually wrestle with problems and examine conceptions, we are reduced to saying things from which all or most of the meaning has ebbed away. And it is, perhaps, in political and social matters that the passage from inspiring discovery to pious platitude and thence to injurious humbug is most rapid. (p.249)

Or, as he wrote in Honi Soit in October 1954: ‘The life of thinking is only one way of living, but it is one way.’ For Anderson the life of thinking effectively displaced ‘politics’ as not only the most fulfilling way of living, but also as the only form of activism that could give ‘progress’ genuine meaning.

Mark Weblin and Pluto Press are to be commended for presenting us with Anderson’s political thought over the whole period of his residence in Australia. Weblin’s succinct commentary in his Introduction and ‘Concluding Scientific Postscript’ not only provides the reader with sufficient context to make Anderson understandable in an age that apparently has lost all intellectual connection with Croce, Hegel, Vico, Sorel, Heraclitus and the other political thinkers in the dark background of our own ‘postmodern’ period, but also provides the most comprehensive account of Anderson’s political thinking since Jim Baker’s Anderson’s Social Philosophy of 1979.

Andersonian scholarship has moved a long way in the 40 years since his death. Perhaps we are coming into a period when the various aspects of Anderson’s thought can be taken for granted rather than being celebrated as a cult. Certainly there are cult aspects in treating Anderson’s politics in isolation from the rest of his thought, but Weblin is comprehensive enough in this particular anthology to remind us that the greatness of a thinker lies not in the command they have of their thinking at any particular time, but in its overall unity, its consistency despite, rather than because of, the thinker’s social needs.

Act of Creation: The Founding of The United Nations
by Stephen C. Schlesinger
New York: Westview Press 2003, 352pp, US$27.50
ISBN 08133 3324 5
Reviewed by Scott Featherston

A world without the United Nations is unknown to most of us. The organisation has been around, for good and not-so-good, for almost 60 years now. Yet few know much about its creation. Historians to date have ignored this pocket of our recent past, but Stephen C. Schlesinger, a foreign affairs historian and Director of the World Policy Institute at the New School University in New York, has changed that. His new book, Act of Creation: The Founding of the United Nations, tells the story of the nine weeks of the Fall of 1945 when the world’s foreign ministers, statesmen and press came to San Francisco to hammer out the UN’s charter.

Schlesinger’s historical narrative is succinct, lucid, and well-researched. Indeed, there are passages that make the hairs on the back of one’s neck stand on end, so well does he capture the essence of these times. But this book really makes its mark in three key messages, not explicitly stated but aimed squarely at those dealing with contemporary affairs.

The first is that the United Nations was never intended to be a talking shop with no clout. As Schlesinger’s account makes clear, its main proponents—Franklin D. Roosevelt and, following his untimely death, Harry Truman—were clear-eyed, hard-headed realists determined to ensure that the UN did not meet the same fate as the League of Nations a generation before. Their men on the ground—Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, the chair of the founding conference, and Leo Pasvolsky, the State Department bureaucrat who nurtured the UN since it was first conceived in 1939—battled a sceptical Churchill, a recalcitrant Molotov and many reluctant smaller states during their nine weeks in San Francisco to create an organisation aimed not at governing the world but at preventing another major war.

The UN was designed to respect the sovereignty of the nation-state so long as threats to the peace, breaches of the peace or acts of aggression were not committed. But if they were, the Security Council, comprising the permanent five (the United States, the U.S.S.R., China, France and Britain) and a further rotating ten countries, was to take any necessary actions, including the application of force, to restore security. Such was the power its founding states delegated to the UN. But acting on this obligation required cooperation amongst the permanent five. The semblance of any such unity, as Schlesinger lucidly tells us, began to fray even in the early months of 1945. It disappeared altogether during the Cold War as the United States and U.S.S.R. vetoed one another’s resolutions. In this respect, the UN was stillborn. It never truly had the chance to exercise the powers it was delegated.

The second message highlights the achievements possible when American diplomacy is clear-eyed, accommodating of the legitimate interests of others, and patient. These were the characteristics of the diplomacy of the Truman era—a time when the United States was, relatively, at its most powerful but also, perhaps, still hesitant about its mantle as global leader. Nonetheless, it led the world in establishing the alliance against communism, the UN, the Marshall Plan, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and NATO, as well as supporting the European Coal and Steel Community (the harbinger to the European Union). This architecture which, arguably, has so positively dominated international politics since then, took time and energy to create. Moreover, as the political horse-trading, scheming and backroom deals described by Schlesinger make clear, none of it was easy and it certainly did not all go America’s way. But despite such difficulties, this approach legitimised American objectives. It made other states a part of, and therefore more willing to accept and actively work toward, the policies determined and outcomes desired. It is difficult to imagine the United States similarly persevering today, particularly in the post-September 11 world.

Finally, the regenerative qualities of the human spirit are evident in Schlesinger’s account. To be so vividly reminded of the determination applied by the statesmen of San Francisco to insure against a repeat of the most devastating war in history, even as the Asian sphere of that war still raged, is to appreciate our ability to learn from and correct for past mistakes. But history also reminds us of our ability to eventually forget these lessons. With many now questioning the very raison d’etre of the UN, Schlesinger’s book is a timely reminder of the reason it was founded. It was not formed to eradicate poverty, cure disease, improve human rights or advance the human race. These are laudable goals, but the UN was formed to prevent major wars. This was its primary purpose in 1945 and should be its primary purpose now.

The UN, of course, is not without its flaws. But like democracy and capitalism, neither of which is perfect, it is the best system of international collaboration we have for the moment. Nonetheless, reform is desperately required. The Security Council is a relic of the geopolitics of 1945. To be legitimate today it must reflect contemporary realities. It needs to accommodate today’s powers currently excluded—Japan and Germany—and contemplate the accommodation of tomorrow’s big states—India and Brazil. It must also address the extraordinary powers inherent in the veto, for legitimacy is not to be found in this uneven distribution of such clout. However, as the many failed attempts at reform instruct us, positive change is not easy. And whilst Schlesinger’s book does not attempt to answer these questions, he certainly shows us where they might be found. Perhaps it is time for the United States to again lead the world in another act of creation.

Orwell’s Australia: From Cold War to Culture War
by Dennis Glover
Melbourne: Carlton North,
Scribe Publications, 2003,
138pp, $19.95, ISBN 0908 011 563
Reviewed by Martin Sheehan

George Orwell continues to be one of the most talked about and debated political commentators of the last century. Once claimed by the right as a champion of the anti-communist cause in books such as Animal Farm and 1984, in recent years Orwell has been the subject of intense interest and reassessment from the left.

In his recent book, Orwell’s Australia: From Cold War to Culture War, Dennis Glover, speech writer to former Labor leader Simon Crean and a prominent Labor intellectual, claims Orwell as the inspiration for his own brand of social democratic politics. Glover’s book also looks at Orwell’s influence on Australian intellectuals, and the diverging interpretations of Orwell’s politics across the political spectrum.

As a discussion of Orwell’s leftist political views, and his influence on Australian intellectuals, Glover’s book raises many important issues of continuing relevance to Australian democracy. The place of ‘truth’ in political discourse; the egalitarian spirit in Australia political culture and society; the future of the democratic left and the Australian Labor Party; and the importance of civility and rationality in political life are discussed through the prism of Orwell’s political writings.

It is a pity that discussion of these issues quickly becomes bogged down in a polemic against the Coalition government, and against so-called neoconservative writers and commentators. Cheap point scoring for the ALP replaces investigating political debate in this country, and the way that those debates have increasingly polarised opinion.

In his role as ALP mythologiser, Glover paints a dark vision of contemporary Australia. The Howard government is obsessed with staying in power at any price. It is prepared to lie to the Australian people. Cynical and alienated voters realise they are being lied to, but according to Glover do not seem to care. Innocent refugees are used as scapegoats by an increasingly authoritarian government. Glover even claims that the government will stoop to political murder. All this is argued with a straight face.

Contemporary Australia is then compared to the glories of the recent Australian past. According to Glover it is the Australian commitment to social democracy that has made our country great:

The true ‘Australian genius’ lies in the creation of a social democracy without ideology—it’s the genius that gave us eight-hour day, mass home ownership, non-denominational public education, nation-building investment, a welfare state, free public health care, and affordable higher education for everyone with talent. (p.3)

By comparison, Australia’s conservatives ‘would have us believe that what made [Australia] great was rugged individualism, British institutions, and a willingness to charge machine-gun posts with nothing more than an unloaded rifle and a bayonet’ (p.2). Of course Glover nowhere mentions which conservatives argue the above.
Glover claims writers and commentators he labels as ‘neoconservatives’ are poisoning our political culture with their ultra-right wing and anti-egalitarian ideas. Who are these nefarious characters? Glover names a grab-bag of political commentators—Paddy McGuinness, Andrew Bolt, Piers Ackerman, Gerard Henderson, and Janet Albrechtsen. It is hard to tell what binds these writers together apart from their general criticism of the left. One wonders whether the neoconservative designation is merely a convenient label for the partisan political task of denigrating the right generally.

Glover’s main complaint about contemporary political life in Australia is that the Howard Government has destroyed, or is destroying, the great Aussie spirit of egalitarianism. Glover acknowledges the growing economic and social cleavages in our society, and the fact that Labor is less and less the party of the working class and the disadvantaged, and more and more the party of the urban left-wing elite:

Australia is seeing the emergence of two societies increasingly cut off from each other. One, based in wealthy, inner-city suburbs, with rising income and wealth—the sort of places where not only the educated left tend to live, but the millionaire commentators too—domin-ates entry to our elite universities and occupations, and is characterised by affluence and access to opportunities that the poor can barely comprehend. And the other trapped in declining suburbs and towns with houses they often can’t afford to sell, has fewer opportunities for education and fewer chances of entry to well-paid professions. The former are having a smaller proportion of our children. The latter are having a larger proportion—often without the ability to provide for them adequately within the nest of a trusting and lasting family relationship. As a result, at least one in six of our children are being brought up in poverty. (p.89)

Glover makes a strong argument for the ALP to return to its working class origins, to take seriously the values and desires of the vast majority of working Australians, whose main preoccupation is providing a better life for their families and communities.

Glover blames the Howard government for dismantling large chunks of the welfare state and for downgrading egalitarianism in the name of efficiency. This is a curious claim from a member of the ALP, the party which in the 1980s and 1990s deregulated the economy. If Australia is a more unequal and unfair society, as Glover claims, it is not due to the Howard government and a few right-wing political commentators in the media —it is due to the Hawke-Keating economic reforms of the 1980s and 1990s.

No Australian government, neither Labor nor Liberal, could have resisted the economic revolution sweeping the world in the 1980s and 1990s. It occurred in response to demands from ordinary people for a higher standard of living. While it increased the distance between rich and poor, it also benefited many ordinary working class people, who realised that they had little to gain under socialism. Glover nowhere acknowledges this political and economic reality.

Overall Glover’s book is a