Allington July 07

Marr's diary of outrages

Patrick Allington

David Marr
His Master's Voice: The Corruption of Public Debate under Howard
Quarterly Essay 26, Black Inc., $14.95 pb, 104 pp, 9781863954051

The continued success and quality of the Quarterly Essay series has done much to promote the long essay as a legitimate forum for detailed, informed and accessible political discussion. That this has occurred during the Howard era suggests that all is not lost in the quest for genuine public debate. In the latest Quarterly Essay, David Marr acknowledges that, ‘[s]uppression is not systematic. There are no gulags for dissidents under Howard.’ Nevertheless, His Master’s Voice is born of, and fuelled by, exasperation. Marr makes little effort to mask his personal enmity towards John Howard. And his disgust at the manner in which the federal Coalition has governed for more than a decade is palpable: ‘Since 1996, Howard has cowed his critics, muffled the press, intimidated the ABC, gagged scientists, silenced non-government organisations, neutered Canberra’s mandarins, curtailed parliamentary scrutiny, censored the arts, banned books, criminalised protest and prosecuted whistleblowers.’

Marr suggests that his essay is about the ‘subtle, bizarre and at times brutal’ methods Howard and his government employ to dictate public debate, and about ‘why Australians put up with them’; but the essay is more adept at identifying the former than at explaining the latter. At times, Marr is in fine form, offering withering, eloquent, sarcastic assessments from a bedrock of solid investigative journalism. His ‘diary of outrages’, a compendium of Howard government attacks ‘on open and honest debate’, is effective in exposing both questionable policies and dubious tactics. Marr’s list – from the shabby treatment of dissenters to the overwrought sedition legislation – creates an accumulating sense of alarm that is real and revelatory.

But at other times Marr seems to take as his starting point an assumption that, deep down and whether they realise it or not, all Australians surely share his – Marr’s – political affiliations and assumptions. Marr is so insulted by Howard’s record, methods, motives and legacy, and so desperate to expose the Coalition’s anti-democratic tendencies, that he makes bold and superior statements that are only sometimes backed by supporting evidence. His Howard-centric focus also helps to perpetuate a notion of political debate as a gladiatorial competition between personalities, but this general trend is itself a part of the reason that the Australian media is so bloated with superficial political noise.

Early in His Master’s Voice, Marr argues that, ‘[m]ore than any law, any failure of the Opposition or individual act of bastardry over the last decade, what’s done most to gag democracy in this country is the sense that debating John Howard is futile’. His portrait of Howard is devastating: he ‘lies without shame’, he is unwilling to admit mistakes, he peddles fear, he obfuscates, ‘he has a genius for ambiguity’, he justifies his extreme policies and behaviour with repeated simplistic calls for ‘balance’ by extolling ‘practical’ measures and by feigning allegiance to the mainstream. Marr’s eschewal of artificial neutrality offers a salutary lesson for the media, which – not unlike Howard – too often hides its partisanship behind the illusion of balance. Marr’s blunt assessment of Howard’s ability to thrive in a world of core and non-core promises – in other words, Marr’s exposé of Howard’s political savvy for the sectarian expediency it so often is – is persuasive, and should be recalled whenever Howard is praised for some ability or achievement for which he should be criticised.

The combination of the diary of outrage and Marr’s assessment of Howard lends further weight to a growing perception amongst some sections of the community that the last decade in Australia has seen a serious deterioration of political debate, and that the Coalition government has frequently attempted to stymie even the mildest and most constructive forms of dissent to its domestic and international agendas. Marr is on firm footing with his searching examination of the extent to which aggression is now entrenched as a standard and acceptable political tactic. The Howard government’s behaviour is characterised, he writes, by ‘a lazy, brutal assertion of power’. Marr’s description of the character assassination of industrial relations academic Professor David Peetz by Joe Hockey and Hockey’s staffers exposes the Coalition’s preference for thuggery over actual debate, although in turn – paradoxically, given its decade of dominance – this implies a government that lacks confidence in its own programme. The Peetz example also reinforces the rising and deleterious influence of min-isterial and media advisers, who occupy an unconstrained space outside of either parliament or the public service. But while Marr’s examination of the thuggishness of the Howard government is troubling, it is also true that politics in Australia has become a spectator sport that demands loud and boisterous behaviour. If politicians seem too often to behave as verbal boxers – communicating in thirty-second exhortations – it is because the prevailing rules of the game say that yelling gets you noticed, that uncertainty equals weakness, that complexity equals messiness, that nuanced debate lacks the wow factor, and that disunity equals political disaster. It is also because, whatever else politicians might do and say during any given day, only certain modes of behaviour create headlines.

The deterioration of public debate has been a gradual trend. Its origins are many and varied, and they pre-date the Coalition’s defeat of the Keating government in 1996. Marr says as much, briefly, but his focus on Howard and his ministers distorts these wider societal trends, implying a prime minister who dictates to, but is never dictated to, the world. Consequently, when Marr says, ‘[o]n a long list of Howard’s political achievements in the last decade, the mood shift of the nation is perhaps the greatest’, he seems disconnected from the context. Australians, he writes, have rewarded Howard’s approach to governing out of a combination of factors: ‘boredom, indifference and fear’, habituation and desensitisation to Howard. More broadly, ‘[w]e aren’t the larrikins of our imagination. Australians are an orderly people who love authority. We grumble instead of challenging it. We despise politicians. Belittling them as a class is a cover for our own passivity.’

This portrait of the Australian people offers several stimulating conversation starters, but compared to, for example, Judith Brett’s layered and lucid discussion in her Quarterly Essay, Relaxed and Comfortable: The Liberal Party’s Australia (no. 19, 2005), it seems a little thin. Marr writes, ‘[o]ver the last decade, “practical” has become a key Howard word used to stop debate in its tracks. Try to explore the principles behind his politics, and more often than not his talk turns to practical options, initiatives, outcomes, consequences, points of view, guidance, solutions, partnerships and so on.’ For Marr, then, Howard’s mantra of the practical is an avoidance technique, his rhetoric a nefarious tool, as it no doubt sometimes is. But
a focus on ‘practical solutions’, an adherence to pragmatism as a virtue, is nevertheless a personal and political stance that Marr seems reluctant toaccept might be actively, openly, independently and honourably held by many Australians, irrespective of Howard’s purposes and plots.

Early in His Master’s Voice, Marr quotes Howard: ‘I think in public life you take a position … And if I ever develop reservations, well, I hope I would have the grace to keep them to myself.’ Marr seizes on this recalcitrance as emblematic, concluding that, ‘[f]or the last decade, Australia has had a prime minister who thinks it beneath him to admit mistakes’. Marr is right: the quote exposes Howard badly (not to mention his curious definition of grace). But it also says a great deal about a political environment in which every utterance a public figure makes is dissected and over-examined. Howard is not Willy Wonka, completely in command of a world of his own making.

There is much about this essay that is timely – and not just because this is an election year. Marr writes that, ‘we’ve let what’s happened, happen. That’s why we’re deluded if we imagine Howard’s departure will see freewheeling debate flourish across the nation.’ But this conclusion raises complex, multi-layered issues, against which Marr’s strident certainty sometimes jars. That is not to suggest he should have been less robust in his critique of Howard or his supporters. But His Master’s Voice reads more like a synopsis than it does like a completed piece. Marr works hard to fit everything he wants to say into the format of the essay, but some of his pronouncements, his conclusions, feel the strain. Within this intelligent, provocative and at times important essay lies the potential for a bigger, more detailed, more prescient and less narky book.