Paul Kelly
100 Years: The Australian Story
Allen & Unwin $29.95pb, 279pp, 1 86508 531 6

PAUL KELLY IS the most influential Australian political journalist of the past twenty-five years. There was a time when Kelly was merely the most perceptive chronicler of the nation's political life, a worthy successor to Alan Reid. With the publication of his most celebrated book, The End of Certainty, he became something rather different: a highly significant player on the national stage. The End of Certainty told the story of party politics in the 1980s. More importantly, it insinuated a powerful argument in favour of the dismantling of the distinctive interventionist economic arrangements that had been established after Federation: protectionism, centralised industrial arbitration and financial regulation.

Kelly moved from The End of Certainty to the editorship of the Australian. He used this position strategically, as a means of supporting the fundamental vision of the Keating prime ministership — Australia as a deregulated, free-market economy with a generous welfare safety net, reshaped in its culture by the ideas of multiculturalism, Aboriginal reconciliation and the republic. Together, before their different falls from grace, Pauls Keating and Kelly were a formidable Irish-Australian double act.

So far as I am aware, Kelly has never previously written about the pattern of Australian political history before his own arrival on the scene. With 100 Years: The Australian Story, which grew out of the current ABC television series, he offers a fresh interpretation of that history, based not on original research but on investigations of the prehistory of the positions he had reached during the Keating years. His mildly left-of-centre, economic rationalist interpretation of Australia's twentieth-century history goes, roughly speaking, like this:

The Australian Commonwealth was formed, for Kelly, from the successful combination here of British settlerist loyalty to the empire and an authentic brand of Australian nationalism. Kelly is contemptuous of the old left-wing view about the ultimate incompatibility of Australian nationalism and British loyalism. He thinks 'the Australian people' have, consistently, been intelligent enough to refuse the choice Henry Lawson offered between the Old Dead Tree of Britain, class privilege and empire, and the Young Tree Green of Australian nationalism and social democracy. Even though he is a republican, Kelly thinks it futile and absurd to grumble about the instincts of a people who rejected outright the offer of constitutional independence from Britain when offered it in 1931, or for whom the royal tour of 1954 provided the most enthusiastic and heartfelt public occasion in its history. Kelly does argue with Australia's history. However, unlike members of the school of Manning Clark, empire loyalism is not his chosen battlefield.

What is? For Kelly, by far the most consequential domestic development in Australia's early years was New Protectionism, the distinctive form of social contract based upon tariff protection and the centralised determination of a worker's wage. Concerning the impact of what he calls the Australian Settlement on the shape of our history, Kelly cannot make up his mind. At certain points in his narrative, Kelly praises the Settlement as the civilising of capitalism, as Australian egalitarianism, as the tradition of the 'fair go'. At other points, he regards it as a major misfortune that for eighty years Australia was shaped by the post-Federation victory of Alfred Deakin's protectionism over George Reid's advocacy of free trade. On this question, Kelly's partisanship is naked. When the Australian capitalist system stumbles badly, for example in the Great Depression, Kelly points an accusatory finger at the rigidities of the Settlement. When, however, under the Settlement, capitalism flourishes, for example during the Menzies Golden Age, he puts its success down, almost exclusively, to the administrative capacity of the prime minister and the benign influence of Maynard Keynes.

Nor does Kelly's inconsistency end here. On deregulatory, free-market grounds, throughout his history, Kelly distances himself from the egalitarian impulses of the Australian Settlement. Yet it is precisely on such egalitarian grounds that he offers a lame and rather uncharacteristic defence of the White Australia Policy, which he regards as responsible not only for the unity and stability of our early history but also for the maintenance of high living standards among the unionised white workforce. It does not require Paul Kelly to point out that Australia formed its Federation at a time when European racism was at its peak. The White Australia Policy is an occasion when an argument against the grain of Australian history would not be out of place.

Although Kelly asks his readers not to judge the White Australia Policy as harshly or ahistorically as he fears they will, when it comes to Aborigines, thankfully, no similar request is made. Kelly knows that the disgraceful ways in which the Aborigines were treated, especially in the first half of the twentieth century, cannot be mitigated by reference to the general Europe-wide racism of the times. Unfortunately, however, in no other chapter of 100 Years does the thinness of Kelly's understanding become so plain. To demonstrate the shamefulness of the treatment of the Aborigines at Federation, Kelly concentrates on the question of whether or not they would be allowed to vote. Compared to other policies of the time — the herding of Aborigines onto penitentiary-style reserves, the extraordinary powers given to the protectors over the most intimate aspects of the Aborigines' lives — the question of the franchise seems trivial in the extreme. Although Kelly does discuss at least one of the truly serious abuses of these years — the removal of 'half-caste' Aboriginal children from their mothers — on balance his analysis suggests that he believes that the children were taken with genuine, if misguided, social-welfare considerations in mind. Kelly does not see that the most important 'welfare' consideration in the removal of the children was itself highly racist — namely, that it was necessary to 'rescue' these 'part-white' children from the degradation of the Aboriginal way of life. Like most Australians, Kelly underestimates the depth of anti-Aboriginal racism in Australia before World War II. As a major player on the national stage, Kelly has had the good fortune to see the cause for which he barracked in the 1980s — free-market neo-liberalism — triumph. He has also had the misfortune to see how deeply the 'losers' in the era of globalisation resent the dismantling of the old Australian Settlement and the victory of his cause. Kelly is honest enough to face this inconvenient truth. In 100 Years, he acknowledges the paradoxical fact that while, during the 1990s, the economy grew fat, very many of the people turned sour. What, then, does Kelly think can be done? The best he can offer is a decent safety net for the 'losers' and a new post-egalitarian 'aspirational' value system, to encourage the winners in our society to feel comfortable and relaxed about enriching themselves.

The Deakinite Australian Settlement was broadly supported, as Kelly knows, for more than eighty years. After less than twenty years, the consensus required to entrench George Reid's alternative, which Kelly favours, is crumbling daily before our eyes.