Brett Evans
The Life and Soul of the Party:
A Portrait of Modern Labor
UNSW Press, $19.95pb, 115pp, 0 86840 738 0

Robert Manne
The Barren Years: John Howard and Australian Political Culture
Text, $27.50pb, 212pp, 1 877008 02 8

J.R. Nethercote (ed.)
Liberalism and the Australian Federation
Federation Press, $44hb, 416pp, 1 86287 402 6

Marian Sawer and Gianni Zappalà (eds)
Speaking for the People: Representation in Australian Politics
MUP, $32.95pb, 330pp, 0 522 84972 5

RECENTLY POPULISM HAS become a thumping counterpoint to the democratic refrain with which Australians camouflage their political culture. This much is clear from the rise of Hansonism, John Howard's stand on reconciliation and the stolen generations, wide support for the Howard-Ruddock (and Beazley) line on asylum seekers, the growth of policies aggravating social divisions and inequality, and the turning away from intelligent Asian engagement.

In the past, populism was a term used to describe rurally-based social movements reacting against invasive and urbanising modernity. More recently, it has recrudesced in angry reactions against globalisation. It is suspicious of outsiders and hostile to intellectuals who would attack sacred (if decrepit) cows (e.g. the derision afforded a leading economist's criticism of Australians' obsession with sport). It is pathologically anxious about non-conformist individuals: foreigners, Aboriginal activists, liberated women, artists and writers, lesbians and gays, people who prefer thinking (and dreaming) to working with their hands. It aligns itself with exclusionary ideologies like racism and fundamentalism. It warns that large cosmopolitan cities are where shyster-lawyers and merciless bankers, overpaid businessmen and drug dealers, molesters and malingerers, atheists and anarchists, ethnics and organised criminals — and all sorts of other unholy temptations — lurk around every crowded corner, under every pencilled eyebrow or grimy raincoat.

There have been no systematic accounts, yet, of Australian populism, despite its immense influence in our history and politics. Three of the books under review address aspects of its stifling constraints. The fourth, Speaking for the People, shows that it can be surpassed with immense benefit to our political discourses.

Brett Evans's The Life and Soul of the Party is an evocative, if rueful, account of populism in the contemporary ALP. It is the best kind of political journalism — lucid writing of 'history on the run'. It opens with a chilling account of the factionalism in Queensland that could have destroyed the party last year and that tested Peter Beattie's formidable political skills to the full. Beattie was able to defeat one kind of populism with his own brand of the same kind of politics.

Evans offers a marvellous description of Paul Keating's venting of spleen at the 1999 annual conference of the NSW ALP, providing a vivid snapshot of the hubris characterising Keating's earlier parliamentary career. (Keating's past performances in parliament are arguably as responsible for the recent shocking decline in parliamentary conduct as those of Tony Abbott, Simon Crean, Peter Costello and John Howard.) Evans brilliantly evokes Keating's hectoring style, his bitter denunciations, his narcissism: 'Yet […] he still holds the audience enthralled.' This is Australian populist leadership at its most virulent.

Later, the conference agenda is debated in a desultory, if formal, fashion. 'Decisions are always made along factional lines. There is never a reason to actually count votes. It's hardly a vibrant democracy.' The idea that the contemporary ALP is a party of principle, ideals and vision — 'the light on the hill' — soon dies in the face of the cheap pragmatism and opportunism that pervade the party today. This results in a cutting off of the would-be governors from the governed across a chasm of alienation that, if it persists, will become fatal to Australian democracy. As Evans notes: 'the most powerful faction is overwhelmingly the "get-back-into-government" faction.' And the experience of government is for personal careerism, for the boyo triumphalism of wielding power. It has little to do with transforming the material and cultural conditions of ordinary struggling Australians; it is horribly irrelevant to what Max Weber called 'Politics as a Vocation'.

Evans leaves us with a picture of the ALP as a party of populist groupies in awe of flawed leaders, giving weight to Michels's prediction that, by organising, labour will hand itself over to oligarchy. The sad thing is that the oligarchy running the ALP these days is so provincial, so populist,
so mediocre.

Robert Manne's latest book, The Barren Years, adds further weight to the contention that he is our most articulate and impressive contemporary public intellectual. You don't have to agree with everything he writes to acknowledge that his arguments are intelligent, and worthy of engagement. This collection of his columns and one or two major speeches represents a sustained and damning critique of the Howard Liberal Government and of John Howard's political leadership. Once again we are faced with neo-populism — this time it is Howard's that, ironically, is a mirror image of Keating's. They may despise each other, but their populism is something that they share, irrevocably.

Manne's sketch of the Howard era is inevitably grim. The failure of the debates about the republic is rehearsed. The tragedies surrounding the reconciliation process and Howard's appalling responses to the stolen generations are catalogued and challenged. Hansonism is excoriated. The wanton devastation of public universities is recorded. The centenary of Federation is noted, justifiably without enthusiasm, for the silly and expensive farce that it has become.

There are two pieces in this volume that stand out. The first is about Sir William Deane, whose renovation of the Governor-General's role showed that the office need not be invisible in the way that Archbishop Hollingworth has so far been conducting it. (In so doing, Hollingworth is in danger of demeaning the office as it has been evolving within our political system in recent years — that is, his tenure, so far, is reactionary, not conservative.)

As Manne points out: 'Conservatives generally exaggerate the dangers and underestimate the benefits of the constitutional part Deane pioneered.' And he concludes with words that would be echoed in the minds of many Australians: 'Sir William Deane civilised and humanised our public life. That is why he is now so deeply and broadly loved.' And, we should add, that is why so many of our current political leaders are so deeply and widely loathed. Deane showed us a side of our national identity that is not grimy and mean, populist and petty. He would have us writ much larger — generously and inclusively, and growing.

The second piece that makes this volume valuable is its last: 'My Country: A Personal Journey'. This is a brief excursion in autobiography, giving us a tantalising glimpse into Robert Manne's personal entry into the public culture of an increasingly sophisticated multiculturalism that Australia was becoming, more or less up until the Howard period. The fact that this growth is now faltering is not entirely Howard's fault; he is as much a symptom of our prevailing plight as he is its cause. Yet Manne's essay suggests ways in which Australian populism could still be transformed into Australian cosmopolitanism and excellence in a region crying out for models of civic virtue. But this will require sensible public policies, enriched and accessible educational opportunities, openness and, above all else, good leadership.

The disappointing thing about The Barren Years is its sense of resignation. Manne is superbly outspoken about the problems currently facing Australian public life. But his solutions are too wryly opaque. We are left without an agenda of possible progressive choices for the country or broad visions for the future. In this regard, Manne seems as hesitant as most intellectuals, media commentators, and political and business leaders across the land. What a dumb lot we are for not thinking through the flagrantly failed public policies still being served up by every careerist politician in the business. Such is the sterile fate of populism in a hard culture. It bites the heads off intellectuals, like matriarchal arachnids, spitting them out contemptuously, terminating further fertilisation. We are blessed that Robert Manne has so far kept his head.

The measure of Liberalism and the Australian Federation is the controversial chapter by Charles Richardson, 'The Fraser Years'. This is not to deny the usefulness of chapters on Liberal foreign policy (from Deakin to Howard — an assumed rather than argued continuum), on economic and industrial development, and on federalism. But the chapter on the Fraser government reveals what the book is really all about: it is little more than an attempt to give the Howard government an aura of historical continuity.

The introductory chapter by Staley and Nethercote is a muddy overview of Liberal Party philosophy. 'Liberal values' — alleged to be important to the Liberal Party and to the Australian Constitution — are interpreted within a very simplistic framework. At most, these values constitute a narrow defence of possessive individualism, curbs on the power of the state, and advocacy of a ramshackle system of constitutional checks and balances within a partial separation of powers. There is little concern in the chapter for traditional liberal theories of human rights, social tolerance — or what Isaiah Berlin described as 'positive liberty'. And nothing is plausibly evident of the rich philosophical conservatism of Edmund Burke and Michael Oakeshott.

The following chapters relate only tangentially to Staley and Nethercote's unconvincing exercise in political philosophy. Most seem to conceive of liberalism in libertarian terms. None offers a convincing case for seeing a crimson (or blue) thread of Australian liberalism running through us all, from Deakin to Howard. If anything, they demonstrate the discontinuity of the Howard years. As suggested earlier, this is startlingly evident in the way the Fraser years are parodied rather than analysed, lending weight to the judgment that this is primarily an ideological book designed to put a cultural gloss on an especially populist Howard régime.

Speaking for the People is an outstandingly original reference text for philosophical and sociological discussions of representation in Australian democracy. Nothing in contemporary political science matches its scope or significance. It brings together an eminent field of experts — from Australia and one from overseas — in pursuit of the sublime democratic ideal of citizens, from as many viewpoints and inclinations as possible, having an effective voice in Australian democratic conversations. This is the sort of colloquium that would seriously challenge the populist poison in Australian politics. We need more — much more — of this sort of thinking and writing.