The topic has also evolved in the published scholarship. For example, the focus of historian Russel Ward’s 1977 A Nation for a Continent (the title snipped from a Federation campaign speech by Edmund Barton) was neatly flipped by environmental historian Libby Robin’s 2007 book How a Continent Created a Nation. Robin advanced the transdisciplinary dialogue between science and history that is central to Billy Griffiths, Larissa Behrendt and Sean Ulm’s new book, The First Inventors: How People Shaped a Continent. As the subtitle indicates, though, the central focus here is on culture rather than the environment.

The book’s immense temporal and spatial reach is organised by chapters focused on journeying, food gathering, landscape management and social organisation. In each, the authors synthesise archaeological evidence, computer modelling and the Indigenous knowledge and cultural memory encoded in song and story to document human flourishing in diverse and changing landscapes.

Like the television series of the same name, which screened in 2023, The First Inventors begins with the peopling of the Australian continent around 65,000 years ago. The Australian landmass, a third larger than today, was part of the Sahul region that included New Guinea and eventually Tasmania. Crossing between Timor and the Kimberley coast, one of the first settlement routes, required watercraft and navigation techniques suitable for over-the-horizon voyaging. This was, the authors contend, the longest sea journey yet undertaken by humans. Several centuries of two-way journeys suggest purposeful rather than accidental settlement, and left an archaeological record that the authors believe provides the first evidence of modern human behaviour.

Much of that evidence was submerged by a sea level rise, eventually reaching some 130 metres following the last glacial maximum around 21,000 years ago. The first humans settled along coastal fringes like those of Timor and Sulawesi, but movement inland — the speed and spread of which has long been underestimated, according to new modelling — required adaptation to hotter, drier environments, and to country that had evolved to burn.

Across the continent, developments in aquaculture, astronomy and pharmaceuticals came through observation, experimentation and evaluation, the hallmarks of science. Archaeological evidence shows the development of hafted axes suited to the dominant eucalypt hardwoods. Maps were encoded in song and story to guide navigation and help locate food and water sources. Fire was repurposed for landscape management, with cool season burns facilitating hunting while preserving local ecologies.

Present-day dating techniques, computer modelling and simulation have produced new evidence of occupation and adaptation that frequently overlays and supports traditional knowledge embedded in stories, songs and cultural memory. “We come to these ancient oral accounts with a healthy scepticism, as well as a deep regard for Indigenous knowledge of Country,” conclude the authors, “and we are persuaded of their veracity by the sheer volume and variety of narratives, both across the continent and within specific stories.”

Describing the earliest Indigenous occupants as inventors might seem implausible to some. The authors tackle this head on, subverting a romantic trope of the inventor as a solitary genius to argue for understanding “invention” at landscape scale, adapted and nurtured across countless generations.

The myth of European exploration and discovery, too, is debunked in the book’s discussion of the songlines and long-distance navigation trails, some stretching across the continent, that facilitated food gathering and cultural diplomacy. European explorers frequently relied on Indigenous guides or followed established tracks, as do many present-day roads. Blaxland, Wentworth and Lawson completed their celebrated crossing of the Blue Mountains in 1813 by trailing a short distance behind an advance Indigenous party.

Yet a colonial mindset lingers. The material evidence of early settlement and trade located by underwater archaeology is unrecognised and unprotected by maritime heritage legislation. Australia is not party to the 2001 UNESCO Convention on the Protection of Underwater Cultural Heritage. Australia’s Underwater Cultural Heritage Act of 2018, the authors assert, prioritises the protection of shipwrecks and submerged aircraft. Conversely, the nomination of the Budj Bim cultural landscape in southwest Victoria, with its network of kooyang (eel) traps, was Australia’s first community-nominated accession to UNESCO’s world heritage list. The chapter featuring Budj Bim shows the capacity of new remote sensing technologies to accurately map the extent and sophistication of Gunditjmara aquaculture in this region.

More encouragingly, settler-colonial perceptions of fire as an alien force and deadly threat is giving way to an appreciation of cultural burning as a strategy for wildfire management.

The First Inventors does feature one figure who might more conventionally be identified as an inventor: Ngarrandjeri man David Unaipon. A chapter recounts the well-known story of Unaipon’s modified design of a sheep-shearing comb, which revolutionised productivity in the wool industry but yielded no financial benefit for its developer. But readers may be less familiar with the oppressive regulation of Unaipon’s daily life. Most of the chapter’s attention, though, is given to his design of a helicopter that applied the aerofoil principle of a boomerang. The final part of the TV series featured a delightful proof-of-concept trial of the design.

Of the three authors, Larissa Behrendt’s name is likely to be most familiar to non-academic audiences, although many may be unaware of the breadth of her activity across academia, fiction, screen and media, and in advisory roles. Larissa wrote and directed The First Inventors series.

Billy Griffiths, a research fellow at Deakin University’s Centre for Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies, enlivened the history of archaeology in Australia in his award-winning Deep Time Dreaming. The accessible, character-driven style of that book is emulated in The First Inventors.

Sean Ulm is a professor of archaeology at James Cook University whose substantial body of work focuses on the relationship of cultural and environmental change in archaeological and paleo-environmental eras. Deep knowledge of the country and longstanding relationships with Indigenous people and disciplinary colleagues come to fruition in this project.

The book, which has appeared after the documentary’s screening, provides space to expand and defend claims and arguments, grounding the project in an impressively wide scholarship. It is also candid about the limits of the archaeological record. Much of the technical innovation described in the text involved the use of fibres, which have limited chances of surviving as material evidence. Beware, say the authors, of conflating the archaeological record with what was once considered important, and which might influence later judgements of cultural advancement. The durability of stone gave rise to the trope of a stone-age people, and to anthropologist A.P. Elkin’s marginally less crude assessment that Indigenous people were parasites, dependent on what nature produced.

But the tendency to essentialise — to fall back on descriptions of timelessness and cultural uniformity — persists. Kevin Rudd’s 2007 apology, note the authors, referred to an “ancient culture.” The demand to prove the existence of native title rests on a static concept of continuity. Perhaps the strongest message of this book is its debunking of a primitivist notion that Indigenous people lived in simple harmony with their natural environment. They were — we all are — living with complex, changing and constructed environments. Successfully navigating the future, argue the authors, will need Indigenous knowledge and Western science working together. •

The First Inventors: How People Shaped a Continent
By Billy Griffiths, Larissa Behrendt and Sean Ulm | Allen & Unwin | $36.99 | 320 pages

The post Shaping a continent appeared first on Inside Story.

Bloomberg reporter Katrina Manson’s Project Maven tells the story of how, over the past decade, the US military has developed AI-targeting tools. Manson, an experienced technology and national security journalist, focuses primarily on the period 2016–21 and the titular project, which was led by US Marine Colonel Drew Cukor.

From the start, Cukor believed AI should be used in warfare only if two conditions were met: humans would still make the final decisions about targeting, and the laws of war would regulate AI in the same way as other methods of waging war. By the end of the book, when Manson brings the reader right up to 2026, that vision seems almost quaint.

Cukor is no longer in the US military, and nor is he associated with military research on AI. Military use of AI now includes autonomous weapons, the so-called “killer robots” deplored by human rights campaigners and condemned by UN secretary-general António Guterres. Governments seem uninterested in regulating or banning this new technology, with American defense secretary Pete Hegseth going as far as rejecting all international law–based rules of engagement in favour of a “warrior” culture.

At the heart of the debate is targeting, a key issue in international humanitarian law that regulates armed conflict. (Although many of the rules of war are set out in the Geneva Conventions and its protocols, the law is grounded in customary rules, some of which are based on centuries-long practice.) One of the first principles of contemporary customary international humanitarian law is the principle of distinction, which states that military attacks must only be directed at military targets and not at civilians. The principle may be widely accepted, but its application is often contested. Who is a civilian? How many civilian deaths (often referred to as “collateral damage”) are acceptable when armies attack a military target?

Careless or malign targeting isn’t new, of course. Manson notes American targeting failures in the pre-AI 1990s and 2000s. Proponents of AI, particularly the Mavenites, have argued that AI will reduce errors in targeting. But not all civilian casualties result from errors: even in the AI age, civilian targets are attacked, sometimes deliberately, and some countries locate civilian infrastructure near military installations in an attempt to immunise them from attack.

In the Middle East, for example, Israel has argued that Hamas uses hospitals — which international law says cannot be targeted — to conceal its operations. The Israeli military has thus targeted hospitals in Gaza, resulting in what Médecins Sans Frontières has described as a dismantling of the health system, leaving many without access to healthcare. In February 2026, the United States bombed a school in Iran, killing nearly 200 adults and children. In that case AI targeting may well have worked as intended, with the United States willing to accept a high risk of civilian casualties to hit an important military target, although recent reports suggest the databases of intelligence on Iran may have been out of date.

Manson argues that pointing to policy choices about acceptable targets and civilian casualties shifts responsibility away from the designers and users of AI. I disagree with her characterisation of the problem, largely because I don’t think these are separate exercises. Settings on AI-supported weapons and autonomous weapons result from the choices of human designers and human users.

But the story Manson tells in Project Maven begins at a different technological moment. Cukor, stationed in Afghanistan in the 2000s, despaired of the inadequacy of the technology available to him. Poor intelligence was leading to flawed identification of targets. American service personnel and civilians alike were unnecessarily killed. Cukor wanted better intelligence. Later, as he sought support to research AI use in the military, he focused on its use for intelligence rather than targeting. Nonetheless, the logical endpoint of improved intelligence was improved targeting. The Mavenites’ main goal in improving targeting was preventing loss of life among soldiers; they don’t seem to have devoted much attention to reducing civilian casualties.

Cukor and his team are the protagonists of Project Maven. But one important strand of the book is the role of the Big Tech companies. As Manson shows, Google (and particularly its employees) was initially reluctant to participate in military research. Over time, that reluctance disappeared internally rather than being overcome by Project Maven. Google and other large technology companies became part of Maven’s network of operations as they developed and tested AI tools.

More significant than this vanishing opposition is the consistent enthusiastic participation in developing AI for military use by the increasingly powerful data company Palantir. Manson’s final mention of Palantir, in the last pages of the final chapter, highlights the company’s involvement with the Israel Defence Force, or IDF, as well as the US military. While Microsoft disabled some cloud services to the IDF late last year, Manson notes, Palantir’s Alex Karp seems much more comfortable with the level of civilian deaths in IDF operations, despite Cukor’s evident discomfort with Karp’s statements.

Project Maven is structured around the three-part targeting process — “find; fix; finish” — plus a fourth section called “feedback.” There, Manson discusses ethics and accountability, including regulation of AI in weapons in international law. She occasionally refers to the Geneva Conventions or the law of armed conflict in the first three sections of the book, and some of her interviewees note that they could break military law and possibly wind up in jail if they target civilians. In the fourth section, she dives deeper into the question of regulation.

AI creates problems of accountability. If an algorithm determines what should be targeted, who is responsible? At the level of state responsibility, there is probably no difference between attributing the conduct of a soldier to the state that issues the orders and attributing the output of technology to the state that used it. When we move to the level of individual accountability, the problem is more acute.

Australia is currently discovering how difficult it is to ensure responsibility for alleged war crimes where direct person-to-person conduct is involved. But determining responsibility for targeting decisions would be even more complex. At least since the end of the second world war, “just following orders” is not a defence, so in principle doing what the AI instructed would not deflect responsibility. But it might be difficult to locate the specific human or humans ultimately responsible. If the soldier firing the weapon doesn’t have the information or the agency to challenge an AI-selected target, does responsibility shift upwards in the chain of command, and if so, where does it land?

Some of the people Manson quotes, as well as many governments, are confident that the existing law of armed conflict is adequate to regulate the use of AI for targeting. Indeed, some of them believe AI targeting already conforms with international law. That view is not universally accepted, however, even among governments, and some argue for new agreements to define acceptable use of AI. In the absence of comprehensive approach to regulation, two strands have emerged: a push to ban autonomous weapons and attempts to ensure that human soldiers retain control of AI-supported weapons. Neither seems likely to succeed in the near future.

Campaigners including Human Rights Watch’s Mary Wareham believe autonomous weapons should be banned by treaty. While Secretary-General Guterres supports an international ban on autonomous weapons, not enough governments want action. Wareham analogises efforts to ban autonomous weapons to the 1990s campaign for a treaty banning the use of landmines, which succeeded in 1997 and now numbers about three-quarters of countries as parties. But recent developments suggests that treaty is not a useful precedent for advocates of banning autonomous weapons. Ukraine and five other European states have withdrawn or declared an intention to withdraw, citing the fact that Russia is not a party and has used landmines in Ukraine.

The other strand for potential regulation of AI weaponry is a requirement for “meaningful human control.” The concept was initially proposed in 2016 by civil society group Article 36, named for Article 36 of Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions that requires governments to ensure that new weapons are consistent with international law. Article 36 presented meaningful human control as a framework requiring transparency, accurate information, opportunities for human intervention, and accountability.

Although Manson doesn’t discuss meaningful human control extensively in Project Maven, some experts, including the International Committee of the Red Cross, believe it would be a useful supplement to existing rules. The threshold requirement for the legal use of AI in targeting would be that the human soldier retains control over the decision to use the weapon. It is impossible to define meaningful human control exhaustively, but based on Article 36’s framework it means more than human decision-making as a backup for automated targeting.

Possibly the best we can expect is for governments to agree on some red lines for AI use overing cases where human decision-making is obviously absent, for example, or is too insignificant to the process. Nonetheless, like a ban on autonomous weapons, any agreement to subject military AI to meaningful human control seems unlikely at present. Unsurprisingly, in submissions to a UN report on military use of AI published in 2025, none of the three key members of the UN Security Council — the United States, China and Russia — advocated new regulation based on meaningful human control of AI use.

Without rules specifically banning autonomous weapons or regulating AI targeting, governments can only fall back on the existing law of armed conflict, including the principle of distinction, with all the uncertainty within those rules.

As the reader progresses through Project Maven, Manson’s concern about regulation and accountability becomes more evident. She seems to regard Cukor and at least most of the Mavenites as good-faith advocates of AI that supports rather than replaces human judgements about targeting. But developments after Cukor’s departure, particularly in the second Trump administration, raise doubts both for Manson and for Cukor himself. The question now is whether regulation under international law can catch up, even as some commentators declare the death of international law.

One final reflection: the back cover of Project Maven includes eight enthusiastic endorsements. Most reveal as much about the authors of the endorsers as they do about the book itself. Some liken the book to a gripping thriller; others see it as a warning about the dangers of AI. I would instead characterise it as a book of reportage, based on extensive research and interviewing, as well as years of experience reporting on the role of technology in security.

Unlike a thriller or a polemic, this book requires close attention from the reader but repays that attention with a detailed and insightful account of how we got here and where the technology might take us. Ironically, one of the by-products of the ubiquity of AI, the increased use of AI-generated news stories to replace human journalists, means that we may have less reporting of this quality in the future. Appreciate this book while you can. •

Project Maven: A Marine Colonel, His Team and the Dawn of AI Warfare
By Katrina Manson | W.W. Norton & Company | $52.95 | 406 pages

The post Rules of engagement appeared first on Inside Story.

To echo the Washington Post columnist David Ignatious, America is a nation both glowing and showing unmistakable signs of decline. “Our social cohesion has unravelled so much,” he writes, that “we often feel like two nations rather than one.” Trump and his administration presented one of those nations to the world using the commemoration as a vehicle for divisive propaganda and political gain.

The contrast with the celebrations for the bicentennial back in 1976 is stark. America was emerging from the traumas of the Vietnam war and Watergate; the economy, foreign policy and race were all cause for concern. Yet there was also a sense — as Gerald Ford said when he became president in August 1974 following Richard Nixon’s resignation — that America’s “long national nightmare is over” and the guardrails of democracy had held. People remember the feelings of patriotism and nostalgia those celebrations inspired.

Looming over this year’s celebrations are the midterm elections and the very real possibility of the Republicans losing the House and even the Senate. Either scenario would bring most of Trump’s autocratic and corrupt behaviour to an end — a fact that he and Republicans fully recognise.

House speaker Mike Johnson summed up their fears: “If we were to lose the midterms, heaven forbid, these Democrats, y’all, impeachment’s not even the big concern. They will turn every committee of Congress into an investigative body, and they’ll go after the president’s family, the cabinet, his donors and friends, half of you in this room will be targeted.”

But while Republicans facing voters in November are justifiably worried about their prospects, Trump seems to have little interest in helping them out, either on policy or electoral finances. Voters are most concerned about the cost of living, especially the impact of the Iran war on gas prices and the soaring costs of health insurance, healthcare and housing. Yet Trump has endlessly mocked mounting concerns about affordability, calling it a “hoax” perpetrated by Democrats, and has downplayed Republicans’ efforts to tackle cost-of-living pressures by refusing to sign a bipartisan housing bill.

“I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation,” he said in May. “I don’t think about anybody.” He was referring to the attention he was giving to negotiating an end to the unpopular war with Iran (still pending) but the remark went down like a lead balloon.

At the same time, with campaigning starting in earnest, Trump is sitting on some US$350 million in campaign funds lodged in his MAGA Inc. super PAC. Perhaps to hold close the funds he personally controls, perhaps to boost his standing in the polls, he has proposed a midterm election convention — a “Trumpapalooza” — to be held in September in Texas (a red state where, unusually, a key Senate race is virtually a dead heat). The Republican National Committee has proposed that state parties use the convention to raise funds for their local candidates.

Trump’s playbook for the midterms encompasses two broad approaches. The first involves undermining the upcoming elections and overturning voting rights. These include having Republican states gerrymander electoral boundaries at the expense of Democrats; illegally attempting to charge the US Postal Service with determining who can vote by mail and refusing to deliver ballots sent by anyone not included on federal mail voter lists; and demanding via the Department of Justice that states turn over sensitive voter information.

Trump is increasingly obsessed with having the SAVE America Act passed. This bill requires citizenship proof to vote, strict ID requirements for in-person and mail voting, and complete voter rolls to be submitted to the Trump administration by the states. He thinks this would eliminate noncitizen and fraudulent voting (extreme rarities); it would certainly make it harder for many disadvantaged Americans to vote.

The SAVE America Act doesn’t have the needed sixty votes in the Senate to overcome a filibuster, and Republican leaders are reluctant to get rid of the filibuster to pass the bill, as Trump has suggested. In a speech given at Mt Rushmore as part of the 4 July celebrations, he stated bluntly why he thinks this is so important: “If we terminate the filibuster as we should do and immediately vote for the SAVE America Act, then we will not lose an election for a hundred years.”

Trump’s second strategy for the midterms is a resort to the hoariest of right-wing tropes, with accusations that Democrats and immigrants are communists. This was a recurrent theme in his 4 July speeches — indeed, Reuters reports he warned about communism eighty-one times in the two weeks between 23 June (when a string of left-wing Democratic candidates won primary contests in New York) and 8 July.

“There is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land,” he said at Mt Rushmore, “including from newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life and our great success. You can be a communist, or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both.” Elsewhere, he described the Democratic Socialists, who have been surprisingly successful in recent primaries, as “animals.” He went on: “We have to stop this… horrible threat of cancer that’s permeating our country called communism.”

Here, Trump is attempting to revive the “red baiting” of the McCarthy era, which he learned about from his mentor, the sinister lawyer Roy Cohn. Trump sees the communist threat as an easy sell.  “All we have to do is define our opponent as being a communist or a socialist or somebody who is going to destroy our country,” he said last week.

For Democrats, the upcoming midterm elections are about just one goal — taking back the legislative branch of government. To do this they will need to convince voters, Democrats and Independents alike, that they can deliver on the issues that matter. Part of this involves dealing with young voters’ concern that the current, ageing generation of lawmakers is unable or unwilling to mount strong and consistent opposition to Trump.

Many younger and swing voters are looking for what can be called progressive populism — Medicare for All, taxing the rich, help with educational fees and childcare, and more social housing. So it’s not surprising that candidates who identify as Democratic Socialists have been successful in recent primaries. This success can be read as a rebuke to elected officials and a shift by Democratic voters to the left, but there is also clear evidence that a range of Democratic voices are choosing the candidates most likely to win in their districts.

It’s important to note that Democratic Socialist candidates — often with endorsements from elected officials including Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani — have only succeeded (at least to date) in solidly Democratic-leaning cities where their progressive policies (and, in most cases, their strong criticisms of Israel) are more popular.

In Texas, James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for the Senate seat currently held by John Cornyn (who lost the Republican primary to Trump’s candidate Ken Paxton), is one of those new voices. Probably best described as a liberal Democrat, Talarico is a thirty-six-year-old state legislator appealing to Texans looking for an alternative to the corrupt status quo most obviously demonstrated by Paxton, who was impeached by the Republican-controlled Texas House in 2023.

Talarico’s campaigning is an interesting blend of religion and progressive Democratic politics and optimism. His campaign messages appeal because they are so unlikely in this partisan era. He is against greedy billionaires who want to divide people, and for the power of love; he has shown a willingness to embrace political difference and invites the support of independents and Republicans who once supported Cornyn. His appeal has translated into fundraising far outpacing Paxton’s and polls that suggest the race is too close to call. Worried Republicans have resorted to vicious personal attacks.

The mood of Democratic voters is exemplified in the results of the Colorado primaries, held late last month. A surge of primary voters, angry at a do-nothing Congress, picked candidates without ties to Washington. House member Diana DeGette, a thirty-year incumbent also best described as a liberal Democrat, lost her primary to a youthful and somewhat controversial Democratic Socialist, Melat Kiros, who ran a savvy social media campaign arguing that DeGette was part of the party’s out-of-touch establishment.

In the race to succeed Democrat Jared Polis as governor, Colorado attorney-general Phil Weiser decisively won against senator Michael Bennet. Weiser argued that the sixty-nine lawsuits he has filed or joined against the Trump administration makes him better equipped to protect the state and its communities than Bennet, who is well-liked but whose eighteen years in Congress didn’t persuade voters he is the governor they want.

Given the list of Trump’s egregious actions against the state, it’s easy to see why Weiser’s argument appealed to voters. Trump has shifted the US Space Command headquarters out of the state, is trying to shut down Colorado’s globally recognised climate research centre and vetoed a water pipeline for drought-stricken farmers. Now he is requiring states to change the way they conduct elections or risk losing tens of millions of federal terrorism-prevention funds. Colorado has had mail-in and email voting for more than a decade and so Trump’s efforts to have the US Postal Service implement voting restrictions is being strongly resisted.

Trump is deeply unpopular in the state and residents are telling candidates they are tired of combative, partisan, us-versus-them political battles that are not solving their problems. Once a Republican state, Colorado’s rapidly growing population has become younger and highly educated. Political analysts largely attribute the collapse of the Republican party there to the rise of MAGA, which has created fertile ground for Democratic Socialists. Four of the ten Coloradans serving in the US House of Representatives are Republicans; of these, only Jeff Hurd (District 3) and Lauren Boebert (District 4) are expected — without Trump’s support — to retain their seats. Jeff Crank is slightly favoured in District 5 and Gabe Evans’s race in District 8 is considered a toss-up.

But the midterm elections are still four months away. With fighting continuing between Ukraine and Russia, an unresolved war in the Middle East, petrol prices, food prices and employment fluctuating, and Trump’s increasingly erratic language and vindictive decision-making, it’s impossible to predict how the American electorate will feel on 3 November. And, as the implosion of Graham Platner’s campaign in Maine demonstrates, it impossible to predict how candidates from both parties, especially those who are untested politically, will appear to those they seek to represent.

In a nation where getting out the vote is essential, having candidates with voter appeal will be vital. In a nation where the president has threatened the upcoming elections multiple times by multiple means, it is essential that state election officials and voters take coordinated action to defend democratic processes. And in a nation where trust in the federal government is at an all-time low, it is imperative that capable, ethical, and community-driven individuals to step forward and are voted into political service. •

The post Midterm manoeuvring appeared first on Inside Story.

Brigham was adopted into a working-class family in upstate New York. Feeling rootless and defective, he concocted fantasy lives for his birth parents, building a social worker’s stray comment about Vietnam into a conviction that his father fought there. From his early teens, he became consumed with the desire to find traces of his parents, poring over public records and visiting country graveyards. His search continued for decades in the face of incomprehension and resistance.

Brigham entered college keen to learn about the war, a fascination that merged with the quest for his birth father to create a career-defining white whale. College was followed by grad school, academic positions, travels to Indochina and successful books. Meanwhile, promising leads in his search for his parents kept turning into dead ends. Finally, commercial DNA testing cracked open the case and Brigham discovered the identity of both parents, now sadly deceased, and the grim circumstances that brought them together.

The book is a powerful testament to the emotional dislocations that adoptees can face. According to Brigham, the 1960s were adoption’s perfect storm, a time when sexual attitudes had liberalised but attitudes to illegitimacy had not. Vast numbers of American children were given up for adoption in that decade, and many had difficult lives, shuttled between neglectful and abusive foster homes or often, in rural areas, treated as unpaid farm labourers. Brigham claims that half of America’s homeless people have experienced foster care.

Writing of his own experience, he identifies adoption as a “primal wound.” As a child he feels shame and abandonment and a hunger for an ancestral identity, vividly imagining the “Ghost Kingdom” of his missing family. He is impatient with the frequent suggestion that he should be grateful for landing in a caring adoptive family. This view centres the perspective of the adoptive parents and mythologises the sacrifice of the birth mother, he argues, while dismissing the experience of the child. Even so, he acknowledges his experience is not universal: his adopted sister Jane doesn’t share his need to clarify her origins.

For Brigham, however, the search for a lineage is obsessive. Preoccupied with finding family resemblances, he writes off possible relatives for having body shapes dissimilar to his own but is then surprised when actual relatives look different. The urgent need for what he calls “genetic mirroring” produces a kind of essentialism. When he learns that an ancestor of his birth mother had migrated from the Shetland Islands 160 years earlier, he declares himself a Scot, observes that he too loves the sea, and hunts down island namesakes. Although the passing of generations has diluted any meaningful genetic connection, a rock-solid ancestral base has been found in a sea of uncertainty.

This is a True War Story has a satisfying arc. Brigham finds the family connection he longed for and loses some of the unsettled desperation that roughened his edges during his years of searching. There is a striking coincidence at the root of the book — that the combat photographer Bruce Atwell, whose work Brigham first wrote about in college, turns out to be his father — and it offers an emotional resolution when it is revealed. Like his father, he has become a storyteller of the war. Unfortunately, that revelation comes with almost a third of the book still to run. It drags a little as the author recounts the process of connecting with a large extended family.

Brigham makes extensive use of reconstructed dialogue that can sometimes sound forced. Children speak with maturity and perspective that belies their years and adults offer plainspoken wisdom straight from a country pulpit. Permeating everything is a folksy earnestness that may seem jarring to Australian readers. Brigham teaches at an elite college, but he is channelling the experience of the rural poor, who disproportionately struggle financially, die young, and serve in foreign wars. Urban irony and self-distancing are not central to their experience.

This is a True War Story mixes factual reporting with generous descriptions of family, friends and colleagues and occasional discussions of politics. Brigham’s story speaks to the intergenerational impact of social class in a country that “fights its battles on the backs of the poor.” His birth parents’ experiences of poverty and foster care made it more likely that he would experience them too. Breaking the cycle is a challenge, but the book presents an uplifting story of how it happened in one tenacious man’s life. •

This is a True War Story: My Improbable History with Vietnam
By Robert K. Brigham | University of Chicago Press | $45.99 | 264 pages

The post Ghost family appeared first on Inside Story.

I wheeled away from the screen and looked at her for a long minute. A colleague was passing and I called her into my office. “That,” she declared, peering over my shoulder, “is someone I’d want to know more about. She is a real person.”

What does that mean — a “real” person? To begin with, I think, Mary (as I’ll call her from now on) presents a face quite unlike the idealised female faces we see in magazines, movies, the media, advertising and, regrettably, AI-generated images. She had dark hair, sloping deep-set eyes, a wide mouth, and a broad forehead tapering to a small chin. This foreshortening of her face meant those ridiculous hats of her era were entirely wrong for her.

The little there is to know about Mary suggests she was intelligent, energetic, determined and practical. She and husband Joe (as he was widely known) were English, both having been born in Staffordshire. Mary (then Mary Turner) was a schoolteacher before their marriage in 1885. Joe came from a mining family that had known poverty and distress — his father’s death in a mining accident left Joe the main family breadwinner at just twelve. Mary’s brother William had emigrated to New South Wales and settled in Lithgow, and his letters home persuaded Mary and Joe that they too might have better prospects in Australia.

With Mary pregnant, Joe went first, in December 1885, following his brother-in-law to Lithgow where he quickly found work as a miner and built a four-room timber house for his family. Mary eventually arrived in 1887, having made the journey alone with baby George Sydney (known as Syd), the first of the couple’s nine children. All their children survived infancy, which has to be a testament to Joe’s ability to provide and Mary’s skilled parenting and management of the household.

Joe was elected to the NSW parliament in 1891 and to federal parliament in 1901. And so, for thirty years until he left politics in 1921, he was constantly away from home for parliamentary sittings, either in Sydney when the family was in Lithgow, or in Melbourne after the family had moved to Sydney. The rearing of their quiver-full of children fell mainly to Mary.

Mary and Joe must have corresponded during their separations but none of their letters appear to have survived. But among the scattering of records preserved in the National Archives of Australia and the National Library of Australia are many photographs of Mary, more than you might expect. (For comparison, no photograph appears to have survived of Ada Watson, prime minister Chris Watson’s first wife.)

I’ve studied them all, for it turns out that Mary Cook is one of those women, like Mary Gilmore, Kathleen Fitzpatrick and Margaret Walkom, with whom I long to spend time. I don’t go searching for these ghosts, they find me. Mary Cook looked me directly in the eye with the gentle but firm expectation that her story is important and worth sharing.

And so, if the textual evidence is slender but the photographic evidence is plentiful, let’s go with the latter. I’ve selected the three photographic portraits that seem to me to offer the richest insights into her life.

The photograph at the top of this essay was taken by renowned Sydney photographer May Moore. She and her photographer-sister Mina, based in Melbourne, were both known for their skill in creating dramatic effects with light and shadow, and May’s portrait of Mary Cook is a beautiful example.

I never tire of observing how the light gathers at the top of Mary’s head and slides down through the parting of her hair. The photographer has permitted the light to define the merest sliver of the sitter’s profile — her forehead, cheeks, nose, lips, even the eyelashes of her left eye. It pools softly on her shoulder to illuminate the pearls at her ears and throat, and to touch the lace on her dress and the posy of flowers Mary has inclined her head to examine.

The archival description dates the photograph to 1918, when Mary would have been fifty-five, but she looks much younger. It can’t have been taken any earlier than 1910 because that was when May Moore established her Sydney studio, but it’s possible that it was taken in 1913 to mark Joe becoming prime minister. (He was the leader of a recent fusion of several non-Labor groups calling itself the Liberal Party, only distantly related to today’s Liberal Party.) It was the high point thus far in Mary and Joe’s long, upwardly mobile journey from the coal-mining towns of Staffordshire.

As a young man, Joe had become a follower of Primitive Methodism, a sect of Methodism that aimed to “uplift” the working classes and advocated the right of everyone, by self-improvement, to use their own talents to improve their station in life. This exactly what Joe had done. Although opposed to gambling and the consumption of alcohol, he had no objection to the display of worldly success and, according to his principal biographer John Murdoch, was vain of his personal appearance and loved to mix with rich, distinguished people.

Possibly, then, the photograph reveals as much about Joe as Mary: that Joe was proud of his life and proud of his wife, proud of the jewels he could give her and proud that he could afford such a fashionable studio. The sweet moment of repose captured in May Moore’s photograph renders it unlike the style of Mary’s later portraits and I wonder whether she saw herself in it or felt she was being assigned a part to play. The Moore sisters did, after all, specialise in portraying performers and writers.

With nine children swarming around her Mary certainly had little time for sitting about staring at flowers, though by then, fortunately, Joe had sufficient means to pay for domestic help for her. His burgeoning career had enabled the Cooks to move from their original cottage in Lithgow into a large, two-storey house on the main street. When they sold up in Lithgow in 1901 the inventory of their possessions shows how quickly they had covered themselves with the comforts and conveniences of Victorian middle-class existence. Their ever-increasing social status can be tracked from their subsequent moves through some of Sydney’s more salubrious suburbs: Marrickville, Baulkham Hills, Summer Hill and finally, in retirement, Bellevue Hill.

The Bellevue Hill house had expansive views over Sydney Harbour and was large enough to contain the lavish furniture the couple had accumulated over the years after they left Lithgow. They named it “Silchester” in memory of their Staffordshire home towns: Silverdale (Joe); Chesterton (Mary). Then they alighted upon a canny approach to downsizing. They demolished the house, built a block of luxury flats on the site, selected the best one for themselves, and rented out the rest.

If this woman was standing for prime minister you’d be interested, right? You want someone competent, experienced, trustworthy, tough but also empathetic? Yes you do, and that’s what I see in Mary here, but unfortunately it was still many years before women were elected to the Australian federal parliament, and in the meantime the talents of many were confined to the domestic sphere.

Lady Mary Cook, mid-1920s. National Archives of Australia M3606, 16

The photograph of Mary was taken between 1922 and 1927. Joe had left politics and accepted an appointment as Australia’s high commissioner in London. It was taken at Angus Faith’s studio in Hanover Square, and for the occasion Mary has had her hair waved (it was naturally straight) and has selected a silk blouse embellished with sequins, with her customary pearls. One necklace, which she also wore for the May Moore portrait, has two extra pearls suspended by what appear to be tiny strings of seed pearls. The viewer is drawn to Mary’s deep, thoughtful eyes (blue, according to her passport), but although she declines to meet our gaze, I feel comfortable with her.

The challenges Mary faced went further than providing a domestic haven for nine children and a busy husband. The defining feature of Joe’s political life was a complete shift in his principles and allegiances from Labor to conservative, from Free Trade to Protectionism, and from republicanism to ardent support for monarchy and Empire. Cook began public life as a trade unionist, and he was an obvious choice of local candidate in Lithgow when an infant Labor Party was being formed in New South Wales after the failed strikes of 1890. He became one of thirty-five new, inexperienced Labor men to take a seat in parliament in 1891.

Three years later Cook refused to commit to a pledge of caucus solidarity because, he said, he wanted to be free to represent the people in his electorate who had voted for him. In the election that year he stood as an “independent” Labor candidate and easily held his seat. Free Trader George Reid, needing Labor support to form government, offered Cook the post of postmaster-general on a salary of £1500 per year, and Cook accepted. This was what enabled the family to move to their fine new house and fill it with undreamed-of luxuries.

Cook’s political detractors were vicious in their condemnation of his apparent opportunism and surrender to self-interest, and from Labor there could never be any forgiveness: Cook was branded and is still remembered as a traitor, the original “Labor rat.” His most recent biographer, David Headon, notices that a significant absentee from Cook’s funeral in 1947 was the then-prime minister and undisputed hero of the labour movement, Ben Chifley. Never would Chifley’s “light on the hill” wrap its warmth around the reputation of Joe Cook.

How was Mary affected by her husband’s abandonment of all his early political beliefs and allegiances? Did she lose friends of her own? What was Joe like at home as he gradually became more irascible and virulent in his opinions? Did the children scatter to the back garden when he was in a temper?

None of Cook’s biographers — John Murdoch, Frank Crowley, Graham Bebbington, John Rickard, Zachary Gorman and David Headon — have bothered much with these questions. They nod respectfully to Mary by noting how, as a former teacher, she had greatly assisted her young, poorly educated husband by spending her evenings correcting his compound arithmetic and reading to him so he could practice his shorthand. But after that the biographers (Headon is an exception) have little further use for Mary.

John Murdoch does acknowledge that the linked decisions to marry Mary and emigrate to New South Wales “immeasurably enriched” Joe’s life. Mary created a home atmosphere of “rest and contentment,” he says, which was important to Joe who was often “tired” after prolonged work. She was a woman of “energy and resource” and the “ideal wife” for him throughout the sixty-two years of their marriage.

Murdoch will not allow that a mother of nine might also be “tired” and doesn’t pause to wonder if Joe was the “ideal” husband for Mary. And consider this: sixty-two years of marriage by itself signifies nothing in an era when divorce was difficult for everyone, and unthinkable for a man in Cook’s position. Some of those periods of “rest and contentment” no doubt resulted in the arrival of the nine children, but did Mary actually want to be nine times a mother? As with most women of her era, her choices were few. If there had been a divorce, what could she have done? Returned to teaching?

Interestingly, before Mary left Staffordshire in 1886 she obtained references from the education authority under which she had trained as a teacher, presumably to give her something to fall back on should she need it. One official noted that in her final year of training Mary had gained a pass rate of 96 per cent. None of Cook’s biographers have noticed this. Why would they? You don’t go looking if you haven’t asked the right questions.

This third photo shows Mary Cook in court dress. The photograph is dated 1926 but other evidence suggests it was taken for a court held at Buckingham Palace in the English summer of 1927. Joe’s appointment as High Commissioner is about to end. The Cooks have been living at 36 Queen’s Gate in Kensington, near the Royal Albert Hall, and mightily enjoying themselves by all accounts. Joe’s biographers have judged his performance in the diplomatic aspects of the role competent rather than distinguished, but he did work hard and successfully at promoting immigration and investment in Australia, and he and Mary relished the social side.

Dame Mary Cook, 1927. National Archives of Australia M3606, 16

Joe had developed a taste for high society during sixteen months he spent with prime minister Billy Hughes representing Australia at the Imperial War Conference in London in 1918, and in Paris for the peace conference in 1919. He was appointed Knight Grand Cross in the Order of St Michael and St George in 1918 and became Sir Joseph Cook. Mary and the family stayed home during that trip, but now, as Lady Mary Cook, she and various of their children went with him.

Joe’s new position meant hosting and attending numerous luncheons, receptions and dinners. He and Mary attended royal garden parties, launches of ships and planes, lunch with Mrs Winston Churchill, “At Homes” with Mrs Neville Chamberlain, Mrs Stanley Baldwin and the Archbishop of Canterbury, and society weddings, notably that of the Duke of York (the future King George VI) to the Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon.

The absolute pinnacle of social prestige was an invitation (“command”) to attend court, where young, unmarried women from the upper crust would make their social debut by being “presented” to the monarch. Married women such as Mary could also be presented.

It was a highly ritualised event but fortunately for outsiders like Mary and Joe, the Lord Chamberlain’s Office issued a guidebook on court dress. Included were advertisements from specialist tailors and outfitters who could supply all the clobber one needed and advice on how to wear it. The 1921 edition instructed that for ladies, feathers, veils and trains had been abolished, but in Mary’s 1927 photograph she is certainly wearing “Court Dress with feathers and train,” as stipulated on her invitation card. The previous instruction has obviously been reversed.

Unmarried women had to wear white, and their headdress was to consist of two ostrich feathers only. Married women could wear colour, as Mary seems to have done, but their headdress had to be a “Prince of Wales” plume consisting of three feathers, the central feather being higher than the rest. The length of the dress’s train was also prescribed. Mary wears the decorations of a Dame Commander of the British Empire, an honour she’d been awarded the previous year. To celebrate their attendance at court women often had their photographs taken at one of London’s prestigious studios, and Mary chose Hay Wrightson in New Bond Street. Lafayette was another popular choice.

For me there are two striking features of this portrait. First, Mary again wears that favourite necklace with the suspended pearls that was obviously so meaningful for her, surely a gift from Joe from way back although not as far back as Staffordshire, I think. This was not a trinket bought at a country fair by a poor young man. (That I would like to see.)

Second, Mary wears glasses for her court photograph. How many women would do that? For an occasion as important as this most would surely leave their glasses in their handbag, and indeed I’ve studied many court photographs and in none of them are the women wearing glasses. One’s character and personality (and weaknesses) were not to be on show. It was all subsumed into the ritual.

And yet here is Mary Cook, just being herself, a real person. She attended at least two other courts during her London years and wore glasses in all her photographs. (Joe, on the other hand, needed glasses for reading but rarely wore them in public, and certainly not for photographs.) It’s possible that Mary was shortsighted and needed her glasses during the formal proceedings to help her manage her train and to perform the tricky act of walking backwards when required. (It was a terrible breach of etiquette to turn one’s back on the monarch.) The glasses also suggest that here was someone who had not forgotten that she had begun married life scrubbing her own floors and stirring the family’s washing in a copper with a stick.

Mary’s DBE recognised “her services in connection with visitors to London from the Commonwealth of Australia” and was not solely for her work with the Red Cross, as John Murdoch believed. (It was mistake repeated by Frank Crowley; Zachary Gorman doesn’t mention Mary’s DBE at all.) Dame Mary, as she was known thereafter, supported a variety of causes and was as active as Joe in promoting immigration to Australia (he and she being perfect exemplars, of course). Most of the biographers fall short of mentioning that Joe’s social prominence could not have been achieved without her.

Or indeed his career success in general. Joe was able enough and certainly hard working, but although he acted the part of a statesman, he lacked a statesman’s vision and capacity to inspire others. Perhaps it was Mary who had the greater talent and ambition? She who plotted and planned, dreamed of and schemed? Biographer Graham Bebbington concedes (where the other biographers do not) that she was a formidable person who did dominate her husband in some things. Shrewdly, Mary could have assessed the marriageable men in her community and thrown in her lot with Joe Cook because he offered the best prospects and seemed the most biddable.

Without Mary, Joe’s highest achievement might have been a job as an accountant to some firm in Stoke-on-Trent, and the closest he would get to Buckingham Palace a day trip to watch the changing of the guard.

Mary was unable to attend Joe’s funeral in 1947 because she was suffering from dementia. She died in September 1950 and her ashes placed next to Joe’s at the Northern Suburbs Crematorium in Sydney.

On balance, the evidence does suggest that Mary and Joe shared the same aspirations. My point is that, as so often happens, women’s compliance is assumed, not interrogated. If, for the sake of the exercise, we flip the power in the relationship from him to her, we notice niggling, ragged little ends: questions unasked, facts unchecked, assumptions untested, alternative perspectives unexplored.

In 1992 Diane Langmore published a study of ten Australian prime ministerial wives (ending with Hazel Hawke) and was struck by how little had typically been said about them. Her book is a fascinating and successful attempt at filling that gap. However, of the six pre-first world war wives — Jane (Jeanie) Barton, Pattie Deakin, Ada Watson, Florence Reid, Margaret Fisher and Mary Cook — Langmore selected only Pattie Deakin for her book.

The lives of the rest are largely unknown beyond glimpses in their husbands’ biographies. There has been little exploration of these six women as individuals, and no consideration of them as a cohort. No one has wondered how well acquainted they were with each other, and what advice and encouragement might have been shared among them, across political boundaries, as they attempted to fulfill a role they may never have sought or expected. Their support for their husbands constitutes an entirely unrecognised contribution to the making of the Australian Commonwealth. •

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O’Connor adopts a “show, don’t tell” approach to debunking some of our society’s most banal and unhelpful narratives about technology and work — among them the idea that AI will “free up” cognitive load and enable people to take on more creative and satisfying tasks and enjoy more leisure. Through nine lively chapters organised into sections on the “mind,” “body” and “soul,” she introduces us to many different kinds of people who work with, around and under highly automated and AI-infused systems, including coders, translators, drivers, warehouse workers, miners and screenwriters.

What emerges is not a ledger of winners and losers but a set of skilfully drawn portraits of power, self-awareness, hard choices and collective contestation. None of O’Connor’s informants is beguiled by grand narratives of human liberation, and none seems to accept at face value the idea that AI is “just a tool.” For O’Connor and many of her interviewees, the question of whether any particular job is robotised always co-exists with the question of whether and how human beings are being made more robot-like when they are forced to work in highly automated systems.

Where things stand within any particular occupation is, O’Connor observes, often detectable from the words people choose they use to talk about their jobs:

“We send him away, then we send him back,” the miner had said about the autonomous truck. Compare that to what the Amazon workers said: “The robot is moving and you have to move with the robot.” Or, indeed, compare it to what Rebecca, the translator, had said: “You still have to be quite fastidious in receiving all this machine translation output, and that’s exhausting, it’s stressful.” All of which is to say, sure, technology might be “just a tool,” but if you’re not the one with the tool in your hand, you’re not the master carpenter, you’re the screwdriver, or, worse, you’re what’s getting screwed.

One of the real strengths of We Are Not Machines is O’Connor’s deftness in showing how AI is, and isn’t, the latest act in a centuries-long drama of worker alienation in response to industrial capitalism. The varieties of anxiety, danger, resentment, acceptance, exit and resistance she chronicles are never detached from the history of capitalism and its critics. In describing the risks of machine users becoming machine-like, for instance, she quotes Ruskin: “It is not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided; but the men — divided into mere segments of men — broken into small fragments and crumbs of life.”

The hypermodern Amazon warehouses that bring the shelf to the worker (rather than the other way around) — and rely on a remote global workforce of “humans in the loop” to oversee mistakes — can be seen, she says, as a new iteration of Henry Ford’s moving assembly line. Appropriately enough, the American engineer F.W. Taylor plays a recurrent role as the architect of the most notorious system for using “time and task” techniques to deskill and speed up workers.

But O’Connor hasn’t written another weary “it’s capitalism, stupid” narrative. This is largely because she has a finely tuned ear for workers’ descriptions of the ways AI-infused systems shape their inner lives at work.

She tells us, for instance, about the silent mantra that Affan, a human “GO-AI Associate” for Amazon in Costa Rica, recites while watching videos of people putting items onto canvas shelves in nine-hour shifts. Faced with a 99.9 per cent accuracy rate requirement and the need to watch approximately 1200 ten-second videos a shift, Affan’s time before the screen is accompanied by the prayer, “Please God, save me from a defect, please God, save me from a defect.”

Poignantly evocative, too, are her presentations of translators’ lives and perceptions before, during and after the imposition of AI-based software. The creativity and sense of meaningfulness of translating from scratch shines through one translator’s explanation of the process:

[Y]ou take a message, a part of the message… then you render it in the other language, mostly through the equivalence of expression, the equivalence of feeling. “If I was thinking this, how would I say it?” That becomes automatic — it feels almost automatic. Sometimes you get stuck [but] if I am hitting the flow, then it feels fantastic.

Having to edit a machine translation, however, is “a bulkier process in your mind,” says Majkic, “it’s less rewarding, it takes more cognitive effort, not less.” In the words of another translator, Petr:

When someone presents you with a solution, and you’re looking at that, and you’re supposed to make it sound natural. It’s difficult to come up with your own solution… I compare this to counting from one to a hundred: one, two, three four — with someone whispering in your ear some random numbers. Imagine that. It’s so frustrating. That, to me, is what machine translation post-editing feels like.

O’Connor doesn’t present the degradation of translation work as something afflicting only the translators, either. End-users of the work — the readers and watchers of the films and TV series being translated — receive more literal translations that might be comprehensible but are also “flat and boring and uninteresting.” The loss here isn’t merely of “quality,” it is also of people’s capacity to recognise what “quality” is or be aware that any alternative might be possible in a market flooded with “good enough” products.

Noting that this, too, isn’t a new dynamic, O’Connor quotes George Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier: “Mechanisation leads to the decay of taste, the decay of taste leads to the demand or machine-made articles and hence to more mechanisation, and so a vicious circle is established.”

O’Connor’s main example of a group of workers for whom the “AI is just a tool” maxim seems plausibly true is software engineers. Most of them view AI tools as a welcome addition to their workflow because they don’t see them as affecting the part of their job they really value, which is problem solving rather than simply writing code. Nor were AI tools forced on this group: because they wield relatively great labour market power, they retain control over whether and how to use them.

But they are very far from representative. For creatives, educators and carers, the application of productivity and efficiency values — even before they were expressed in AI form — seems like a category error in any attempt to grasp the purpose and value of their work. O’Connor depicts the sense of violation felt by artists, for instance, who see the idea of AI as simply a “tool” as profoundly misconceived. For them, it is “far more like an end-results machine than a new kind of paintbrush.” As the historian Lewis Mumford once explained, “the purpose of art has never been labour-saving but labour-loving, a deliberate elaboration of function, form, and symbolic ornament to enhance the interest of life itself.”

In care work, too, technology-reliant approaches provide new iterations of old ways of missing the point. Debates about AI-infused care robots are a distraction unless they recognise what is lost or degraded when we attempt to organise something inherently and profoundly relational (beautifully elaborated by sociologist Allison Pugh as “connective labour”) as if it were an industrial commodity to be produced via principles of scientific management.

The Buurtzorg nurses O’Connor interviewed (who have a high level of worker autonomy, are geographically embedded, and deliver client-centred, defragmented care) were aghast at the idea that performing “simple tasks” was a “waste” of their training. “You are not only there for that simple task, you are there to see the people, to see the life, to see what you are dealing with,” said one. “You can’t take care of someone who doesn’t trust you, because they won’t tell you the whole story, because sometimes they think it’s not important, but even the little signals can be something that’s really wrong.”

O’Connor doesn’t merely observe the multiple clashes between the AI-enabled Taylorism and the values that hold us together as human beings with bodies, minds and souls. She also delves into the structures of power that make contestation over those matters meaningful.

One of her key case studies describes underground miners in Sweden who don’t evince categorical hostility to digital technology and automation, and show openness, creativity and collaboration in how such systems might be integrated into their work. She describes how the agreement they reached about self-driving underground trucks and loaders reflected genuine give-and-take: how worker concerns that digital surveillance systems would drift from safety mechanisms into forms of discipline and speeding-up were worked through to the parties’ mutual satisfaction.

In that case, says O’Connor, the understanding and compromise on display rested on “a very human edifice: a system based on relationships of trust, underpinned by a careful balance of power. It struck me that it required a great deal of skill, effort and emotional intelligence to maintain it.” It was a system underpinned by collective bargaining not only at enterprise-level but also nationally, sectorally and locally. Employers and unions (the latter with 70 per cent membership density) were able to reach sector-specific agreements lasting one to three years within a system that, by its nature, is more responsive than one-size-fits-all laws imposed sporadically in the face of powerful political resistance.

Integral to the Swedish miners’ approach is a reliable and comprehensive welfare safety net that provides 80 per cent of pre-employment earnings to displaced workers. Through this lens, whether you see AI as a “tool” is not a matter of individual preference or psychological flexibility but intimately related to institutional arrangements that reflect collective workplace power.

The nature of industrial power is also critical in O’Connor’s account of the Writers Guild of America’s agreement with film and TV producers that set the conditions for writers to control when AI is used. The new contract didn’t ban the technology, but it did remove the economic incentive for companies to use it to displace writers by specifying that AI content could not be classified as “source material” merely to be “revised” for lower rates.

The agreement wasn’t merely the product of enlightened and flexible thinking on both sides. It emerged from an industrial relations framework that supported sector-based contracts and permitted industrial action, in this case a 148-day strike in which writers were supported by actors and support from Teamsters and United Auto Workers. As well as generating countervailing power, the process ensured the issue wasn’t metabolised by workers as a private source of shame, lack of training or bad choices. By making the issue public and visible, says O’Connor, workers felt “as if the wider public was also on their side.”

We Are Not Machines concludes with persuasive observations about the importance of attending carefully to how we talk, and therefore think, about work and technology. It is impossible to disagree with O’Connor’s observation that “wave,” “tsunami” and other metaphors “encourage us to see this process as analogous to a powerful force of nature — something that cannot be controlled, but can only be prepared for, and then mopped up after.” As she says, “new technology doesn’t just unfold. It never has. It is created by people and implemented by people.”

Nor, she argues, should we accept the thin, desiccated view of humanity that makes up Silicon Valley’s view of progress: the idea that we are merely slower, stupider, weaker and more biased versions of the machines. Anyone who doubts her point — and in fact everyone that doesn’t — should urgently read the Papal encyclical Magnifica Humanitas.

O’Connor writes brilliantly, too, about the importance of not feeling boxed in when we ask difficult and complicated questions about where AI belongs and how it should operate:

To say you don’t want AI to clone musicians does not also mean you don’t want protein-folding, antibiotics, low child mortality rates or indoor plumbing. That is a ludicrous mental box to put oneself into. And people don’t do it with any other kind of produce. If you think heroin is bad, you don’t worry that people will think you are also against paracetamol.

O’Connor guides us, instead, to some better starting questions. She cites Neil Postman who suggested in his 1992 book Technopoly that we ask: “What is the problem to which this technology is the solution? And whose problem is it?” To Postman’s questions, O’Connor adds another, “Are there any other ways to solve the problem?” To these, I would perhaps suggest one more that emerges from her account: what structures are we building to enable answers to these questions to be meaningfully debated rather than simply imposed?

O’Connor is to be applauded for insisting we centre human agency when we talk about how AI is designed and introduced into workplaces, that we always ask who decides. The next step in the analysis — and one beyond the scope of her book — is to ask why we so often accept the formations of industrial power and corporate power inherited from the last century as “givens,” as if they are features of the natural landscape (“Norway has mountains,” “Australia is flat”) rather than as structures we have built and can choose to maintain or change.

If we know Taylorism is deeply corrosive to the forms of trust and relationality that are critical to care, for example, why do we increasingly choose to provide care via private equity companies, the institutional vehicles perhaps least capable of reversing disastrous low-trust, high-fragmentation “time and task”-based approaches? Why do we persist with collective bargaining structures that (with narrow and highly conditional exceptions) confine collective worker voices to the enterprise level and narrow range of “permitted matters”? These institutional structures were built in the time before AI, and whether and how we continue to use them is up to us. •

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Janet Flanner is not a familiar name today, but by any measure her career is worth knowing about. Born in Indianapolis in 1892, she saw in her hometown’s endless tabletop of corn fields a life of excruciating boredom. At age twenty, she reacted to her father’s suicide by choosing to live wildly, careering out of her university studies and into a succession of journalism jobs she swiftly made her own. Unwisely married, she escaped to New York and then into a relationship with actress and writer Solita Solano, with whom she decided to emigrate to Paris in 1922.

Like so many other young Americans, Flanner was intent on writing about “beauty with a capital B” in the City of Light. With aspirations on a level with Henry James, Laurence Sterne and “any of the Brontës,” she picked up the odd bit of journalism while pouring her early energies into a novel. Cubicle City (1926) was the result. Though it has since been grouped with landmark works of queer literature including Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928), Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928) and Djuna Barnes’s The Ladies Almanac (1928), its lack of contemporary success tempered Flanner’s willingness to persevere with fiction. As a friend said, her desire to write fiction exceeded her talent at it.

But Flanner’s ability with the real was something else. Her letters about life in Paris to family and friends back in the United States sparkled. Whether she described the people strolling through the Tuileries Gardens, what was being said around the nightclubs and galleries, or the dramas and scandals of the American expatriates who increasingly crowded the cafes and bistros, she had a talent. As friend Jane Grant said, Flanner’s letters were “so gay and attractive.”

Moreover, in Grant’s view, such letters would fill a vital gap in the new, weekly magazine her husband had recently founded. “The New Yorker,” Harold Ross famously declared, “will be a reflection in word and picture of metropolitan life. It will be human. Its general tenor will be one of gaiety, wit and satire, but it will be more than a jester. It will not be what is commonly called highbrow or radical. It will be what is commonly called sophisticated, in that it will assume a reasonable degree of enlightenment on the part of its readers.”

Finding a Paris correspondent was part and parcel of such a pitch: Ross expected his readers to be versed in all things French and regard Paris as the world’s centre of art and fashion. For them, Flanner’s letters — as Grant soon wrote to her — were “just the thing.” Thus, for $40 a pop, she should commence sending to the magazine 1000-word letters containing “anecdotal and incidental stuff familiar to Americans… Dope on fields of the arts and a little on fashion, perhaps… There should be lots of chat about people seem [sic] about and in it all he [Ross] wants a definite personality injected.”

Flanner swiftly realised that tone and voice were more important than subject matter. Ross was an editor obsessed with finding the precise word, with prose that was direct and as tight as a drum. Thus, Flanner’s voice became cultivated but detached, wry and often pithy. It resulted in letters that were endlessly amusing. Ulysses, she wrote, was the book “the civilised half of a half-civilised world has long been humbly waiting.” The dadaist writer Tristan Tzara was “a great man of small stature.” A book by Jean Cocteau provided “an hour’s delight” and a memorial to the inventor of camembert cheese unfortunately resembled “a slice of gruyere.” “There is no justice,” she added.

Signed “Genêt,” Flanner’s letters began appearing in September 1925. She would continue filing them — albeit with breaks — for another fifty years. And the magazine she likened at this time to an “oversized minnow learning how to swim” soon became the blue whale of the literary and publishing world.

Mark Braude’s Typewriter and the Guillotine tells the story of that evolution through Flanner’s experiences and work. It is the most notable and most interesting thread of his book, and if it is a story told before — in Brenda Wineapple’s fine biography of Flanner (1989) and in Ben Yagoda’s comprehensive history of the New Yorker, About Town (2000) — it gets a welcome retelling here.

Perhaps most refreshing is Braude’s focus on the women in that “Lost Generation” of artists in Paris. While Hemingway, Joyce and the others make their due appearances, Braude pays more attention to the innovative women also working at their craft and enjoying life on the continent. Cameo appearances by Gertrude Stein, Alice Toklas, Nancy Cunard, Collette, Edith Wharton and more are enlivened by striking details: Djuna Barnes’s preference for nude suntanning, for example, or Toklas’s single-minded interest in herbs.

A central conceit of the book is that the New Yorker’s evolution paralleled an evolution in Flanner’s work. At first, Braude writes, Flanner wrote in a “casual, loose style,” conversational and reminiscent of the cafes in which she gathered information, and left it to editors to refine her prose. Soon, however, she was doing that herself.

The context of her work also evolved. If the Paris she initially wrote of was simultaneously elegant and rough, glittering and squalid, it was also an old-world metropolis in a period of sustained change, where iconic cafes were unceremoniously shuttered and new fashions and ideas in art were constantly swirling. But Flanner rarely wrote about the “lingering sense of mourning” that abided in Paris. Exacerbated by Europe’s economic uncertainty and social unrest, the trauma of the first world war arguably lay at the root of the hedonism and pursuit of abandon charted by Flanner’s letters.

This was not a subject Flanner was prepared to probe: as Wineapple wrote, she believed her Genêt persona was “a high-class gossip columnist.” It couldn’t do that kind of work. Nor was the New Yorker pushing Flanner to do so. As magazine colleague E.B. White once joked, the only strong political stance the New Yorker took in the 1930s was on a proposal to relocate the information booth at Pennsylvania Station. It simply was not part of the magazine’s outlook to be overtly political or so engaged.

This began to change in the 1930s, when Flanner started regularly visiting Germany. At first, her attention to the darkness amid the glitter was fleeting: writing in 1931, she acknowledged that Germany had produced “workers without work and capitalists without capital,” that there was “terrible want in certain quarters.” But, as Braude notes, Flanner then “moved quickly from that gloomy material” to the giddy decadence of the Weimar Republic’s restaurants and cabarets and general party atmosphere.

Two years later — by which time Adolf Hitler had been sworn in as Germany’s chancellor — the darker facets of the country were clear. Signs outside towns announced that Jews were not welcome, Nazi flags were everywhere, and the harassment of foreigners and Jews was not even disguised. During one trip, Flanner saw a Jewish boy “being marched down the street with a placard around his neck, confessing to the sin of kissing a non-Jewish girl.” And yet still her despatches shied away. As she wrote lightly, “All over Europe, 1933 has been a worrying kind of year.”

The New Yorker didn’t want her to look closer. “AVOID DANGER TAKE NO CHANCES,” the magazine telegrammed when news of riots in Paris reached American shores. The magazine needn’t have bothered: when she realised she couldn’t get through the crowded streets to see the action, Flanner left to have a beer at a brasserie with friends.

As time went on, though, that detachment, that deliberate inattention, became untenable. Flanner’s friends and social circles increasingly acknowledged there might be another war in Europe, and the social unrest evident in those riots continued to swell. By the second half of 1934, convinced Germany was going to “come and gobble France as sure as we sit here,” Flanner was pitching to Harold Ross a profile of the German chancellor. She was second-guessing herself, conscious of her limits and uncertain whether she could transcend them to write about such an important subject. Ross, meanwhile, was reluctant: he had earlier vetoed an interview with Mussolini as “out of bounds for us” and thought serious current affairs material was ill-suited for what he persisted in calling a “humour magazine.”

When it went ahead, the resulting three-part profile didn’t entirely vindicate either Flanner or Ross. Flanner had been fascinated by Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will and aroused by the magnitude and precision of the German military she saw at the Nuremberg rally in 1935. But conversations with everyday Germans and a prolonged period of reading Hitler’s speeches and writings, including Mein Kampf, convinced Flanner that Hitler was a fanatic, that Germans were crazy, that war was likely, and that she shared all anti-Nazi attitudes. And yet she feared a profile saying as much would be used as crude anti-Nazi propaganda. As Braude writes, keenly, “She was a writer, not a publicist. She was certainly no diplomat.”

And so Flanner decided to write that profile in the style she would use for anybody, writing of Hitler’s life without any mention of whether people might agree with his views. She included a considerable amount of information about Nazi dogma, the number of bodies Hitler had climbed over in his scramble for power, and the violent outlook at the heart of the Nazi regime. Yet there was also a measure of detachment and wryness that seemed incongruous. As it began: “Dictator of a nation devoted to splendid sausages, cigars, beer and babies, Adolf Hitler is a vegetarian, teetotaller, non-smoker and celibate.”

It marked a change nonetheless. In 1936, when he asked Flanner to cover the Berlin Olympics, Ross added a new request — that she “get something of the [German] political and economic situation” into her work. And, particularly once the Spanish civil war broke out, Flanner focused more and more on political and military developments in Europe. Over the next three years, the tone of detachment faded and a sense of immediacy and presence took root. “It’s melancholic to see,” she wrote in May 1938, “how quickly humanity, if left free after its initial success, deserts the early, earnest union that gave its cause strength and squabbles itself to bits.”

Within two years, recognising the Genêt persona and style was now fundamentally wrong for the moment, Flanner began signing her columns with her own name. She would not return to Genêt until after Paris had been liberated.

Braude tells this story well, with evocative prose and a sharp eye for the tangible detail: readers will encounter many smells and tastes in this book. Less successfully, he also tries to graft another story onto Flanner’s life — that of German serial killer Eugen Weidmann.

In short, fragmentary chapters spliced between chapters about Flanner, creating an ominous drum beat through the book’s first two-thirds, Braude tells of how this social outcast and misfit turned criminal. Imprisoned in Germany for theft, Weidmann and several accomplices escaped to Paris with a plan to enrich themselves by kidnapping and ransoming rich foreigners.

The men were inept, and soon turned to murder. Weidmann killed six people, including a young American woman, Jean De Koven, unleashing a short and dramatic police hunt in the latter half of 1937 that ended with a shoot-out at a villa just outside Paris. Tried and convicted — a task made easier by his willingness to confess — Weidmann was executed, in public, by guillotine, in June 1939.

Given the geopolitical tensions and anxieties as well as the American press attention engendered by De Koven’s murder, it was no surprise that the trial took on a broader significance than its senseless and squalid crimes deserved. The prosecution and defence, for example, tried to claim Weidmann was representative of a broader German outlook and nature — of violence, bloodthirstiness and depravity. Told in hasty and cluttered chapters, the story of Weidmann’s trial is profoundly anti-climactic, not the least because of Braude’s decision to open the book with the scene of Weidmann’s execution.

According to Braude, strong parallels in Flanner and Weidmann’s lives warrant their stories being told together. But the parallels are generic and strained: “Both were foreigners in France… Both adapted quickly to their new surroundings… Both longed for beauty.” The intersection of their lives, meanwhile, is momentary. While Flanner reported on Weidmann’s trial and execution, nothing suggests it left a deep impression on her.

As a mark of her evolution, the fact she covered the trial is telling. As Braude writes, “She hadn’t come [to Paris] to write about decapitated murderers.” But the more important mark is surely that of her engagement with the looming Nazi shadow in the lead-up to the second world war.

Flanner certainly saw that. Her coverage of war crimes perpetrated by the Nazis, her reportage of the Nuremberg trials and her work on the Nazi looting of priceless cultural artefacts were indefatigable. And they inflected the New Yorker’s style and outlook thereafter.

As Ross wrote to her, in June 1946, “I think our transition to peace, art, amusement, frivolity, etc, will be gradual, and probably the magazine will never get back to where it was.” •

The Typewriter and the Guillotine: An American Journalist, a German Serial Killer, and Paris on the Eve of WWII
By Mark Braude | Grand Central Publishing | $65.99 | 421 pages

The post Just the thing appeared first on Inside Story.

The inquiry’s head, acting justice Robert Hulme, this week found “a reasonable doubt” about the guilt of three of the six — Ilija Kokotovic, Joseph Kokotovic and Mile Nekic. Hulme referred his findings to the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal, which will now consider whether their convictions should be quashed. But he declined to question the convictions of the other three — Vjekoslav Brajkovic, Maksimilian Bebic and Anton Zvirotic — each of whom continues to protest their innocence more than twenty years after being released from jail.

The six men, all young tradies in Sydney and Lithgow at the time, were arrested on 8 February 1979 after a seventh man calling himself Vico Virkez contacted state police. Virkez told them he had become embroiled in a Croatian nationalist bomb plot against Yugoslavia’s communist government and wanted to expose it before harm was done. Police raids followed, leading to one of the longest criminal trials in British Commonwealth history and the six men’s conviction in February 1981. Each was sentenced to fifteen years’ jail and served seven to eight years before being paroled.

Gradually, though, an alternative scenario began building up. According to this version, Virkez was actually a Serb named Vitomir Misimovic, masquerading as a Croat, who had accumulated a stash of stolen gelignite in Lithgow with his gullible housemate Bebic. Once he told police that bombs were about to be set across Sydney, the state’s police heavies, the Criminal Investigation Bureau, employed their notorious methods — bashing, verballing and “loading-up” — to frame six Croatian activists irking the Tito regime.

Two applications for judicial review of the convictions, in 1994 and 2013, failed. Then the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation declassified records of phone taps showing Virkez had been communicating with an officer of the Yugoslav intelligence service, the UDBa, at the Yugoslav consulate in Sydney during the six months before the arrests.

A third bid for review was then accepted by the NSW Supreme Court, with Hulme appointed to run it. He heard evidence and submissions for almost a year, with legal teams representing the NSW Police, individual police, the state’s prosecutors, ASIO and of course the six convicted men. More than twenty police officers were brought out of retirement and quizzed about the evidence they gave all that time ago.

Hulme has digested the massive trove of transcripts, exhibits and subpoenaed documents and now, fifteen months later, has published a cautious 543-page report and a similar-sized volume of annexures. Having followed the campaign for the men’s exoneration for nearly twenty years, I was puzzled by some of his assessments — especially on the question of ASIO’s role in a likely miscarriage of justice — and the weight he has given to certain testimony.

Hulme was not inclined to entertain the alternative narrative as a whole. He finds the main part of the evidence given by Virkez, who had turned crown witness for the trial and been given a short sentence, to be credible despite Virkez’s having told the ABC’s Chris Masters on camera in 1991 that he made most of it up — an admission he later repeated to the Sydney Morning Herald’s Paul McGeough. Virkez returned to Yugoslavia after giving evidence, without punishment by its authorities, and died in 2014.

The judge likewise accepts the testimony of the then federal police intelligence official Roger Cavanagh, who flits in and out of the investigation as a specialist on threats from the Croatian extremist Ustaše organisation and other anti-Yugoslavian groups. Cavanagh played down the connection between Virkez and the Yugoslav intelligence service in the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal, portraying  Virkez as a voluntary informant rather than an agent.

“The evidence does not support the contention that Virkez held considerable animus towards Ustaše Croatian organisations and activists and thereby had a motive to frame Croatian people, or to engineer a false flag style operation adverse to their interests,” Hulme found. The judge did not address the evidence that Virkez did indeed hold considerable animus towards Ustaše Croatian organisations, nor his animus towards one of the Croatian Six in particular, Vjekoslav Brajkovic.

The allegation that Virkez “played or held a higher role, such as an ‘agent provocateur’ either in the traditional or confined sense, cannot be sustained,” writes Hulme. “In his role with the Yugoslav consulate, Virkez is best described as an ‘informant’ or ‘source.’ If he is to be considered any sort of ‘agent,’ the qualifying term used by Cavanagh of ‘low-level’ is apt.”

Hulme grants that Virkez “remains a controversial character and there is a lot that remains unknown or is unclear about his background.” And he concedes that Virkez was not truthful in all respects of his trial evidence, for example when he denied he was in contact with the consulate for the purpose of spying on Croatians. But on the “core subject” of the bombing conspiracy, Hulme concludes that Virkez’s account was supported by the call he made to the consulate just before tipping off the NSW police. “The call was, in effect, a plea for help and advice; he said, ‘I am in some sort of trouble,’” he writes.

The judge argues that his evidence is “not in any way tarnished by the claims made by Virkez many years later in interviews with Masters and McGeough, two highly respected journalists who tracked him down in his native country. While those claims provided support at a superficial level for the petitioners’ case, they are replete with inaccuracies and inconsistencies that deny them credibility.”

This interpretation of Virkez’s behaviour is similar to that of the prosecution in the trial. It hardly accords with the more widely accepted picture of Virkez as a malign, cynical character who sprung a trap on his gullible housemate Bebic and the other Croatians while his delighted UDba handlers looked on from a safe distance.

Cavanagh, long retired, died in 2021 before the inquiry hearings began. Curiously, the Australian Federal Police were not represented at the inquiry, and no attempt seems to have been made to seek any records it (or its predecessor, the Commonwealth Police) might have on Virkez. Maybe Hulme had no power to call them. In one interview, Virkez said he had been in contact with “ASIO” and told to speak to a “Kavanagh.” Had Cavanagh been running Virkez as a source himself? It’s an intriguing thought.

Nor did Hulme take up the contention of the lawyers for the Croatian Six that the Wood royal commission’s 1994 finding that systemic “process corruption” existed in the CIB squads brought into question all the police evidence in this case, notably the alleged discovery of gelignite in Sydney homes and the “admissions” some of the accused allegedly made to the CIB after their arrest.

The only way for such a conspiracy to be proven would be if any of the surviving police admitted to have taken part in or known about it. But the legislation setting up this kind of judicial inquiry notably excludes the power of royal commissions and certain other types of inquiry to compel testimony and grant legal immunity in exchange. Hulme said he asked the NSW government during the inquiry for a legislative patch to fix this gap, but without success. “It cannot be known whether the exclusion of the power of compulsion did in fact work to conceal such evidence,” he said.

Hulme did find several police officers involved in Brajkovic’s arrest had severely bashed him, one using a twisted towel to throttle him, and had then conspired to mislead an Internal Affairs Branch inquiry into Brajkovic’s complaint. (The branch accepted the officers’ concocted explanation for his injuries: that he, with help from other accused, had inflicted injuries on himself to discredit police.)

Nor did the police take proper precautions for the potential discovery of massive amounts of explosives in their raids. “Indeed, by today’s standards, the nonchalant way police acted on intelligence that there might be ‘30–50kg of explosives at an undisclosed location’ was rather extraordinary,” Hulme said. “However, the inquiry does not find the inadequate or complete lack of precautions to mean that police had formulated a conspiracy to falsely accuse the Croatian Six before any raids were carried out, knowing that there was no real bomb plot. Instead, more probable is the explanation that the lack of precautions ‘was in all likelihood a product of a cavalier attitude that prevailed at the time and nothing more sinister.’”

Hulme was highly critical of Special Branch officer Victor Jefferies for withholding his knowledge of Virkez’s Serb background and Virkez’s anti-Croatian views, and for endeavouring to keep his Yugoslav consulate link hidden from the committal hearings of the charges against the Croatian Six.

He dismisses for lack of evidence the conjecture that the two half-sticks of gelignite (and associated wiring and detonators) found in each of three Sydney homes raided by separate police groups came from a “stash” of incriminating items kept by the CIB squads to “load up” suspects.

But when he discusses the convictions of the Kokotovic brothers and Nekic — arrested at the same house with sticks of gelignite on a desk at which they were preparing leaflets, according to police — he finds it unclear who possessed the incriminating items. He considers their alleged admissions of joint possession in the CIB “interviews” to be concerning. Together with the sketchy references to them by Virkez and Bebic in Lithgow, he concludes that reasonable doubt exists about their convictions.

It is when he turns to the main new evidence that led to the inquiry — the evidence of ASIO involvement — that Hulme leaves a huge gap in accountability.

ASIO records declassified in 2018 reveal that the security service was tapping telephones at the Yugoslav consulate and monitoring Virkez’s contacts with UDba. Soon after the arrests in February 1979, a secret report was circulated by its head office in Canberra. Virkez, it said, had “for a period of at least six months prior to the arrests acted as an informer on Croatian nationalist activities to a person suspected by ASIO of being an intelligence official attached to the Yugoslav Consulate-General.” The plot revealed “the depth of the penetration of Croatian extremist groups by the YIS in Australia.”

This report went to top NSW police and the Special Branch. In follow-up exchanges with ASIO, then assistant police commissioner Roy Whitelaw said “if the opposition [ie the six men’s defence team] became aware of this information it could blow a hole right through the police case.” Later Whitelaw was advised he could tell his prosecutors about it as long as the source was not made public. Through the trial and appeal, defence subpoenas for relevant intelligence information about Virkez were rejected on national security and other grounds.

As a result, the crown prosecutor, the late David Shillington QC, was able to assert, unchallenged, that there was “not a skerrick of evidence to suggest that [Virkez] was some sort of undercover agent, an UDBa or Yugoslav representative.”

Hulme’s inquiry tried to find out whether ASIO’s information had got to Shillington. Various surviving police witness said he was fully informed about everything he should know. Hulme declines to accuse him of knowingly withholding evidence important to the defence: “[I]t would be neither fair to the late Mr Shillington QC, nor reasonably supported by the evidence before the inquiry, to conclude that he abdicated his responsibilities and acted in a manner inconsistent with his overarching duty.”

The judge noted that when the Croatian Six sought leave to appeal in the High Court in 1986, the then NSW crown counsel, Reg Blanch QC (later chief judge of the NSW District Court), admitted that if the prosecution had withheld vital evidence for the defence “it would be almost automatic that there would be a miscarriage of justice.”

Hulme’s own counsel assisting submitted that the defect in the trial process by reason of non-disclosure was significant. In his finding, Hulme conceded that the nondisclosure “could meet the current day test for a miscarriage of justice in that it could be regarded as an error or irregularity that could realistically have affected the reasoning of the jury to its verdict,” helpfully citing a recent case.

“However,” Hume went on, “the ultimate question for the inquiry is whether there is reasonable doubt as to guilt of the Croatian Six. A flaw in the trial processes is an appropriate matter to report upon and might inform this question, but it is not in itself determinative… The unavailability to the defence of information and evidence concerning Virkez’s allegiance to Yugoslavian interests and his association with personnel at the Yugoslav consulate has no impact upon the question of whether there is a reasonable doubt about the guilt of any of the members of the Croatian Six.”

Hulme circled the subject again in his conclusion, where he referred to “failings” in the disclosure of information about Virkez’s association with the Yugoslav consulate and loyalty to Yugoslavia. “The extent of what was known and should have been passed on is not entirely clear,” he wrote, “but there is no doubt that there was a denial of some probative ‘ammunition’ that could have been effectively deployed in cross-examination of Virkez.”

This non-disclosure, he went on, “arguably was significant and could be regarded as an error or irregularity that could realistically have affected the reasoning of the jury to its verdict and thereby constitute a miscarriage of justice.” He repeated his reference to a recent High Court ruling to this effect.

It is puzzling that Justice Hulme didn’t consider the question of a miscarriage of justice to be within the ambit of his inquiry. After all these years, exactly whose task is it? That question must surely be considered by the two authorities to whom he has given his report: NSW chief justice Andrew Bell and NSW governor Margaret Beazley (herself a former president of the NSW Court of Appeal).

The procedures drag on. Of the three exonerated, Mile Nekic has died and the Kokotovic brothers didn’t seek this inquiry. A ruling that a miscarriage of justice did indeed occur would bring a sort of exoneration for the other three, and for the broader Croatian-Australian community, which has had to live with the stain of terrorism this case has spread over them for nearly five decades. •

► Hamish McDonald’s account of his involvement in the successful effort to reopen the case

The post The Croatian Six inquiry raises more reasonable doubts appeared first on Inside Story.

Both novellas depend on the reader’s being alert to subtle character shifts and inner lives, insofar are they are intimated, and both films, each set in Ireland, have found their own ways of dealing with those inner reflections. Neither novella and neither film depends on a conventional cause-and-effect narrative leading to a predictable conclusion. I came to the later book and film before the earlier ones, and will stick to this order as it probably influenced my response to them.

Small Things evokes a small Irish town, New Ross, and the kind of life in which the key figure, Bill Furlong, works and enjoys his happy marriage and family. Though he reflects on life’s other possibilities, Bill is clearly aware of and grateful for what he has. His mother died when he was young; he was subsequently looked after by Mrs Wilson, the well-to-do owner of the property on which his mother had worked as a maid. He has never known his father. Keegan creates a wholly credible sense of his marriage to Eileen and of their five children; he and his wife don’t agree about everything but this marriage clearly works.

A major moment in the novella’s plot — and in Bill’s life — occurs when he delivers coal to the local convent, a training school for girls that houses an abusive Magdalene laundry in which the girls are cruelly treated. In the coal shed he finds one girl, Sarah, who has been locked away as a punishment and tells Bill she wants to drown. When he talks to Sister Mary, the “Mother” of the convent, she smilingly bribes him with money as a Christmas present for his family. When he comes across Sarah again he must make a significant decision about how to respond.

Neither his action nor the possible identifying of his father is the object of melodramatic flourish or sentimentality in the book or in the film. Instead, they convey a feeling that these issues, however personally important, may be treated as “small things” in the scope of the larger world and its ongoing difficulties and beliefs.

The film, directed by Tim Mielants from Enda Walsh’s screenplay, pursues the same narrative course as the novella but finds its own way of rendering the recurring sense of inner reflection the text creates using Bill’s responses to events. Whereas Keegan’s prose does so immaculately, one of the triumphs of the film lies in Cillian Murphy’s performance as Bill Furlong, with his quiet changes of facial expression and subtly conveyed shifts of awareness.

As played by Eileen Walsh, Furlong’s wife Eileen is humanly companionable but capable of moments of sharpness. As mother of five children, she has plenty to occupy her, and she suggests appropriate affection as well as individuality. As Sister Mary, the ever-reliable Emily Watson endows a seemingly benign surface with a much chillier, more rigorous viewpoint.

The controlled tone of the film’s final moments is perfect. In a Hollywood version, there would have to be a group hug at very least — possibly joined by Bill’s father, whose identity remains unknown in the film as in the novella.

Having used the words “immaculate” and “perfect” in relation to aspects of Small Things, and being tempted use them again in relation to The Quiet Girl, the film version of Keegan’s Foster, I might appear to readers to be raving, and this may well be the case.

“Plot” scarcely seems the right word to describe what happens in Foster. Once the initial action has been made clear, it feels more like a life simply going on from day to day. It begins with the girl (unnamed) being driven by her father to stay with her godparents, the Kinsellas, because her mother is pregnant. When the father drives off with the girl’s belongings still in the car, Seán Kinsella tells her not to worry: “We’ll have you togged in no time,” and this proves symptomatic of how kindly the girl will be treated in the months ahead.

She has no idea of how long she will be there, but she will experience a kind of love her home and her parents never seemed to offer. Quite early on, she says (and the whole story is told in her words): “I wish this place without shame or secrets could be my home.” She helps Edna Kinsella with cooking and other jobs and is happy to do so. Seán teaches her to read and, for fun, regularly times her run for the mail in the post-box on their farming property. And so on. The ongoing warmth and affection she is shown leads her to think of “the difference between my life at home and the one I have here.”

None of this becomes a subject of easy pathos; rather, it is a means of exploring how, in this very different environment, the girl’s responses to life are changing. As we shall see, the film version, The Quiet Girl, will have a different way of articulating these responses, but with no less eloquence. Keegan creates some variance in how the girl is drawn to the two “foster” parents and they in turn show affection for her. The same cannot be said for her actual parents after Seán drives her home once her mother has given birth to a son.

The film captures the tone of Keegan’s story seemlessly transmuted into the new medium — with never a superfluous moment. In fact, Colm Bairéad’s telling (he is both director and screenwriter) renders a gentle change in life with a perfection for which it is hard to think of many competitors.

The Quiet Girl begins with a long shot of a hayfield in which a girl is calling out to her sister Cáit (Catherine Clinch), who is hiding in the hay, that “Mum’s looking” for her. Back home, Mum reprimands her for having mud on her shoes. This is part of the coldness of Cáit’s life at home, a matter not ameliorated by her father’s alcoholic tendencies, and there is no sense of family farewell as she leaves to stay with her mother’s cousins, the Kinsellas.

Her father (Michael Patric) is driving, but she sits in the back seat and he doesn’t talk to her. She is warmly welcomed by Mrs Kinsella, Eibhlín (Carrie Crowley), who hasn’t seen Cáit since she was a baby. The father leaves without a kiss for his daughter or thanks for the gift of rhubarb Eibhlín has given him. These and other details establish the environment Cáit is leaving and the one she is arriving at.

From there, events closely follow those of Keegan’s story, showing the viewer the immediate and continuing kindness Cáit receives from Eibhlín and the slower-to-start but equal warmth of feeling she experiences from Seán (Andrew Bennett), and how this is registered in Clinch’s performance as Cáit. In fact, “performance” seems almost too conventional term to describe how Clinch renders so many of her reactions to her changing circumstances in subtle shifts in facial expression as she gradually warms to affection so at odds with her own family.

She is pleased to help both Seán and Eibhlín in their daily work and is far from excited when she has to return home after her mother has given birth to a baby boy. “You’ve grown” is the nearest her mother can say (or do) in the way of welcome. When the Kinsellas drive off, Cáit races after to catch up with them in an emotionally charged moment that, like Small Things, never reeks of sentimentality.

Two beautiful Irish novellas have been adapted into two beautiful Irish films to which I hope that I’ve done justice. •

From the archive: Brian McFarlane on screen adaptations of Wuthering Heights, Anna Karenina and Great Expectations

The post Transmutations appeared first on Inside Story.

A Taiwanese writer of Chinese heritage, Yang has an ambivalent relationship with the language in which she writes: the language of the People’s Republic of China, the “them” against which the “us” of Taiwan is defined. In contemporary Taiwanese television and movies, it is common now to hear Taiwanese (Hokkien) spoken. Yang Shuang-zi seeks to evoke in writing what on the screen is readily projected: an imagined community for Taiwan, with a history and cultural references that belong to it alone. In Taiwan Travelogue this is not a linguistically bound community, but language is effectively deployed to show it struggling to come into existence. Most obviously, Taiwan is a place that has to be translated to be understood. The entire novel is in fact one long translation process.

The novel is imaginatively framed, with an informative introduction at the beginning and a series of afterwords revealing the afterlife of the text that constitutes the main narrative. This introduction should not be skipped: it is part of the novel. The purported writer, Hiyoshi Sagako, Taiwan-born of Japanese ethnicity, is a fictional character, and her account of the novel’s various editions a 1954 Japanese original translated into Chinese (in abridged form) in 1977 and then again, with elisions restored, in 2020  is also fictional. The only translation that a reader has to believe in is the one into English by Lin King, first published in the United States by Graywolf Press in 2024, from a Chinese-language original published in 2020.

From the introduction, we learn that the fictional Japanese original is a first-person narrative by literary celebrity Aoyama Chizukyu, who arrives in Taiwan in 1938 on an official visit organised by the Japanese Government-General. By then, Taiwan had been under Japanese control since 1895. Aoyama encounters a complex society, with Japanese “mainlanders” like herself in the top stratum. A second stratum consists of Japanese locals like Hiyoshai Sagako, who in the introduction discusses the ambiguous status of Taiwanese-born Japanese. Aoyama’s first allocated guide, Mishima, belongs to this stratum.

The third stratum is composed of ethnically Han (Chinese) locals like Aoyama’s main guide and companion, Ông Tshian-hóh, known as O Chizuru in Japanese but referred to in the novel by Aoyama’s affectionate nickname for her, Chi-Chan. The Han population is itself diverse, as Aoyama learns. At one point Chi-Chan introduces Aoyama to a barely explored bottom layer, Taiwan’s First Peoples, impressing Aoyama with her erudition by talking about them as “indigenous” (yuanzhu zhongzu, as opposed to tuzhu, or “natives,” for example).

Aoyama, the reader soon learns, is taller than most Japanese men. Her towering presence in the novel is a metaphor for the overweening presence of a colonial power. Chi-Chan is tiny by comparison — comparable in height to the sparrow-like schoolgirl Tân Thsiok-bi, who like herself is the love object of a robustly built Japanese. Since Taiwanese were on average taller than Japanese in this period, the metaphor is slightly strained but the author, writing for a Taiwanese readership, can probably depend for credibility on historical impressions of Japanese power.

The novel is a love story of sorts, with the developing romance between Aoyama and Chi-Chan tenderly evoked. The two women share a consciousness of the restraints placed on women by a society that doesn’t allow them to casually eat by the roadside or drink in a bar, and in which heterosexual marriage is an expectation that they will have to meet. Physical contact between them is never more than tentative.

As a story about attraction between women and linked issues of living in a patriarchal society where women are fated to be married off to men, this novel is worth comparing with its shortlisted competitor, Bulgarian writer Rene Karabash’s debut novel She Who Remains. Karabash takes up the baton from Ismail Kadare, winner of the inaugural International Prize in 2005, with a story set, like Kadare’s Broken April, among blood-feuding families of Albania’s Accursed Mountains. There is a love story in the novel, again between two women, but it is fleeting. The main protagonist, a “sworn virgin” who has adopted a male persona in accordance with the grim Kanun code, embodies the problem of the socio-sexual regime of which not only she but also her male family members are victims. It is plainly a novel about patriarchy.

Taiwan Travelogue, by contrast, is unmistakably a novel about colonialism. The love story is foregrounded but the main theme could easily have been developed with a heterosexual relationship at its core. Writing the love story is a way of writing, critically, about power extended by the “mainland” (neidi, in this case Japan) over Taiwanese. For Karabash, the national context is immaterial. She is not interested in Albania per se; the Accursed Mountains are merely an opportune setting. Yang Shuang-zi, on the other hand, is undoubtedly writing about Taiwan. Hers is not a story that could easily be transposed.

Aoyama herself is not a conscious agent of Japanese imperialism. She has never been a fan of the Imperial Japan’s Great Southward Expansion and resists being caught up in the propaganda war supporting it. She is critical of an imperial project that threatens to destroy the existing ways of life of the colonised peoples. At the same time, she is an intellectual who assumes the right to know, love and explain the colonised territory, simultaneously seeking to know, love and explain Chi-Chan. She is the Japanese “Orientalist” par excellence.

The journey is a gastronomical one. Aoyama has a gargantuan appetite, voraciously consuming every meal or snack that comes her way, generally because it is provided by Chi-Chan. A metaphor for colonialism is again evident. The book’s chapters are organised by foodstuff or dish, beginning with the simplest of local foods, melon seeds, and working up to the most complex, the twelve-dish full menu and its distillation in a “leftover soup.” Food is a teacher and a mediator.

By the fifth chapter, when Aoyama is introduced to braised minced pork in its different iterations, northern and southern, she has begun to think about cultural erasure as a problem in Japanese colonialism. In the eighth chapter, she accommodates Chi-Chan’s food preferences by making Japanese sukiyaki with pork instead of the customary beef. Cultural accommodation is underway, although it is not evenly balanced. In the same chapter Chi-Chan wears a kimono to please Aoyama, but she wears it under sufferance.

In the course of her travels Aoyama is presented with a dizzying array of dishes and ingredients, which even in a world of fusion cooking will probably be lost on most readers of the translation but must be deeply meaningful to Taiwanese readers. In a place where the difference between being Chinese and being Taiwanese is a work in progress, food has become a touchpoint of difference. Yang Shuang-zi exploits this trope to the full. Not every dish or ingredient she mentions is peculiar to Taiwan, but taken as a whole, the cuisine has its own grammar. A local argot of food terms is one means Yang has found for writing Taiwan into the inflexibly Chinese text.

The narrative proper concludes on poignant note with a single bowl of fruit and jelly ice shared by Aoyoma and Chi-Chan. By this time, Aoyama has been helped to a deeper understanding of her relationship with Taiwan and with Chi-Chan by her original guide, the ethnically Japanese Mishima, in an unexpected and wonderfully timed turn in the novel as it approaches its conclusion.

After the war, Taiwan passed from Japanese to Chinese hands. The Japanese mainland (neidi) was replaced by a Chinese mainland (dalu). By using the term “mainland” in her translation, Lin King keeps the parallel in the reader’s mind. The difference between these two mainlands is the difference between past and present. Taiwan has come to terms with its Japanese colonial past and accepts its Japanese legacy. China, by contrast, is a present threat.

Taiwan Travelogue deals with this time gap by shifting the entire framework back in history. Just as the Japanese legacy is plain in contemporary Taiwan, so too was the Chinese cultural legacy in Japanese Taiwan in the 1930s. Chi-Chan loves classical Chinese literature. She owns to a Chinese ethnicity by wearing a qipao (or cheongsam). It is the Japanese present she finds challenging.

But just in case anyone thinks a Chinese legacy too obviously entitles the People’s Republic of China to some sort of prior ownership of Taiwan, King sedulously avoids the terms China and Chinese in the text. For the name of the country, she employs the Japanese term “Shina,” expressed in characters deployed for their sound, not their meaning. For the word Chinese in a literary sense she uses the term han, a synonym for the English term “Chinese” in many contexts.

In a note at the end of the book, King explains her decisions about translating in a way that sustains the illusion of a Japanese urtext and supports the historical context of the story. The strategies she adopts are true to the tenor of Yang Shuang-zi’s writing. They are consistent, too, with a Taiwanese nationalist historiographical trend towards identifying “China” as the modern state that emerged in the twentieth century as the Republic of China, following an historical trajectory completely separate from Taiwan’s own.

There are costs to clarity for an English-language readership. Decisions about the rendering of names and terms have yielded a cluttered text that is more difficult to read in translation than in the original. The original has footnotes built in as part of the fiction of translation from the Japanese, and many more footnotes again have been added to the English translation. Japanese names with diacritical marks sit alongside Mandarin terms with tones superimposed, with Taiwanese (Hokkien) words in italics. English-language readers are presented with orthographically complex terms they cannot begin to understand unless they are well versed in the histories, languages and romanisation systems of three different East Asian territories.

Historical context apart, persuasive translation into English is rendered challenging by differences in literary conventions and cultural dispositions. It takes a while to get used to a character who “dimples” as much as Chi-Chan does. “Dimples” is not a word easily deployed in serious fiction. Rosamond in Jane Eyre has dimples, but Rosamund is definitely not the woman with whom Rochester falls in love. Yet King had limited translation choices here. Chi-Chan was endowed with dimples by the author. There are no synonyms for dimples.

Particularities of time, place, and language complicate the text but don’t impede enjoyment of it. Aoyama’s journey of discovery never ceases to be interesting. Dialogue between Aoyama and Chi-Chan carries it along lightly. From melon seeds to jelly ice, the story follows a compelling narrative arc. Not unexpectedly, Taiwan Travelogue proves to be a book for its time, a work of historical fiction set on an island with a difficult past and an uncertain future, a country that is recognised by no great power but that is refusing simply to go away. •

Taiwan Travelogue
By Yang Shuang-zi | Translated by Lin King | Scribe | $32.99 | 320 pages

The post Journey to an interior appeared first on Inside Story.

In Phoenix, Arizona, we meet Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) during a lunchtime tryst in a hotel room with her boyfriend Sam (John Gavin). She wants to marry him, but he is reluctant to commit until he has paid off his debts. Leaving work early that afternoon, complaining of a headache, Marion steals $40,000 from a client and decides to drive to Sam’s home in California. We see her in her apartment, packing a suitcase and getting changed. Initially, we had sympathised with Marion: back in the hotel room, as the hopeful bride to be, Marion had worn a gleaming white bra; now, as a criminal, her bra is black, and she has lost our sympathy.

The music that accompanies Marion on her drive was first heard under the opening credits, but at night, on the highway, in the pouring rain, with windscreen wipers in sync, it is more urgent, more dangerous. The tension Hitchcock and Herrmann create together here put us firmly back on Marion’s side, and when she stops at the Bates Motel and tells its proprietor, Norman (Anthony Perkins), that she intends driving back to Phoenix in the morning to put everything right, she might have put the white bra on once more. Instead, she takes a shower.

What happens next is too well-known to need any description, but while the shower scene is rightly famous, the lead up to it and the scenes afterwards are no less remarkable. For sixteen minutes, this film has no dialogue. The only voice we hear is Norman, off-screen, briefly berating “mother.” Beyond that, we hear sound effects (that’s a cabbage being stabbed) and music.

The slashing strings of the shower scene might be the most famous cue in film history but consider the following ten minutes in which Norman cleans up the murder. He goes round the bathroom with his mop, wraps the body in a shower curtain, clears away all evidence that Marion was ever there, spots, at the last minute, the folded newspaper that (unknown to him but not to us) is wrapped around the stolen cash, and puts everything in the boot of Marion’s car.

As we watch Norman at work, we finally relax. It is partly that we are still recovering from the shock of the murder — and the fact that, in a breach of Hollywood protocol, the star has been killed forty-five minutes into the film — but it’s also Herrmann’s score. Following the insistent “windscreen wiper” music and the stabbing violins of the shower scene, his music for the clean-up, though intense, is almost consoling. At the end of the scene, the music stops and we watch Norman push Marion’s car into a swamp, accompanied by the sound of frogs, crickets and glugging water as the vehicle sinks. Suddenly the glugging stops and we hear only nature. The car is just three-quarters submerged, the roof still visible. Norman looks anxiously about him, and we hold our breath. Then the glugging starts up again as the swamp swallows the rest of the car. Norman smiles and we smile too. We’ve shifted allegiance once more.

Originally, as Steven C. Smith reminds us in his book, Hitchcock and Herrmann, the director hadn’t wanted music for the shower murder, but when Herrmann played him the cue he had recorded on spec, Hitchcock was convinced. Psycho is a black and white film — the director said he wanted to frighten his audiences, not nauseate them — and Herrmann matched this with a monochrome sound, scoring his music for strings alone.

The typical Herrmann sound palette was far richer, involving lots of brass, low winds — bass clarinets always a favourite — and plenty of percussion: these were the colours in which the composer excelled and, like most of the greatest film composers, he insisted on doing his own orchestration: “This whole rubbish of other people orchestrating your music is so wrong. I always tell them, ‘Listen, boys, I’ll give you the first page of “Lohengrin Prelude” with all the instruments marked. You write it out. I bet you won’t come within 50 per cent of Wagner.’ To orchestrate is like a thumbprint.”

Bernard Herrmann’s career in film was bookended by his work on two certifiable masterpieces: Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) and Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976). Herrmann died in his sleep on Christmas Eve 1975, following his final day of work on Scorsese’s picture. In between those titles were The Magnificent Ambersons, Jane Eyre, The Ghost and Mrs Muir, The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Cape Fear and Fahrenheit 451. But at the heart of it all were the nine films on which he worked for Hitchcock between 1955 and 1966: The Trouble with Harry, The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Wrong Man, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, The Birds (which has no score, but credits Herrmann as “sound consultant”), Marnie and Torn Curtain. It was from the last of those films that Hitchcock sacked Herrmann.

It all started so well. Mutual admirers for years, director and composer wanted to work with each other from the early 1940s, but the timing was never right. Their first collaboration, The Trouble with Harry (1955), was a black comedy. There were nearly always humorous moments in Hitchcock’s films, but comedies were as rare for him as they were for Herrmann. The plot of this one involves a series of characters who walk past, ignore, fail to see, trip over or feel guilty about a body (Harry) lying in an idyllic landscape. This allowed Herrmann to compose a series of vivid character pieces for the ensemble cast, setting out his musical wares with different styles and colours, and influences ranging from Stravinsky to Vaughan Williams. A tramp, who waddles like a penguin, is given a version of Vaughan Williams’s penguin march from his score for the film, Scott of the Antarctic.

The Trouble with Harry was not a box office hit, but it remained a favourite of Hitchcock’s, and he was delighted with Herrmann’s contribution. Hitch and Benny (always Benny, never Bernie) now embarked on what the twenty-first century might call a “bromance.” They deferred to one another and quoted each other’s witticisms to their wives.

In his next film, a Hollywood remake of his 1934 film, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), Hitch put Benny on screen conducting the London Symphony Orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall — another long scene with no dialogue. We see a shot of the poster advertising Herrmann’s performance; we see several close-ups of Herrmann conducting and another of his score; it is even Herrmann’s baton that cues the cymbal crash that, in turn, cues the attempted murder, the film’s main plot point.

The subtitle of Smith’s book is “The Friendship and the Film Scores that Changed Cinema,” and the “Friendship” is important. Herrmann and Hitchcock could read each other’s minds.

The composer became adept at giving the director what he wanted: a cool-jazz score for the noirish true-crime story, The Wrong Man (1957); a lush, neon-lit romantic score, shot through with tragedy and lashings of harp glissandi for Vertigo (1958). But he also gave the director what he didn’t yet know he wanted: a tambourine-heavy fandango for North by Northwest (1959) and those slashing violins in Psycho.

Another word about that scene. Much of its effect is in the editing. There are fifty-something edits in under ninety seconds, the cutting of the film mirroring the nature of the murder. (In Rope, where the murder weapon is a single length of rope, there are no cuts at all.) But if it had played out as Hitchcock intended, without music, just running water, stabbing and screams, it would have been yet more confronting and very hard to watch — even in black and white; even in the knowledge that a cabbage was involved. In a sense, Herrmann’s musical cue ameliorates the horror and turns the scene into art. Where Hitch was concerned, Benny had strong instincts.

Yet these instincts, allied to a deal of hubris, would finally prove Herrmann’s undoing. By the mid-1960s, films had changed, and Hitchcock — a maker of popular films with an eye to the box office — understood the changes. James Bond movies had pop scores and came with hit songs, and so when he came to make his spy movie, Torn Curtain (1966), with big stars, Paul Newman and a wildly miscast Julie Andrews, Hitchcock (and Universal Studios) wanted a lighter, poppier score, maybe something with an electric guitar.

The studio asked for a different composer, but Hitchcock stood by Herrmann, telling him “no fewer than four times” what he must do. Herrmann agreed to the lighter score, but he also remembered how Hitch had been wrong in the past, how he would have missed out on the shower music in Psycho if Benny hadn’t written it behind his back. Once again, the composer went his own way.

Like Psycho, Torn Curtain has a set-piece murder. Newman and an East German woman he has only just met murder a Stasi agent in her cottage. They must do it in silence so as not to alert the agent’s driver, waiting outside, but in any case they can’t speak each other’s language. After a minutes-long struggle and much grunting, they finally succeed in getting Gromek’s head into a gas oven. This time, Hitchcock didn’t specify no music, but he later said he’d wanted to show how hard it was to kill someone. In other words, we needed to hear the grunts.

Herrmann’s response to Hitchcock’s request for a pop score in Torn Curtain was to go weird and lavish. Lots of low brass — sixteen horns, nine trombones, two tubas, two timpani players, and “a large group of cellos and basses.” So, no electric guitar, but also no violins or violas and no woodwind except for twelve flutes! (“The sound of all those flutes will be terrifying!” he said.)

Herrmann felt sure that when Hitchcock heard the dark, sonorous, dramatic score he had composed — exactly the opposite of what he’d been asked for and agreed to — the director would gratefully change his mind, just as he had on Psycho. Herrmann was wrong. Hitchcock attended the recording session where the composer was in high spirits, cracking jokes. The director asked to hear an early scene in which a group of scientists is trapped on a ship in the arctic weather. The scene is essentially played for laughs, and Hitchcock had stipulated light music. Herrmann’s music was dark and dissonant, underlining the freezing temperatures. Hitchcock stopped the orchestra after ten bars and fired the composer. He returned to Universal Studios, apologised and offered to pay Herrmann’s fee out of his own pocket. They engaged John Addison, composer of light comedies and films set in 1960s Britain (such as A Taste of Honey) to write the score.

It’s clear from Smith’s book that neither Benny nor Hitch quite got over their breakup. Hitchcock was on his final stretch; no one would put Topaz, Frenzy or Family Plot in their pantheon of his great films. Herrmann fared better, being taken up by François Truffaut, then Brian De Palma and finally Scorsese. In 1968, he released an album of his music for Hitchcock’s films, including Psycho, Vertigo and North by Northwest, his sleeve notes praising the director. But he received no response. If he listened to it, perhaps it only served to remind Hitchcock that his greatest films — and his greatest collaboration — were behind him. •

Hitchcock and Herrmann: The Friendship and Film Scores that Changed Cinema
By Steven C. Smith | Oxford University Press | $73.99 | 312 pages

The post Benny & Hitch appeared first on Inside Story.

So wrote Fernanda Dahlstrom, lawyer and refugee advocate, in a 2018 opinion piece in the Guardian. This gritty paragraph could well serve as the back cover blurb to her recently published memoir, The Framing. This is the story of Dahlstrom’s unusual childhood, of a decade marked by upheaval, subterfuge and, most of all, the frequent incarceration of her mother, Margaret Dahlstrom, for theft and identity fraud.

Margaret, the reader learns, was raised in Balwyn, a Melbourne suburb that’s as solidly middle class as they get. She went to Fintona Girls School and trained to be a teacher. She reads Wuthering Heights as a racist text and pooh-poohs Mallarmé. She so loves everything Swedish that she changes her family name to Dahlstrom and tells her daughter that her frequent visits to university campuses in different states are for her work as a Swedish translator.

Fernanda is eight when Margaret is jailed for the first time. Of this, Dahlstrom writes, “The first thing I remember of that day — night — that you went to jail is being home alone. Somehow, I knew that you were in prison, that Sir [Margaret’s sister] was on her way to get me. I was in Grade Four but my smiling teacher was a world away. Who brought me home from school — the farmer next door? — and what they told me is missing.”

This second person address is an occasional feature of the memoir, as if Dahlstrom is speaking directly to her mother about her childhood experiences in a way she hasn’t been able to in real life. Of visiting her mother in jail for the first time, she writes: “a woman in a blue tracksuit sat at a table, and I saw that it was you. You smiled and it was all wrong. You never wore tracksuits. And you had this weirdly fatalistic look… At some point, you said it was only a bounced cheque.” The adult Dahlstrom drily comments, “No one goes to jail for bouncing a cheque.”

Later in the book, when Dahlstrom visits her grandmother after a long estrangement, the picture becomes clearer. Inside a manila folder in her grandmother’s back room are “yellowed pages covered in handwritten scrawl”: unpaid traffic fines, a student loan defaulted on in 1986, a list of suspended sentences Margaret received in the 1990s. “The trouble started when you were still in kinder,” her grandmother tells her.

Yet Dahlstrom remembers her early childhood as carefree, and Margaret seems to have been constant enough in the first eight years of the author’s life. Only a relatively secure attachment between mother and daughter could explain the resilience and bravery of the author, who, in the decade following her mother’s first jail term, spent several periods — each of weeks’ duration — living on her own: preparing vegan meals, caring for pets, doing well at school, even catching trains unaccompanied from Ballarat to Melbourne to visit her mother in Fairlea prison.

There were interviews with child protective services, and a period of formal foster care with an Adelaide family, from whom the author escaped at her mother’s behest. There were kind families who took her in for a while, but never any sense of stability, largely because Margaret engineered it so.

Perhaps the cruellest blow was Dahlstrom’s long period cut off from Margaret’s family, rendered crueller still by the absence of a father or any family on his side. (She never knew her father.) Margaret’s parents, reasonable and loving, could have provided Dahlstrom with the stable home she lacked, if Margaret had only allowed her to trust them.

The lighter moments in this memoir are largely derived from the excitement of a life on the wrong side of the law. Recalling one of several times her mother gave a false name and address when checking into a motel, Dahlstrom writes, “Using a fake name always gave me a feeling of apprehension, a nervous excitement that we might get discovered, but no one ever blinked an eye. Looking back, I wonder if we took more steps than necessary to cover our tracks and if this was done partly for my benefit. Did the glamour, the thrill of a life on the run make it less likely that I would start to question her claims? It was, undeniably, a lot of fun.”

On a rental application for an apartment in South Yarra, yet another of Margaret’s attempts at a “fresh start,” Margaret lists Dahlstrom’s name as Freja Kenway. When the teenage Dahlstrom protests at the complicated “j” in Freja, Margaret replies, “Sorry. I automatically spelled it the Swedish way.”

Then there are the apparently substantial proceeds of crime: business-class flights to Europe, various houses bought and sold, Dahlstrom’s years at elite private schools, lavish birthday presents, wads of hundred-dollar bills stashed in the wardrobe. Was much of the stolen money never refunded, despite all those stints inside? Clever, erudite Margaret seems to have always been two steps ahead of the police.

As a child, Dahlstrom dreamed of becoming a writer, and her memoir is peppered both with touching letters to her mother in prison and some wonderful excerpts from her stories of a fugitive mother and daughter. “When I dig these old manuscripts out of the overnight bag,” she writes, “I see the events of my life in the mid-’90s writ large in what I always thought of as fantasy.”

This, indeed, is the crux of The Framing: the border between fact and fiction in Dahlstrom’s childhood was far too porous. And many years later, Margaret is still unable to give her the gift of the truth when she asks for it. “You want to humiliate me,” her mother says. Dahlstrom writes, “All the times I had appealed to her to connect this or that piece of the puzzle and we had sat around analysing the past, working towards a hypothesis. How could she brush off all those efforts with not even a sentence to acknowledge it had all been an act?”

The Framing is challenging on several levels. The narrative tends to skip backwards, forwards and sideways in time and place, mirroring a life on the run where nothing is as it seems. As well as the switches into second person voice, the text occasionally splits into two columns on the page. Several people are referred to by pseudonym or nickname only. The title, too, is ambiguous: at first blush it suggests that Dahlstrom, the lawyer, is aiming to convince the reader of her mother’s innocence. But the book gradually gives “framing” a more psychological flavour as it attempts to shape narrative meaning from childhood events.

Reading The Framing is therefore a somewhat destabilising process, perhaps intentionally so. Dahlstrom wants us to feel in some small part what she has struggled with daily: the shaky ground of identity, the perils of trust, the need to remain self-reliant. On one occasion as an adult, when speaking to her then girlfriend, Dahlstrom writes: “I was just so disoriented,” I said, and as the word came out, I felt how perfectly it described me. I had grown up beside a navigational sign, a formative ‘You Are Here’ that pointed decisively in the wrong direction.”

Disorientation is also evoked by Dahlstrom’s assertions about the rights of children. As a young adult, she argues the case for drastically lowering the voting age: “We send ten-year-olds to jail in real life; surely we could talk about the possibility of them voting.” As a newly minted lawyer in Darwin she’s quickly brought face to face with inequities in the legal system, especially for First Nations people of all ages. Citing the abuses at Don Dale Youth Detention Centre she writes, “A rights paradigm solely based on principles of access to education, healthcare and accommodation does nothing to disrupt the fundamentally coercive and disenfranchising nature of adult–child relations.”

Given Dahlstrom’s experiences, this stance isn’t surprising. “When I speak about it now, I often get this reaction: You should never have been left on your own,” she writes. “How to explain that being alone was grand. Empowering… I had what every eleven-year-old wants: adventure. Staying in a motel by yourself, people say, dismayed. Anything could have happened. And I think: a locked door, and an empty room — what could be safer?”

Is Dahlstrom really arguing for eleven-year-olds to run their own lives? Or is this an attempt to avoid the role of victim? She never makes this entirely clear, but if she is to be judged on her actions — excelling at school despite being three years younger than her peers, supporting herself during her tertiary studies, finishing a law degree, never once committing an offence — then the victim role has never been hers.

The reader is bound to ask: given Margaret’s apparently stable and supportive upbringing, her intelligence and capabilities, why did she choose a life of crime? Was it simply the lure of easy money, or perhaps the titillation of it all? It’s tempting to psychoanalyse here, and Dahlstrom makes something of an attempt. Did her mother suffer trauma as a child, she asks? Was the boiling water that burned her chest as a baby the root cause of her behaviour? Solid conclusions aren’t, and perhaps can’t be, provided: in fact, Margaret remains a mystery on every level, shrouded, it appears, even from her daughter.

Shrouded, but intensely powerful. Margaret’s level of psychological manipulation — dare I say, gaslighting — of her daughter is chilling to observe. In an eighteenth-birthday card to Dahlstrom, she writes: “I know there are things about your childhood that you would like to have been different… and there are things that, in retrospect, I wish I had done differently. But there is a lot too that I wouldn’t change and most of all I wouldn’t change anything about you. So however wrong some parts of the past seem, they’ve fitted together somehow as a background to who you are now.” Take that, dear daughter.

Finally, The Framing is also a testament to Dahlstrom’s instinct for finding good people to support her along the way, albeit sometimes at a distance: the parents of childhood friends, the vice-principal at her elite secondary school, a well-known and unnamed fantasy author who encouraged her writing from an early age, wonderfully generous girlfriends, and her mother’s family with whom she’s now reunited. These people have helped her reframe her childhood and adolescence, free from her mother’s influence. Let’s hope that through the writing of this intriguing memoir — a process that would have painful and cathartic in equal parts — she has found clarity and a grounded sense of self. •

The Framing: A Memoir
By Fernanda Dahlstrom | Melbourne University Press | $34.99 | 256 pages

The post No one goes to jail for bouncing a cheque appeared first on Inside Story.

Until 2011, any mention of a “carbon tax” invariably meant a consumption tax on specific goods. John Howard swore off a “carbon tax” before he lost government in 2007 but promised an “emissions trading scheme,” as did Labor. Like “carbon pollution reduction scheme,” it sounded like a cure for insomnia. But shorten it and add the “t” word, and you’ve got a potentially powerful stress inducer. Ferociously attacked by Tony Abbott’s opposition, Gillard’s scheme was indeed widely loathed and feared — until it came into operation in mid-2012 and not much changed for most people.

In 2014 the Labor opposition attempted to return the favour by labelling the Abbott government’s proposed-but-never-legislated general practitioner co-payment a “GP tax.” It didn’t catch on. The trick to getting the media to adopt these terms is to make them shorter and snappier than the official name. Abbott’s 2010 “great big new tax on everything!” (Rudd’s CPRS) didn’t become media shorthand; and four years later, “GP co-payment” was already short enough.

Bill Shorten learnt to appreciate the power of tax slogans: most powerfully when his 2019 franking credits policy was labelled the “retiree tax.” (There was also his “death tax,” which was as fictional as Labor’s “the Turnbull government will privatise Medicare!” messaging in 2016.) The “retiree tax” phrasing was parroted not just by the usual suspects at News Corp and 2GB radio but also, with little apparent thought, by the ABC and other straight news outlets.

These short, sharp labels just “work” for the news practitioners, and then can be devastatingly effective because many, perhaps most, Australians really don’t understand the policy but retain the shorthand — especially when it contains the “t” word. What sort of party wants to levy a tax on people simply because they are old and no longer able to work!

So it’s no surprise the Coalition has rolled out a couple of “taxes” since the May budget. First the “death tax” was resurrected, but this time rooted somewhat in reality: the planned changes to trusts would indeed affect some inheritances. The government wisely dropped the idea last month, and while most commentators correctly noted the potential toxicity of the opposition’s framing, they missed another crucial element: the timing of the plan’s introduction.

The headline changes — to the capital gains tax and negative gearing — come into effect this time next year. But the ones affecting trusts begin on 1 July 2028 — that is, after the next federal election. So the government would effectively have been taking the “death tax” to the election.

Labor’s capital gains and negative gearing changes, by contrast, will be in operation by the time we vote and (at least on their current stated intentions) the Coalition (and perhaps One Nation) will be one under scrutiny for their promises to reverse them and to index income-tax thresholds. All of which would cost the budget a lot of money.

It’s one thing for an opposition to promise to kill a government proposal before it’s enacted; it’s another to promise to unscramble a policy already in operation.

The other, more recent post-budget label is the “widows tax!” — in reality, the plan to end the “grandfathering” of joint ownership of property in cases of death or divorce, which would deprive people who co-owned investment properties before 12 May this year of the right to continue negative gearing after 1 July 2027. A splendid bit of creative communication, “widow’s tax” rapidly did the rounds of the media.

The government backflipped pretty quickly on this one as well, either to avoid being seen as picking on widows or because they decided it was undesirable, or a bit of both. They’ve acknowledged quite a few errors and unintended consequences in their bill and hopefully will change some more.

Reports suggest that Anthony Albanese believes the government’s vulnerability to fear and loathing will die down now the main budget bill has been passed (with more amending legislation to come later in the year). I don’t agree. The crucial date will be 1 July 2027, when the changes become reality and the sky doesn’t fall.

Still, there’s a remote chance of animal spirits raining on the parade. While experts say the capital gains and negative gearing changes, in themselves, should have only a modest impact on house prices, the reaction of would-be buyers so far has been to sit on their hands in case prices drop, which has naturally caused just that to happen. It’s a kind of “nothing to fear but fear itself” spiral the government must at least be a tiny bit worried about. A housing crash would be terrible in many ways, including for the government’s standing.

But the most substantial criticism of the budget measures, as opposed to point-scoring, goes to what they will mean for non-housing investments. Applying the capital gains changes to all investments does go against the government’s purported aim of making housing less attractive than other investments. The negative gearing changes at least do that.

What will all this mean when the next election is held in a little under two years? All our crystal balls are too foggy to anticipate the pleasures Australian politics will be inflicting on us (or perhaps voters will be inflicting on Australian politics). This time last year no one dreamed One Nation would be riding so high.

But one thing is close to certain: Angus Taylor won’t be Liberal leader. Andrew Hastie, whose policy preferences and even rhetoric very much resemble One Nation’s, would trigger a leap in the Coalition’s polled numbers, mostly the expense of the far-right party. But eventually, as the date with the ballot box approaches, his intentions could induce stress in the more progressive end of the Liberal Party, its (remaining) supporters and even the politically uninterested middle. Opposition leaders who set themselves up as “conviction politicians” tend to worry voters.

Still, if most of the electorate reviles an incumbent enough they’ll kick them out regardless.

Times are hard across the developed world, at least by past standards, with Australia among the lagging countries in per-capita performance.

The opposition parties will blame bad economic times on the 2026 budget — along with reliable old Labor economic incompetence — while trying not to explain how they will pay for their promises to undo it all and index income tax thresholds (if those promises are still Coalition policy). They’ll warn of the future, that deep down Labor still wants to levy a tax on death — and perhaps even “widows.”

But the government’s capital gains tax and negative gearing changes as big issues as the next election? Nah, they’ll be in place and part of the furniture. •

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Despite commanding the world’s most powerful military, Trump looks like achieving, at best, the agreement Barack Obama secured with Iran — the one Trump tore up in his first term on the ground that it was the worst deal ever. Consider the cost in human lives, to the world’s economy and to the vestiges of Middle East stability of his reckless aggression.

In her new book Done in a Day, Elisa Tamarkin wants us to remember how badly an earlier war, in Vietnam, went for the US — not to mention for the millions of Vietnamese killed and injured — and how little politicians, and the public, seem to have absorbed its lessons.

Tamarkin brings an interesting dual perspective to her task. She is a professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, and she is the daughter of Bob Tamarkin, a foreign correspondent with the Chicago Daily News. Her family arrived in Vietnam early in January 1975 and her father was on the last helicopter out of Saigon on 30 April. Elisa, then aged four, had been evacuated with her mother to Hong Kong on 10 April.

Tamarkin has both real affection for journalism of the kind her father practised and a critical awareness of its shortcomings. Her book is richly illustrated with photos showing the innards of news work: the reams of telexes, the telegrams between her father and his editors, the final front pages of more than twenty American newspapers between 1978, when the Chicago Daily News closed, and 2025.

There is nostalgia in this and also, remembering the word’s Greek roots, pain (álgos) as Tamarkin recalls the proud history of the News’s early, deep commitment to reporting foreign news. As long ago as 1901 the newspaper’s publisher, Victor Lawson, had set up bureaus in Tokyo, Peking, Egypt, South Africa, Latin America, Australia and various cities in Europe, pioneering the comprehensive surveilling of world affairs that took grip during the twentieth century.

Lawson wanted a “man on the spot” (and they were almost all men) in each of these cities, living in foreign capitals rather than flying in and out. That way they would learn the local context, cultivate local contacts and anticipate events, equipping them to recognise a real scoop when it came their way. By the first world war, the paper had thirty resident reporters covering events from the front lines.

All this cost a lot. But it yielded other dividends: apart from strong coverage of breaking news, the News specialised in what one of its correspondents called “side-light stories” — “the unexpected, incidental angles on events that you could never drop in to find.”

By the time the paper closed in 1978, the amount of foreign news carried by it and its fellow American papers was in decline. In 1970, Tamarkin reports, foreign news occupied 11 per cent of the “news hole” in daily newspapers. By the time the Vietnam war ended the figure had dropped to 6.3 per cent. A decade later, after big companies began buying up newspapers in individual cities and consolidating them into chains, the figure had fallen even further to 1.8 per cent. Today, only the most resilient of the world’s legacy media, like the New York Times, can afford to run foreign bureaus.

Foreign reporting is not without its problems: newspaper publishers’ interests, whether ideological or commercial, are often aligned with their government’s foreign policies, as Tamarkin shows was the case with Lawson. Foreign postings were keenly sought after in newsrooms, leading to a certain arrogance among the species. As a character in Tom Stoppard’s 1978 play Night and Day remarks: “A foreign correspondent is someone who flies around from hotel to hotel and thinks the most interesting thing about any story is the fact that he has arrived to cover it.”

From the vantage point of 2026, it is also clear something has been lost. Ideally, foreign correspondents go out into the world, get to know other places and people and then translate what they find for their audience at home. They are an inoculation against the kind of news and opinion silos created and then cemented by the digital age.

Tamarkin’s book is carefully researched and genuinely thought-provoking, but it is also dense and allusive. Five extended chapters each cover several meaty topics with digressions into, say, Thomas A. Harris’s 1969 book about transactional analysis, I’m OK — You’re OK, or an early twentieth century “cine-poem,” The End of the World Filmed by the Angel of Notre-Dame.

That aside, the most important theme of the book for me was Tamarkin’s complicating of the history of the Vietnam war. She begins by focusing intently on the final days of a conflict that had begun as a civil war in 1955 and ended in 1973 with the signing of the Paris Peace Accords. Saigon’s fall to North Vietnamese forces prompted the largest evacuation by helicopter of Americans and selected foreign nationals from the US embassy, though not, sadly, many of the Vietnamese who had fought with and supported the Americans.

How the war ended, though, is just the starting point for the author’s meditation on how political leaders think about wars and how the public’s perception of war is shaped by the news media.

Done in a Day also reaches beyond most media history by asking how the interaction between political leaders and the public shapes what each did next, especially after it became blindingly clear to anyone paying attention that the war was going disastrously for the Americans yet the nation’s political leaders kept it going for year after year.

Tamarkin points to Daniel Ellsberg’s famous leaking of the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in 1971. Ellsberg had been among the authors of a secret forty-seven-volume history of America’s political and military involvement in Vietnam since 1945, which had been commissioned by defense secretary Robert McNamara.

Although the New York Times published only part of the 3000-page narrative, writes Tamarkin, it was more than enough to make clear how the public “had been deceived by four presidents who knew from the start that the war would never end until it was lost, even as they continued to drop millions of tons of bombs.”

Even by 1970, before Ellsberg’s leak, there had been no shortage of information about the war’s disastrous progress in news reports and in books by journalists who reported from Vietnam, among them Frances Fitzgerald (Fire in the Lake, 1972) and David Halberstam (The Best and the Brightest, 1972).

Ellsberg lamented the “endless, escalating stalemate” that first the Johnson and then the Nixon administrations allowed to continue. In his 1972 book, Papers on the War, he argued that members of the executive branch of government and in congress “had neglected totally to unlock and study its own copies” of the history of the war.

Ellsberg had tried in 1970 to persuade the secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, to skim the study or assign it to an assistant to read it for him, to which Kissinger replied, “Is there really much to be learned from that?” Tamarkin comments: “We know now there probably wasn’t much for Kissinger to learn, since he had been striding toward failure all along with a realist’s resolve, eyes wide open, hoping just to hold it back until… the next election.”

Ellsberg had also revealed parts of the secret history to a Senate foreign relations committee, but with little impact, and later in 1970, presenting a paper at an academic conference, he saw that even political scientists were largely unaware of its contents. As he acidly remarked, “An expert — I once heard — is a man [sic] who has read a book that no one else has read.”

Meanwhile, as Tamarkin notes, another million ton of bombs had been dropped, and hundreds of thousands of people in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos had died, along with 10,000 Americans. She quotes Hannah Arendt, writing in the New York Review of Books in 1971: “The public had access for years to material that the government vainly tried to keep from it,” which underscored the news media’s power but also a willingness to turn a blind eye for more than two decades “as though a fact is safely removed from the world if only enough people believe in its nonexistence.”

It is hard to ignore the present-day parallels. I can’t be the only person to have noticed that the news media’s rush to quote Donald Trump’s latest utterance about the war in Iran doesn’t exactly meet the definition of news — reporting something new — but instead underscores how easily the convention of seeking the views of those in power can be gamed by politicians.

Nor can I be the only one to have noticed that journalists reporting for the ABC’s metropolitan stations here in Australia don’t seems to have been listening to the first hour of Radio National Breakfast when various experts have been saying for months that the American president’s war in Iran was ill-conceived, ill-informed and illegitimate.

Either the journalists are not doing their job properly or their deference to power is growing, despite all their protests to the contrary. When the role of journalism is under multiple threats — many of them aggressively shaped by Donald Trump — we don’t need more deference to power, not least because those in power, like Trump, are abusing their positions and damaging so many in the process.

If it is dispiriting to see how easily and thoroughly the lessons of history are erased or forgotten, it is welcome, and bracing, to have them put before us so carefully and thoughtfully as Elisa Tamarkin has in Done in a Day. •

Done in a Day: Telex from the Fall of Saigon
By Elisa Tamarkin | University of Chicago Press | $46.95 | 300 pages

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If you missed the news cycle, here’s a quick recap.

When the latest episode of The Karl Stefanovic Show appeared last Tuesday it featured the infamous Robinson “interview” (actually an extended monologue interspersed with softball questions and approving chuckles from Stefanovic). It immediately drew widespread criticism for its derogation of journalistic responsibility.

A day later, the episode was taken offline — apparently by Stefanovic’s team — and republished by Pauline Hanson on her YouTube channel, where it has since been viewed more than 500,000 times.

By the end of the week, Nine had declared it was parting ways with Stefanovic, prompting its former star to release an unapologetic YouTube video declaring himself “free” and “truly independent” from mainstream media.

These highly publicised events generated commentary in all corners of the Australian media. Much of the discussion has focused on the terms of Stefanovic’s exit from Nine, the viability of his podcast venture, and the strategy behind the Robinson interview. (Was it a misstep on Stefanovic’s part or a deliberate move to stoke controversy and hasten his exit from Nine?)

These are important issues, but for those interested in media and politics they aren’t the only questions worth considering.

Why is it that one of Australia’s most highly paid media personalities would abandon national breakfast television — a platform that attracts a wide audience and helps to set the daily political agenda — for a highly uncertain future as a fringe podcaster catering to conspiracy theorists and neo-fascists? And what does all this tell us about the status of television within a rapidly changing global media ecosystem?

Stefanovic’s podcasting experiment may seem a counter-intuitive move for a figure who clearly relishes national celebrity. But performers like Stefanovic are not in the habit of choosing smaller audiences, less prestige and less income. They make strategic decisions based on where they think media markets and audiences are going.

Stefanovic is gambling that a prominent position within the global far-right mediasphere may be more impactful — and potentially more lucrative — than his current position at the apex of an established but fast-declining mass medium.

This is not an unreasonable assumption. Commercial television audiences and advertising revenues have been in freefall for years. While shows like Today still attract hundreds of thousands of viewers daily, those audiences are old (the average age of linear free-to-air viewers is fifty) and steadily decreasing in number. There are simply not enough young viewers tuning in to replace them.

As Stefanovic knows, the power and prestige of commercial broadcast television is in terminal decline — along with the advertising revenues that sustain that sector. Twenty years ago, when Stefanovic took the reins at Today, television was an industry of long lunches and lavish compensation packages, with the biggest stars endlessly indulged by management. No longer. Television is now a business of shrinking markets; aggressive cost reduction is the only route to profitability.

These dire economics may explain why Nine moved swiftly to sack Stefanovic. Scrubbing his $2-million-plus annual pay package off the budget sheet while simultaneously reassuring risk-averse advertisers that broadcast television remains a safe space for their brands was clearly the smart choice — and perhaps Nine’s only viable option.

One of the most interesting commentaries about the Stefanovic affair came from a Nine stablemate, the business columnist Elizabeth Knight. In her column for the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald, Knight took a stab at interpreting the business logic behind Stefanovic’s lurch to the right.

Stefanovic “astutely picked the direction of media monetisation – the fragmentation of audiences and the rise of the podcast,” she wrote, noting that the most popular podcasts are those populist titles that “push… back on the status quo and [promote] the politics of grievance.”

For Knight, though, Stefanovic’s move represents a misunderstanding of the Australian media market. “In larger markets such as the UK or the US, there is a good living to be made by the likes of Joe Rogan,” she wrote, “but the same can’t necessarily be said for a market the size of Australia.”

Has Stefanovic fundamentally misunderstood the economics of national media? Is Australia not big enough to sustain the kind of fringe media that he is trying to cultivate? This may well be the case. But perhaps Stefanovic and his team have their eyes set on a different prize: a shot at stardom within the global far-right media sphere, which extends well beyond our national borders.

You can see, then, why Stefanovic may be willing to trade a declining national television audience for a dispersed, transnational and highly engaged audience of far-right YouTubers.

One thing is clear: old assumptions about mass and niche media are being tested by these strange events. When Australia’s best-known commercial TV news personality can suddenly reinvent himself as a far-right media celebrity and then try to take a chunk of the national audience with him on a journey into the fringes of the manosphere, something important has shifted in Australian media.

The distance between television — a nationally regulated, “old” broadcast medium — and the echo chambers of social media now seems smaller than ever.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised by this. After all, the commercial free-to-air networks have long stoked the fires of anti-immigrant sentiment with their racialised coverage of crime, boat arrivals and housing affordability. Stefanovic’s politics may represent only an intensification of, rather than a radical departure from, this ignoble tradition. •

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Who gives the orders? Who follows orders? What is the nature of the order, ranging from trade to wars?

Start with a dose of optimism. Much of the order still works. The General Postal Union, established in 1874, continues to deliver, no matter what the distance. Earlier ages would be agog at the global reach of the simple letter. To double the amazement, add the phone-as-computer we all carry in our pockets. Distance and time compress. Every previous age would be in awe of the golden age of globalisation that’s now receding.

The order we have suffers even as it delivers enormous benefits. Those benefits — past, present and possible — mean we have entered an ad hoc era of patches and fixes to keep important bits ticking or intact. Workarounds become system essentials. We are in a time of ordering rather than order.

See how patching operates with the World Trade Organization, the body designed to set the rules and judge the disputes of international commerce. The WTO is “a bit of a mess these days” and “largely dysfunctional,” judges the Washington economist Marc Levinson.

Yet, with the notable exception of Donald Trump, “faith in the benefits of a globalised economy is very much alive around the world,” Levinson writes. “The international value chains that define modern manufacturing are not breaking apart, and the number of containers passing through the world’s ports reached a record level in 2025. Rather than stifling trade, the WTO’s decline has fuelled an array of less sweeping agreements intended to lower barriers to trade and foreign investment.”

Short of the optimum, reach for options. They’re more ad hoc than the great multilateral promise of the WTO, but that’s where we are — amid barriers, breaches and government intervention. Lots of fixes needed. Keep the mail and merchandise moving, despite the messiness.

The “peace” deal between the United States and Iran is built on mends, make-dos and mistrust. But the workaround should get 20 per cent of the world’s oil flowing again through the Strait of Hormuz.

All sorts of fixes are needed because we are mourning that glorious time after the end of the cold war when tech and trade flooded across borders and peace was on the rise. That belle epoque ran from 1989 until the global financial crisis (America’s 2008 economic nervous breakdown). While the Belle Epoque that spanned the forty years before the first world war was a European experience, our two decades of golden globalisation was enjoyed by the whole world, and much still glows.

The biggest challenge of this century will be to do a better job of avoiding the world wars Europe imposed on the last century. The dire trend is that combat deaths around the world in the past four years have been the highest since the end of the cold war. “Smarter Tech is Making War a Dumber Choice,” the Economist editorialised, yet leaders are still drawn to the dumb: “Bullets and bombs killed nearly three-quarters of a million people in wars between 2021 and 2024. Many more died from the indirect effects of conflict, such as hunger and disease.”

Oslo’s Peace Research Institute adds up the figures in a report on combat trends since 1946, finding that “2025 was one of the most violent years since the cold war, with sixty-five active conflicts across thirty-five countries — the highest number recorded since 1946 — and more than 255,000 fatalities.” International conflicts had doubled from four in 2024 to eight in 2025, and “several latent border conflicts… have become violent, reflecting the current growing global tensions.”

Australia’s region feels the rumbles too. “The Asia-Pacific can no longer be classified as fully at peace” is the first sentence of the International Institute for Strategic Studies’ annual Asia-Pacific Regional Security Assessment. The study says Asia faces a “combustible mix” made potent by Asia’s power to reshape a global order created by Western/European ideas about the role of the nation, the purpose of the state and the rights of the people. To restate the questions, who gives the orders and what’s the nature of the order?

“The crisis in the concept of world order,” Henry Kissinger declared in 2014, is “the ultimate international problem of our day.” Kissinger’s book World Order called for “a reconstruction of the international system” because global rules and norms had to be based on “common convictions.” Kissinger worried that “a multipolarity of power” produces “a world of increasingly contradictory realities.”

The ultimate international problem Kissinger described keeps growing. With plenty of new shoves from Donald Trump, we are going deeper into The Post-American World, the title of Fareed Zakaria’s 2008 book, published amid the great financial crash, describing America’s relative decline and “the rise of the rest.”

The rise of the rest is the point. After the bipolar cold war frigidity, America basked in a unipolar moment that coincided with a golden globalisation based on America’s idea of how the world works and trades. Since the financial crisis, globalisation has become slowbalisation. The multipolar era is upon us in all its fascinating messiness.

America is still a military superpower, but as Zakaria argued nearly two decades ago, “in every other dimension — industrial, financial, educational, social, cultural — the distribution of power is shifting, moving away from American dominance. That does not mean we are entering an anti-American world. But we are moving into a post-American world, one defined and directed from many places and by many people.”

Trump’s “America First” policy is a declaration that the hegemon is declining to the status of normal big power, worried more about itself than the international system it once ordered. In the unmaking and reshaping of the global order, Trump is the first president of the post-American world.

What Trump has done within the US — smashing at laws, norms and institutions — he repeats internationally, battering at everything from the United Nations to the WTO to NATO. Many regimes around the world are happy to follow Trump’s lead. Helping the US president dismantle the order created by the US means others have less to fear from Washington, and less reason to follow US orders. Trump’s war against Iran showed the limits of US hard power. His words hack at US soft power, sapping the international influence of America’s culture and values.

Multipolarity means every nation is constantly re-ordering its choices about the issues and partners that matter. A term borrowed from financial markets — “hedging” — has become the new normal of international relations. States hedge to seek options, balance risks and protect interests. The hedging calls for continuous attention and lots of motion.

Writing in the journal Foreign Policy, Suzanne Nossel flips the discussion of superpower “hegemony” to the new age of hedging which — with elegant wordsmithing and an added “d” — she dubs “hedgemony.” She argues this is not a tactic limited to emerging powers or a response to particular geopolitical shake-ups:

Hedging has become central to international relations, shaping how powers great and small approach trade, technology, finance, energy, and security. States are no longer hedging within a system that is episodically volatile but out of a recognition that there no longer is much of a system at all. The rise of what we might call “hedgemony” is both a response to the reshuffling of the global order and an accelerant of this transformation. Although these moves are being pursued by individual governments in search of stability and security, the net result may be a world that is less predictable and even more dangerous.

Hedging is both tactic and strategy for an era busy working on “ordering” because of the fracturing of the liberal international order. The “ordering” analysis comes from Bruno Maçães, a Portuguese academic and writer who served as Portugal’s Secretary of State for European Affairs (2013–15).

“The age of world order is finished,” Maçães writes. “What we have now is ordering, world building, a process without end.” If a world order is a snapshot, ordering is a never-ending film. Principles of change and choice are thinner but more durable that the norms of the liberal order. Maçães offers two principles of ordering:

• Technological revolutions reshape global hierarchy: the country that wins the tech race moves to the centre. China’s arrival as an economic power launches a revolutionary project to reshape the global system to place China closer to its core.

• Every country is free to choose: “China is now the largest trading partner of more than 120 nations,” Maçães observes. “Most of them do not want a bloc; they want optionality.” Ordering is about getting competing offers, not being conscripted. This is “a standing election in which the great powers must canvas continuously for support.”

Our multipolar time is much like the soccer World Cup: the competition engrosses the globe, many more teams are on the pitch, little nations can take on the giants, and it’s hard to predict the leaders, much less the winners. Three nations host this tournament, run by a body with four official languages (English, French, Spanish and German). Notably, China didn’t qualify this year, but Xi Jinping has ordered catchup on the football front, along with all the other international expansions.

The biggest difference between the World Cup and our world order is that soccer still follows the rules. Players must obey the referee’s whistle.

Unlike the world game, the world order has a problem with referees and rules. We have no ref’s whistle to police disintegrating international laws and norms and habits. With no referee, nations must try to do the ordering even as they run around the pitch. It makes for a chaotic match. Many can score, but fouls and rough play abound. •

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And the second half of this year promises more of the same, maybe even worse, with a “supercharged” El Nino (characterised by warming of the ocean surface in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean) expected to reach history-making strength. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says there’s a 63 per cent chance this El Niño will grow so intense it will rank among the largest El Niño events on record.

UN secretary-general António Guterres has described El Niño as an “urgent climate warning.” El Niño conditions will “pour fuel on the fire of a warming world,” he has forecast, triggering billions of dollars in damage from heatwaves, floods, droughts, tornadoes and wildfires.

Even in the absence of an extreme El Niño, billions of people around the world are experiencing increasingly frequent, intense and long-lasting heatwaves. Studies show 489,000 heat-related deaths globally each year, with 45 per cent in Asia and 36 per cent in Europe. But the true toll remains unclear, especially for low- and middle-income countries, because most countries lack consistent systems to track heat-related casualties. Vulnerability to heat is shaped by age, health status and other physiological factors, by occupation and other exposure factors, and by socioeconomic factors including housing.

Real hardship has already fallen on the less-developed areas of Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa and the Pacific. India and the Middle East are experiencing severe and sustained extreme heatwaves, with summer temperatures consistently exceeding 50°C.

In its December 2025 State of the Climate in the Arab Region report, the World Meteorological Organization highlights how the regions and people of the Middle East and North Africa, where water is always in short supply, are under constant pressure from rising temperatures and increasingly extreme weather. WMO secretary-general Celeste Saulo says intense and longer-lasting heatwaves are “pushing society to its limits… Human health, ecosystems and economies can’t cope with extended spells of more than 50°C — it is simply too hot to handle.”

On a single day in late April this year, all of the top-fifty hottest cities in the world were in India. In such temperatures farmers are unable to work outside, livestock are under heat stress, crops fail and food supplies are severely curtailed. The heat reinforces longstanding inequalities of caste, class and gender in poor and marginalised communities. It is causing heart attacks and kidney injury among outdoor workers and homeless people and exacerbating diabetes, respiratory illnesses, mental ill-health and other chronic conditions.

Refugees, internally displaced and stateless people are on the frontlines of this crisis. Refugee settlements are disproportionately located in climate-stress zones — including the Horn of Africa and the Middle East — where makeshift shelters, little access to water, and no means to manage heat make tens of millions highly vulnerable to record-breaking temperatures.

In the developed world, meanwhile, reports of heat waves too often focus on the impact on sporting events, energy bills and strained electricity grids, ignoring the costs to productivity, medical services and the health of vulnerable people and livestock. As the Financial Times reports:

Once indoor temperatures rise above the low-twenties centigrade, or around 75 Fahrenheit, humans start to suffer. Sleep duration and quality fall rapidly when temperatures rise above 23°C. Cognitive performance fares similarly… The same is true of office workers’ productivity, which peaks at around 21°C and rapidly deteriorates as the mercury rises. And that’s all before we get on to mortality, where death rates climb steeply once temperatures hit 30°C.

The effects of heat may be exacerbated in cities where, despite better access to cooling, dense populations generate urban heat islands, amplifying risks for the elderly, pregnant women, outdoor workers and anyone who can’t afford airconditioning. Around 200 million city-dwellers in more than 350 cities live with summer temperature highs of above 35°C. Without dramatic change, around 970 cities will be at least this hot by 2050, with much higher exposures in Asia, Africa and North America.

In Australia, the national climate risk assessment, released in September 2025, suggests annual heat-related deaths at 2°C of warming would go up by 190 per cent in Sydney and 126 per cent in Melbourne compared with today’s levels.

Extreme heat is one of Australia’s most dangerous natural hazards and it’s getting worse. It has caused more deaths in Australia than any other natural hazard and has a major impact on ecosystems and infrastructure. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare estimates that in the ten-year period from 2012 to 2022 extreme heat accounted for 7104 hospitalisations (with 2143 of these occurring in the last three years of the decade) and 293 deaths. Other research suggests higher numbers: one study estimates heatwaves caused more than 1000 deaths in Australia in the four years between 2016 and 2019, with the highest mortality rates in communities with older populations and lower incomes or education.

Indigenous Australians are disproportionately vulnerable to extreme heat due to compounding factors that include substandard and poorly insulated housing, energy insecurity and higher rates of chronic, climate-sensitive health conditions

Humidity makes the heat much more lethal. Heat stress limits for human survivability were previously defined using a wet-bulb temperature of 35°C . Combined with 100 per cent humidity, more than six hours’ exposure to this temperature will cause heatstroke and organ failure, even among young, healthy adults. But recent research suggests extreme dry heat can be just as deadly as humid conditions. A 2023 study warns that, if the world warms by more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels (it had warmed by 1.37°C in 2025), as many as four billion people, particularly those in communities across Pakistan, India, China, and several African countries, would be at risk.

The impact of increased average temperatures extends to animals and the broader environment. They alter the distribution and intensity of pests and diseases, affecting flora, insects, livestock and humans. The spread of many infectious diseases is accelerating, as are the mosquitos and other vectors spreading them. (The Japanese encephalitis virus, for example, spread by the common banded mosquito, is now endemic in northern Australia and was last summer was found as far south as Victoria.) Some existing pathogens are becoming more virulent or widespread. (High temperatures increase the survival and biting rates of mosquitos carrying West Nile virus, for example.)

Despite the mortality, morbidity and economic costs, heatwaves rarely receive adequate attention because the death tolls and destruction are not always immediately obvious. But the impact of high temperatures on sport, obvious even to the politicians who pay more attention to sporting heroes than to scientists, might offer help prompt action.

The FIFA World Cup host cities are among those currently experiencing unusually ferocious heat and humidity. It’s tough for players, for those lucky enough to be in the stands, for the crowds gathering at outside venues, and for security and transport services staff.

Soon the focus will shift to the US Open in New York, where the weather is often hot and humid. After many players had problems with the heat at the French Open, they are calling for stronger responses from tournament organisers to a problem increasingly affecting their ability to play and earn. Could their voices finally drive greater climate action? •

The post The heat is on appeared first on Inside Story.

To take a local example: on Anzac Day in 2015, Scott McIntyre, a sports journalist with SBS married to a Japanese woman, sent out a number of tweets including the words “remembering the summary execution, widespread rape and theft committed by these ‘brave’ Anzacs in Egypt, Palestine and Japan.” Understandably, this offended many Australians, even though it was grounded in some uncomfortable facts.

Several News columnists took up the cudgels, and for good measure the Australian’s Chris Kenny sent messages to communications minister Malcolm Turnbull urging him to force McIntyre off the public payroll. Turnbull rang the managing director of SBS, Michael Ebeid, who subsequently made clear that the tweets were “not at all the views of @SBS.” McIntyre was sacked the following day.

That was that. The caravan moved on. Except for McIntyre and his family. They received death threats; his wife and children moved to Japan; his marriage broke up. In short, McIntyre was cancelled and the right to free speech swept aside — practices the Murdoch media condemn whenever their journalists come under attack.

A year after the controversy, McIntyre received what he described as “quite a substantial financial settlement” from SBS after he sued for unfair dismissal. The SBS guidelines were ambiguous: employees had “a right to make public comment and to enter into public debate in their personal capacity” but also required that SBS was “not brought into disrepute.” It is not as though his sports journalism was likely to do that.

Another Australian example: that of Yassmin Abdel-Magied, who migrated from Sudan with her family in 1992. In a stellar rise, she co-founded a youth charity at the age of sixteen, gained a first-class honours degree in mechanical engineering, was chosen as Queensland Young Australian of the Year and appointed by the federal government to the board of the Council for Australian–Arab Relations.

She also made frequent media appearances and sometimes attracted controversy, such as when she said in early 2017 that Islam was “to me, the most feminist religion” (attempting to draw a distinction between the religion itself and how Islam is practised). The Australian ran more than thirty articles denouncing her, report Dodd and Ricketson, and Andrew Bolt wrote seven columns about her for the News tabloids.

On Anzac Day in 2017, Abdel-Magied sent out a post saying “LEST.WE.FORGET (Manus, Nauru, Syria, Palestine…),” which she meant as a reference to asylum seekers and Palestinians who had died. Warned by a friend about how it might be received, she took down the post and apologised. But it was too late to stop her being condemned by politicians and the media, led by News, who pursued her for months. That encouraged a public pile-on, with online abuse, including videos of beheadings and rape. Abdel-Magied sought help from a psychologist and left Australia permanently to live in Britain.

Free speech? Not when News disagrees with you. While many people were offended by her remarks, even though they were misunderstood, did it really warrant her being hounded for months until she fled Australia?

Social media has accelerated the coarsening of public debate, but before that Murdoch led the way, with his publications often playing the person rather than the ball. Shouting and outrage attracts attention; it also encourages appalling behaviour and, on occasions, violence. Challenging public figures is one thing; vilification only feeds the toxic debate.

Rupert Murdoch’s business achievements are impressive: he has built the biggest media empire in history. His journalism? Not so much. He said in 1996: “For better or for worse, our company is a reflection of my thinking, my character, my values.” For worse is the authors’ assessment and few will disagree.

The negatives are many and major. Murdoch’s newspaper the Sun campaigned for Brexit, now widely acknowledged to have been the economic disaster experts predicted. It was not the only newspaper to do so but it had one of the biggest circulations.

Murdoch has always followed the money and the power, meaning that Fox News and Donald Trump were an irresistible combination. Murdoch didn’t believe Trump was fit to become president in 2016 and nor did he think he deserved to be re-elected in 2024. Yet Fox News gave him the exposure and backing that helped enable his rise and promoted the democratic outrages he has perpetrated.

That includes the claims of the stolen 2020 election, even though, as revealed by the Dominion court case (which cost Murdoch US$787.5 million), Fox commentators knew them not to be true. But it all helped Fox to become the single most profitable news business in the world.

The Murdoch outlets have taken every opportunity to cast doubt on the urgency of tackling climate change while giving credence to all manner of crackpot and fringe arguments.

And then there is the illegal hacking of the phones of celebrities, royalty and others who were potential sources for stories, practised on an industrial scale by the Fleet Street newspapers in Britain, mainly but not solely those owned by News. It epitomises one aspect of Murdoch’s “whatever it takes” journalism and was described by Australian media academic Rodney Tiffen as “the biggest media-related scandal in the history of English-speaking democracies.”

It ended up costing News £1.2 billion in legal fees and settlements. The even greater cost was to its reputation, particularly over the one case that outraged the British public and was the trigger for the Leveson inquiry into the media: the hacking of the phone of Milly Dowler, the thirteen-year-old who went missing in 2002 and was subsequently found murdered.

That particular offence wasn’t uncovered by the Guardian until 2011. In a public display of contrition, Rupert Murdoch asked to see her parents to apologise and, putting his head in his hands, told them “this is the worst day of my life,” leading Milly’s older sister Gemma to later remark that, if it was the worst day of Murdoch’s life, “then you’re bloody lucky.”

That same year Murdoch appeared before a parliamentary inquiry to declare it was the “humblest” day in his life. The contrition didn’t last: in 2013, he met with journalists at the Sun to reassure them he was on their side. Thanks to employees who recorded his address and leaked it to other media, we know that Murdoch thought the police investigations into hacking were “laughable” and “outrageous.” There was an admission of sorts: “We got caught with dirty hands, I guess.”

Not everything about the Murdoch media is black and white. It employs many fine journalists in Australia and overseas, many of them working in areas unaffected by culture wars and political agendas. Even as a senior journalist writing about politics and national affairs for the Australian for a decade and a half from the 1990s, my columns and feature articles were published with only occasional and minor editing, whether or not they contradicted the newspaper’s editorial line.

But I felt more and more uncomfortable as the newspaper’s right-wing agenda spread to its news coverage and diversity shrank on the opinion pages. With few exceptions, the “contest of ideas” the Australian proclaims on its website has become an echo chamber. But the Murdoch media doesn’t do shame: Fox News carries the deeply ironic slogan, “fair and balanced.”

For less senior staff than I was, life is more complicated. Often reporters are assigned a story with an angle that reflects a pet News Corp issue or prejudice. That can put them under pressure to stretch the facts to meet the request, perhaps by seizing on a relatively minor aspect. Regularly reporting back to editors that there is no story or finding a better one that doesn’t fit its agenda are not career-enhancing moves.

The agendas in the News publications are increasingly blatant. One tabloid interpretation likened this year’s federal budget to communism. News outlets support Israel whatever it does. They rail against antisemitism, completely justifiably, but ignore Islamaphobia.

Journalists are taught, or used to be, that nothing matters more than seeking out the truth. After all, that’s what distinguishes professional journalism from the gut beliefs and random thoughts presented as facts on social media.

But the owner of the largest share of English-speaking media has a different view. Rupert Murdoch was warned in 1983 that the diaries of Adolf Hitler were fakes but his British paper, the Sunday Times, published them anyway. The proprietor’s defence was that they increased circulation and that “after all, we are in the entertainment business.”

Murdoch established his priorities early in his career, when, as owner of the Sunday Times in Perth, he lobbied WA industrial development minister Charles Court to allow him a stake in the developing mining boom. As reported by author Robert Duffield in 1979, he told Court: “Look, you can have a headline a day or a bucket of shit every day. What’s it to be?” •

Getting Murdoched: How Murdoch’s Media Wields Power and Punishment
By Andrew Dodd and Matthew Ricketson | Hardie Grant | $39.99 | 424 pages

The post Lest we forget appeared first on Inside Story.

Some people seem destined to rise, propelled by a commanding presence, a mellifluous voice, agreeable bone structure or a privileged upbringing. Some can inspire others to better possibilities with an advocate’s passion and soaring turns of phrase. Some win with empathy, an easy manner and the common touch, or a fighter’s defiance and fearless disposition. Some climb on superior political skills, dogged persistence and administrative competence. Mostly, it’s a mix of all those elements in varying proportions. And then there’s timing, circumstance and a bit of dumb luck.

The sudden propulsion of One Nation party leader Pauline Hanson into conversations about national leadership makes it an opportune time to consider exactly what we’re after in a prime minister. It’s also a good reason to contemplate how past leaders’ personalities and practices have contributed to the political climate we’re now experiencing. With the prime ministerial office carrying complex, high-pressure responsibilities, the character of its occupant has immense consequence.

If we were to design the ideal leader — not such a ridiculous concept in this accelerating AI universe — there’d be a long list of desirable attributes to incorporate. For starters, you’d want a top-notch public communicator who can engender confidence. They’d need to be able to clearly speak to Australians as a whole and engage easily with all kinds of people, from colleagues and staff to bureaucrats, businesspeople, foreign leaders and regular folks.

Thoughtful intelligence is important, too, the kind that can discern the source of a problem, find the best solution and implement it for the nation’s benefit. In an optimum model, you’d also include a ready ability to see things from other points of view and anticipate the possible consequences of different courses of action.

The perfect PM would be steely enough to stand up to pressure, courageous enough to take hard decisions for the greater good, and self-assured enough to front up and explain why, in ways people can understand. It goes without saying, they’d be authentic. Resilient. Reassuring. Intuitive. Able to think simultaneously about what’s required now and for the future and find ways to tackle both at once. They’d be able to stay on course but also pivot as circumstances require.

This prime minister would be a team builder who can keep the cabinet and backbench together and motivated. They’d be capable of working all hours across time zones while keeping a stable temperament. They’d be inspiring and visionary but also good at prioritising, making decisions and getting things done on time and on budget. Administrative competence is a much underrated skill, assumed in all prime ministers but absent in a few.

They’d be relatable — enjoy a laugh — but have earned and retained widespread respect. They’d place the people’s interests ahead of their party’s or their own. They’d lift up, not punch down. And they’d be able to distil what makes us all Australian and remind us of it whenever we need to pull together.

Of course, leadership perfection doesn’t exist and Australians will have differing views on which characteristics are most important. We tend to recognise them best by their absence.

Breaking down the component qualities can be a bit awkward because it naturally leads to measuring the incumbent against them, likewise their predecessors and any gathering pretenders. The analysis becomes even more uncomfortable and possibly slightly precarious when it extends to assessing prime ministerial competence and individual leadership styles through the lens of personality and the influence of upbringing.

Despite the perils of this kind of endeavour, Monash University political historian Paul Strangio argues it’s a necessary discomfort. Strangio acknowledges he’s on dangerous ground with his new book The Alchemy of Leadership, which takes an unvarnished look at the first seven Australian prime ministers of the twenty-first century, how they grew up, how that informed their stewardship — and where Australia finds itself as a result.

Strangio confesses he should know better, having engaged in something similar two decades ago when he was examining the complex past relationship between Gough Whitlam and his treasurer, Jim Cairns. He describes the horror of discovering before presenting a paper about the formative influence of Whitlam’s doting mother that his octogenarian subject was in the audience. Less surprising, the former prime minister was unafraid to deliver an eviscerating response in real time.

“Despite the risks and elusiveness of the enterprise, I still hold that venturing to fathom those who govern over us is a vital task,” Strangio insists in his introduction. “At the quarter mark of a turbulent century, the evidence for its urgency is all around.” Besides, he adds, “it is an itch that had to be scratched.”

The temptation to engage in deep personality analysis of our leaders is one that those who observe them at close range tend to resist. Political journalists can be blunt about character but are wary of straying too far into psychology lest it be deemed highly subjective, unnecessarily personal and prejudicial — to their subjects and ultimately themselves. After all, you do need people to keep speaking to you. But it’s morbidly fascinating to see someone else do it from a distance.

As his title suggests, Strangio’s volume presents primarily as an assessment of each of the Australian leaders of a period that produced seven prime ministers. Declaring it “too common to be merely coincidental” that our foremost PMs all benefited from “special maternal investment,” he illuminates the patterns in their backgrounds and considers their personalities alongside benchmarks of success.

Strangio uses several sets of metrics laid out in others’ work. He cites respected scholar Patrick Weller, longstanding politics professor at Griffith University, on three measures of prime ministerial accomplishment. Do they survive and win re-election at least once? Are they clearly in charge of their own government? Do they have an agenda they manage to introduce?

Strangio also references the work of political psychologist Graham Little, who identified three main leadership types: strongman, inspirational and group. And he also looks to the early twentieth-century political sociologist Max Weber’s 1919 work Politics as a Vocation, which concludes that “a firm taming of the soul” — or what American presidential scholar Fred Greenstein described as emotional equilibrium — was the singular indispensable attribute.

To diagnose who possesses it and who doesn’t, he groups the seven by leadership type and looks at how the circumstances of their early years may have influenced their approaches.

Strangio’s harshest assessment is reserved for Scott Morrison, who he says left office “abhorred by voters but still mostly a leader of cryptic motive and intent.” He examines Morrison’s religiosity and summarises the self-comparisons he makes in his memoir, Plans for Your Good, including with Jesus, as “staggering self-conceit.”

Beyond stinging conclusions like those, he finds things to praise and criticise in all of them.

A popular Kevin Rudd beat Howard at his own game, presenting as a younger, more modern, version. But after he shelved a core policy promise of an emissions trading scheme, his damaged popularity left him “dangerously exposed.” Strangio calls him “a figure singularly ill-suited to the rigours of high office.”

Gillard’s calm competence saw her pass more legislation in minority government than Howard managed in his final term. But she was undermined by conservative-led misogyny, her own communication problems, and how she had got the job, a process that blindsided voters and invited Rudd’s vengeance.

Abbott, Strangio says, triumphed through aggression and “implacable negativity,” not the policy creativity that had distinguished both Menzies and Whitlam. Turnbull tried to return to Menzies’s model but showed “insufficient mettle in holding the line against his tormentors.” Each of the past prime ministers, he observes, effectively boobytrapped the job for those who followed.

But Strangio goes beyond free character analysis based on background and common traits to make some highly relevant observations about the genesis of our current politics and its arc over the first quarter of this century.

He unpicks the leadership styles and policy hallmarks of each prime minister in the context of a core theme: the influence of the man who led Australia into the new millennium, John Howard. His premise is that Australia has lived under “Howard’s settlement” ever since.

Strangio identifies the year 2001, which hosted Australia’s first twenty-first century federal election, as having marked two significant shifts still influential today. Describing Howard as “a supreme escape artist, an election-time Harry Houdini” and “the fountainhead of contemporary Australian politics,” he argues that 2001 saw a prime minister who’d been raised with “impeccable courtesy but also plain tastes” remodel himself as a strongman. This process was aided by public anxiety over asylum seekers and a world-changing terrorist attack on the United States.

Strangio posits that 2001 also marked the completion of the Liberals’ transition away from their Menzian philosophical foundations as a progressive party of economic reform to what he calls “populist-hued conservatism.” He says this “heralded a new era in the nation’s politics and gave impetus to dynamics that would prey on Australian democracy in the new century.”

Separate from the psychological profiling, what makes this a timely piece of analysis is that a major driver of Howard’s moves at the time was the threat from a surging One Nation and its leader Pauline Hanson. Elected in 1996 as an independent former Liberal candidate who was disendorsed mid-campaign for comments about Indigenous welfare, Hanson won by still appearing on the ballot paper as a Liberal, boosted by her sudden notoriety.

From the platform of parliament, she then resurrected, albeit in a less filtered manner, the kinds of sentiments about Asian immigration that had cost Howard a tilt at the prime ministership when he expressed similar thoughts twenty years earlier from within what was then still the party of Menzies. Hanson’s was a more extreme populism than Howard would come to embrace. After her party won eleven seats at the 1998 Queensland election, it started to threaten the Liberals’ base federally, just as economic pressures were further eroding their vote ahead of seeking a third term.

Strangio highlights Howard’s decision to go all-in on border protection and security as the way to recapture fleeing support, the 11 September attacks only amplifying fears he’d seeded and ripening them for reinforcement. The author marks it as a tipping point from which Australian political practice has not recovered.

Strangio acknowledges Howard’s mastery of politics. Having been initially, like William McMahon decades before, a “leader of last resort” for his party, Howard had cemented himself through such vastly superior political skills that the comparison falls away. Having entered representative politics with an unwavering opposition to the kind of social reforms Gough Whitlam had championed, and been able to fight them all over again in the form of Paul Keating, his 1996 win allowed him to start entrenching his attitudes in his party. Strangio argues Howard’s embrace of an “unthreatening, mild-mannered” form of populism began with that election, built on positioning with the “mainstream” and against “elites” and minority special interests.

He describes Howard as “a great learner” who wouldn’t have misread the electoral messages in 2022 and 2025 as his more “militant” heirs appear to have done and has since counselled against extremes. But he also argues that the deep conservatism of his upbringing, which saw him drive the Liberals to oppose cultural and social modernisation, has left the party alienated from young voters and on an unsustainable course.

The analysis doesn’t spare Labor from blame for the state of our politics. Strangio argues that Labor’s philosophical uncertainty emerging from the neoliberal, reform-heavy Hawke–Keating years allowed Howard to raid its traditional working-class constituency and claim them as his “battlers.” He says this identity crisis helped populism grow roots in Australia.

“Howard’s flirtations with reactionary populism were always likely to turn perilous,” Strangio observes. “Once that fire was lit, the probability was that it would be impossible to douse and control; instead it would escalate. That escalation… is now dangerously close to a conflagration point.”

Although Howard unquestionably belongs in the top tier of Australia’s prime ministers, says Strangio, the quality of his leadership deteriorated through his later years in office and was “ultimately corrosive” for the country.

His assessment of incumbent Anthony Albanese’s leadership is necessarily hampered by the fact that it isn’t over yet. Strangio suggests he has claims to being the most significant leader since Howard, not least for having broken the run of instability by managing to be re-elected. He also points to Albanese’s 2025 victory as delivering “a mighty blow to Howardism” by denying Peter Dutton’s version the chance to flourish in office.

He doesn’t spare Albanese, highlighting an “inability to animate with words,” though that’s balanced by praise for a political skillset similar to Howard’s and a “thread of kindness” he says is “precious in this ill-tempered century.”

Strangio notes that both Albanese and Howard served lengthy political apprenticeships, something he determines is also key to leadership success.

That’s a qualification Pauline Hanson can also claim to have earned, albeit nowhere near the levers of power. Strangio’s vivisection predates her party’s recent acceleration and his interest is in those who’ve reached the summit, not the many more who’ve tried to climb. But it’s not hard to see how Hanson’s already-tectonic impact on politics could give rise to a new irresistible itch. •

The post What makes a good prime minister? appeared first on Inside Story.

For full disclosure, I should say that I am among those who doubt One Nation will be able to sustain its momentum. It is therefore possible I found what I was expecting or even hoping to find in her address. Still, it is striking that once she no longer had a script written by someone else in front of her — once question time began at the Press Club — her discipline slipped and we got to see the old One Nation, and the old Pauline Hanson. In substance she sounded much like the right-wing Liberal she was before she lost preselection in February 1996 — even while her message was delivered in the familiar populist style that, through word, tone, facial expression and body language, constantly announces Hanson has “had a gutful.”

In her seemingly interminable speech — at one stage, the chair Tom Connell asked her to begin winding up — she was making a pitch to keep a hold on that 30 per cent of voters who are already saying they will vote One Nation and to add perhaps 5 per cent more. After refusing to give a “divisive Welcome to Country” (she presumably meant “Acknowledgement,” but never mind), Hanson spent most of the next three-quarters of an hour continuing to tell us who and what she hates.

Hanson remains, in that sense, what she has always been: a bundle of resentments and a harvester of grievance. But her present efforts meet with the most favourable of seasons for such a politician and movement: an energy crisis, a cost-of-living crisis, a housing crisis, high immigration coming out of Covid, and the Bondi terrorist attack. On the political front, the Coalition is a mess, its leadership ineffectual. Labor stumbles on — paradoxically, given its enormous majority would normally be considered unassailable in a single election.

Predictably, Hanson treated immigration as the cause of the housing crisis. She then went on to link the problem to “the utterly flawed policy of multiculturalism.” Australia is “multiracial,” she said, but should be “monocultural.” Future Liberal leader Billy Snedden said much the same thing in 1969: “I am quite determined we should have a monoculture, with everyone living in the same way, understanding each other, and sharing the same aspirations. We don’t want pluralism.” But back then, to call for “monoculture” still meant something: Australia had barely passed out of the era of Britishness, and the White Australia Policy, while on the way out, was still in place. Even the politicians contributing to the dismantling of that old order still assumed the place would remain a white nation even when they politely refrained from saying so. But what could “monocultural” mean today, unless it is a nostalgic appeal to an Australia outside the living memory even of ageing Gen Xers like me?

As a populist, Hanson naturally claims the privilege of defining what that culture is: she represents real Australians, not the kinds of people who read Inside Story. More than half the population was either born overseas or had a parent born overseas: “Is that what Australia wants?,” she complains. It is a startling pitch, vaguely reminiscent of the old-time bragging that Australia was 98 per cent British and that it needed to stay that way notwithstanding the covetous Asian hordes to our north.

Populist politics is obsessed with drawing boundaries between those who truly belong and those who do not. But it is surely risky in an immigrant nation that has had an official policy of multiculturalism for about half a century to draw the line where she and her advisers seem to have decided to draw it. Who does Hanson think is living in all those suburbs she wants to win back from the Labor Party if not migrants and their children?

All the same, Hanson more or less held it together during her haltingly read text. Australia is “predominantly a Judeo-Christian society” and “Western civilisation and its values are under siege.” “Radical Islam” and the “transgender insurgency” menace the country. Net zero is a “hoax.” Anthony Albanese is a “liar.”

And a few specific policies. Nuclear energy for Australia. More control of artificial intelligence. Abolish SBS. Turn the ABC into a subscription service for city people. End government financial subsidies to renewable energy: after all, “the bloke in the corner store” doesn’t get this kind of help. (To which the obvious retort is that “the bloke in the corner store” no longer exists. There’s that nostalgia again.)

I don’t doubt the popular resonance of this kind of appeal in our present moment, even while I am sceptical whether most Australians support having broadcasts of the World Cup football taken from them because Hanson objects to the existence of a multicultural broadcaster. That said, it is in keeping with the basic joylessness of her politics. Hanson began her political career, in local government, with a campaign to prevent the building of a library in Ipswich because she thought it was a waste of ratepayers’ money. It is hard to discern much change in her outlook thirty years later. She is one of life’s straiteners.

Alongside her selective nostalgia, Hanson combines a vision of homeliness, an articulation of resentment, and a performance of authenticity, however contrived. Even while One Nation takes Rinehart’s money and Hanson drops in on Donald Trump at Florida’s Versailles, Mar-a-Lago, she continues to play the outsider challenging the political establishment, the real taking on the fake. All of this is well calculated to appeal to people who believe the world is hurtling outside their control, nothing is what it seems, and that politicians — insiders all — won’t listen to them.

And to be fair, it is hard to have much sympathy with the mainstream politicians who looked on complacently for decades while house prices went through the roof and now find themselves berated for it by a gifted, tested political opportunist. Hanson spent a lot of time in her address talking about poverty, hunger and homelessness, too — perhaps part of an effort to give her cause some moral ballast and confound the accusation she is the puppet of filthy rich “Mrs Rinehart,” as she likes to call Australia’s wealthiest woman and One Nation’s most generous financial sponsor. Still, Hanson had no policy to offer the poor and the battler apart from suggesting less government spending and more coal would reduce their cost of living.

In this connection, One Nation has a problem — and that materialised once the question and answer session started. It was then that we got our reminder that Hanson, for all her longevity, is not a particularly creative politician. Successful populisms elsewhere have mixed and matched, assembling bits and pieces from the left and right to create a broad constituency and thereby take the wind out of more centrist opponents’ sails.

If she were one of these types, Hanson would have said that she intends doubling the parental leave allowance and spending even more on childcare by taking funding away from Indigenous people or universities or the ABC — or from other of the many “rorts” she believes are being perpetrated under our collective noses. Instead, she said businesses should not be expected to pay women who were not at work and that government funding of childcare is “out of control” and requires “investigation.” Come election time, all of this is likely to go down in Australia’s suburbs about as well as Peter Dutton’s working from home policy.

In short, as she entered full, unscripted flight, all of the familiar instincts came into play. She sounded like a reactionary who, even now, could find a home on the right of the Liberal Party — the place where she began three decades ago. When asked by Mark Riley from Seven about her consistent parliamentary record of doing over workers, she sturdily defended business in its efforts to deal with lazy employees. They should be easier to sack. She complained about abortions. She harped on about government spending like a hardened 1980s economic rationalist. But some areas of expenditure were especially unwarranted: money would be taken out of Aboriginal affairs and placed in “consolidated revenue.”

On One Nation itself, she said some remarkable things that have barely featured in media coverage. She recounted how she had refrained from creating branches when One Nation Mark II emerged in 2015 because there were 350 the first time round and “I had nothing but trouble.” That’s a pretty remarkable confession even by the standards of Australia’s somewhat reduced political parties: the rank and file can’t be trusted, so let’s not have one. But One Nation does now have branches, although they seem to operate under bizarre controls and restrictions. Hanson’s support for constitutionally enshrined freedom of speech doesn’t apparent extend to them. Why? Because “I have to be in total control of it.”

There is also the not inconsiderable issue of how a party whose current lower-house presence amounts to two seats — one of them the result of Barnaby Joyce’s defection from the Nationals — will be translated into a credible competition for executive power. Interestingly, much of the media has been so entranced by Hanson’s verbal abuse of Sarah Martin that nobody picked up that while she was in full flight she indicated she intends to run for the Senate again.

No journalist asked the obvious question of whether she — or her new colleague Joyce, for that matter — would be standing for the House of Representatives now One Nation is supposedly vying for government. Indeed, there is a surprising indifference in the commentariat about this hardly trivial matter: it is as if it is imagined the sheer force of populist passion will sweep away all institutional barriers in the name of the people’s will. Those who recall the Joh for PM fiasco of 1987 will understand how magical that kind of thinking is in a parliamentary democracy.

It is often being said that One Nation is a more professional outfit than it used to be. Probably so. It certainly has plenty of money and is working social media with apparent success. Nonetheless, it is also still Hanson’s show. Her deepest instincts appear to remain those of an ageing minor-party leader more interested in saying what the 5 or 10 per cent of voters who form her traditional base still want to hear. The parallel with Peter Dutton’s retreat into culture wars and Sky appearances during the last election campaign is striking.

Coalition strategists seem no less sure about how to respond to the One Nation threat following Hanson’s Press Club address as they were before it. Labor strategists, on the other hand, have been given a generous allocation of material to work with. •

The post Once a Liberal appeared first on Inside Story.

The immediate cause is Thursday’s parliamentary by-election in northwest England. But the roots of Starmer’s demise go back to his election as party leader six years ago.

This week’s by-election was one of the most remarkable to have taken place in a century of British parliamentary democracy. It was called after the Labour MP in the little-known Makerfield constituency stood down to allow Starmer’s chief Labour critic, Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham, to return to Westminster as an MP and challenge for the party leadership.

The result was by no means a foregone conclusion. Makerfield, a former mining district, is typical of many parts of small-town England: it lost its economic purpose and prosperity under Margaret Thatcher’s deindustrialisation and has never recovered. A solid Labour seat up until the Brexit referendum in 2016, it voted overwhelmingly to leave the European Union; since then its Labour majority has declined in successive elections under pressure from far-right parties led by Brexiteer-in-chief Nigel Farage. Just last month, Labour was wiped out in the local council elections, with more than 50 per cent of voters choosing Farage’s latest party, Reform UK.

Andy Burnham hails from the area, and — having served in Gordon Brown’s cabinet between 2007 and 2010 — has been a successful and popular mayor. But Makerfield’s recent voting history meant he was by no means bound to win. It was a brave place from which to launch his challenge to Starmer.

But the result was not even close. On a higher turnout than in the general election of 2024, Burnham stormed to victory with 54 per cent of the vote. His Reform UK opponent managed just 35 per cent, and Restore Britain, a splinter party with an even further right anti-immigrant platform, won 7 per cent. The Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and Greens got a mere 3 per cent between them.

The result is a personal triumph for Andy Burnham. Canvassers on the doorstep reported what the polls had already suggested: Labour is deeply unpopular and few people were prepared to vote for the party. It was Burnham himself people were supporting, often precisely because they wanted to get rid of Starmer. Burnham’s “Vote Andy” election leaflets didn’t even mention the party; any other Labour candidate would undoubtedly have lost.

If Burnham’s popularity is remarkable — he has been mayor for nine years and his approval ratings have risen the longer he has been in the job — Labour’s unpopularity isn’t hard to fathom. Under Keir Starmer it has squandered the opportunity that he himself had created to reverse the public’s growing disillusionment with politics.

Starmer was elected to the Labour leadership in 2020 after his predecessor, left-winger Jeremy Corbyn, lost his second general election to the Conservatives. Though not as radical as Corbyn, Starmer promised his party he would govern from the left. But since winning a remarkable victory in the 2024 election — taking the party to a huge majority of 174 seats over all other parties in parliament — he has abandoned almost all his pre-election promises. Having campaigned on the basis of “change,” he is widely perceived as having delivered very little of it.

Starmer only became an MP in 2015. Having previously been a human rights lawyer and director of public prosecutions (for which he was awarded a career service knighthood) he had almost no background in politics or political activism. What his parliamentary colleagues and party members have since discovered was that he also has few political ideas or values.

His rapid rise to a shadow cabinet position in 2016 was largely due to the refusal of many leading Labour MPs to serve under Corbyn. But when Corbyn stood down in 2019 Starmer’s calm, even dull demeanour and technocratic experience looked appealing, and he was comfortably elected leader. When he took the party from the depths of defeat to a landslide victory in 2024, party members’ choice appeared to have been triumphantly vindicated.

His two years at 10 Downing Street, however, have been a disaster for himself and for the party. The tone was set early on. Inheriting an alarming fiscal position from the outgoing Conservative government, his first policy announcement was not to, say, raise taxes on the wealthy, but to cut a welfare benefit given to pensioners to help them heat their homes in winter. It caused an uproar, and Starmer eventually had to (partially) reverse it. But his approval ratings never recovered. Later he tried to balance the books with a £5 billion cut to welfare spending, mainly targeted at disabled people, which was defeated by his own backbenchers.

In all, Starmer has been forced to retreat no fewer than thirteen times from policies he has announced — not because of anything the Tories have done (they have far too few seats to make a difference) but because of public opposition and anger. He has increasingly been seen as simultaneously unprincipled and incompetent.

That impression has been exacerbated by his apparent inability to communicate any principles that might define his or his government’s purpose. Starmer has insisted that he is a pragmatist — that there will never be such a thing as “Starmerism” — but the result is that opinion polls consistently say the public no longer knows what Labour stands for. When Starmer made a hardline speech on immigration last year whose language evoked that of an infamous racist of the 1960s, calls for him to be replaced as leader started gaining ground.

This is not to say there have been no achievements. Starmer’s government has instituted a new set of workers’ rights, especially for those in the ultra-flexible gig economy. It has limited private landlords’ rights to evict tenants for no reason. Health service waiting lists are falling. Starmer has personally managed a difficult relationship with Donald Trump, leaving Britain with lower American tariffs than its European peers.

But such wins have barely cut through to the public. Starmer’s approval ratings have declined month on month and now stand at nearly minus 50 per cent. Labour fell behind Reform UK in the opinion polls in early 2025 and has been languishing ever since. In the elections to the Scottish and Welsh parliaments and English local councils last month Labour suffered huge defeats, both to Reform on its right and the Greens on its left. At national level Labour is now on 17 per cent, half its 2024 election vote share, with Reform on 26 per cent and the Conservatives 18 per cent.

If this situation were sustained to the general election in 2028 or 2029, Nigel Farage would be the next British prime minister. It is this prospect that has led Andy Burnham to declare his desire to challenge Starmer for the Labour leadership.

So what happens now? There are three possibilities. One is that Keir Starmer refuses to give up his position and says he will fight Burnham in a leadership contest among Labour’s members. In those circumstances another candidate, former health minister Wes Streeting, would almost certainly join the race too. It is hard to see either of them beating Burnham, however, which would mean Burnham becoming Labour leader, and prime minister, at the end of such a contest in September.

A second possibility is that Starmer acknowledges his unpopularity and says he will stand down, but Streeting refuses to pull out. Again, there would be a leadership contest Burnham would almost certainly win.

Burnham’s own favoured option, unsurprisingly, is for there to be no such contest, with both Starmer and Streeting acknowledging the inevitable and standing aside (in Streeting’s case presumably in return for a senior job in a Burnham cabinet). In that case he would ask Starmer to conduct an “orderly transition” over the next three months, which would allow Burnham to appoint a team and prepare new policies and then to take over at 10 Downing Street in mid-September.

You may have noticed that all of these possibilities have the same end result. But if it is now more or less certain that Andy Burnham will soon be entering the famous front door, the political conversation will quickly turn to what he will do when he gets there. He has promised more radical policies to reduce the cost of living, bring the privatised energy and water industries under control public control and “reindustrialise” forgotten areas like Makerfield. He has also pledged reform of the electoral system. Most of all he has promised to restore “hope” to an increasingly disillusioned and fractious British public.

But there are plenty of cynical commentators who point to Britain’s struggling post-Brexit  economy, constrained public finances and divided public opinion and, electoral miracle-worker though he may be, doubt Burnham can do any of it.

It is not as if others haven’t tried, they point out. When Andy Burnham in due course replaces Keir Starmer at Number 10, he will become the UK’s seventh prime minister in ten years. •

The post Next stop, 10 Downing Street appeared first on Inside Story.

So many big targets, so many uncosted “policies.” A lot of Hanson’s sentiments could appeal to many or most voters, but others, particularly when she was answering questions (workers are “lazy,” childcare workers don’t need qualifications, her slippery views about abortion), not so much. Left unmentioned were her strong anti-vaccination views, her adoration of Donald Trump, her fellow One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts’s conspiracy theories, her backing from posh squillionaire Gina Rinehart, her attitudes to guns.

She and her team would be happy with her performance: she was confident, strong, not for turning and avoided those tricky topics. The grievance theatre — everyone’s picking on her but she keeps soldiering on — was on full show.

Hanson is the leader of an insurgent party, so the rules that apply to the Libs and the Nats don’t apply to her. But this insurgent party is suddenly leading the pollsters’ primary vote figures in a three-way contest with Labor and the Coalition.

That doesn’t mean One Nation is “ahead in the polls” any more than when, in the old days, the Coalition led in primary votes but lagged after preferences. If recent survey results were replicated at the ballot box, Labor would likely have the most seats — maybe a majority — followed by One Nation, daylight, and then the Coalition.

If One Nation’s primary support gets into the high thirties, though, a majority of seats might (depending on other parties’ support) be on the cards. Somewhere between its current thirty-ish and that scenario, a One Nation–led alliance with the Coalition becomes likely.

Comparisons with Trump are limited: he took control of the major centre-right party, and hence its place in the country, its infrastructure, its finance and its rusted-on supporters. The United States has not seen the electoral splintering that’s happened in other advanced democracies (if America still sits in that category).

In Western Europe, where most countries use proportional representation to elect their lower houses, some far-right parties have topped the vote with very low numbers. Georgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy got 26 per cent in 2022, but along with her party’s junior centre-right partners won a majority of the Chamber of Deputies seats. (That’s the short version; the longer one includes first-past-the-post single-member districts, which members of her coalition divided between them so as not to split the vote — similar to Liberal frontbencher Tony Pasin’s recent thought bubble.)

At the other end of the range of outcomes, Austria’s Freedom Party won the most votes, 28.8 per cent, and the most seats in 2024 but remained totally out of government. In between, a few far-right parties won similarly modest vote pluralities and then entered government in some form, although not supplying the head of government.

France’s lower house’s electoral system is similar to ours: single-member districts, with its second round of voting rendering it all somewhat “preferential.” Two years ago, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally group topped the first round (like our primary vote) with 33 per cent, winning pluralities in a majority of districts. Other parties then selectively sat out the second round out to deny it victory.

In our compulsory preferential voting system, strategic non-contesting of seats (as advocated by Pasin) makes little sense, but recommending preferences to or away from other parties does. Labor always puts One Nation last on its how-to-vote cards, but at recent elections the Coalition has “preferenced” One Nation ahead of Labor everywhere, largely because most of the very conservative Liberal and Nationals memberships would strongly object, and possibly defect, if they preferenced Labor.

Hanson’s Wednesday speech devoted many words to lambasting Anthony “the Liar” Albanese and Jim Chalmers, but no Coalition members were mentioned. While One Nation casts itself as an alternative to the two-party seesaw, its strongest criticism is always directed at Labor (often with a swipe at the Greens). And yet it inflicts a lot more damage to the Coalition parties.

How much more damage?

There’s a question most pollsters ask without publishing the results. When a respondent says they’d put “1” next to a small party or an independent, the pollster asks which of the major parties they’d give their preference to on the ballot paper.

The question usually starts something like: “As you may know, you must rank either Labor ahead of the Coalition or the Coalition ahead of Labor on the ballot paper…” These words provide information people don’t get when voting, and this artificiality is one reason why these respondent-derived preferences don’t tend to stand up well against the eventual flows at elections.

But the question is brilliant for getting some idea of the (major) partisan leanings of these voters. One outfit that publishes these numbers is Redbridge/Accent, and in their last three (non-MRP) reports the results for One Nation voters averaged to 77 per cent for the Coalition and 23 for Labor. That’s a good proxy for the relative proportions the insurgent party takes from the majors.

Of course, the major parties began shedding primary votes years and decades before One Nation staged its recent revival; indeed, the revival itself is a symptom of the ongoing collapse of the two-party system. The support has to go somewhere, and at the moment it’s coalescing around this person.

As the election approaches, the prospect of a government comprising One Nation and the Coalition has the potential to push more voters, however reluctantly, to support Labor.

It’s barely a year since Peter Dutton led the Coalition to disaster, largely because he was seen as too Trumpy. But he was the epitome of sensible centrism compared with Hanson. That’s the big question about the 2028 election: will the old rules — that voters crave stability and reassurance and are risk averse — still apply? A lot will depend on how the economy is going, and whether the cost of living still feels alarming. People can take desperate measures in desperate times. •

The post One Nation’s preference problem appeared first on Inside Story.

These shifts in spatial and temporal perception are vividly captured in Siri Hustvedt’s memoir of her anguish after the death of her husband Paul Auster. Ghost Stories begins with a precise statement — the date and time he died in 2024 — and then falls into the disarray of the aftermath.

She sorts and discards his clothing. She gathers up the assortment of drugs that had accumulated during his cancer treatment and has her sister dispose of them. Tidying his desk, she observes his writing habits, his collection of pens and typewriter ribbons and his handwritten notebooks. The busyness of cleaning and clearing absorbs and distracts her.

But then she looks at his chair in the dining room, noticing the marks on the floor made as he moved while seated. Formerly a source of annoyance, she sees them now as “traces of his body’s living weight,” marks of her loss, and she crumples, howling, “I want you back. I want you back.”

Hustvedt observes and describes her fluctuating states of mind as she moves through their home as “cognitive splintering.” One minute she is exploring medical statistics and debates about the effects of environment on genetic inheritance; the next she is struggling with sleeplessness, nightmares, the horror of her husband’s final days of life and the family trauma that preceded his cancer diagnosis.

Hustvedt has written extensively on the interplay between mind and body, drawing on her intellectual interest in the sciences of the mind – psychiatry, psychoanalysis, neurology and psychology. In her non-fiction book The Shaking Woman, Or a History of My Nerves she analysed her experiences of the interplay between involuntary seizures, fear, distress and an uncanny ability to continue speaking as if her “self” was distinct from the “shaking woman.”

She has also examined the ways that migraine affects perception and can induce disorienting and disabling physical reactions. Not surprisingly then, while she acknowledges Paul’s smoking as a probable contributor his inoperable lung cancer, she surmises that the deaths of his son and his baby granddaughter the previous year had induced mental responses that contributed to his illness.

Paul Auster’s son, Daniel, died of a drug overdose days after his arrest for the manslaughter of his infant daughter, who had died after ingesting fentanyl and heroin. These events, which Auster called “the horrible things,” haunted the last year of his life, but he was insistent that “the story be told.” Hustvedt recounts their anguish over the son’s drug addiction and the traumas it wrought. Like Auster, she had written fiction drawing on Daniel’s troubled life that reveals their concern over a long period. While Paul held out hope for his son’s future, Siri withdrew in response to the “lies, thefts, and betrayals.” She acknowledges it was easier for her because she was a stepmother, but the tragedy of the baby girl’s death shattered Paul’s faith Daniel would change.

Insisting that “the wondrous and the horrible mingle,” Hustvedt juxtaposes her brief account of these two deaths with the happiness at the birth of a grandson to their daughter Sophie and son-in-law Spencer in 2024. Paul Auster wrote long letters to his grandson during his illness, aware he would not live to see him reach adolescence. These letters provide familial stories of the sort that might be told to a child about their parents and forebears — the events of 11 September 2001, when Miles’ mother could not be contacted; the farm in Minnesota where his grandmother Siri grew up — documenting “the unbroken generations of love.” In Ghost Stories they are interspersed with Siri’s letters to friends during her husband’s illness and treatments, her diary entries and her reflections on death and grief as human mysteries.

Paul Auster’s novels have often been described as postmodern, defying conventions of plot trajectory and authorial voice. Several, considered “autofiction,” incorporate people from his life as characters and include versions of events he experienced.

Hustvedt writes more conventional novels, but this memoir is decidedly postmodern in its fragmentary form and disrupted narrative. It chronicles their relationship over its forty-three years, from when she was a graduate student writing a thesis on Charles Dickens and Paul was yet to publish The New York Trilogy, which brought him international fame. It is the story of a companiable marriage that provided the ground for mutual flourishing as writers.

In some respects, and understandably, the marriage is idealised, to the point where I was surprised when, well into in the book, she mentions arguing at the dinner table. But the account of his cancer treatments and her care of him over the last six months of his life creates a vivid picture of their intimacy and its transformations over the decades.

Paul’s death is the annihilation of their unity as a couple. Recalling the ways they became increasingly similar over the years, she sees that he took to the grave “my words, my touch, my ideas, my books, and my humour, all the changes in him wrought from living with me over four decades.” She gropes for visceral metaphors that capture the injury of loss — amputation, a phantom limb, “a gaping hole in my torso.” The “splintering” of her life in the wake of his death means her own body is the site of loss, grief and dislocation, but as a writer she is also the detached observer and analyst of her emotional states.

And just as Paul embodied changes wrought by Siri, she has incorporated elements of his life as part of herself. She captures the physicality of grieving — the “aches and electric jolts and mouth sores,” blank insomnia, “soldiering on” through sickness and suffering.

When the funeral is over, she returns home, dines with visiting relatives, and then lies on her bed, sleepless. She experiences the ghostly presence of Paul “taking the last two steps up to the third floor, just beyond the open door. He crossed the landing, walked into the room, and stopped at the side of the bed.” He had said he wanted to return as a ghost, and she is convinced he is there to comfort her: “his invisible, adoring concerned presence flooded me with a dense, plump, happiness.” At other times, his presence manifests as the smell of smoke from his small cigars, and she feels this regular olfactory hallucination as “a sensual trace of my past with Paul.”

Grief memoirs typically deal with the irrational, bizarre ways mourning can simultaneously recognise the loss and engage in denial. Joan Didion called this “magical thinking” when she documented her response to her husband’s death. She refused to throw away his shoes in case he returned. Like Hustvedt, C.S. Lewis used the metaphor of amputation in A Grief Observed, elaborating the complex emotions of suspense and fear as irrational expectations of an event that can’t possibly occur — the return of the dead beloved. Hustvedt claims her experience of smelling Paul’s cigars as symbolic but material, her sense of his step on the stairs as “the ineffable feeling I longed for… briefly restored to me. I got him back.”

Hustvedt also retrieves her husband by describing his habits, his relationships with family and friends, his literary fame and the moral and aesthetic impulses that inspired his writing. In many respects Ghost Stories is a eulogy, giving biographical details and memories of their daily interactions, describing his generous affection for various family members. He was effusive in his admiration for his wife’s writing and boasted about the achievements of his singer/songwriter daughter Sophie and her husband Spencer, a photographer. His letters to his grandson reveal an almost naive pride in their parental accomplishments.

The text switches back and forth — back to their first meeting, their wedding day, and how both their careers flourished in the decades that followed, forward to the grieving. Her role in the “Siri-AND-Paul” entity is conveyed through the literary device of commentary on three letters she sent him in the early phase of their relationship. These intimate disclosures, written when she was very young, are balanced by the reflections on her feelings decades later. By her account, the deep love they express for each other was embedded in a creative collaboration of support, commentary and critique.

Ghost Stories invites comparison with other memoirs of grief, especially those by authors whose partners were also writers. Didion, Lewis, and more recently, Geraldine Brooks have all written about the shock and disbelief at the death itself and its shattering of their sense of self. Didion and Lewis grapple with their trauma in eloquent, almost detached, philosophical language. Brooks and Lewis narrate how they eventually come to terms with loss and anguish, each invoking religious or spiritual traditions.

By lacking resolution Hustvedt’s story captures the chopping and changing as life continues. “There are moments when NOW obliterates grief,” she writes, including the maddening bureaucratic necessities that accompany death: changing banking details, closing accounts, managing the literary estate. And there are the simple pleasures of sunny days and enjoying seeing a growing grandchild. This openness, and the spontaneity of diary entries, emails to friends and her letters, is balanced by careful observations and contemplation of her husband’s illness and death.

The Hustvedt–Auster household was clearly well-organised, with file boxes on each family member. Hustvedt uses these archived documents — letters, diaries, fragments of stories, recollections — to reconstruct different points in their lives. She has always introduced stories from her life into her fiction, often in ways that make the “truth” hard to distinguish from the imagined. In Ghost Stories there is no haziness. Mourning is a cruel process, and she is relentlessly candid in describing it. •

Ghost Stories: A Memoir
By Siri Hustvedt | Sceptre | $34.99 | 303 pages

The post Phantom limb appeared first on Inside Story.

Martin may be best known for her biography, Ida Leeson: A Life, which won the Magarey Medal for Biography in 2008. Ida Leeson became the first female director of the Mitchell Library. Martin’s first book, initially written as her PhD thesis, is her three-part biography, Passionate Friends, the lives of Mary Fullerton, Mabel Singleton and Miles Franklin. This brilliant book delves into the work of these writers, their travel and their personal lives through their letters. Martin explores these women’s views of their own sexuality, living as they did in times when lesbian relationships were not openly acknowledged, and brings their lives and their loves to light with sensitivity and in loving detail.

In her latest book, Double Act, Martin once again has recognised two women who deserve to be remembered: Eirene Mort, a professionally trained artist and designer, and Nora Kate “Chips” Weston, a skilled metal worker, woodcarver and carpenter. Eirene studied in London, returned to Sydney in 1903 and met Chips not long after. By 1907 they were sharing a studio in Sydney.

Martin’s book is not only a tribute to these two strong women. It also presents an absorbing and detailed picture of the artworld of Sydney before, during and after the first world war. The Arts and Crafts movement drew many artists together and Eirene and Chips were both active in expanding the status of women in that movement.

Double Act is beautifully illustrated with Eirene’s sketches, bookplates, designs and watercolours as well as photographs of Nora’s metalwork and furniture. Eirene Mort’s designs for pottery and bookplates using brolgas, kangaroos, swans and waratahs are superb. At times the two women collaborated, with Eirene creating designs to be fashioned in timber or metal by Chips. The two women travelled together through New South Wales with Mort sketching and gathering ideas for designs, always with Australian motifs.

Nora and Eirene lived quietly together for sixty years in what Martin calls a “homosocial” world of women artworkers where female couples were not unusual in the early 1900s. Women — especially professional women of a certain class — could live together as “friends” in a way that was not acceptable for men. Eirene and Nora created their home, Weld, at Vaucluse, where they made their art and took in students.

Martin presents visually striking plans of the Vaucluse house and the tone of her writing as she describes this home is quiet, calm and feminine, just as this work and living space must have been for Eirene and Nora. I found Martin’s discussion of the gendered nature of design very persuasive and I think this aspect of the work will be of great interest to readers.

Double Act is a book to treasure. Both Eirene and Nora descended from prominent colonial families. Their stories are told against the history of Sydney and New South Wales in the first half of the twentieth century, through wartime and the progress of women’s rights. The book shines with illustrations of beautiful arts and crafts work and with spotlights on the particular forms the women produced.

Most movingly, Double Act tells of the developing and enduring love between Eirene and Nora. Selections of Eirene’s writing taken from her letters, together with Martin’s intimate writing style make this an immersive and satisfying read. Eirene and Nora have been brought back into the light.

Martin concludes this book with a poignant and meaningful poem by Mary Fullerton who shared her life with her “friend,” Mabel Singleton, two of the subjects of Passionate Friends:

Feelings can have no framed
Solidity
Nor love a stable shape
Nor can you measure me

Double Act is a superb addition to Sylvia Martin’s important body of work. It is a book to savour. •

Double Act: Eirene Mort and Nora Kate Weston
By Sylvia Martin | National Library of Australia | $36.99 | 256 pages

The post Into the light appeared first on Inside Story.

I am reminded of this every time I review a book that touches in some way on goings-on in Canberra’s aid and foreign policy scene. I get messages from insiders telling me I’ve either been too tough on the subject or not gone hard enough. Tales and perspectives gush out, many of which are amusing, insightful, revealing or chatty, with a few teetering towards defamation. Yet when I ask these individuals to consider penning their own articles, they go quiet and start to mumble about “not wanting to rock the boat.”

Which brings us to Nicholas Enrich’s book Into the Wood Chipper, a Washington insider’s account of being present at the dismantling of the American foreign aid agency USAID in the first few months of the second Trump administration. USAID was among the first targets of Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE, and the title of the book stems from a late-night message in which Musk wrote that he had “spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could gone [sic] to some great parties. Did that instead.”

Enrich was USAID’s acting assistant administrator for global health during that period. To use an Americanism that I learned during my own time in Washington DC, Enrich was a man who “keeps the receipts” — he documented every text and email and took contemporaneous notes on every bonkers, Kafkaesque conversation he had with the political appointees and senior bureaucratic enablers hellbent on dismembering USAID. The result is a book that is gossipy, scabrous, pointed, darkly amusing, occasionally profound, insightful on the bureaucratic condition and, in highlighting the cruel effects of these decisions, desperately sad.

Enrich is not just a person with the courage to write but also a person who can write. He is a pacy, engaging wordsmith with a pleasingly snarky turn of phrase and an ability to produce vivid scenes that propel his hellscape narrative.

Apart from some scene-setting about what USAID was and a potted personal biography, the period his book covers is short. It spans from November 2024, when Donald Trump was re-elected, to early March 2025, when Enrich realised he could not conscionably be a part of the process anymore. By then, the organisation he’d fought for had been reduced to less than a husk. He blew the whistle by releasing a trove of memos documenting what was going on behind the scenes.

I lived in Washington DC during the first few months of Enrich’s timeframe and can attest to how accurately he describes the jittery, forlorn, tense, anti-“woke” atmospherics of that time. These were fanned by prominent voices in the MAGA-sphere on platforms such as the former Twitter and podcasts such as The Joe Rogan Experience. (I worked as a senior adviser to the United States Institute of Peace from 2022 to 2025, and DOGE shuttered that organisation shortly after it had finished with USAID. The fate of the institute is still before the courts, although it seems impossible to imagine it will return to its former state.)

Yet, as Enrich writes, even the most fatalistic could not have imagined what epic fury would be wrought unto foreign aid so soon after the inauguration. On his first afternoon back in office, President Trump issued an executive order for a “ninety-day pause in United States foreign development assistance for assessment of programmatic efficiencies and consistency with United States foreign policy.” Soon after, another order decreed a “stop work” on all foreign aid projects.

The bland bureaucratese unleashed pandemonium. Staff working on diversity, equity and inclusion programs were immediately fired, children receiving drugs in a promising tuberculosis trial stopped getting treatment, and medicine and food bound for the needy began to moulder in ports and warehouses across the world.

And then, for Enrich, who was given the dubious honour of being promoted during this period, things get worse. He interfaces with political appointees, many of whom worked with the agency during the first Trump administration and nurse personal grievances against it. One such individual tells Enrich that he believed that USAID staff killed his family’s dog.

The administration announces a waiver for “lifesaving humanitarian assistance” but there is a lack of clarity as to what the waiver encompasses. Ever the bureaucrat, Enrich tries to save what programs he can in the bureaucratic manner he knows best, penning memos and crunching spreadsheets to make his case for reopening some health programs including one that would quell an Ebola outbreak in central Africa.

His efforts are hopeless. The direction is already set and the infrastructure to support these programs already obliterated. I wrote that Enrich was “like someone taking a banana to a gun fight” in the margins of the book at this point.

The political appointees (and their bureaucratic enablers) are simply not interested in Enrich’s reasons. The waivers are rendered a “farce,” Enrich writes, and no one wants to listen. One of the political appointees advises him to “take a step back” after he points out in one of his memos that terminating the contracts in such a wholesale manner would cost millions of lives.

The atmosphere grew ever stranger and more jittery as more colleagues are terminated and locked out of the building, with some being some reinstated and then fired again. As one example of the paranoia, he cites the case of a colleague who spent “all day eyeing a suspicious-looking croissant that had been mysteriously left on her desk, fearing it might be poisoned” only to learn it was a surprise pick-me-up from a concerned colleague.

Stymied at every turn, exasperated by the torrent of misinformation about USAID emanating from the Trump administration, Enrich realises his work is futile. With colleagues, he compiles documents outlining the impacts of the “pause,” the hollowness of the “waiver” and the impact of the cuts both on vulnerable people around the world and the global reputation of the United States. Ever the good bureaucrat, he gives the memos the most bland titles imaginable. And then, in the sort of act that would cheer a pissed-off public servant anywhere, he sends the memos out in a mass email to current and former colleagues. Soon thereafter, one surmises, he starts to work on this book.

A little over a year on, the impact of the abrupt rupturing of USAID is clear. A study published in the Lancet last year estimated that approximately an additional fourteen million people could die by 2030 because of the cuts. A new Ebola threat in central Africa is growing, with the World Health Organization declaring it a public health emergency of international concern.

Yet even with that stark figure, the ending of USAID feels like yesterday’s news, a topic too impolitic to raise. Governments — ahem, partners — that received support from USAID barely mentioned the demise of the organisation at the time and don’t do so now. I was in Papua New Guinea recently and the only physical signs of USAID still visible were placards for abstruse workshops from yesteryear that remain hanging in government offices.

Some US health programs have started up again but on very different terms, now run out of the State Department. These are implemented by the same suite of managing contractors who used to implement USAID programs and who presumably have scrubbed forensically all references to diversity, equity and inclusion and other now-verboten-speak from their websites.

It is in the nature of obituaries that the dead are lauded and their blemishes, imperfections and worse overlooked. A similar halo effect can be observed in how AusAID is referenced nowadays, when it is mentioned at all. If I had my druthers, I wish Enrich had done a tad more reflection about what hadn’t been working well within USAID. My colleague Robin Davies described it once as a “harried, hamstrung and traumatised organisation.” I met some truly amazing people working within it, but all were labouring in the midst of an unbending contract model and spending way too much time developing metrics that I doubt anyone either used or even fully understood.

Still, Enrich has given USAID a solid tribute with this blow-by-blow account of its demise. He is one gutsy fellow. As prominent writer, surgeon and senior Biden-era USAID appointee Atul Gawande writes in his warm foreword, Enrich wrote the book when he had “still-young children… a mortgage to pay [and]… no clear job ahead for his future.” That takes courage.

I hope his book gives others situated either in bureaucratic foxholes or nearby vantage points, all of whom have stories to tell, and many of whom are more financially secure than Enrich, the courage to write. •

Into the Wood Chipper
By Nicholas Enrich | Simon & Schuster/Summit Books | $57.99 | 240 pages

This review first appeared in Devpolicy Blog, published by the Development Policy Centre in the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University.

The post The man who kept the receipts appeared first on Inside Story.

Yet Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu are absent from the index, and Donald Trump gets only passing mentions. Instead, the authors are concerned with tracing the question to its best-known source in the philosophy of David Hume, and even further back to the work of Etienne de la Boétie, who wrote in the sixteenth century, a generation after Machiavelli. Force alone was not enough to account for the submission of thousands to a single tyrant, La Boétie reasoned.

Margalit and Sharon bring exceptional knowledge and experience to their subject. As cultural historians, they draw their lines of analysis through Montaigne, Hobbes, William Godwin and Tolstoy to the twentieth century’s Gore Vidal and Noam Chomsky. But what of the twenty-first? When it comes to compliance — a central factor in the success of manipulative politics — the second Trump administration has seen truly stupefying manifestations in the judiciary, the academy, the commercial world and the media. And yet the book doesn’t go there.

The authors make the case that examining political manipulation in ancient democracies and early modern republics helps to make us aware of recurring or enduring elements. Certainly many of the assertions drawn from historical sources have a keen relevance, all the more arresting for the terms in which they are expressed. La Boétie points to “practices and enticements” that serve to keep the people “stupefied.”

“Stupefied” is a good word for a study of manipulation. It communicates so much more than “stupid” and is not so readily weaponised. If claims that the people are stupid are replaced by the question of how they became stupefied, attention turns to causes and remedies. And so the authors set out to offer “a workable account of manipulation.”

The finger is most obviously pointed at propaganda campaigns, with social media as the arena of worst offences. But the authors also quote philosopher Susan Stebbing’s 1939 observation about the need to examine our individual failures of thinking, and the book’s argument is balanced between those polarities: personal responsibility for the formation of opinions versus external influences seeking to confuse or confound ethical judgement.

On the first, Margalit and Sharon take examples from literary and philosophical sources ranging from ancient Greek mythology to classics of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, with Shakespeare’s Othello as a recurrent illustration of how “perverting the way a person reaches decisions” is a deeply psychological process. It is also a form of domination. The authors emphasise that their main interest is in political manipulation, but Othello is a complex case of the personal being weaponised to political ends.

Margalit and Sharon introduce Plato and Aristotle as commentators on the centrality of flattery in tyrannical government. This is not just something that goes on among courtiers, as in Machiavelli’s account. Plato stresses the appetite for flattery within crowds seduced by grandiose figures purporting to embody their interests and aspirations. Aristotle identifies the strategy at all levels as “pandering to extract benefit.” Is this dynamic an insidious by-product of the arts of rhetoric?

That’s a disturbing ethical question. Rhetoric is the art of convincing, which is about more than presenting valid truths and arguments. It works by “engaging cognitive abilities” with opening gambits that implicitly flatter the audience’s intelligence: “This is a deep point…”; “We who can see through the lies…”; or (a Trump favourite) “Not many people know this…” But the book refers only in passing to the culture of sycophancy in the Trump White House.

Historical parallels can certainly be illuminating. Gustav Le Bon wrote in 1895 that new psychological characteristics emerge among people “from the mere fact of their being assembled.” This quotation appears in a section on mass manipulation, “mass-man” and the mob. Le Bon’s words could be applied, though, in a way he had not anticipated: what of the assemblies at Mar-a-Lago, or Epstein Island?

In our time, the concentration of wealth and celebrity in circles of political influence is a more bizarre and consequential manifestation of “new psychological characteristics” than anything we are seeing on the streets. The normalisation of plastic surgery, huge investments in immortality research, and exhibitions of infantile behaviour recall the excesses of eighteenth-century Versailles. The role of extreme wealth in contemporary manipulation is also something a book on this subject might be expected to deal with.

Concentrated analysis of psychological manipulation through the examples of Machiavelli, and Iago in Othello, may yield insights that apply to strategies used by influencers like Charlie Kirk, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and Ben Shapiro — or, for that matter, the left’s Rachel Maddow and Kara Swisher, who explicitly aim to call out manipulative tactics. Perhaps we should be able to draw the parallels for ourselves, but it’s complex work to untangle what is new and specific to the political dynamics of our times.

There’s certainly a case to be made for critical distance in an overheated political milieu in which public opinion is assiduously stirred by influencers seeking to push it into the red zone. Discussion of how manipulation contributes to the rise of the MAGA movement, the British Reform party or One Nation risks becoming caught up in the incendiary dynamics. The ideological vehemence of the Likud government under Benjamin Netanyahu, for example, has made commentary on antisemitism a high-risk activity, but it is one in which many forms of dangerous manipulation are at work.

What makes Netanyahu an especially striking omission from Captive Minds is the credentials of its two authors. Avishai Margalit is a professor emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Assaf Sharon is professor of philosophy at Tel Aviv University and co-founder and senior fellow of Molad: the Center for Renewal of Israeli Democracy. Both have impressive records of active intellectual engagement with Israeli politics.

Margalit’s landmark books on the ethics of memory, occidentalism and compromise are informed by a lifelong engagement with the realities of a crisis-ridden nation. As a contributor to the New York Review of Books he has written articles on Yitzhak Rabin, Ariel Sharon, Yitzhak Shamir and Shimon Peres. In April 2023 he spoke with the New Yorker about the fusion of religion and nationalism strategically promoted in Netanyahu’s rhetoric.

Sharon’s Molad centre conducts research on forms of current populism associated with conspiracy theories, disinformation campaigns and anti-liberal incitement. He discusses the difficulty of speaking plainly in an environment where denunciations of the massacre by Hamas immediately bring accusations of being an apologist for Zionism. He, too, sees religious nationalism as an emergent force that deprives “actual living citizens” of the freedom to define their identity in the face of hereditary determinations.

They do return to the present in the final chapter, with a review of how manipulation is evolving in the present communications environment. They identify two primary aspects. One is the growing dominance of images in public discourse, which they describe as “a shift of momentous proportions.” Perhaps we need the perspective of a deeper history to see it that way, having taken it for granted for more than three generations.

The second factor is the rise of social media and independent blogging, and here the authors fall into the trap of judgementalism. They cite Gresham’s law: bad money drives out good. (Thomas Gresham, an advisor to Elizabeth I, urged her to raise confidence in the coin of the realm by reversing the practice of blending the metals with alloys.) Something similar, they say, is true of public discourse, when professional journalism is driven out by amateur punditry and the viral propagation of shrill opinion.

It’s a common complaint, but one that skates over the more complex realities. Social media is not all bad. To cast it as debased currency is to ignore the amount of genuinely informed and ethical concern circulating among regular contributors. In many situations it serves as counter to the heavily weighted messaging of billionaire-owned newspapers and television networks. Professional journalism is itself a debased currency in an era when media owners determine what is reported, and how.

The authors describe their own conclusion as “unsatisfying,” a word that may echo Margalit’s long engagement with the principle of compromise. Like generals, they acknowledge, philosophers tend to prepare for the previous war, but they rest their case for the value of hindsight on some fundamental principles, the most important of which is freedom. A free society can only be built on the freedom of individuals as thinkers and adjudicators of the most important issues confronting them. It is this freedom at the level of cognition that is the book’s fundamental concern. •

Captive Minds: A Study of Manipulation
By Avishai Margalit and Assaf Sharon | Harvard University Press | $64 | 288 pages

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The push is to eradicate any kind of teaching and learning other than that which is officially mandated, namely “explicit” or “direct” instruction, once known as stand-and-deliver, or the fill ’em up theory of learning. Claiming to be backed by the hot new findings of “learning science,” the reality is long-familiar, with a twist: the teacher at the front facing twenty or twenty-five students delivering a centrally developed and mandated lesson plan in the approved manner as specified in the departmental “teaching and learning model.”

Sold as an educational measure — Victoria’s minister declares “we’ve got to make the precious use of every minute we have of students with us” — the push is better understood as a reassertion of top-down power, of ministers over bureaucracies, of bureaucracies over schools, of teachers over kids, of big states over small and of states over the Commonwealth and its “national approach.” It comes with the unmistakable frisson of a crackdown. 

The official crackdown is backed by a broad-front mobilisation of interests. Hence Michael Stutchbury, the former editor-in-chief of the Financial Review who now heads the conservative Centre for Independent Studies, lauding a standout school in which “Teachers do the teaching and are the authority in the classroom. Desks face the front. Lessons are fast-paced and structured. There are clear rules and expectations…” Hence the Australian attributing Ireland’s recently lifted performance (“making the world green with envy”) to a concentration on the basics. Hence The Australian Curriculum: In Search of a Knowledge-Rich Education, commissioned by another conservative outfit, the Menzies Centre. And hence a high-end conference pitching “knowledge-rich curriculum” as the key to system-wide reform.

Among those on the receiving end of the crackdown, reactions vary.

Few hard-pressed teachers can resist a free lesson plan. Equally few like being told that’s the only approved lesson plan. Even fewer like being told they’ll teach it in the head office way. Some of the more active teachers take a fundamentally different view of teaching and learning: they see teaching as a calling, and the school not as a franchise outlet but as a site for the production of learning and growth, crucially assisted by various forms of teaching. The crackdown breeds resentment and disaffection, hastening the exit of the most capable teachers.

Principals, those unfortunate sergeants of the force, increasingly hold heretical views; many are angry that a curriculum dominated by the university-oriented Australian Tertiary Admission Rank makes it impossible to give the kids what they need. Many bite their tongues; life is hard enough without putting their jobs on the line.

Among the intelligentsia, the teacher educators and others in the universities, on the other hand, the heretical view is close to being an orthodoxy. Some call for “transformation.” The learning scientists generally regard the narrowly cognitive “science” on which the crackdown depends as old hat, wrong about most kinds of learning, and counterproductive. But the academics are more inclined to “critique” than resist; few entertain the idea of getting organised to do something. And they are hierarchs too, in their way; most believe that their “research” finds the way, “practice” follows. Besides, they’ve got their own branch of the crackdown (the 2023 Scott report on teacher education) to contend with.

Then there’s a swarm of retailers of everything from software to school camps to coaching, as well as the “thought leaders” and consultants offering morale-boosting workshops and revamp services to schools, a few targeting the big end of town. (Their number includes Learning First, impresarios of the conference mentioned a moment ago and, not coincidentally, authors of the highly selective account of Ireland’s education reform puffed by the Australian). The general rule for those who depend upon schools and systems for a living must be, of course: follow the money.

And, last of all, the kids. There is much hand-wringing about the lack of “engagement,” “agency” and “wellbeing” among students, about the rising incidence of “school refusal,” “absenteeism,” bullying, “classroom disruption,” straight-out defiance and even violence by students on teachers. Many organisations confessing to such widespread workforce discontent would look to a comprehensive makeover of the whole setup; the leaders of schooling, by contrast, are blaming the victims, and pasting “programs” onto a dysfunctional way of organising daily work and of students’ learning careers.

Here the question of class intrudes, along with a widely unnoticed ageism: the people being cracked down upon are kids, and overwhelmingly they are working-class kids. Almost all of them are in government schools, and government schools are the only schools directly under the bureaucratic and ministerial thumb.

The crackdown is in practice a crackdown on the “hard” government schools, not the selectives (dozens of them in NSW) or the leafy suburb government schools or most of the non-governments, dominated by students and families focused on the big prize at the end. It’s the schools battling high staff turnover, insufficient everything and the humiliation of poor “performance” as divined by NAPLAN and publicised on My School.

It is emblematic of the class politics of the crackdown that the knowledge-rich conference will be held at the five-star Intercontinental Hotel in the Sydney CBD, a long way east of Parramatta — and even Parramatta is a long way east of the geographical centre of greater Sydney, where the westies are.

The crackdown gets the whole problem wrong right from the start. There can be no doubt that the received way of organising teaching and learning can be got to tick over like a Swiss clock — schools like the one lauded by Michael Stutchbury, those very few schools where the many stars of schooling align. The standard model can even be improved a bit across the board — it’s possible that the crackdown will be rewarded by barely visible lifts in this or that indicator.

The “knowledge rich” idea — the latest in a long line of slogans including “effectiveness,” “evidence-based” everything, “quality teaching” — has been around for decades, but always falls at the first hurdle: you can’t get knowledge-rich if you can’t or won’t understand the knowledge, no matter how hard or well the teacher teaches. “Curriculum” is a relationship before it is a menu. The received model cannot engage the many disengaged. Nor can it give the compliant/engaged students in the “good” schools the safe, happy, broad and richly rewarding experience of schooling that it is now possible to provide for just about every kid.

What the crackdown doesn’t recognise or chooses to ignore is that it’s the kids who bring the energy required for learning and growth — or refuse to. It’s the school’s job to find that energy, encourage it, and shape it. The same could be said of the relationship between government schools and systems. The realities of the present moment in Australian schooling should be manna from heaven for a well-organised alliance of the industrial orgs and the professional/curriculum associations. But no such alliance exists. Myriad professional associations stick to their myriad patches while the teacher unions confuse “public” and “system” with the domineering bureaucracies. The divided (and intimidated) are easily conquered.

There are ironies in all this, several of them. One is that the only outright condemnation of (and alternative to) the crackdown’s Gradgrind thinking I’m aware of has come from the grandees of the independent school system. Another: the crackdown is betting the farm on the OECD’s “effective” teaching/schools line just as, rumour has it, that same organisation is about to ditch “effectiveness” in favour of “flourishing.” A third: the knowledge-rich line and its many antecedents focus on the things AI can do instead of the relationships between human beings that only human beings can do.

Fourth, and last: if Michael Young’s classic The Rise of the Meritocracy (1958) is even half right — and a growing band of contemporary readers think it is much more than that — then Labor governments, state and federal are driving a form of schooling that is fuelling the voter base for One Nation. •

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An exchange on Sky News last week summed up the mood, and the government’s response. Journalist Andrew Clennell asked Albanese whether Labor’s broken election promises on negative gearing and capital gains tax had contributed to One Nation’s rise. “There’s never been less trust in the major political parties,” said Clennell, “and One Nation support is rising. Is it really ideal to be breaking promises like this? Because that looks like something that could fuel the rise of —”

Albanese broke in. “I’ll tell you what’s not ideal,” he said. “It’s to see the rise of populism… [I]f people think the economy isn’t working for them and they’re working their guts out and they’re not getting opportunity, I tell you what, they will turn to more simplistic grievance-based politics. And that is the context in which my government is saying, ‘No, no, we’re going to deliver real change for the better. This is what we’re doing. This is why we’re doing it.’ Because it is real, the frustration that people have out there.”

The government argues its budget tax changes will  help young first-home buyers and stop the tax system from favouring those with investment income over those whose earnings come from wage labour. But that doesn’t answer the question of whether such measures will be effective in countering populism or whether a broken election promise has backfired at a time of rising distrust in government and the major parties. One Nation obviously thinks the latter, and has launched a major funding campaign using the slogan “Fire the Liar.”

It was not just One Nation’s rising poll numbers that should concern the federal government. Labor had a major wake-up call at the South Australian election back in March. As political scientist Luke Mansillo pointed out, SA Labor’s massive victory came with warning signs. He detected “enough places that Labor has suffered losses to One Nation for the federal government to worry about. Peter Dutton’s strategy of outer urban and regional seat targeting is coming off for One Nation, who can peel off voters the Liberal Party could not.”

Mansillo was referring to the Coalition’s populist strategy at the 2025 election, when Liberal leader Peter Dutton depicted himself as more in touch with ordinary working-class voters than Labor, which he accused of pandering to racial and ethnic minorities and woke elites.

Albanese depicted his government’s 2025 victory as a decisive vote against Dutton’s politics of division: as a vote for a socially inclusive national unity based on “fairness, aspiration and opportunity for all.” The implication was that right-wing populism doesn’t work in twenty-first century Australia.

But various commentators, including me, questioned Albanese’s analysis. He was telling part of the story, but many additional factors contributed to the Liberals’ massive election loss, from an unpopular leader to campaign own-goals and even the impact of Donald Trump.

Far from rejecting Dutton’s strategies, the Coalition is doubling down on issues like immigration, while leaving open the possibility of preference deals and a closer relationship with One Nation. It’s true that Angus Taylor has (for the moment at least) ruled out the suggestion of his “close confidant and numbers man,” South Australian MP Tony Pasin, that the Liberals should make a deal with One Nation to carve out the seats each party will contest so as not to compete with each other. Pauline Hanson has made clear One Nation will be targeting outer-suburban seats currently held by Labor.

Meanwhile, the more equal, diverse and socially inclusive society Albanese espouses can still be depicted as a woke-elite project by his opponents. It is an old Labor problem.

This is not the first time Albanese appears to have underestimated the influence and political effectiveness of right-wing populism. He also did so during the (failed) Voice referendum campaign in 2023.

Albanese’s attitude seems to go back to a view of Australian politics he held early in his term as prime minister. He apparently believed he would be managing a socially inclusive, idealistic, collaborative and progressive new politics that would favour Labor and groups such as the teal independents. He returned to that vision of Australian politics in his 2025 election victory speech.

One Nation’s rise since then should have made it clear that, while politics is changing and the old two-party system is under threat, the old politics of culture wars and right-wing populism is alive and well. Albanese is now more aware of the danger — how could he not be given recent opinion poll results? — but he seems to see the difference between his earlier depiction of the state of Australian politics and the unexpected rise of One Nation as primarily a reflection of changed economic circumstances.

In a time of global economic uncertainty with rising inflation, a major cost of living crisis and a housing crisis, a significant number of voters will feel disenchanted with traditional political parties and turn to populist alternatives. Many One Nation voters may also genuinely believe that reducing immigration numbers will help fix Australia’s housing and infrastructure crisis yet have no desire to see the reduction take racially or religiously discriminatory forms. The breadth of One Nation’s appeal is reflected by the newly elected South Australian MP who spoke lovingly of his Indonesian Muslim same-sex partner

But One Nation’s rhetoric can also appeal to those who do support discriminatory policies, to the “dark angels in our nation” famously referred to by former Labor leader Kim Beazley when he lost the 2001 “Tampa election” to John Howard. Right-wing populism can fuel the resentment of various social groups who feel their previous racial, religious, gender or sexuality privilege is under threat.

Some Labor figures emphasise the economic roots of discriminatory attitudes, and former treasurer and party president Wayne Swan has blamed rising economic inequality for the rise of populism internationally. But we should remember that Kim Beazley tried to counter Howard’s populist culture wars and mobilisation of national security issues  by focusing on the largely economic “kitchen table” concerns of ordinary Australians. Furthermore, the White Australia policy and blatant discrimination against Indigenous Australians flourished during the economically privileged postwar boom of the 1950s and 1960s.

Admittedly, Labor has had limited success in selling all it has done to tackle cost-of-living issues, including tax breaks, wage increases, increased government subsidies for healthcare and childcare. Although its efforts have also been undermined by rising inflation, fuel costs and a housing crisis, this failure doesn’t adequately explain Hanson’s resonance with substantial sections of the Australian population.

How else do we explain the electoral success of  a women who flies around the country in a plane given to her by Australia’s richest woman, Gina Rinehart, and who also accompanied Rinehart to party at Mar-A-Lago with the US president, whose war in the Middle East has contributed to Australians’ economic hardship?

Surely it is time for Albanese to reconsider his positive take on the new politics In Australia. We live in a time when the old politics of culture wars and division are very much still with us. As social democratic parties around the world have found, there are no easy ways of countering right-wing populism. But a first step is to correctly analyse populism’s nature and causes, and economic distress is only part of the explanation.

If it is to succeed in winning back mainstream voters, Labor also needs a better strategy for countering culture wars, including One Nation’s clever use of social media platforms. It also needs to be better at countering the populist framing of issues, and not just immigration. For example, it needs to make a stronger case that its broad equality agenda on issues from race to gender  is not “woke,” “elite” or anti-worker but actively supports disadvantaged sections of Australia’s  diverse working class. Above all, Labor needs to become better at anticipating the populist reaction to its actions and planning accordingly. •

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Observing China’s slower growth in recent years, Wright argues the country’s financial system and fiscal arrangements can only be repaired at a significant risk to the Chinese leadership. President Xi Jinping’s headline efforts to rejuvenate the economy with technological advancement might achieve its aims, but the fundamental economic imbalance would remain. Wright says why in his new book, Broken China.

China’s well-known over-investment in property and construction are the exemplars of a financial system that pursued politically motivated objectives rather than sustainable investment. Provincial governments chased growth targets by drawing on a magic pudding — sales of public land — and large-scale construction was backed by banks that often had strong local political links.

Revenue from land sales helped fund infrastructure projects, further boosting growth targets, a top-line metric for advancement within the Communist Party. Citizens, who typically only had access to low-yielding bank deposits, favoured property for its rapid capital gains, thereby fuelling a speculative bubble. (After the bubble burst in 2020, Wright notes, housing starts collapsed 69 per cent by 2024.)

On the fiscal side, Beijing initially loosened controls on local government to allow special-purpose financing vehicles for strategic projects. This fuelled a rash of local government initiatives, many of which ultimately relied on the logic of the bubble. Those pools of debt have increasingly weighed on the national economy, forcing Beijing to juggle, prop up and consolidate debt. Banks are caught in the middle, with dubious financing putting serious pressure on both their earnings and their ability to finance new activity.

As the complexity of China’s economic renovation and export-weighted trade has grown, analysts have focused on trends in finance. The April 2026 central bank data was another red flag, signalling severe economic contraction. An outright fall in bank lending was the headline, with new loans contracting by RMB 10 billion (A$2.1 billion). That is, more money was repaid to banks than was lent to the real economy. Year on year, credit growth fell by almost half.

The latest budgets released by thirty-one provinces showed a marginal gain in revenues but a steep, continuing decline in land sales income, which was down by roughly two-thirds on five years ago. Provinces are filling the gaps by “monetising” state assets: bundling them up to create an income stream to be sold to investors. In principle, this might a sensible way of cutting excessive debt. In practice, reports of individual cases — loss-making bus fleets and bundles of rental property — suggest the debt is simply being shifted to banks or other public financial institutions.

Optimists believe this is a period of transition for the Chinese economy. Credit growth is slowing because local government debt is being refinanced, consumers have become more conservative, more business growth is financed by equity, and large companies are using bond markets — rather than banks — to finance their activities. That view assumes the restructuring will absorb the financial baggage of past indiscipline and growth will be delivered by technology and manufacturing. Optimists think the system is working.

For Wright, the problem is systemic. Any solution — like who gets loans and how they are priced — will challenge system fundamentals. Repairing public finances requires higher and different taxes as well as larger government transfers to households. The problem is intensely political because effective changes would lower economic growth even more. “The key questions facing Beijing at present,”   Wright says, “concern which types of political costs China’s leaders are willing to bear.”

Just ahead of Xi Jinping’s elevation in 2012, China’s leadership flagged what Wright identifies as a fundamental course correction. The 2013 Third Plenum of the Communist Party, a forum often associated with significant economic policy shifts, adopted a range of steps designed to fix the systemic flaws that had built up into substantial risk. China would allow markets, enforced with better regulation, to have a decisive role in resource allocation; excessive government intervention would be rolled back.

The extent of the challenges and the powerful vested interests meant it was no surprise Xi was given a degree of power unthinkable since Mao’s demise. But while he flexed his muscles on a range of issues, notably endemic corruption, the critical economic problems went untackled.

Contrary to widely held perceptions, Wright believes China’s economy is being driven by its financial system rather than central planning. The failure to follow through on vital financial reforms has allowed its decay to reach debilitating proportions.

“The rise and the eventual stagnation of China’s financial system,” he writes, “is a story of multiple rounds of unintended economic consequences of Beijing’s policy choices, with little evidence of long-term design or strategy. Policymakers were slow to correct obvious policy excesses within the financial system, forcing them to use increasingly blunt and costly measures when they finally responded. Those excesses in credit expansion and the policies used to correct them produced the economic slowdown China is facing today.”

The critical period started in 2008 and culminated in 2018, Wright argues. The massive Chinese credit expansion (which incidentally buffered the global economy) in response to the 2008 US sub-prime crisis initiated financial ill-discipline and a blowout in debt. Beijing’s response — its “deleveraging” campaign from 2016 to 2018 — crystallised a debt burden that now weighs heavily. Official provincial government debt rose from less than RMB 20 trillion in 2018 to RMB 54.8 trillion by December 2025, and “unofficial” local government debt also remains a problem.

One important factor that went missing was the growth of “shadow” banking and peer-to-peer lending, which had been allowed to fill the gaps left by staid official banks. (According to business journal Caixin, another RMB 15 trillion of operational debt owed by local financing vehicles derives from expensive unofficial loans with a limited likelihood of being repaid.) While unofficial financiers were inevitably risky in what was already an excessively risk-prone market, sometimes playing a role that allowed official lenders to get around regulations, they did reflect a reforming shift toward market-based lending.

In any case, the “deleveraging” brakes sharply curtailed activity. And, as Wright says, investors who were used to very little risk were suddenly confronted with collapsing asset values and failed investment vehicles. Then, in the 2020s, came the crash of the property market, a massive driver of economic activity and household investment. With the tide of credit receding, more and more of China’s borrowers were revealed to have been (in Warren Buffet’s colourful phrase) swimming naked.

Wright explains that while regulators tried to tighten credit growth as early as 2011, the political culture of the period meant nothing effective occurred until a huge amount of damage had been done. The “shadow” financial system allowed regional banks to grow outside their borders with transactions that were at best opaque. Depositors, assuming any bank offering was state guaranteed, poured money into “wealth management products” that fuelled rampant speculation in everything from property to commodities and provided the illusion of liquidity in otherwise moribund investments. (Not a very different formulation, as Wright notes, to that which in 2008 brought the US sub-prime market to its explosive end.)

Households were bound to the game by their unusually large savings, which financed the lending, and by their exposure to a property market that became, over time, almost Ponzi-like, with home buyers paying upfront and the cash fuelling ever-greater rates of dubious construction. Businesses were tied in by demands for ever-greater investment.

At the core were provincial governments, pushing both housing and infrastructure construction — and later, new technology industries like photovoltaics and electric vehicles — to levels that could only be sustained by dubious borrowing. All of which is relatively familiar to anyone who has observed the bubbles typical of overheated investment markets everywhere.

Inexplicably, China’s leaders added an extra dimension. Just as the “deleveraging” strictures were biting, Beijing decided to sharply rein in some of the country’s booming commercial sectors. Alibaba’s Jack Ma, shortly after giving a provocative speech about China’s moribund financial services sector, was told that the New York IPO of Ali Pay, his digital payments platform, was canned. Ma disappeared from view for some time and a range of other high-profile digital ventures were similarly handicapped.

Even more shocking was the announcement on 24 July 2021 that private tutoring businesses — which Wright says had attracted about US$120 billion of foreign investment — could no longer operate on a for-profit basis or attract foreign capital.

As Wright highlights, e-commerce, education and digital services businesses had been growth sectors for young, educated workers. Their sudden curbing by administrative fiat had so dramatic an effect that the national statistical bureau suspended publication of youth unemployment figures. Having curtailed debt funding, Xi Jinping piled on a sharp reversal of fortunes for growth areas that were both productivity enhancing and large employers of university graduates.

Then came Covid. While China’s initial response was ostensibly effective, Beijing saw the emergence of the Omicron variant in 2022 as such a threat that it imposed notoriously harsh limitations on movement. The economy effectively stalled. The economic costs were “astronomical,” says Wright, and they continue to affect consumer and business sentiment today.

“Overall,” Wright concludes, “China’s leadership appears highly reactive and reluctant to confront China’s most pressing economic problems, including slowing productivity growth, persistently weak domestic demand, deflationary pressures, weaker household consumption, and ongoing capital outflows… The question that now confronts analysts of China’s economy is to what extent Xi Jinping acknowledges the problems in the economy, or whether he is no longer concerned with the rate of China’s economic growth.”

China’s leadership obviously knows more than Wright knows, which he acknowledges. So why have they not changed course? Why doesn’t Beijing use its financial power and command of the economy to clean out the rotting stock of debt? Because, he says, “Beijing has now lost control over its primary policy tools for directing China’s economy: the financial system and fiscal policy.”

Like most observers of China’s economic outlook, Wright believes fundamental change is required to lift consumption — partly by shifting the basis of taxation and partly by providing direct transfers to households. His notable focus, however, is on the accumulated weight of ill-advised or plainly indulgent investment and its associated debt.

“The most important policy choice China’s leaders will be forced to consider concerns the difficult question of whose debts should be repaid, and whose will face default, with all of the associated implications for China’s future economic development” Wright says. “These are intensely political questions, and they help to explain why fundamental reforms are so difficult. While China’s fiscal and financial systems are decaying, the process of decay generates no immediate pressures or crises for Beijing.”

Ironically, he adds, “China’s system is most vulnerable to systemic crisis when reform becomes a realistic possibility, because government guarantees are then reconsidered quickly among lenders and investors. This dilemma — ongoing decay is debilitating but reform is acutely dangerous — highlights the limited but stark economic policy choices currently available to Beijing.”

Wright’s point about the politics of realising losses is not idle. Back in the 1990s the economic agency in one large province, Guangzhou, was unable to meet its debts. Regulators called the banks — many from Hong Kong — to a meeting in which they casually announced that the agency had no government guarantee. Losses were massive for those lenders who had assumed, not unreasonably, that China would not allow a key development agency to fail.

More recently, the tightening of bank regulations after 2018 curtailed unofficial “wealth management products.” When a bank in Henan defaulted on these products, depositors rioted. They believed, not unreasonably, that a publicly owned bank would back its products.

This all leaves China with a dilemma. Excess investment by the provinces in everything from cement and steel plants to shiny new photovoltaic and electric vehicle plants is depressing prices and piling more debt on local government. Closing uneconomic production would hit local economies hardest, and the cumulative impact would be widespread. Local governments, which account for almost 90 per cent of the activity that drives China’s economy, are meanwhile under increasing pressure to reduce the burden of debt while continuing to drive investment for growth.

Any serious effort to rebalance the economy would involve significant disruption, since a large share of employment is in activities that wouldn’t survive the withdrawal of political financing. Forcing banks — or Beijing — to absorb massive losses isn’t a simple matter of issuing an edict either. Someone has to pay, and either option would still require funding that would burden households — or worse, cause bank failures.

And perhaps the consistent pursuit of investment — and the failure to reach a consumption-led economic maturity — is integral to the China’s political system. As manifested in Xi’s Made in China 2025 policy, Beijing’s ambition is essentially hegemonic. China should dominate in a technological and industrial sense and the way to do that is via strong, state-directed investment. The financing of that agenda demands that household savings are essentially conscripted rather than allowed to fuel domestic consumption.

On balance, Beijing’s dilemma has been in sustaining the primacy of its political system while delivering on its core promise of ever-rising levels of what Xi calls “common prosperity.” Right now, the young graduates flooding onto China’s job market are encountering diminishing opportunities. China’s dynamic private sector is suppressed and the economy is over-reliant on exports running up against rising international resistance.

Wright makes a compelling case that something has to give. How Beijing finds its way through this period seems likely to have serious consequences, not least for an economy like Australia’s that has been an enormous beneficiary of China’s growth. •

Broken China: How the Economic Miracle Shattered and What It Means for the World
By Logan Wright | Polity Press | $51.95 | 272 pages

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Unfortunately, the story is mostly about what’s not in the report, which I’ll get to. As for what is included, start with the fact that it contains many factual errors (this is a “draft” report and they would presumably have been caught in a full copy edit, but still), as evidenced by the warnings that appear on nearly every page.

The autopsy does not really present a unified theory of why Kamala Harris lost in 2024. The unnamed author writes, among other things, that the party moved too far left and failed to define Trump and go negative effectively. But it arrives at these conclusion with a surprising lack of new research but with a lot of pundit conventional wisdom and “analysis” you’d expect from someone committing the Strategist’s Fallacy — the tendency for campaign consultants and political strategists, especially on the Democratic side (where quantitative analysts are overwhelmingly focused on policy positions and ideological point-positions), to map their mental model of how they make political decisions onto voters.

I don’t know how much the DNC pays for reports like these, but presumably if it really wanted to understand why Harris lost it would want to invest some resources into fact-finding research like surveying state party chairs and local officials, as well as talking to voters who switched sides. Maybe it could even do some original causal research on its theories.

But the biggest problem is that the autopsy straight up ignores the major reasons Harris lost in 2024. Yes, it’s bad enough that the report doesn’t mention that party bosses failed to coordinate an early exit for Joe Biden, who was too unpopular to win. And there is no mention of Israel/Gaza, low turnout in the cities, and nothing on Harris’s race or gender. But this is a data-driven site, so I want to really focus in on what the numbers can tell us.

When we boot up the data, it’s obvious the main reason Harris lost is that 2024 simply had too much inflation-induced anti-incumbent sentiment for the incumbent party to overcome. This is curiously missing from its main diagnosis. The word “inflation” isn’t mentioned in the autopsy a single time (except in the context of inflation-adjusted ad spending).

The reality of the 2024 election is that it was going to be hard for a Democrat to win, regardless of who they were or how they campaigned. The broader economic and political conditions were so favourable to Republicans that you would have expected Trump to win about 90 per cent of the time, regardless of campaign or candidate effects.

Political scientists have been pointing out for decades that you can predict presidential elections reasonably well using just two pieces of information: how voters feel about the incumbent president, and how voters feel about the economy. There are many variants of this model — such as the “Bread and Peace” model (Douglas Hibbs), the “Time for Change” forecast (Abramowitz), Ray Fair’s “Fair” model, and Wlezien/Erikson’s work with “Leading Economic Indicators” — but all use a similar set of economic and political “fundamentals” to predict the result of the election.

None of these models is perfect, but they’re a useful baseline for forecasting elections and understanding why certain results happen. One use of the predictions is to distinguish the part of an outcome that’s about candidates and campaigns from the part that’s structural.

The chart below shows a model I built for exactly these explanatory purposes. It uses Gallup’s net approval of the incumbent president measured in June and the trailing two-year average of the University of Michigan’s Consumer Sentiment Index to predict the incumbent party’s share of votes cast for the Democratic and Republican candidates for president — what we call “two-party” vote share. That’s it: two variables, both measured before Labor Day (7 September), both knowable months before any ad runs, and in some cases, before candidates are even picked.

The dashed line is a perfect prediction. The shaded line shows the 80 per cent prediction interval for the 2024 election, and the solid blue dot shows the actual result of the race.

In 2024, Kamala Harris received about 49.3 per cent of the two-party vote. The model — using from 1956 through 2020, with 2024 held out — predicted she’d get about 48 per cent, with an 80 per cent prediction interval of 46.6 per cent to 49.9 per cent. Harris’s vote share lands on the upper end of this range, but still squarely inside of it.

In a sense, then, the surprise of the election is that Harris did as well as she did, considering the prevailing factors against her. Given Biden’s approval rating in June (deeply underwater, in the high 30s) and two straight years of the worst consumer sentiment readings outside of a recession, the Democratic nominee was on track to lose the popular vote by four points. She lost by 1.5.

Contrary to the autopsy and Strategist thinking, you don’t need a theory about Harris’s past issue positions, or whether the campaign spent too much on broadcast and not enough on connected TV, or whether Future Forward (a Democratic Super PAC) and the campaign had aligned strategies, to explain the 2024 outcome. The fundamentals already explain it.

I have found that people don’t like giving or hearing this explanation for election results. I recently tried at a meeting with congressional staffers, and I think it left them dejected and/or upset, because it gave them few action items besides “run anti-incumbent candidates when the economy sucks.”

Another reason consultants don’t focus on structural factors more often is that they can’t sell you any services to solve that problem, because there’s nothing you can do about them.

But generally speaking, “inflation was high, and Harris was going to lose anyway” is a much better explanation for 2024 than anything else in isolation. Since we have the track record of this inference, and it has been helpful historically, we can also be confident it will continue to be helpful in predicting future elections. A lot of the other explanations people are giving about 2024 don’t extrapolate well to future elections. (“We should align the campaign’s interests with its Super PACs” — what? duh!)

If you only read the DNC report, you’d think 2024 was a uniquely American failure of Democratic messaging, organising and candidate definition. And maybe you don’t buy my “fundamentals” regression of election outcomes. Well, to that person I’d emphasise that 2024 wasn’t just bad for Democrats; it was bad for incumbent parties all across the globe.

As data journalist John Burn-Murdoch documented in the Financial Times, every single governing party in a developed democracy that faced voters in 2024 lost vote share. The Tories were obliterated in Britain. Macron’s coalition lost its majority in France. The LDP lost its majority in Japan. And on and on. Incumbents from Portugal to South Korea either lost outright or were badly weakened.

What did all these countries have in common? Not Kamala Harris’s communications strategy. Not the Democrats’ rural organising budget. Not whether the party had gone “too far left” on social issues. They had inflation. The post-pandemic price shock hit virtually every developed economy, and voters everywhere punished whoever happened to be holding the gavel when prices went up.

Burn-Murdoch said on Twitter/X the day after Trump won:

We’re going to hear lots of stories about which people, policies and rhetoric are to blame for the Democrats’ defeat.

Some of those stories may even be true!

But an underrated factor is that 2024 was an absolutely horrendous year for incumbents around the world.

This should give the structural theorists more ammo in rebutting the autopsy truthers. When incumbents lose across dozens of countries with different parties, different candidates, different media environments and different campaign tactics, the parsimonious explanation should be the one variable they share. In 2024, the global post-Covid inflation rate was far beyond what was observed in prior decades.

Party autopsies are basically my Strategist’s Fallacy in its purest form. Tactical choices look enormous when you stare at them up close, but largely miss the point. From inside a campaign war room, every ad decision, every rally location, every reporter interview feels like it could swing the race. And in a truly close election, some of these factors might add up.

But the campaign decisions are small factors dominated by a much more influential set of fundamentals that predict roughly where the final result will land, regardless of who’s running the campaign.

The autopsy’s diagnoses — Democrats didn’t define Trump, didn’t go negative enough, didn’t engage male voters, didn’t show up in rural areas, didn’t invest enough in digital ads, didn’t have a “permanent campaign” strategy — could all be simultaneously true and roughly irrelevant to the 2024 outcome. They might matter at the margins in a future election where the fundamentals are neutral. But they probably didn’t matter much in 2024 because the fundamentals weren’t neutral.

Worse, by attributing the loss to strategic failures, the autopsy invites the party to learn the wrong lessons. If you decide Harris lost because she didn’t run negative enough ads against Trump, you’ll spend 2028 running more negative ads. If you decide she lost because the campaign didn’t have a clear definition of the candidate, you’ll spend 2028 obsessing over the candidate definition. Neither will help if the next Democratic nominee inherits another period of high inflation or low presidential approval. And neither will be necessary if they inherit a recovering economy and a popular incumbent.

The deeper problem with the autopsy is that it imagines a voter who doesn’t exist. The kind of voter the report’s recommendations would persuade — someone weighing Harris’s issue positions against Trump’s, watching campaign ads carefully, updating their beliefs in response to messaging frames — is essentially a Washington consultant, not your grandma who can’t afford to pay her bills because gas is up 50 per cent and electricity subsidies just ended. One of the problems with autopsies is that voter psychology takes a lot of work to understand well, but the people who have that skillset largely aren’t the type of person the DNC is hiring to audit their choices.

Start with what we know about the anti-system voter. A large and growing share of the electorate doesn’t think in terms of “left vs right” or even “Democrat vs Republican.” They think in terms of “the people running things are screwing me, so throw the bums out.” They are not persuaded by an ad explaining that the “opportunity economy” is a better plan than the “Trump economy,” because their objection to the status quo isn’t about specific policies — it’s about the status quo in general. A large portion of voters simply cast their ballot against whoever they perceive as being more a part of “the system” or “the establishment.” And this can be a decisive bloc!

This is also why the hidden axis of American politics — the well-being-oriented, “non-ideological” dimension that runs orthogonal to traditional ideology — keeps catching strategists off guard. Most Washington-based political professionals were trained to think about voters along a single left-right spectrum, and to design messages to “move” voters along it. But a huge fraction of the electorate is non-ideological. They hold a mix of progressive and conservative views that are basically uncorrelated with one another, and they choose candidates based on cues that have little to do with the policy debates that animate party staff. They want change. They want competence. They want leaders to “fight” for them. They do not want to hear about left-right identity politics if the price of a gallon of milk is $6.

And then there is the low-information voter, who decided 2024 more than any other group. The voters who broke hardest for Trump in 2024 were the ones who paid the least attention to politics. These are voters who, in our surveys, cannot name the party in control of Congress, don’t follow the news regularly if at all, and make decisions mostly based on vibes and what their social groups are saying. The DNC autopsy spends pages on messaging strategy aimed at engaged voters and almost no time on the people who actually moved.

This is what strategists miss when they treat campaign choices as the dominant drivers of vote choice. But you can’t ad-target your way out of an inflation problem. You can’t define your opponent if your opponent’s main appeal is that he is not the person currently in charge while gas is $5 a gallon. And you certainly can’t run a 107-day campaign aimed at low-information voters and expect them to suddenly start paying attention to your six-point plan on housing. Whether you “defined your opponent early” has no bearing on the dominant force in politics.

There is one thing the party could have controlled that the autopsy almost entirely sidesteps: the decision to stick with Biden and not have a primary at all in 2023–24. Biden’s approval rating had been underwater for nearly three years by the time he dropped out. The forecasting models were warning early that Biden’s odds of winning in November were perilous and trending lower. As we have seen, based on the fundamentals, they may have been even worse.

By letting the party nominate Biden without a primary or convention, party bosses closed themselves off to those paths to November that ended in victory. The party had years, not weeks, to coordinate a graceful handoff to a successor who could have built a real campaign around economic reform, distanced her/himself from the Biden era, and had a fair shot at competing against an incredibly flawed opponent.

The autopsy mentions the truncated timeline for Harris’s campaign in passing, but does not engage with the actual decision-making chain that produced the truncated timeline at all. That omission tells us a lot about the Democratic Party as an institution — about who has power, who exercises it, and who is ultimately (not) being held accountable for 2024.

You can argue that even a hypothetical Democratic nominee who entered the race in 2023 would have lost given the fundamentals. I think that’s probably true! But “we would have lost by less and the party wouldn’t be in this crisis of legitimacy” is a meaningful counterfactual, and it’s the one piece of self-criticism the institution most needed to do. (I might argue that the soul searching about 2024 — the notion of an “autopsy” in general — to explain a 1.5-point defeat is all a bit dramatic anyway, but your mileage may vary.)

If you are the type of person who buys into the autopsy’s Strategist Brain theories of political outcomes, then you are going to dramatically misread the moment in 2026 and 2028.

If Democrats lost in 2022 and 2024 because economic conditions were bad and they were in charge, they should expect to win in 2026 and 2028 if conditions are bad. That’s because they are the out-party now. But if you buy the explanation for 2024 presented in the DNC autopsy, and ignore the structural factors at play, you are less likely to see this as the dominant messaging strategy for your campaign.

Consider that Trump’s approval is already underwater enough to give Democrats the House and maybe the Senate in 2026, and the presidency in 2028. Consumer sentiment, after a brief post-election bump, has cratered as tariffs have inflated costs of goods and the war against Iran has caused gas prices to spike. If the trends we’ve seen in general and special elections in 2025 and 2026 hold, we are looking at a substantial Republican defeat in the midterms and a genuinely favourable environment in 2028.

But here’s the catch, and it’s a big one. Those very same fundamentals that will create positive conditions for Democratic wins in 2026 and 2028 will also start working against them the moment they take power. Anti-incumbency in the post-pandemic era has been unusually durable — voters across the developed world have been throwing out whoever is in charge, regardless of ideology, for five straight years now. If Democrats win the House in 2026 and the White House in 2028 on the back of Trump’s economic mismanagement, they will inherit the same trap that swallowed Harris: a public that is structurally pissed off about the cost of living and willing to punish whoever happens to be in charge when the next election rolls around.

We should not expect economic anxiety to simply fall away. A new New York Times/Siena poll fielded on 11–15 May finds that 88 per cent of potential Democratic supporters say the American economic system is unfair to most Americans, and 83 per cent say the political and economic system needs major changes (63 per cent) or to be torn down completely (20 per cent). Only 1 per cent want no changes at all.

The only way to escape the gravity of anti-incumbent sentiment is to do something big enough that voters actually feel it, or signal that you’re trying. You don’t need a twelve-point plan and to rattle off macroeconomic indicators from the Oval Office; Biden tried that. The next Democratic candidate will need something on the scale of the New Deal or the Great Society — a generational project that reorders the relationship between the American economy and the American worker, and that voters can point to and say “My life is better because of this party.”

Democrats need a president who, in 2029 — like Zohran Mamdani in New York City — says the cost of housing, healthcare, childcare and energy is the central political question of our time, and who proposes to do something on the scale of that problem. There are lots of options on the table for a party that wants to go big. Build millions of new homes. Cap the price of insulin and expand negotiation to every essential drug. Subsidise childcare or make it a public good. Build out clean energy infrastructure fast enough to combat rising costs from AI infrastructure and climate change. Tax the people who have captured most of the economic gains over the last twenty years and use the money to fund the policies ordinary people actually buy. Pick fights with the industries that profit from scarcity and dysfunction — and win them.

This, of course, will be hard; defying gravity always is. It requires governing the way Roosevelt and Johnson governed, with the assumption that bold action creates its own political coalition. And it also requires you to look back on your failures with a holistic view of what causes certain outcomes.

I have not yet seen anything close to this from the Democratic Party, from the think tanks, or from the leading 2028 contenders. There are gestures toward the “abundance” agenda, populism and “radical centrism,” but these mostly read like positioning exercises, not serious agendas for a people that are really hurting. The 2024 autopsy was a chance to start that conversation by being honest about why Harris lost. It failed to do that.

This matters because the fundamentals giveth and the fundamentals taketh away. A Democratic win in 2028 built on Trump backlash, without a generational economic vision behind it, is a Democratic loss in 2032 waiting to happen. The only durable answer to anti-incumbent sentiment is to actually earn re-election. The party has roughly two and a half years to decide whether it wants to think that big — and that creatively.

I would have liked to see a DNC autopsy with more data, more research, and more attention to the real hard work on voter psychology, economic anxiety, and the path forward. The 2024 autopsy was the party’s chance to confront the thing it actually got wrong. Harris lost because prices were high, Biden was unpopular, and voters across the world were in a mood to punish whoever was in charge. It is surprising to read a hundred pages about messaging discipline and rural organising and still miss that fundamental fact. And yet.

Democrats are about to be handed a win in 2026–28 by voters who are angry at the party currently in power. If they mistake that for vindication of a new strategy that fiddles around the margins — instead of the same structural anti-incumbency that buried Harris — they will spend the 2030s out of power and wishing they had thought bigger when time was still on their side. •

This article was written by G. Elliott Morris and published at his newsletter, Strength In Numbers. It has been republished here with his permission. Read more from Elliott at gelliottmorris.com.

The post The real reason Democrats lost in 2024 appeared first on Inside Story.

James Morris was born in 1926. Not long after attending a public school, he enlisted in the British army. There was nothing fem about him — he was a virile man of action. Morris served in Venice and Trieste — places that would become fixtures with him — and more exactingly in Palestine, witnessing the fighting between Jews and Arabs in the last days of the British mandate. By then an intelligence officer, the precept “watch and learn” sharpened his powers of observation. While there he discovered Charles Doughty’s classic Arabia Deserta — its idiosyncratic, highly mannered prose spoke to the young soldier, and greatly influenced his mature style. As did Kinglake’s Eothen, and, more subtly, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Meanwhile the British Empire was collapsing all around him. In a matter of months, 1947 saw Britain withdraw unilaterally from Palestine before partition was effected, while in the subcontinent another, bloodier partition marked the emergence of independent India and Pakistan.

Back in civilian life, Morris returned to Oxford, where as a schoolboy he held a choral scholarship. He then determined on becoming a journalist, with the Times. Not long after, he accompanied the British expedition, which (with the aid of Tenzing Norgay) was the first to reach the summit of Mt Everest. There was much intrigue about this, with spies for Indian journalists snooping around. A code was devised to transmit messages safely; the news happened to reach London on 1 June 1953, the eve of the Queen’s coronation. Such an auspicious event — an omen — sent the press into a frenzy: the “conquest” of Everest surely signalled a “New Elizabethan Age.” Morris had almost reached the top himself: certainly he was now the world’s most famous journalist. The book he wrote about the expedition was translated into thirty languages.

The Times cramped his style — they didn’t approve of his writing assignment-based books — and so he left if for the Guardian. He was sent to Egypt, where he correctly discerned that Britain and Israel’s main objective in 1956 was not to gain full control of the Suez Canal but to overthrow Nasser, the Egyptian president. Another assignment took him to Oman, the feudal opposite; yet another to South Africa, to cover the Rivonia treason trial. This, too, occasioned a book, the rather flat South African Winter. Morris was always better at probing places than exploring issues.

This talent first came to the fore in his account of Venice (1960). Some found it too atmospheric, not linear or factual enough. It was a highly developed personal response: “getting to know Venice transformed everything for me.” A bestseller, the book enabled Morris to set himself up as an author. Money would always be tight, not only because by now he had four children, but also because he liked to live in a mildly capacious style. Somehow he managed, every year, to get to America — he loved the antidote of its shrill modernity. More characteristic was the move to an old rectory on the Thames, where he cultivated the image of a squire, buying a horse and a punt. He was deliberately living down his own social origins from a family of housepainters and labourers.

Morris continued to undertake many foreign assignments for the Guardian, until he felt out-of-joint with paper’s ethos — “fairness, modesty, and rational assessment. I liked a touch of swank.” Books continued to appear at a rapid rate — notably on Spain (the country prized for its un-American authenticity) — and Oxford, which he evoked splendidly. But gradually a larger project began to clamour for his attention.

For some time Morris had planned a book called “India and Us,” but gradually this alchemised into something else. He had, after all, been present at the lowering of the British flag in Cyprus, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Tanganyika, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Uganda and Kenya. The idea of a Pax Britannica trilogy began to take shape, particularly since, with the advent of the Beatles and Carnaby Street, public consciousness of Empire was fading fast. (In a London secondhand bookshop at the time you might find, as a friend of mine did, E.M. Forster’s copy of a book on an Indian hill station, or a signed copy of Cromer’s Modern Egypt.)

The first of the three volumes (1968) was the centrepiece, a masterful still of the Empire at its zenith (just before jingoism was punctured by the Boer war.) Hence its full title: Pax Britannica: The Climax of an Empire. The emphasis is on how the Empire worked: systematically Morris explicates elements such as the Colonial Office, administrators, entrepreneurs, settlers, railways, the navy. Helping to clinch it together was the clever device of recording how each part of the Empire marked Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee (1897). In Dublin there was a riot, culminating in the special illuminations being sabotaged. Elsewhere, a deluge of doggerel:

Hail our bright Queen in her regalia
The one foot in Canada, the other in Australia.

During the War, Morris had been horrified by the way a gentle-mannered colonel, walking companionably in Cairo streets, casually kicked an Egyptian out of the way — and how that act was seemingly ratified by the victim’s blank acceptance. Morris was aware, too, of “the long humiliations of colonialism.” But in this volume he focused on how the British themselves saw the Empire, at a time when (Ireland and South Africa excepted) there were few stirrings of colonial nationalism. (Indeed in the 1880s the impractical idea of imperial federation had enjoyed a strong following.) The book was intended to be affectionate: as one literary critic put it, “this glittering nostalgic text… doesn’t exactly hide the racism and genocidal violence of the imperial enterprise, but they’re somehow swept up in the sheer mad gusto of the narrative.” Eventually it would be translated into Mandarin.

When the second volume of the trilogy, Heaven’s Command, appeared some years later, it was in effect a back story: the Empire in the earlier nineteenth century. Quite different was the third and concluding volume, Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (1977). Here Morris was drawing on the insistent memories of all those flag-lowering ceremonies. The book abounds in sharp images: analysis of deeper issues are lacking, glossed over. “Gradually it occurred to them [the British] that… the very conception of one race having the right to rule another was unjust.” In Trumpets the dirge of decline is offset by some high notes, including Gandhi appearing before the King and Queen in a loincloth. Churchill later fumed at such theatrics: to think that this one-time Inner Temple lawyer would appear formally as a “half-naked fakir” was too much. But Gandhi had a ready response for reporters: “The king had enough on for both of us.”

One day in 1972 I picked up an evening London newspaper and found, deep inside, a small paragraph saying that the writer James Morris was undergoing, in Casablanca, a sex-change operation. Surely not James Morris the hardy travel writer… Must be someone else, I thought. The name would not be uncommon in England. But verily it was so. Jan she became — and does so now in this review.

The subsequent book Conundrum tells how something was nagging Morris from a very early age — that a male body did not seem quite right. Sex among boys at an English public school was light and determined nothing. As for the army, “Far from making a man of me,” Morris wrote, it “made me feel more profoundly feminine at heart.” More, “I began to detest the physique that had served me so loyally.” By his mid-thirties Morris was desperate: somehow he must transition, or die. It would be nearly twenty years, and after much medication, before that was completed.

Meanwhile Jan had found a new love: Wales. True, she had grown up in the ambiguous county of Monmouth, but her parents were English rather than Welsh. It was part of a new identity; transition eased it. Moreover, to retreat to a mountain redoubt made sense, given how “the world shrinks and uniformity presses in.” Sensing a culture in peril, she took a crash course in Welsh. Wales, Wheeler points out, replaced the tattered imperial ideal, even making her see that in a new light: “a dreadful phenomenon redeemed by its style.” She came to hope for a Welsh republic, and her contribution to the struggle was the ability to yoke a romantic vision to political goals. But the incandescence of Jan’s The Matter of Wales, wrote one reviewer, “turned the prose purple.” Even so, Jan would later remark of her very Welsh son Twm, that he had “no feeling for that stately sense of order that I like about England.”

Australia she did not like. An early article reduced Melbourne to a ramble down Collins Street, while she was appalled by what she saw as the shallowness of Sydney. An article following an ordinary guy’s day in Sydney completely missed the mark; the following book, Sydney, was not much better. Australia exposed her snobberies. When I met her here in 1988, I was struck by both the surface skittishness and the underlying steeliness.

Step by step Jan had successfully presented herself in women’s clothing. There were a few exceptions: the dedication to the Oxford Book of Oxford (1978) is to the Warden and Fellows of St Antony’s College… except one. Somebody at the high table must have given her a hard time. Her son Mark says that at one stage she tried to look like the Queen. A woman now, yes, but she wanted to be different from every other woman in the world. “I haven’t gone from one sex to the other,” Jan maintained. “I’m both now.” She still travelled and wrote: there would be some fifty books in all. The publisher Faber thought her prose, now more impressionistic, had “become girly.” But now that she was trans and therefore trendy, Jan was approached by Rolling Stone and wrote articles for them.

Morris’s ego had always been strong; now it tipped into narcissism. The silent witness of all this travel and travail had been his wife. She never wrote or spoke a word in public about such matters. “Elizabeth’s unbroken silence,” said Germaine Greer, “is the true measure of Jan Morris’s enduring masculinity.” She was utterly steadfast. For her part Jan recognised that the “union with Elizabeth has given nobility to my mostly frivolous life.” When they travelled, they now said they were sisters-in-law. Divorced at the time of transitioning, the couple — who had continued to live together all through — remarried. Amazing. Less happy were Jan’s relations with the four children. One summed it up by saying “we were introduced, but we never really got to know each other.”

Jan Morris then has a double reputation. In 1996, The Times nominated Conundrum as one of the 100 Key Books of Our Time. It is the cornerstone of trans literature. But Morris’s masterpiece is the Pax Britannica trilogy, the author convincingly claimed by her latest biographer, Sara Wheeler, to be “one of the finest descriptive writers who ever lived.” Morris was excited by the tapestry of Empire, or rather by its moving parts: “the flashing epaulette, the gleaming gunboat and the trickle of sweat from the pith helmet…”

Wheeler herself has turned in a splendid biography. Jan Morris: A Life is superbly written and impeccably researched: she has managed to close much of the Elizabeth gap by drawing extensively on the memories of the alienated son, Mark. The book is a pleasure to read. •

Jan Morris: A Life
By Sara Wheeler | Faber | $55 | 413 pages

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What Malcolm Turnbull calls a political vacuum applies to both policy and demographics. The Liberals have deserted the field on issues such as climate change and a sensible migration policy while losing the votes of women and young people. Many Australians might well be attracted to a new party with similar values to the teals — integrity, stronger action on climate change, gender equity, reducing the influence of lobby groups, even, dare we say, policy grounded in solid evidence.

Added impetus comes from new election funding laws, a blatant Labor–Liberal fix to tilt the field against independents.

Apart from contesting teal-type seats in the lower house, the best prospects for a new party in the immediate future could be in the Senate, which is elected by proportional voting on a state- or territory-wide basis. In fact, running for the Senate effectively requires registration as a party because it is the only way candidates can be placed above the line on the ballot paper, which is how most people vote.

The challenge lies in the execution. Persuading prominent people to join, for a start. Two teals, Monique Ryan and Kate Chaney, have already made clear that joining a party would compromise the basis on which they were elected as community independents. So have regional independents Helen Haines and Rebekha Sharkie.

Still, this might not be an insuperable obstacle: consulting with supporters about a loose party structure without the rigid discipline imposed by the Labor and Liberal parties could be an acceptable compromise.

Enticing Liberal MPs to defect is another matter entirely. It means not only risking failure at the next election but also weathering accusations of treacherous sabotaging of a Liberal Party already down on its knees. Neither moderate sitting Liberals nor former MPs like Keith Wolahan have so far shown any appetite for such a move.

Building name recognition in a crowded field would require massive publicity and major funding. A party organisation and campaigning machinery would need to be established or at least build on existing structures such as Climate 200.

Who should lead such a party? Malcolm Turnbull has the public profile but in the minds of many carries too much political baggage. Allegra Spender, who holds Turnbull’s former blue-ribbon Liberal seat of Wentworth, figures prominently in recent discussions. David Pocock, the ACT senator whose comments triggered the latest debate, is widely admired but is not advancing his leadership credentials.

In an interview with the Australian Financial Review, Spender shied away from a question about becoming leader as “hypothetical, hypothetical, hypothetical.” While she is “at least open to conversations” about ways to work more closely, including as a new centre right party, “if a few people got together, why would you need a leader? If you have a few people to start off with, I think that may be how you get things going.” More dipping a toe into the water, then, than leaping off the deep end.

Before his death in 2015, former Liberal prime minister Malcolm Fraser was the last person to put serious effort into forming a new centre party. John Howard, who boasted in the era of Reagan and Thatcher that “the times will suit me,” had increasingly alienated Liberals who adhered to the liberalism espoused (if not always practised) by Robert Menzies — “progressive…, in no sense reactionary.” Fraser was one of them, at least after he shed his former persona as a hard-right cold war warrior.

Fraser was patron of the new movement, together with former Labor minister Barry Jones and businesswoman Janet Holmes à Court. The equally stellar cast of founding members included former Fraser minister Ian Macphee, barrister Julian Burnside and Simon Holmes à Court, son of Janet and founder of Climate 200.

A constitution was drawn up and policies commissioned in areas such as health and the economy. By 2015 there was a “Founding Members’ Statement of Values and Purpose” for a party under the working title of Renew Australia, which was later changed to Reform Australia. It is striking how many of the issues identified align with the current debate.

“Our corroded national politics has led many Australians, particularly young people, to increasing disillusionment, disengagement and despair,” said the statement. It went on:

[W]e will be a party free of organisational affiliations to either the union movement or associations representing business or special interests… We will advocate strongly to limit the influence of money on party policymaking and government decision-making by requiring that donations to political parties be capped and fully disclosed — publicly and immediately. We see advancing the status and position of women in society as one of our most important objectives… We particularly recognise the importance of intergenerational equity and hence we reject policies that would impose unfair and unreasonable burdens on succeeding generations… [W]e recognise that nothing short of a profoundly different way of structuring the global economy will avert the catastrophic effects of a warming planet.… [W]e should not cede to any foreign country the capacity to decide whether Australia is at peace or goes to war, nor will we participate in war just because our traditional allies go to war.

Work on a new party continued for several years after the Fraser’s death but, as one of those involved put it, “it didn’t survive the loss of his remorseless energy.” The reality is that many ideas for new parties have started with high hopes but few have risen to prominence and fewer still have endured.

The Labor split of the 1950s saw the creation of the stridently anti-Communist and socially conservative Democratic Labor Party. It won Senate seats and directed its lower house preferences to help keep Labor out of power in successive elections. It faded into obscurity following the Whitlam government’s election in 1972.

Don Chipp, a minister in pre-1972 Coalition governments, formed the Australian Democrats as a centre party after Malcolm Fraser left him out of the ministry in 1975. A man of passion and conviction, he coined a slogan with real impact — “keep the bastards honest.”  The Democrats held Senate seats from 1977 to 2008, reaching a peak of nine senators in 1998.

The Greens, one exception to the rise-and-fall pattern, have endured since Bob Brown first won a Senate seat in 1996. The other existing long-term party is One Nation, with Pauline Hanson first elected as a disendorsed Liberal in 1996, though the party subsequently shrunk to seeming irrelevance before a recent revival that threatens to wipe out the Nationals and seriously wound the Liberals.

Built on grievance and nostalgia, One Nation’s support is strong but also shallow. If its standing in the polls is sustained, its moment of truth federally will come at the next election, when voters take a closer look at Hanson’s leadership credentials, her lack of policies that aren’t unrealistic, incoherent or harmful, her enthusiastic embrace of Donald Trump, wars and all, and her patronage by Gina Rinehart. Unless, like Trump supporters, none of that bothers them at all. •

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When Donald Trump went to Beijing last month he didn’t have to bend the knee, at least literally, to Chinese president Xi Jinping, as Macartney had to Qianlong. But the American president’s visit had echoes of that 1793 mission. Trump was the importunate barbarian, Xi the aloof possessor of all the advantages. Trump was effusive in his praise of Xi, who reciprocated in stiffly formal terms.

For the United States, the export pay-off was desultory: just the usual Chinese purchases of soy bean for its pigs and Boeing jets for its airlines. Hard questions about tariffs, semiconductors and rare elements were passed to new bilateral trade and investment boards. Xi offered no help with Iran.

In return for these meagre results, Trump bowed to China on two fronts. One was to concede equal status in world affairs, at least in the economic sphere. The other was to cross a bipartisan line on Taiwan, to some alarm in both Taipei and Washington.

In the first case, Trump agreed to Xi’s concept of a “constructive relationship of strategic stability.” Xi expressed the hope this would “transcend the so-called Thucydides Trap and create a new paradigm of major country relations.” (The reference was to the ancient Greek historian Thucydides, who recorded Sparta’s fatal effort to thwart the rise of Athens.)

If Trump understood and agreed, he seems to have willingly committed America to accepting that China is here to stay as a great power and abandoned any hope of squashing its strategic ambitions. The concession builds on the G2 (Group of Two) concept Trump and his team took away from their meeting with Xi in South Korea last October, a concept that alarmed America’s China hawks and some US allies as an implicit retreat from US “primacy” in the Western Pacific. Not only are many Americans unsettled but the Chinese and their neighbours in Asian are trying to deconstruct Xi’s words and Trump’s response.

A survey of Chinese-language commentary published in Sinification, an independent American newsletter that translates and unpicks policy debates within China, gives an insight into how Chinese analysts see the visit and its aftermath.

According to initial analysis at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, an arm of Beijing’s Ministry of State Security, the Trum-Xi meeting puts US–China rivalry in “a new phase of strategic stalemate” — though it still needs careful attention to avoid “capsizes.” Another analyst under the State Security umbrella, Zhang Jian, sees May’s successive visits by Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin as signs China was becoming a key “connecting point” in the emerging multipolar world.

Zhao Minghao of Shanghai’s Fudan University sees Trump’s willingness to accept “constructive strategic stability” as an important adjustment on the American side, demonstrating that flexible realism had become the foreign-policy principle US president favoured. America specialists Da Wei and Zhou Wuhua at Beijing’s Tsinghua University merge the concepts of the G2 and multipolarity into a “dual-core multipolar order” with China and the United States as the key players but middle powers having the space to hedge selectively between them, avoiding the hardening of cold war–style blocs.

But others see America aiming to hold on to the commanding heights in a new global economy. Among them is the Shanghai Development Research Foundation’s Jia Min, who dismisses the notion of “the East rising and the West declining” and points to the United States entering a new cycle driven by artificial intelligence. Far from having retreated from the globe, says Jia, the US has grown more flexible, more strategically attuned and more expansionary.

Di Dongsheng and Ji Xianbai at Beijing’s Renmin University argue that an emerging “techno-industrial complex” is driving the United States to abandon free-market orthodoxy for state-led industrial policy, civil–military fusion and resistance to regulation. This digital-age heir to the military–industrial complex would fuse big tech, the national-security state and venture capital into a single-interest bloc.

As the line between public power and tech capital blurs, Di and Ji expect the big technology companies’ grip on Washington to intensify. The increasingly powerful data and AI company Palantir has already shown how government contracts, revenue and valuation could rise together. Abroad, this techno-industrial complex is harvesting “war dividends” in the Ukraine, Gaza and Iran conflicts while using “small yard, high fence” containment to preserve American technological hegemony.

Even some of the optimists think that constructive stability can quickly be upset. “Since Washington’s overarching goal of strategic competition with China is unchanged,” writes Peking University’s Jia Qingguo, “relevant US government departments are still likely to roll out policies that Beijing reads as confrontational, thereby undermining the stability of the relationship.”

Contrasting with those mixed views, China’s strategic analysts have generally been cheered by remarks Trump made about Taiwan immediately after his talks with Xi. The Chinese leader had warned of “clashes and even conflicts” if the US and Taiwan began overtly asserting the island’s independence.

Trump’s response was to tell Fox News he was holding back a US$14 billion package of arms exports to Taiwan, comprising missiles, anti-drone defences and a powerful air defence command system. The arms deal is “a very good negotiating chip for us, frankly,” he said, without making clear what he would be seeking from the Chinese in return for withholding the weaponry. “It’s a lot of weapons,” he added.

Using arms sales to Taiwan in talks with China would cross a red line laid down by president Ronald Reagan in 1982 as part of his “Six Assurances.” His administration had transferred diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing in 1979 and was seeking to maintain stability in the region.

Trump also took an implicit swipe at Taiwan’s president Lai Ching-tei, whose Democratic Progressive Party has been arguing Taiwan is effectively independent of the mainland while retaining a formally status as part of a Republic of China. Trump said the US remained neutral on Taiwan’s position, but added: “I will say this: I’m not looking to have somebody go independent. And, you know, we’re supposed to travel 9500 miles to fight a war. I’m not looking for that. I want them to cool down. I want China to cool down.”

Trump’s remarks have caused deep unease in Washington, among opponents and Republicans alike, as well as in allied capitals. “The net effect of his comments,” says the Brookings Institute’s Ryan Hass, “was to suggest that his views on Taiwan independence were closer to Beijing’s preferences, that Taiwan had a greater responsibility to avoid provoking conflict, and that America’s security support for Taiwan was negotiable with China.”

Hass adds: “Trump’s public openness to negotiating with Beijing over America’s posture on Taiwan will serve as the diplomatic equivalent of a matador waving a red flag in front of a bull. It will cause Beijing to intensify its efforts to test the boundaries of what it can gain in terms of loosening America’s commitment to Taiwan’s security.”

Trump’s words certainly cheered a late-May roundtable of Chinese specialists on Taiwan, Sinification reports. Xiamen University’s Li Peng acknowledges Trump’s unpredictability but argues that repeated interactions between Trump and Xi could stabilise the American president himself and thereby support stability in cross–Strait and US–China relations. Shao Yuqun of the Shanghai Institute of International Studies sees Trump’s willingness to discuss arms sales with Beijing as a partial abandonment of the Six Assurances, while his refusal to endorse Taiwan independence implies a policy of non-intervention if conflict intensified between Taiwan and China.

Wang Hailiang of the Shanghai Institute of East Asia Studies, says Beijing must use the next three years — more or less the remainder of Trump’s term, though he did not spell that out — to create a positive, irreversible trend in China–US–Taiwan interactions and push Washington towards “informal honourable neutrality.” In other words, China has to work on a pliable US president while it can.

The importance of using the next two or three years to draw in Taiwan is underlined for some Chinese observers by the entry of a third player, Japan, into the equation. Recent changes to Japan’s defence exports rules would strengthen that country’s defence-industrial base, sustain wartime production capacity, and push the country towards becoming a regional “source of trouble,” write Xu Yongzhi and Duan Zhiyou, two Japan-watchers under State Security’s academic arm. Exports to the United States, Australia, the Philippines and other partners would reinforce a “grid-like” US alliance system, deepen first-island-chain military integration, and help Japan court neighbouring states into a potential China-containment network.

“China’s immediate strategic focus with regards to Taiwan should remain on the United States under Trump, but Japan may become a far more dangerous obstacle after 2028,” writes Renmin University’s Jin Canrong. “First, Japan is moving from backstage involvement to open confrontation, hollowing out its pacifist constitution, expanding arms exports and joining first island chain military activity, yet it still depends heavily on US intelligence, space and strike systems. Second, if constitutional revision succeeds after the 2028 upper-house election, a fully militarised and potentially nuclear-armed Japan would greatly complicate China’s Taiwan strategy, thereby compressing the current window of opportunity for resolving the Taiwan issue.”

Up until the late 1980s, many in the US and other parts of the West might not have been too worried if Taiwan had been taken over by the People’s Republic and merged with the mainland. The island was governed by a harsh one-party dictatorship, first under Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and then under his son Chiang Ching-kuo. Censorship was pervasive and the regime’s secret police weren’t averse to working with criminal triads to assassinate critics, including exiles in the United States.

But the younger Chiang’s death in 1989 freed up Taiwanese politics. Elections were held under his successors in the Kuomintang (the Chinese Nationalist Party, or KMT), with the KMT and the new Democratic People’s Party alternating in power. Despite having fought the communists ardently in the years before 1949, the KMT today is more sympathetic towards reunification than its main rival party.

In Beijing, meanwhile, attitudes hardened after the 1989 killings in Tiananmen Square, and flickering hopes of political “convergence” were rekindled after Xi Jinping came to power in Beijing at the end of 2012. In the West, Taiwan acquired new importance as a gain for democracy and supplier of the world’s main source of semiconductors — the latter an attraction for the Chinese too.

On taking office, Xi made clear that the reunification of Taiwan was one of his key goals. It was not an issue that could be passed along from generation to generation, he told a visiting KMT leader in 2013. The build-up of China’s naval and air power intensified, aimed at making it harder for American forces to operate safely around Taiwan. In about 2019, China dropped the word “peaceful” from its formula for reunification.

But this very maritime ambition, transforming China’s military from land power to one with extensive reach into the oceans, had the effect of quietly enhancing Taiwan’s importance to American strategy. As UNSW strategic analyst Clinton Fernandes pointed out last month, Taiwan has become more and more important in bottling up this Chinese naval power. “Taiwan is a critical node in a chain of islands consisting of US allies and partners: Japan to its north and the Philippines to its south,” he wrote, adding that US forces in Japan and the Philippines control vital sea routes for the Chinese.

“The US can detect, track and follow Chinese submarines as they cross the sensor barrier,” Fernandes went on. “It can trail them covertly with its own very quiet submarines, or use maritime patrol aircraft and ships equipped with antisubmarine warfare helicopters to trail them overtly. It can sink Chinese ships if ordered to do so in a crisis.” This makes the strategic calculations easy to understand: “For China, incorporating Taiwan allows it to deter hostile forces off its own coastline. For the US, if China were to take Taiwan, it would be free to project power into the Pacific Ocean.”

With Xi about to turn seventy-three and positioning for a fourth five-year term as leader, the question is how patient he will be. He is quietly working on the current KMT chairman, Cheng Li-wun, who visited Beijing in April. There, Cheng emerged from a meeting with Xi urging a resumption of cross-strait exchanges.

Back home, the KMT and its allies in Taiwan’s legislature have been blocking and cutting President Lai’s defence budget, reducing the funds available to take up the US$14 billion arms package Trump is holding back. Now in America talking to congressmen and think-tanks, Cheng is presumably arguing for the increasingly unpredictable Trump to keep sitting on it the aid. •

The post Careless Trump raises the stakes for Taiwan appeared first on Inside Story.

You can bet that got a vocal chuckle, as did his quip about being the morning after to the conference’s night before “at a local bar.” Lawyers always laugh at jokes by judges, especially judges from the nation’s top court. As near as I can tell, the last time such a judge appeared at the North Queensland Law Association’s annual conference was when Susan Kiefel — then, like Beech-Jones is now, the highest court’s lowest judge — spoke in Mackay in 2008.

Beech-Jones’s appointment to the High Court in 2023 attracted no interest outside legal circles. He was of interest to me — a fellow science-law grad from the ANU, albeit before my time there — and I had recently praised a sentencing judgement of his, so I tweeted a few angles the media could cover: “the fiftieth man on the court,” “the first hyphenated justice!” But the media went for “married to Suzie Miller” (the playwright of the rightly feted one-hander, Prima Facie) and “born in Tasmania!” if it covered his appointment at all.

That’s how most High Court justices like it. In 2017, then justice Virginia Bell bemoaned her American counterparts’ relative fame:

For $24, you can buy a Ruth Bader Ginsburg coffee mug. It features a rather grim portrait of her honour under the words “I dissent.” How lucky we are that in Australia, outside the law faculties, very few people would be able to name the Chief Justice of the High Court let alone the six puisne justices.

And that seems to be how the North Queensland Law Association likes it too.

“I decided the best approach was to start you off gently,” the judge informed the northerners, “but maybe wake everyone up with something a bit pointier towards the end.” In its Facebook post summarising the event, the NQLA duly covered the gentle part — a mix of bland summaries of recent cases and quirky forays into Queensland history — but completely omitted the pointy bit: the judge’s no-holds-barred attack on a different legal association.

The body that drew the judge’s ire was the Samuel Griffith Society, which is well known in legal circles as a club of conservative lawyers, academics and ex-judges. Beech-Jones wanted the north Queenslanders to know that the club’s namesake — a favourite Queensland son, politician and judge who was the first national chief justice — was himself no conservative, but “was more than Marx curious, Marx adjacent if you like.”

Actually, one historian has argued that he may also have been racism adjacent, the justice allowed, but Beech-Jones refused to go there, saying that judges should never make such charges lightly. And then he called out a slew of papers delivered at the society’s events for criticising the High Court’s native title cases in angry and often racist terms, statements “that say nothing about Indigenous people or the decision in Mabo [No 2] but a lot about the author.”

What would Samuel Griffith have thought, he asked the crowd, of a more recent suggestion that the venerable Queenslander’s namesake society seek funding from a billionaire? “I do not think that question is very difficult to answer. But perhaps the better question is what do you think?’

The audience that day may well have learnt a few new things about Sir Samuel Griffith, but I doubt they learnt anything new about the Samuel Griffith Society. Queenslanders are all too familiar with conservative politics in general, and all but the younger ones will grimly remember the 1990s debates on native title, which made the recent Voice referendum debate seem more like an acknowledgement of country. The proceedings of a group of conservative legal types are easy to imagine and, in any case, are nearly all publicly available.

That being said, a comprehensive account of the society would have to wrestle with the platforms it has regularly given, sometimes repeatedly, to not-so-conservatives like George Williams, Anne Twomey, Michael Kirby and (my law school colleague) Cheryl Saunders. Beech-Jones, who had clearly pored through the society’s proceedings, chose to omit their participation in a society whose first leader was the second Queenslander to head the national court, Harry Gibbs. More pointedly, he didn’t mention the many judges who had delivered keynotes to the society, including Beech-Jones’s fellow north Queensland conference goer, Susan Kiefel, several other sitting chief justices and two of his own colleagues on the current court.

Was Beech-Jones’s speech a dig at his own colleagues? My initial reading was no. Beech-Jones didn’t criticise anyone for merely attending a Samuel Griffith Society conference. That being said, he did attribute some speakers’ unsavoury views to the society itself and urged law students to think twice about “defin[ing]” themselves by joining its “chapters.” You might call his speech “guilt-by-association adjacent.”

But, if recent reporting in the Australian is accurate, Beech-Jones has since rejected an invitation to speak at the society’s coming conference in Sydney. That wouldn’t itself be noteworthy, except that he reportedly cited the Council of Chief Justices’ Guide to Judicial Conduct as one reason, specifically its advice to avoid the appearance of continuing ties to political parties “such as might occur by attendance at political gatherings.” That’s clearly a dig at both the society and his fellow (and past) judges, I’d say. I’d also add that it’s a very strained reading, one that says nothing about the Samuel Griffith Society or the Guide to Judicial Conduct but a lot about its reader.

I’d usually leave such intra-legal tiffs to the Australian and its ilk. But this particular tiff raises some quite startling issues about the High Court’s medium-term future. This will all take some explaining, so bear with me. I’ll start you off gently, but wake you up with something a lot pointier towards the end.

Let’s start with some birthdays. We know that the current justices were born on 9 January, 7 March, 19 June, 5 July and 19 November. Attentive readers will note that, while there are seven justices, I’ve only listed five birthdays. That’s partly because two justices — as it happens, the two who have attended Samuel Griffith Society shindigs — share that birthday in early January. (Shared birthdays are likely in groups of twenty-three or more, but the odds of them in a mere group of seven are closer to one in twenty.)

It’s also because there’s no public information about Robert Beech-Jones’s exact birthday. That’s a little strange, because High Court judges’ birthdays are publicly significant, thanks to a 1977 referendum that mandates their constitutional retirement “upon… attaining the age of seventy.” (A quirky bit of Australian law means that that day actually comes a full twenty-four hours earlier than most people think.)

The judicial birthday that will matter soonest is that of the High Court’s oldest justice, chief justice Stephen Gageler, who was born on the 5 July. Crucially, Gageler turns seventy in 2028, the same year our current federal government turns three. That puts his seventieth birthday soon after the next federal election. Indeed, so soon that the question of who will actually choose the next chief justice is quite murky.

Gageler’s successor might be chosen by the outgoing government (as replacements are typically announced a few months early to ease the handover) or by the incoming one (which will be in power closer to the swearing in.) Or, if the government changes and the new one tries to undo the old one’s choice, the question of who chooses might end up before the High Court itself.

Chances are, this mild constitutional crisis will be dodged. Maybe the electorate will re-elect the current government. Maybe Gageler will quit months early to head-off any impasse. Or, perhaps most likely, Gageler’s successor will be an uncontroversial pick, as most such appointments are.

But all of this puts paid to speculation that Robert Beech-Jones’s speech is an equivalent to Dyson Heydon’s successful “application letter” for the High Court. The election timing means his entrée into politics last month was more of a disapplication letter: #anyonebutRBJ. Indeed, there are multiple reasons why he won’t be the next chief.

One is an unshaken Australian tradition that is perhaps aimed at stopping such power bids from within. Since Federation, every High Court chief justice has been either its next most senior judge — as Stephen Gageler and his predecessor Susan Kiefel both were when they ascended — or an outsider appointed straight to the top. So, unless Albanese or his successor decides that an election year is the right time to break a century-long practice, the top court’s next chief will either be the current second-in-seniority (Michelle Gordon) or someone who isn’t on the current court.

A second reason is one that won’t make me popular with the Samuel Griffith Society: gender diversity. Inside Story’s recent coverage of the Albanese government’s remarkable record of placing women in senior national roles didn’t mention its appointment of Jayne Jagot to the High Court in 2022, a step widely feted for placing women in the majority on the apex court for the first time. The catch is that that female majority ended just eleven months later with Robert Beech-Jones’s appointment.

This is actually the third time a man has replaced a woman on the national court, but it’s a first for Labor, and also the first time female majorities and chief justiceships reverted to male ones. But these unfortunate landmarks passed almost completely unnoticed in 2023. Perhaps everyone assumes a new High Court tradition has been established under which majorities and chief justiceships will see-saw between men and women from now on.

All three of these factors — 2028 electoral politics, the seniority tradition and the possible High Court sex see-saw — point away from the Albanese-appointed Beech-Jones and towards the Abbott-appointed Michelle Gordon as Australia’s next chief justice. But there’s another, very pointy, factor firmly against both of them.

In schooling the Samuel Griffith Society and his colleagues on the Guide to Judicial Conduct’s advice on judges attending “political gatherings,” Robert Beech-Jones perhaps unwittingly drew attention to another part of the guide that states judges “must avoid involvement in political controversy.” If the Samuel Griffith Society’s conferences are too political for judges to attend, surely that makes it too controversial for judges to attack.

But there’s an exception in the guide for a political controversy that “directly affects the operation of the courts, the independence of the judiciary or aspects of the administration of justice.” Perhaps that’s why Beech-Jones paired his criticism of the society with two bits of American judicial politics.

The first one is a perennial American debate about whether old constitutions should be read the way their drafters would or the way modern readers would. Beech-Jones archly pointed out that while the speakers at the society all seem to favour the first approach (known as “originalism”), their namesake (himself a drafter of Australia’s constitution) and successive High Court justices haven’t. He mocked both the society and a majority of the US Supreme Court for favouring reading the American constitution’s “right to bear arms” to fit eighteenth-century gun regulation traditions rather than twenty-first-century public safety concerns. “Which approach do you prefer,” he asked the north Queenslanders, “theirs or ours?”

I don’t know if the judge took audience questions but, if he had and I’d been there, I’d’ve asked him about the current American dispute about “birthright citizenship.” President Donald Trump has urged the US Supreme Court to stop reading a constitutional provision on citizenship the way its post–civil war drafters would (as granting citizenship to almost anyone who is born on the nation’s soil) and more like modern readers would (with an eye to an orderly national border, among other things.) “Which approach do you prefer,” I’d ask Beech-Jones, “the originalist approach or Trump’s?” (We’ll find out the American apex court’s own answer in coming weeks.)

But it’s the other spectre of American judicial politics Beech-Jones raised — the successful push by American conservative groups to have conservative judges appointed to that nation’s federal courts — that would surely have roused his Australian crowd. “There is a highly sophisticated legal term to describe that process,” the judge declared, “it’s known as court stacking.” And then he pointed out a 2020 paper by then senator Amanda Stoker about the High Court’s landmark (and divided) ruling barring the federal government from deporting Indigenous non-citizens that ends with a pointy bit proposing the society should learn a lesson from its American counterparts.

The Samuel Griffith Society will doubtless be chuffed at this seeming judicial endorsement of its potential dramatic influence on Australian politics and more. But Beech-Jones didn’t spell out how exactly Australian courts — staffed via behind-the-scenes ministerial consultations and expiring with each judge’s constitutional dotage, rather than the American method of frantic public hearings and horsetrading that place winners on the bench for life — can be stacked by anyone.

Back in 2017, Virginia Bell said it was “inconceivable that the outcome of an Australian election might turn on whether a Coalition or a Labor government would be in a position to make the next appointment to the High Court of Australia.” Beech-Jones likewise seems to think stacking is exclusively an American thing: “If anyone thinks this particular US style of court stacking and judicial decision-making is a good idea, then go and live there.” That is, he thinks Stoker’s paper says more about the Samuel Griffiths Society than it does about Australia.

But here’s my pointy bit: Bell and Beech-Jones are both very wrong. The reason? Beech-Jones’s appointment to the national court.

It’s time to look at birth years. The current High Court’s are 1958, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1969 and 1974. Eagle-eyed readers will notice I only listed six. That’s because, while Robert Beech-Jones’s birth day isn’t public, his birth year is: it’s 1965, the same year as his fellow Albanese-appointee, Jayne Jagot, and adjacent to the birth years of Coalition-appointees Michelle Gordon and Jacqueline Gleeson.

And that’s the rub. Beech-Jones’s appointment in 2023 meant that, for the first time since constitutional age limits were introduced, there are four very closely-aged judges on our national court, all of whom turn will turn seventy in a sixteen-month period between mid-November 2034 and early March 2036.

This spate of mandatory retirements, first noticed in online legal commentary in 2023, will very much complicate the work of the national court in the mid-2030s. It will need a solid pair of hands at the top while it endures an extended period of reduced staffing and judicial churn that will make it very hard to do its core task of resolving major legal disputes in lasting ways. That is why I say none of the court’s current early sexagenarians ought to be picked to replace Stephen Gageler in 2028. And neither, heaven forbid, should a fifth similarly aged judge be appointed that year, as chief or otherwise.

The process of filling these four vacancies will be quite different from the usual process too. They will be (and indeed should be) seen as a job lot, so that considerations of balance on the apex Court — between states, between genders, between fields of legal expertise and (I’d say) between birth years — can be properly managed. If the normal selection approach is taken, female legal highfliers from New South Wales born in the 1970s will be fielding a lot of behind-the-scenes enquiries next decade.

But the selection may well be very abnormal, for a reason election tragics will already have spotted. The four justices’ seventieth birthday parties might well fall entirely within a single federal electoral cycle, that of our nation’s future fifty-first parliament. Whichever party ends up with a majority or a workable minority of the lower house — be it Labor, the Coalition or maybe a new political force — in a federal election held in late 2033 or early 2034 would have untrammelled power to remake the national court.

There’ve been a few American presidents who’ve appointed a majority of that nation’s Supreme Court in a single term in office, including Washington, Lincoln and (Franklin) Roosevelt, but each of them also needed the approval of that country’s Senate for each pick. Australia’s prime ministers are more powerful than their counterparts in exactly this respect, but, aside from the early days of Federation, have only appointed majorities to the national court in between repeated national elections.

By contrast, our prime minister in 2034 — whoever he or she is — might need to win just a single election to personally remake a majority of the court as they wish. Or, to put it another way, to stack the nation’s most important court. Perhaps that possibility will dominate the relevant election. Or maybe, this unusual prime ministerial superpower will be ignored by an electorate focused on other concerns. Which would you prefer, Robert Beech-Jones? Neither? Well, maybe you should have thought about that when you took up Susan Kiefel’s vacancy in 2023.

Fortunately, Beech-Jones can reverse his (and Albanese’s) terrible error, but he’ll need to heed a hard lesson from America. Ruth Bader Ginsburg originally got her face on a mug labelled “notorious RBG” because of her iconic legal role and look in the mid-2010s, but these days she is much more notorious for a quite different reason. As recounted in Suzie Miller’s other one-hander, RBG: Of Many, One, when the judge was eighty, president Barack Obama carefully suggested she retire at a time when the nation and its elected institutions were united behind the Democrats, and her own court’s political affiliations were finely balanced. Alas, Ginsburg turned him down, out of a mix of pride, hubris and misplaced hope, easily her worst and most consequential decision.

Robert Beech-Jones, of all the current justices, knows this story and its many terrible judicial, political and social outcomes all too well. What would RBG have thought of a suggestion that a justice of the High Court of Australia should quit years early just to prevent a future prime minister stacking the court? I don’t think that question is very difficult to answer. But perhaps the nation-changing question is: what does RBJ think? •

The post The notorious RBJ appeared first on Inside Story.

Once, an interviewer asked me a much more interesting question: why does Hitler still exercise such a fascination and loom so large in our culture? I responded with something along these lines: in an era in which there is less consensus about traditional religious definitions of what we should consider to be good, there is a broad secular consensus that Hitler (along with Nazism and the Holocaust) represents a definition of absolute evil.

My vague intuition has received a more developed and thoughtful articulation in a short book (or long essay) by Alec Ryrie, professor of the history of Christianity at Britain’s Durham University. In The Age of Hitler: How We Will Survive It, Ryrie argues that the Christian narratives and moral teachings that were hegemonic in Western societies until the second world war have been replaced. Since the war, he says, “we have all been living through the age of Hitler… the age in which our public morals have come to be defined with reference to the Nazis.”

Ryrie provides a concise sketch of how often references to Hitler, Nazism and the Holocaust appear in popular culture. Initially he seems to be covering similar terrain to Gavriel D. Rosenfeld’s 2013 book, Hi Hitler! How the Nazi Past Is Being Normalized in Contemporary Culture, which surveys popular culture’s treatments of Third Reich historical themes. Think of all the internet parodies of Hitler’s ranting in the bunker in the 2004 film Downfall. Indeed, analogies with Hitler and Nazism became so ubiquitous online that “Godwin’s Law” — which essentially says that the first person to introduce a Hitler analogy into an online argument loses — became a popular means of trying to stem the tide. But Ryrie soon veers in a different direction.

If Hitler represented absolute evil then the war the Allies fought to resist his aggression and defeat his regime was in some senses a “good war.” The title of Studs Terkel’s 1984 people’s oral history of the conflict, The Good War, might have contained a strong dose of irony given that the accounts he gathered didn’t shy away from the grisly aspects of the conflict. But there was no irony in the celebration of the (mostly) men who fought in that conflict as “the greatest generation” during the Reagan years, even though President Reagan himself spent the war in the studio lots of Hollywood.

As Ryrie justifiably points out, however, a war is a questionable thing to base a set of moral values on. I grew up on a diet of wholesome, morally unambiguous tales of wartime heroism (books like The Dam Busters and Colditz, for instance) but historians have since arrived at much more complex accounts of the war. The mass fire-bombing of civilians in German and Japanese cities, the racism and sexual violence, the grimmer aspects of Stalin’s conduct on the Eastern front — all received more attention as time went on. The Allies’ less praiseworthy acts don’t diminish the evil of Nazism, but they do blur the moral certainties of older narratives.

We also risk drawing lessons from the war that aren’t applicable to present dilemmas. Ryrie justifiably points to the inflationary use of the term “appeasement” in international crises. A respectable body of international relations literature has been devoted to the use and misuse of the “Munich” analogy in debates about how to deal with belligerent countries.

This is not to deny that Western societies drew important lessons from that war, notably the ideal of universal human rights. As Ryrie writes, “we cannot imagine our modern faith in human rights without the experience of the second world war.” Among other things, the post-1945 emphasis on universally valid human rights has energised anti-racist and anti-colonialist movements. But Ryrie sees our “faith in human rights” as flawed, because it is grounded in historical experience that is losing its salience in our culture.

It’s possible to show, on the other hand, that our contemporary concept of human rights has roots much further back than 1945 — at least as far back as the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and the American and French revolutions. Ideas of human rights are grounded in ethics and philosophy, not just historical precedents and memory.

Ryrie argues that the “age of Hitler” is coming to an end, which he doesn’t view as a bad thing. It’s also inevitable, he says, as the remaining number of living witnesses to wartime events shrinks and societies or cultures with different memories of that period make increasing claims on our attention.

Just over twenty years ago, in an important essay on the Crisis of Antifascism (2004), the Italian historian Sergio Luzzatto diagnosed the waning hold anti-fascism had as a founding ideology of the postwar Italian Republic. The passing of the generation of protagonists of the struggle between fascism and anti-fascism, the banalisation of the memory industry, and the active efforts of elements of the Italian right to trivialise and relativise the crimes of Mussolini’s regime had all contributed to the weakening of the tradition of anti-fascism as a way of mobilising democratic politics.

Today Italy is governed by a party that is a direct linear descendant of the neo-fascist party founded in Italy after 1945 by unrepentant functionaries of Mussolini’s Fascist party. Europe-wide, far-right parties have secured large segments of the electorate. In Germany, the inoculation against the far right lasted longer than in many other countries, but the extremist Alternative for Germany is today polling as the most popular party in the country.

Ryrie doesn’t really engage greatly with political-historical analysis of the kind that Luzzatto practises. Instead, he proceeds to argue that it is time for the culture wars that divide contemporary Western societies to give way to a new synthesis of moral values. To get there, “progressive secularists” will need to learn from the positive dimensions of rooted religious traditions and “conservative traditionalists” will need to relearn the values of humility and repentance.

Ryrie’s argumentation doesn’t take account of the corrosive effects of a generation of neoliberalism, with its elevation of self-interest and its tendency to dissolve older sources of social solidarity. Names like Thatcher, Reagan and Hayek are missing from his book, despite its engagingly wide set of cultural references. He tends to be dismissive of class or economic factors, and it is frustrating to read an essay on contemporary history that has so little to say about actual power relations in society.

It is hard to argue against the value of dialogue with people of differing views, in the abstract. But when peaceful protesters tried to reason with Trumpist paramilitaries in the state of Minnesota in January this year, two of them were shot dead. •

The Age of Hitler: How We Will Survive It
By Alec Ryrie | Reaktion | $34.95 | 160 pages

The post Are we still living in the Age of Hitler? appeared first on Inside Story.

They had much in common. Born only nine years apart — Kafka in 1883 in Prague and Benjamin 1892 in Berlin — they died in their forties. Both grew up in well-to-do households. Both were the children of assimilated German Jews. For the Nazis, the qualifier was irrelevant: Benjamin’s brother and Kafka’s three sisters were murdered in 1942 and 1943.

A recurrent melancholia afflicted both men and affected their work. Their writing was influenced by the emergence of a new technology, the projection of moving images. They were loners, but the women they loved left a large mark: Felice Bauer and Milena Jesenská in Kafka’s case and, in Benjamin’s, his wife Dora and his lover Asja Lācis.

At the time, close friends and some fellow writers considered Benjamin and Kafka exceptionally talented, but while they were still alive, they weren’t well known to a broader public. That’s also because many of their texts were published only posthumously.

Kafka wrote only three books of short prose and Benjamin published four titles: his doctoral and postdoctoral dissertations; Deutsche Menschen, an edited anthology of letters published under a pseudonym in 1936 in Switzerland; and One-Way Street, a collection of philosophical-literary miniatures that appeared in 1928, albeit as a brochure rather than a book. (Benjamin did, however, contribute numerous articles to newspapers, magazines and radio programs.)

Their reputations grew exponentially after they died, not least due to the efforts of close friends who arranged for the posthumous publication of their writings. Kafka’s literary executor Max Brod defied his express wish to burn his manuscripts unread and published his diaries and manuscripts, including The Trial and The Castle. Hannah Arendt and Theodor W. Adorno, above all, ensured that their friend Walter Benjamin’s previously unpublished texts would find a readership.

“Posthumous fame is one of [the Roman goddess] Fama’s rarer and least desired articles,” Arendt noted drily with reference to Kafka and Benjamin. It seems “to be the lot of the unclassifiable ones, that is, those whose work neither fits the existing order nor introduces a new genre that lends itself to future classification.”

Kafka and Benjamin have been the subject of an abundance of studies by scholars, particularly in literary studies and cultural theory, and numerous biographies have shed light on all aspects of their lives. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings’s 2014 opus is the most comprehensive account of Benjamin’s life and thought, covering his many intellectual pursuits and his path-breaking contributions to literary criticism, aesthetics, philosophy and cultural history. Its German edition runs to more than 1000 pages. For good reason, it has been hailed as a definitive account.

Peter E. Gordon’s recently released Walter Benjamin: The Pearl Diver is concise where Eiland and Jennings’s treatment is exhaustive. Gordon, who teaches European intellectual history at Harvard, has given us a beautifully written biography that is particularly valuable for readers not already familiar with Benjamin’s life and work but also a pleasure to read for others more conversant with his writings.

Like many books about Benjamin, this is a sympathetic account. “I have chosen not to dwell on the less palatable aspects of his character,” Gordon admits, “his gambling, his infidelities, his erratic moods, or his penchant for ruthlessly cutting off friendships when they no longer suited his needs.” But he certainly hasn’t written a hagiography — which cannot be said of all of Benjamin’s biographers.

Walter Benjamin: The Pearl Driver appears in Yale University Press’s Jewish Lives series. The question of the extent to which Benjamin was a Jewish writer provides the angle that distinguishes Gordon’s biography. I found his answers to that question the least convincing aspect of the book — if only because they sometimes read as if they were added belatedly, in response to an editor’s reminder. The need to focus on Benjamin’s interest in Judaism also seems to have led Gordon to privilege his subject’s correspondence with his close friend Gershom Scholem at the expense of other sources.

The book’s structure and Gordon’s reflections on it are a strength. Like others who have written about Benjamin, Gordon confronted the challenge of historicising the life of an intellectual who was preoccupied with history’s potential and who, “perhaps more than most professional historians, was alive to the enigma that works of the past offer more riches than the past can control.”

Gordon has therefore tried — successfully, I think — “to undo the historicist cliché by restoring some measure of contingency to a human life that, like all lives, remains forever open in its meaning.” He begins with Benjamin’s untimely suicide at Portbou, only to leave that “aside and begin anew.”

That’s particularly appropriate given the widespread morbid fascination with the last twenty-four hours of Benjamin’s life (crossing the Pyrenees on foot, clutching a briefcase that may, or may not, have contained a precious manuscript; writing a letter to his son that the woman to whom it was entrusted mysteriously destroyed). Gordon’s writing strategy is appropriate also in light of Benjamin’s afterlife as a cultural theorist of our time, which often seems to dwarf his life as a son, husband, lover, father, friend and impoverished writer.

Eiland and Jennings’s book was exceptional in paying close attention to Benjamin’s family: his parents and siblings, his wife Dora and their son Stefan. Gordon, too, is interested in Benjamin as a person rather than merely a thinker and writer, but he mentions Stefan only in passing.

Dora and Walter divorced in 1930, and four years later Dora moved to San Remo in northeastern Italy, where she opened a pensione. Stefan joined her in 1937. “But he could not stay there long,” Gordon writes. “Lacking citizenship, he was deported in 1941 from Italy to Australia; he survived the war and became an antiquarian bookseller in London, where he remained until his death in 1971.”

It wasn’t Italian citizenship that Stefan needed (and even that would not have saved him, as Italian Jews too were deported to concentration camps once Nazi Germany occupied Italy in 1943). Stefan left San Remo in 1938 and moved to London (a fact that is, to be fair, mentioned elsewhere in Gordon’s book). Dora, who had married a British national to be able to live in Britain, followed him in 1939 and again ran a guest house. Having become an enemy alien when Britain declared war on Germany, Stefan was interned on the Isle of Man and in 1940, together with more than 2500 others, shipped to Australia, where he was interned in Hay (New South Wales) and Tatura (Victoria).

Dora Benjamin with the couple’s son Stefan, c. 1920.

Encounters and conversations during Stefan’s journey to Australia aboard the infamous Dunera occupy most of John Schad’s quirky and delightful Walter Benjamin’s Ark: A Departure in Biography, published late last year. It is a book about Stefan (called “S.”, “Steffe” or “the prince” in the book, and Stefanzerich when he was little), who has sometimes been absent from accounts of his father’s life. In an afterword, Stefan’s daughter Mona Benjamin applauds Schad for making “the footnote the story.” He turns Stefan from a mere witness to the greatness of his father’s life into a central character. But Walter Benjamin’s Ark is also a book about Stefan’s larger-than-life father (“the king”) who, in the book, is imagined to have reunited with Stefan aboard the Dunera.

Schad is a professor of modern literature at the University of Lancaster and the author of several works of experimental criticism, including The Late Walter Benjamin (2012). It’s not easy to pigeonhole his latest book. It qualifies as creative fiction but is also a piece of innovative and meticulous scholarship. It strikes me as a departure from rather than in biography. Perhaps it’s best described as an annotated novel. Or a script for a radio play.

Mind you, much of its text is not made up. Like Benjamin himself, who likened quotations in his work to “wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction,” Schad juggles other writers’ fragments, often deliberately out of context. Rather than expecting readers to recognise quotes, Schad italicises them, references them in footnotes, and provides introductions in which he directs his readers’ attention and provides tongue-in-cheek justifications for his selection. Unlike his father, Stefan was not a writer, but Schad quotes him at length, using notes of his utterances as a child Benjamin kept and titled “Opinions et pensées.”

The Dunera left Liverpool for Australia in July 1940. Its human cargo included some Italian and German POWs and some Nazis, but most of those on board were Austrian and German refugees who had been interned in Britain after the fall of Dunkirk. Schad’s narrative features a handful of the actual passengers, among them three men who shared the surname Wilde, the actor Sigurd Lohde and an acrobat called Zeppie.

Biographies of Benjamin, including Gordon’s, make much of Benjamin’s friendships with other intellectuals: Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, Siegfried Kracauer, Gershom Scholem, Adorno, Gretel Karplus (who in 1937 became Gretel Adorno) and others. Schad isn’t interested in such obvious interlocutors. Rather, he introduces a cast of characters most of whom never met either Stefan or Walter Benjamin but who, in Schad’s text, are also sailing on the Dunera. Virginia Woolf, Rosa Luxemburg, Hamlet, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Gertrud Kolmar — all are part of “the ship’s company” and of Benjamin’s “very own queer kingdom.”

Biographers tend to rely heavily on written sources. It’s therefore no surprise that those writing about Benjamin’s life have highlighted his relationships with people whose correspondence with him survived. Schad, however, goes much further than to rescue those of Benjamin’s acquaintances from oblivion who didn’t archive their letters (or talked to him mostly on the phone, as Schad’s Virginia Woolf does). He imagines conversations with historical figures whom Benjamin never met and who may not even have been of much concern to him.

That kind of irreverence is refreshing. (While Schad’s writing is no doubt inspired by Benjamin’s, the irreverence appears to be very much his own.) Sometimes the imagined conversations aboard the Dunera are outright funny. But the light-hearted banter characterising some of the dialogues is a thin layer over a darkness: the catastrophe of the Shoah that forms the historical backdrop to the narrative, and the loss experienced by Stefan, which becomes only more acute with his father’s appearance aboard the Dunera. Light-heartedness is entirely absent when Rosa Luxemburg, who was murdered by members of a far-right militia, her body thrown into the Landwehr Canal and retrieved not until several months later, is referred to as Mermaid.

Schad restores more than “some measure of contingency” to Benjamin’s life when he reunites Benjamin with his cousin, the poet Gertrud Kolmar, who was murdered in Auschwitz on 3 March 1943 and whose brother was on the Dunera. Her appearance is prompted by the opening of a lecture by Wittgenstein, “Suppose a story began with ‘She wore a black dress.’” She may or may not be the female counterpart of the angel in the Paul Klee painting “Angelus Novus” that was Benjamin’s most prized possession. And that angel may, or may not, have been none other than S., “the prince” and (quoting Kolmar now) “a youth with gleaming and quivering wide-spread wings” “whose countenance is sorrow.” After all, his middle name Rafael (which does not appear in the Australian internment records) came from one of the archangels.

The title of Gordon’s biography cites Hannah Arendt. In an essay published in 1968 — first in German in the literary journal Merkur and subsequently in the New Yorker and in Illuminations, an anthology of Benjamin’s writings — Arendt writes about Benjamin’s rare “gift of thinking poetically”:

Like a pearl diver who descends to the bottom of the sea, not to excavate the bottom and bring it to light but to pry loose the rich and the strange, the pearls and the coral in the depths, and to carry them to the surface, this thinking delves into the depths of the past — but not in order to resuscitate it the way it was and to contribute to the renewal of extinct ages.

Not only was Benjamin capable of thinking poetically — he was also able to convey his thinking to others. He was not only one of twentieth-century Germany’s most influential thinkers, but also one of its most elegant writers. That’s particularly evident in Benjamin’s 1928 collection of miniatures, One-Way Street, and in his memoir of sorts, Berlin Childhood Around 1900, in which he delves into his childhood to “pry loose the rich and the strange.”

The young Walter, c. 1897–1902. Selle & Kuntze

The German publisher Suhrkamp brought out a first version of Berlin Childhood, an edition prepared and introduced by Adorno and dedicated to Stefan, in 1950. The first book of Benjamin’s writings published after his death, it received positive reviews but turned out to be Suhrkamp’s least successful title that year. Adorno blamed “the trauma that asserts itself as soon as the name Berlin is mentioned.”

Benjamin had begun working on a series of vignettes about his childhood in the second half of the 1920s. The first texts appeared in print in 1926 in a literary magazine. But it was not until six years later that he decided to write a book composed of short “expeditions into the depth of memory.” By the end of 1932 he had completed a typescript of thirty pieces.

Unlike Kafka, Benjamin tried, often desperately, to have his writings published. That was also because — unlike Kafka, who worked for an insurance company — he did not have a steady income, relied on the support of his father and later of Gretel Karplus and his ex-wife Dora among others, and tried to survive by writing for newspapers and radio.

He sold the collection of vignettes to the Frankfurter Zeitung, a liberal daily, which intended to serialise it. But the Nazis’ seizure of power in March 1933 meant those plans came to naught. Altogether, only eighteen vignettes were published, some of them under the pseudonyms Detlef Holz (which he also used for the book Deutsche Menschen) and C. Conrad to circumvent the ban against the publication of texts by Jewish authors.

Benjamin meanwhile kept revising the texts and adding to the collection. He approached publishers in Germany and Switzerland, but to no avail. By 1938, he had put together several versions, copies of which were with publishers and friends. That year, he prepared a final typescript comprising thirty-two vignettes, this time also indicating the order in which they were to appear.

When he fled Paris in 1940, he entrusted the typewritten pages, together with other manuscripts, to the philosopher and surrealist writer Georges Bataille, who hid them in the Bibliothèque nationale. The philosopher Giorgio Agamben discovered them there forty-one years later. It is this final version, the Fassung letzter Hand, translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen, that has just been published by Verso.

In A Berlin Childhood Around 1900, Benjamin carried “the rich and the strange” to the surface, because, as he explains in a foreword, “[i]n 1932, while abroad, I began to realise that I would soon have to take a fairly long and perhaps permanent leave of the city in which I was born.” The tenor of some of these vignettes is reminiscent of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, parts of which Benjamin had translated in the 1920s. But Benjamin’s remembering differs from Proust’s. He had lost “the security that had been granted his childhood” not only when he ceased being a child but also because after 1933 a return to Berlin was no longer an option.

The Berlin that Benjamin remembered and brought back to life is the comparatively affluent western part of the city, where his family lived. The vignettes feature the zoo, which must have been a frequent destination for young Walter and his nanny, his school, and the family’s summer residence near Potsdam. The backdrop for many of the vignettes, however, is the interior space of the family’s apartment, where the child’s sleep is invaded by frightful dreams and where the telephone, a seemingly innocuous apparatus, “disfigured and outcast, between the laundry hamper and the gasometer in a corner of the back corridor,” had the capacity to annihilate “all thought of my time, my intention and my duty.”

Franz Kafka, c. 1915.

The final piece in the Fassung letzter Hand is titled “Das bucklichte Männlein” (“The little humpbacked man” in Shierry Weber Nicholsen’s and “The little hunchback” in Howard Eiland’s translation). In it, Benjamin remembers peering down a shaft that provides a basement window with light and ventilation. At night in his dreams “looks that paralysed me were shot out of such basement holes.” Lines from a children’s book convince him that the looks were those of a little humpbacked man, who couldn’t be seen but who ever saw young Walter.

“He has long since abdicated,” begin the concluding lines. “Yet his voice, like the humming of the gas mantle, whispers to me across the threshold of the century: ‘Liebes Kindlein, ach ich bitt, / Bet für’s bucklicht Männlein mit!’ [Dear child, I beg of you, / Pray for the little humpbacked man too!]”

The little humpbacked man also appears in an essay Benjamin wrote about Franz Kafka, whom he recognised as a kindred spirit. “Among the images in Kafka’s stories, none is more frequent than that of the man who bows his head far down on his chest,” writes Benjamin. “It was always this way with Kafka. Compare this early diary entry: ‘In order to be as heavy as possible, which I believe to be an aid to falling asleep, I had crossed my arms and put my hands on my shoulders, so that I lay there like a soldier with his pack.’”

Like many other Dunera deportees, Stefan opted to return to Britain when he was offered the opportunity. On 12 December 1941, he left Australia aboard the Largs Bay, a passenger ship converted into a troop carrier. Via Auckland, the Panama Canal, Curaçao, Bermuda and Halifax he travelled to the UK, where he was initially reinterned, once again on the Isle of Man.

A certain Karl Kafka, a textile salesman from Vienna, blue-eyed like Stefan and, like Stefan’s father, born in July 1892, had also been taken to Australia on the Dunera. Like Stefan, he chose to return to Britain during the war. For Schad, that’s a good enough excuse for imagining conversations between Stefan (“the prince”), “the king” and “a Herr Kafka who is neither quite Franz nor indeed Karl.”

Kafka and Benjamin never met. But unlike Rosa Luxemburg, Virginia Woolf or Ludwig Wittgenstein, Kafka meant a lot to Benjamin. He was an admirer of Kafka’s writings and defended Max Brod against those who accused him of disrespecting his friend’s instructions to burn his manuscripts. Kafka was never far from Benjamin’s mind, and wrote three essays about the Prague writer, one of them a script for a radio broadcast.

In “Some reflections on Kafka,” part of a 1938 letter Benjamin’s to Scholem, he observes: “as Kafka puts it, there is an infinite amount of hope, but not for us. This statement really contains Kafka’s hope; it is the source of his radiant serenity.” “Ah yes. [Clears throat]. There is an infinity of hope —,” Schad lets Kafka (“neither quite Franz nor indeed Karl”) say, whereupon the king completes the sentence: “But not for us.”

Kafka: Exactly. Satisfied, your highness?

[The king does not reply.]

I said, is your highness satisfied that there is an infinity of hope, but not for us?

[The king does not reply. Kafka thus speaks to S.]

Sir, your father is hesitant with his reply.

Benjamin provides one possible response, all to do with an infinity of hope, and again he casts a humpbacked man in a lead role. In the first of his “On the concept of history” theses he describes a puppet-like automaton capable of playing a winning game of chess. But rather than being a precursor of a machine powered by AI, the apparatus conceals a little humpbacked man who is an expert chess player and guides the puppet’s hands by means of strings.

Benjamin, influenced by Marxism and mysticism, imagines a philosophical equivalent to this apparatus: the puppet is called “historical materialism,” and it wins if it “enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight.” Kafka (Franz or Karl?) may have agreed.

The king: By the way, Herr Kafka …

Kafka: Yes, sir?

The king: Would it surprise you if I tell you how enormously delighted I am to discover such a profound and spontaneous communication between our thoughts?

Kafka: No, no it would not surprise me. Not at all. For, you see, there are nothing but surprising things in the world. •

Walter Benjamin: The Pearl Diver
By Peter E. Gordon | Yale University Press | $34.95 | 224 pages

Walter Benjamin’s Ark: A Departure in Biography
By John Schad | UCL Press | £30 / open access PDF | 302 pages

Berlin Childhood Around 1900
By Walter Benjamin | Translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen | Verso | $32.99 | 115 pages

The post Walter Benjamin reloaded appeared first on Inside Story.

Ease of entry doesn’t always mean ease of exit. En route to Hong Kong from the Canton Trade Fair, James was stopped at the border and taken away by security guards. Then, for more than eighteen months, his whereabouts were unknown. Australia didn’t recognise the People’s Republic of China at the time, and even if the government had been interested in James’s plight no official routes of communication existed between the two countries.

As it happened, opposition leader Gough Whitlam was a friend of the missing journalist. During his historic first visit to China in 1971, Whitlam received confirmation James was alive and in prison on charges of spying. Elected in December 1972, Whitlam promptly initiated diplomatic relations with China and James was released. By the time he made it back over the border into Hong Kong he had spent 1169 days in prison, much of it in solitary confinement.

Half a century later, that story played out again for another Australian journalist, Cheng Lei. Her new play, 1154 Days, is a dramatisation of the events in August 2020 that wrenched her out of a comfortable life as a TV business journalist in Beijing and subjected her to six months’ detention in solitary confinement followed by a formal arrest and imprisonment on charges of spying.

Like James, Cheng was released after a change of government in Canberra and a consequent improvement in Australia–China relations. Her story has been told often and on different platforms. She has written a book about her experience, A Memoir of Freedom (reviewed for Inside Story by Hamish McDonald) and has appeared in a documentary, Cheng Lei: Her Story, broadcast on Sky News. With this play, which premiered on 28 May at the North Melbourne Arts House and ran for five nights, she tells her story yet again. It’s worth seeing, and I imagine its creators hope to have it staged in other cities.

Cheng worked with two collaborators, Emma Valente and Clyde White, to develop the script, and performs her own character. Accompanying her on stage are two young people who act as her prison guards early in the play and then, in the final scene, assume the characters of her half-grown children. Otherwise, 1154 Days is a one-woman show. In a public but intimate space — the theatre enables an audience of no more than 132 — she acts out what happened to her. There is something cathartic about the performance.

The play falls into six parts. In the opening scene, performed in front of closed curtains at the front of the stage, she describes her life before prison. We see a busy, confident, breezy Cheng talking in Chinese and English, singing, appearing on television (a constant prop) and changing in and out of the clothes that equip her for her many roles in life as a television journalist with two children and a busy social life in Beijing.

The contrast could not be greater with the Cheng Lei of Part 2, a woman in prison garb, sitting motionless and reduced to silence, with one guard by her side and another standing directly before her. She can ask permission to exercise (one or two paces forward and back) and to use the toilet, guard still by her side. Such is life for someone under what the Chinese legal system calls “residential surveillance at a designated location,” which might sound like house arrest but is actually a form of enforced disappearance.

Six minutes of this on stage — sitting, exercise, toilet break, bed, sitting, exercise, toilet break, bed — is sufficient to give the audience a good idea of the six months she spent in those conditions. Her relief at finally being moved to a normal prison is palpable.

Part 3 of the play is about life in prison with three cell mates. Four television screens show four pairs of feet, scuffs and trouser ankles differentiated, prison tubs showing the few belongings of each. The cell mates come to life in Cheng’s interactions with them. Together they pace out the closely regulated days.

She takes time out from the re-enactment to talk to the audience directly. Her first Christmas in the cell was memorable, she says, for the first time they all sang together. She taught them “Silent Night.” The singing went on, surreptitiously, for the next twenty-two months.

Disarmingly, there is a kind of love story. In Part 4, Cheng Lei makes contact with a male prisoner in the neighbouring cell, devising a laborious code to communicate with him by knocking on the wall. The man’s name is Bo (which means wave) and she discovers he is a nuclear scientist. He owns a dog and she surmises he is kind. He occupies her waking hours, filling her starved human heart. After two weeks, guards discover the knocking. They are both punished, and he is moved away. The audience is left wondering where he is now.

The denouement comes in Part 5. After more than three years, Cheng Lei is finally about to be sentenced. She sings what will be a last song with her cell mates, although she doesn’t yet know that she won’t see them again. The song is Cindy Lauper’s “True Colors”:

You with the sad eyes
Don’t be discouraged
Oh I realize
It’s hard to take courage

Taken from her cell, she is again in court, willing herself not to hope for a short sentence. At this and many other points in the play she shows the strategies she employs to stay sane. Reading is one, although her quota of books is limited; singing is another; learning the names of all the world’s capitals cities is a third. But with the struggle against hope in this final stage of her imprisonment, she reveals more clearly than at any other point the importance of mental health for her survival.

In fact, the sentence is for time she has mostly already served. The means to convey the drama of this moment has eluded the playwrights and the audience can only lean into the moment as the real woman who has been through this real experience covers her face in front of them on the stage, overwhelmed.

For this audience, it is touching to hear Cheng Lei’s expressions of nostalgia for things Australian: the sunshine, most of all, but also mangoes and broccoli. Perhaps she had always thought of herself as having two home countries, just as she speaks two languages, hardly noticing when she shifts from one or the other. But it has become clear to her that China is not home. In the final scene, “back home,” a green coverlet on the stage serves as grass for a picnic with the children. The kids squabble briefly. The boy wants his sister’s chips. The girl is fixated on her phone. After a while they are all up on their feet, kicking a soccer ball around the stage. The sun is shining.

That contrast between the prison and the picnic inevitably leaves an impression of “Australia good, China bad.” Perhaps for this reason, the play ends with a corrective message, delivered in a sequence of didactic statements rolling across the screen at the back of the stage. “China is not simple,” the audience is told. It needs to be considered with “nuance.”

There was a moment of nuance in the Q&A held after last Friday’s performance, when Cheng Lei spoke about the prison guards during her initial time of “residential surveillance.” They were very young, she remarked, technical school students recruited for a job they took on without much knowledge about what it entailed. Cheng felt for them. One was ill with diarrhoea during her shift and had to stand on guard in her soiled clothing, having her pay docked afterwards for the breach of whatever bizarre rule might have covered this exigency.

But there was little in the Q&A to mitigate the critique of China offered in the play. In discussion with compere Qian Jinghua, Cheng engaged with the larger political issues it raised. Among these was journalism: namely, the reduction in truthful, fearless reporting about China, a place where everything is focused on the stability of “the system” (the Communist Party) and nothing is for the people. Qian and Cheng spoke together of the need to support the citizen journalists in China. “There are now knocks in the middle of the night to check on people’s ID,” remarked Cheng. “That never used to happen.”

Even as this discussion was taking place, news was breaking that the New York Times journalist Vivian Wang had been expelled from China in February. Wang follows a long line of journalists in recent years who have either been expelled from China or have fled the country in fear of their personal safety. Australian journalists Bill Birtles (from the ABC) and Mike Smith (Australian Financial Review) were evacuated in September 2020 after being subjected to interviews about Cheng Lei by the Ministry of State Security.

In his 2025 review, Hamish McDonald places Cheng Lei’s A Memoir of Freedom in a genealogy of works by Australians held aspolitical prisoners abroad: Peter Greste, Kylie Moore-Gilbert, Sean Turnell. It might be better placed in the rather longer genealogy of books written by political prisoners of the People’s Republic of China. The writers are mainly foreigners but they include some Chinese. Jean Pasqualini (Bao Ruowang) was both: the son of a French father and a Chinese mother. His Prisoner of Mao, published in French in 1973 with an English translation appearing in 1976, is a searing account of his seven years detention in laogai (reform through labour) camps and stands as the archetype of the China incarceration story.

Francis James didn’t write a prison memoir, but his story, like Cheng Lei’s, has been staged. The James Dossier, written by journalist and playwright Bob Ellis, was a musical celebration of James as the hero of his own life — an eccentric production befitting a truly eccentric man. Prison seems not to have made much impression on James other than expanding his knowledge of the works of Mao Zedong. Back in Australia he would advise bemused audiences they should be reading Mao alongside the Bible. When the Chinese government cleared him of all charges in 1986 and invited him back to China on an all-expenses-paid tour, he accepted with alacrity.

It is difficult to imagine anything comparable happening to Cheng Lei. Asked in the Q&A whether she would ever go back to China, she answered simply that she had been deported and there was no way for her to return. She simply wouldn’t get a visa. Her reply brings to mind the reflections on exile by US-based writer and academic Kang Zhengguo. Kang spent three years in a labour camp but he found the constraints on his life outside the camp almost as unbearable as the conditions within it and in mid-life was glad to exchange his Chinese passport for an American one. In his memoir, Confessions: An Innocent Life in Communist China, he reflects on the irony of having a native land that is a place of danger rather than safety, one you want to flee rather than return to.

Kang Zhengguo grew up during the Mao years. Watching Cheng Lei’s play about imprisonment during the Xi years prompts the question: after all this time, what has changed? “Like a spider in its web in a dark corner of the room,” writes Kang Zhengguo, “the Security Bureau [is] always lying in wait for its prey.” •

The post Place of danger appeared first on Inside Story.

Julia Cooke’s newly released Starry and Restless brings us another group of three women writers, all of whom came into prominence in the middle of the twentieth century. Rebecca West and Martha Gellhorn would be known to most readers; Emily Hahn is the outlier, and possibly the most interesting.

All three were fearsome as they were fearless, and each of them belies Becker’s assumption that female war correspondents only came into their own in Vietnam. Not only were women covering the Spanish civil war and the second world war, they also were prone to breaking other rules. According to Cooke, the onslaught against “objectivity,” for instance, occurred much earlier than 1970s New Journalism, and from the start women were a critical factor:

Cracks in the firmament of American journalism had widened enough to make space for a new approach to reporting. Two decades earlier, closer to the turn of the century, an emphasis on “objectivity” had attempted to establish guardrails around sensationalist, openly partisan journalism… But objectivity slipped and skated when it hit certain subjects, like the suffrage movement or racial violence or global conflicts.

As for reporting on wars, it took perseverance and ingenuity for women to get into war zones, let alone deal with unbelievable hardships in covering them, hardships often far more difficult and dangerous than those their male colleagues experienced.

The eldest of Cooke’s trio was Rebecca West (born Cicely Isabel Fairfield, a name she discarded for the one we know her by). She began her career writing for suffragist papers but by her forties, Cooke writes, “she had aged into stature as one of Britain’s best-known literary celebrities.” Her son was fathered by H.G. Wells, twenty years older, but she broke off altogether with him once she was making enough to support the child herself. By the time she married the bankrupt Henry Andrews she was earning enough to support him too. Then Andrews came into an inheritance that further enhanced their lifestyle. The couple stayed together until Andrews died, with West surviving him by another fifteen years.

Most readers would know of Martha Gellhorn, if sadly more for her liaison with Ernest Hemingway — just as West is too often remembered for hers with Wells — than for her own remarkable career. But Emily “Mickey” Hahn is another matter. The first female to get a degree in mining engineering, she gave it up for writing. Despite producing more than fifty books, she is relatively unknown today.

In 1930, on the first of her many adventures, Hahn took a third-class berth on a steamer to the Belgian Congo. It was 1930, America had sunk into the Depression and, unemployed and freelancing, she was seeking a place cheap enough to live, think and write in. Five years later she was in Shanghai, feted as “one of the cleverest of America’s youngest writers.” There, a nightclub regular, she acquired a reputation, a pet gibbon, and eventually an aristocratic Chinese poet, who, among much else, married her and introduced her to opium.

Shanghai’s bombing by the Japanese was Hahn’s segue into war reporting. Her male colleagues, considering Europe more important, had left to cover the war threatening there. Her pieces in the New Yorker focused on the lives of civilians, depicting “the subtleties of people of different cultures and national allegiances.” When things got too grim she fled to Hong Kong, interviewing Chiang Kai-Shek’s wife and her two sisters in Chongqing on the way. It was in Hong Kong that the war would finally catch up with her.

It caught up with Martha Gellhorn too, who was in Europe making good money for her bulletins to Colliers magazine. Before Czechoslovakia, she had been writing from France and England, but unlike the English, which she found in denial, the Czechs were hiding anti-aircraft guns in haystacks in preparation for a German invasion. As the war gathered pace she went with Hemingway to his beloved Cuba, where she sought a stabler home than his rough Havana headquarters. It’s hard to dismiss the feeling that Finca Vigia, the rundown farm they rented and restored, represented Gellhorn’s hopes for a permanent relationship with a man already noted for his serial monogamy.

Settling in a country property in England, Rebecca West might also have been hankering for permanence. In 1939, she and Andrews bought Ibstone House, halfway between London and Oxford. Like Finca Vigia, it was in disrepair, but they did what they could to restore it. They were safe from the Blitz there, but West could hear “the thrum of German bombers worrying their way past her home” as she worked on Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, her magisterial study of Yugoslavia. The couple ended up sheltering a retinue of Yugoslav refugees from the war.

For some, permanence would prove an illusion. Gellhorn and Hemingway married in 1940 but that didn’t quell Gellhorn’s need to write and travel. When Colliers asked her to cover events in Asia she couldn’t subdue her wanderlust, nor Hemingway his machismo. He insisted on accompanying her but, true to form, propositioned other women along the way. It turned out “a horror journey,” a defining step towards their marriage’s eventual dissolution.

Gellhorn sought her own agency for the rest of her life, yet the price was a restless impermanency. On France’s Omaha Beach for D-Day in June 1944, and later in Italy “sleeping in fields and foraging for food,” she was the war correspondent once more. At war’s end she bought a small bombed house, co-authored a play with Virginia Cowles — another correspondent — and then wrote a book about the Dachau concentration camp. She continued moving, adopting an Italian orphan whom she took with her to Cuernavaca.

Yet the lure of reporting still called, despite the contradictions in chronicling the pain of others and the prizes that time and again went to the men. In 1954 she married Tom Andrews, a former Time editor. On the cusp of cold war conservatism consigning women to the home, the marriage ended with her discovery of his five-year affair with another woman.

Like West before her, Hahn bore a child out of wedlock in occupied Hong Kong. A woman full of surprises, she was a remarkably tenacious mother, and the little girl, the daughter of British prisoner of war Charles Boxer, survived. Boxer also survived, and was released when Japan surrendered. The couple married, Hahn continued to write, and they had another daughter. Of the three woman, hers seemed to be the happiest marriage; their difficulties eased when Boxer was offered an academic position at Kings College London, though eventually she lived separately from him.

Friends and rivals as writers go, the three women moved in and out of each other’s lives. West was a mentor to Hahn; Gellhorn and Hemingway turned up in Hahn’s Hong Kong apartment. Their knowing each other is the glue that holds together the stories, not to mention the reader’s attention. They wrote to each other, and some kept diaries or extensive notes in which the others were mentioned. That said, Starry and Restless is so full of incident it’s sometimes hard to keep up. Fortunately there’s an excellent index and pages and pages of endnotes. It is indeed a scholarly achievement, a historical treatment of the changes in women’s journalism and how women in turn have changed the profession.

Cooke has already made her own name as a writer with The Other Side of Paradise: Life in the New Cuba, a young woman’s travel book published when she was in her twenties. She first visited Cuba in 2003, fell in love with the place and in 2008 went to live there, studying at the University of Havana and interviewing Cubans from various parts of the island.

Then came her Come Fly the World: The Jet-Age Story of the Women of Pan Am, a book about nine women stewardesses (the word was still in use then) who crewed the Pan America flights to and from Vietnam during that American war. Neither it nor The Other Side of Paradise was concerned with the politics per se; Cooke’s interest, as she’s described it, lay in how the geopolitics affected each of her interviewees’ lives. The same can be said about this latest book.

But why a multiple biography? Previous biographies of Cooke’s subjects tend to be out of print; surprisingly, Hahn published the only memoir. All good biographies embed their subjects in their times, but it’s possible that the attraction of dealing with a group has it the other way around, with their subjects turned historical characters, acting out the chance and flux experienced by differing generations, dismantling the stereotypes that have grown around them. •

Starry and Restless: Three Women Who Changed Work, Writing and the World
By Julia Cooke | Farrer, Strauss & Giroux | $49.99 | 448 pages

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The bit about the budget is old news and entirely true. But it’s important to note that One Nation’s poll lead was in primary votes only, and we all know that’s not the full story under our electoral system. The concept of national two-party-preferred support might be outliving its usefulness, but that doesn’t mean primary votes now rule. Preferences are no less important than they ever were. And in fact the pollster, Redbridge/Accent, estimated Labor’s two-party-preferred support was 51 per cent regardless of whether its main opponent was One Nation or the Coalition.

The poll has 31 per cent for One Nation, 28 for Labor, 20 for the Coalition and the Greens on 12 (with 9 per cent for the rest). Since then another outfit, YouGov, has replicated the order if not the exact numbers, and Roy Morgan Research has Labor and One Nation tied. (An earlier Morgan poll put One Nation ahead, but as psephologist Kevin Bonham pointed out it was one of its less reliable SMS polls.)

How would these numbers, replicated at the ballot box, translate into House of Representatives seats? That’s awfully difficult to say, but it’s very likely no party would enjoy a majority. Labor would probably have a plurality (more than anyone else), with One Nation second and the Coalition third. Perhaps the ALP would retain government with support from the Greens and independents. Or One Nation plus the Coalition might be in a majority.

Could One Nation, during this parliamentary term, be in a polled position that translates into a likely majority all by itself? It’s possible; another five points at Labor’s expense, with all the others kept constant, would probably do it, assuming the Coalition continues to treat Pauline Hanson’s party favourably on their how-to-vote cards.

Late last century, prime minister John Howard was dragged kicking and screaming to “preferencing” Labor ahead of One Nation across the country, but that was a different time, a different electorate landscape — and a different Liberal Party. Preferencing Labor today would cause serious anger in the party membership and push more of them into the arms of the insurgent.

South Australia’s vote in March, the country’s first general election since the One Nation surge, showed us a few things. One was the durability of the party’s polled support all the way through to — and then on — election day. It happened in a particular context: a popular Labor premier and government widely viewed as certain to win (which it did very handsomely). This might have freed some people up to use their vote to send a message to the established parties, particularly the Liberals.

And it was a state — not federal — election, which probably means less at stake than a federal vote. Running a country is about the big items, particularly pulling and pushing those economic levers. Yes, many, perhaps most, people believe business as usual is no longer working, but when push comes to shove we know voters can be scared of changes that might affect their economic security. And Hanson has now discussed moving to the House of Representatives with a view to taking those levers. The other information South Australia provided was how seat-by-seat distributions of preferences play out with a large One Nation vote.

At the 2025 federal contest, when it received just 6.4 per cent nationally, One Nation picked up a quite strong flow of preferences from the Coalition. The Coalition dropped out of the three-candidate-preferred count against the ALP and One Nation in just one federal electorate, Hunter in New South Wales. When its primary vote (plus the preferences it had picked up from minor parties and independents) was distributed according to voters’ instructions between Labor and One Nation, it flowed a whoppingly one-sided 80.1 per cent to One Nation.

A year later in South Australia, the flows were noticeably weaker. Across the eleven electoral divisions in which the contest came down to Labor versus One Nation, the Coalition’s distributed preferences in the final round of counting favoured the latter by a much more modest 66.6 per cent.

More evidence came from electorates where Labor’s accumulated vote was distributed to the Coalition and One Nation. In the one 2025 federal where that happened, those votes went 58.9 per cent to the Coalition and 41.1 to One Nation. In South Australia in March, the percentages in the two such contests were favoured the Coalition much more, 71.5 to 21.5 per cent. This makes intuitive sense: if most “right-wing” supporters have shifted their first preference to One Nation, the rest will generally be relatively unenthused by the party.

These numbers matter when we’re trying to make sense of national polls — and even more so when we look at seat-by-seat ones such as Redbridge/Accent’s most recent MRP, a much larger, slightly earlier survey that still has Labor leading the primary vote. Pollsters and others must make assumptions when they simulate full seat-by-seat counts, eliminating parties one by one and distributing their preferences.

Redbridge/Accent’s estimates from that poll put Labor on 76, One Nation on 53 and the Coalition on 12. My estimates, mostly relying on South Australia’s flows, are quite different: 86, 43 and 12 seats respectively. For what they’re worth, that is. With lots of caveats. And with two years to go until the election. (Estimating preference flows to and from independents is the hardest part of the exercise.)

Victoria’s election in November will provide another big information dump, and will probably be more relevant to the federal sphere, given the absence of a popular Labor incumbent.

For the government in Canberra, two years is a long time, particularly from a budget as detested as this. The key date is 1 July 2027, when most changes come into operation and the fear of them starts to subside. But even before the budget, One Nation didn’t look like it was going away. •

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We were due to get a video message from Aziz Abu Sarah and Maoz Inon, a Palestinian and an Israeli who work together for peace after both losing relatives in the conflict — Sarah’s brother died of injuries sustained in Israeli custody and Inon’s parents were killed by Hamas on 7 October. But the computer failed. A few men stared at a laptop, balefully tapping a key, until a young, bearded bloke wearing a yarmulke took the mike: “I’m Hoff. I’m the tech guy. I’m an introvert, and not very good at public speaking,” He grinned shyly: “I’m also not a very good tech guy.”

But it was just a glitch, and soon the face of a handsome man in his early fifties, with wiry grey hair, filled the large screen at the end of the room. Mo Husseini, a Palestinian-American, was speaking to Friends of Standing Together, the Melbourne branch of an organisation of Jewish and Palestinian Israelis dedicated to — wait for it — peace in the Middle East.

Founded in 2015, Standing Together stands for an end to the occupation of the Palestinian territories, peace and independence for both peoples, and “full equality for everyone in this land.” It has 7000 members in Israel, about two-thirds of them Jewish, a third Arab. It’s a small number but membership has more than doubled since October 2023. (It also has 250,000 followers on social media.) Standing Together has collected food and clothing for Gaza residents and protected food trucks entering Gaza from attacks by far-right Israeli groups. Israeli novelist David Grossman,  who has written powerfully about the conflict, has spoken at Standing Together rallies.

Husseini, who lives in Washington State, is a filmmaker, novelist and member of the national launch committee for Friends of Standing Together USA. A piece he published in May 2024, “50 Completely True Things,” got more than half a million reads, perhaps because he found a fresh and funny and heartfelt way to write about a conflict that has nothing fresh or funny about it. Husseini grounds his writing not in the region’s endlessly litigated history and politics but in a principle. Two peoples live on this land and both have a right to live in peace and dignity. Start there.

But starting there is difficult, a point Husseini made right off the bat when he thanked people for coming. “I don’t say that as a pleasantry, I mean it. Being involved with Standing Together when the world is rewarding people for picking a side, for the comfort of tribe, for the dopamine hit of certainty, is a choice that carries a cost,” one that was rarely acknowledged.

Husseini spoke for half an hour without notes and in the strange intimacy of Zoom, which shows every twitching eyebrow or thought crossing a face. Noticing a young boy in the front row, he apologised in advance for a few “swears.” I sensed a man not convinced of his own wisdom but feeling his way, through speech, towards his version of the truth.

“I am a Palestinian,” he began. “I am not the Palestinian. I do not speak for any Palestinians. I can barely speak for myself most days.”

His family, carried across borders “by the shifting winds of history,” migrated from Palestine to Kuwait, where Husseini grew up, then to the United States. Husseini always felt he was from somewhere else, “somewhere you can’t go back to.” Belonging was a kitchen, food, a certain accent, the way his mother said the word, “home.” “Being Palestinian is frankly a shitty gig.” But “I wouldn’t trade it for anything. I carry it with pride and love, and a ferocity that sometimes surprises me.”

What profoundly shaped his thought was living in America after 9/11. As a cultural Muslim, with a name that “sounds like the names of the people who flew the planes,” Husseini felt a relentless pressure to make himself understood to people who saw him as dangerous or didn’t see him at all. A pressure to show in every conversation that he was a moderate, to condemn al-Qaeda and bin Laden, to make a “performance of harmlessness that is hard to describe unless you have lived in it.”

It was hardly the worst thing in the world, Husseini said, and he wasn’t asking for sympathy.

Nevertheless, in the looks he got on planes and in theatres, in the random body searches that weren’t random, “I learnt in my body, in my heart, what it feels like when a whole society decides that who you are matters less than your category or tribe or religion… when you stop becoming a person and become the representative of a people.”

That lesson was why he became a writer, and why he joined Standing Together. Because, Husseini said, “that same machinery, that same impulse to condense an entire people into a single dangerous silhouette,” was now being applied to Jews.

He didn’t elaborate much on what he meant, but in a recent piece he wrote of “the way Zionist has become, in some corners, a synonym for Jew… the way criticism of Israeli policy slides, sometimes by accident and sometimes very much on purpose, into something older and uglier.” Speaking to Australians while the royal commission was hearing testimony about the shocking extent of antisemitism in this country, Husseini didn’t need to explain.

Husseini said his listeners often asked him a hard question: how could he as a Palestinian extend understanding to a people that was actively oppressing Palestinians? By talking about Jewish pain alongside Palestinian pain, was he not letting Israel off the hook?

The answer was easy, Husseini said. “I’m not both-sidesing this.” The power was not equal; occupier and occupied were not on the same moral plane. “My anger at what Israel is doing to Palestinians is not diminished by one single degree… I judge the occupation, the settlements, the bombing of hospitals, the taking of land and the uprooting of olive trees, the entire apparatus of domination that has made Palestinian life broadly unliveable for generations.”

But, he said, he refused to take the next step: “that because the Israeli government is doing these things, somehow every Israeli is complicit… somehow all Jewish people are guilty.” Because that was the step that had always been used against Palestinians.

“Activists really need to hear this,” he said. “The people who want you to flatten, who want you to say they are all the same, who want to treat everyone on the other side as a stand in for the worst of the other side. You are handing the Israeli right the narrative it needs: ‘See, they all hate us, there is no partner, the only option is more walls and more bombs.’

“You don’t defeat an unjust system by becoming its mirror image, you defeat injustice by becoming the thing that injustice says is impossible — people from both sides in the same rooms refusing to be what the system needs them to be.”

Lest anyone think his vitriol ran only one way, Husseini took “careful aim” at his own side, because “intellectual honesty is not a buffet where you get to skip issues you don’t like.” The Palestinian leadership’s “corruption, authoritarianism and factional cannibalism” had catastrophically failed its people for decades, Husseini said. Leaders had refused to accept imperfect peace deals that might have saved lives. The Hamas “cult of martyrdom” that “feeds children into a meat grinder and calls it resistance” had gotten the people of Gaza killed in catastrophic numbers.

But he was not here, Husseini said, to weigh Israeli failures against Palestinian failures, misery against misery, who had suffered more — “that exercise itself is the poison, the thing that keeps the conflict locked in place.”

Instead, the path forward required “everyone to look at their own house with the same ruthless clarity that they bring to looking at the other guy’s.” Until that happened, “we are not serious about peace, we are serious about being right — and being right has never in the history of any conflict saved a single life.”

Husseini turned to the role of story-telling, and of Jews, in his life. “Before I had a conversation with a Jewish person, I had lived in Jewish stories: books, films, arts, music. They all did something no political argument could have done. They let me feel in my body what it is like to carry a different people’s history. Not to agree with it but just to understand it.”

It was through stories that Husseini learnt that Jewish people were “not performing their fear. Their fear and trauma is real, it comes from somewhere ancient and it lives in their children in the same way my trauma lives in me. A good story makes flattening impossible… you cannot reduce them to a slogan. You know they are a person.” Even a paragraph that “captures someone mid-scroll” on their phone — “that crack is the beginning of something, everything that happens in rooms like this.”

Husseini took a few questions from the room, then left with an apology and a grin: his son’s last soccer game of the season was about to begin.

A young guitarist, Samantha Levy, stepped up to sing Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah in Arabic — words she said she had learnt from a Palestinian man. An organiser, Abe Schwarz, closed the event by pointing out that Husseini had quoted a line from Anthem, another Cohen song: “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” He asked us to support a project to provide food to Palestinian families in the West Bank displaced by Israeli forces. And if people wanted to stick around, he said, Jewish, Israeli, Palestinian and Arab people would be meeting that afternoon in this room to talk about the conflict.

People milled around, moved by Husseini’s talk. I was, too, yet something in me resisted these sweet notes at the end. Were they a balm to try to soothe the unending bitterness of this conflict? We would leave, stirred, with Cohen’s “sacred chord” humming in our heads, when only darkness seemed to lie ahead.

Five days after October 7, 2023, Standing Together signed a statement made by twenty-nine Israeli civil society groups calling for negotiations with Hamas to free the hostages and opposing the war that was about to begin. Dozens of members left the organisation as a result, no doubt feeling its line was too soft given the barbarity of the attacks and the ongoing threat posed by Hamas. At that time the organisation and one of its leaders, Alon-Lee Green, were getting 2000 threatening messages a day, after right-wing groups published their addresses.

And when an Israeli military action freed four hostages in Gaza in 2024, Jewish and Arab leaders of Standing Together struggled to write a joint statement that struck the right balance of joy at their release with pain at the collateral loss of Palestinian life. The organisation’s rule that it presents one united position to the two communities can be hard to uphold.

While Standing Together locates itself proudly on the left, it has few friends among the global left that has so ardently embraced the Palestinian cause. The Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which since its founding in 2005 has sought to ostracise Israel in global forums, called Standing Together a “normalisation outfit that seeks to distract from and whitewash Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza.” Speaking on American campuses after 7 October, Alon-Lee Green and another Standing Together leader, Sally Abed, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, had the bizarre experience of white student protestors wrapped in keffiyehs telling her she was normalising Israel, and telling him to go back to Poland.

I wondered whether Standing Together’s traditional leftist rhetoric of solidarity, justice and struggle would limit its ability to grow in a country that has shifted sharply to the right since the suicide bombings of the Second Intifada in the early 2000s. But it is not the only voice calling for a middle way.

On the Palestinian side I’m thinking of Ali Abu Awwad, who founded the Palestinian non-violence movement, Taghyeer (Change), and Samer Sinijlawi, president of the Jerusalem Development Fund. In the diaspora there are the British-Palestinian blogger John Aziz, and in the United States, Ihab Hassan and Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib.

None of these writers is blind to the torment of their people. They’ve lived it. Alkhatib has lost thirty relatives, many to Israeli airstrikes, in the war in Gaza. Awwad and Sinijlawi both spent more than four years in Israeli jails after taking part in the First Intifada. In 2000 Awwad was shot by an Israeli settler while changing a tyre in the West Bank; an Israeli soldier shot his brother dead at a checkpoint. Nevertheless, all three have chosen to work with Israelis in calling for what Sinijlawi, in one of the most moving recent articles I’ve read on the conflict, calls dignity for Palestinians based on security for Israelis.

Such voices exist on the Israeli side — probably more of them — but given how much their people are the underdogs in this conflict, the voices of these Palestinian writers leap off the page. They get a lot of contempt — John Aziz is regularly called an Uncle Tom — and are seen as naive dreamers at best, but they might be not only the bravest but the most practical people in the conflict. They work in the space between millennial fantasies on the right and left: of one supremacist Jewish state and the elimination of the Jewish state. They have their own dream, but they also have a strategy to achieve it, one that looks hopeless… and is the only hope.

Husseini said he wasn’t by nature an optimist. “I’ve spent years writing about a conflict that has not gotten better and in the past two and a half years has gotten unspeakably worse.” Yet he held onto the “stubborn, possibly irrational, delusional” idea that “two peoples have lived before on this land and can again.”

Change would come “person by person, grain of sand by grain of sand” until, when the diplomats finally met to negotiate a final outcome, they would find the foundation for peace already built beneath them. Hope was not a feeling but an action, Husseini said. “It’s rolling up our sleeves and getting on with it.”

We left feeling a sliver of that hope, not a lot but a sliver. I’ll go to another Friends of Standing Together event. Hope to see you there. •

Hiba Qasas from the Geneva-based Principles for Peace Foundation and Gil Murciano from the Israeli Institute for Regional Foreign Policies are speaking on the Roadmap to Peace in Sydney on 1 June, Canberra on 2 June and Melbourne on 4 June. Details: New Israel Fund.

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Berlin Shuffle, Boschwitz’s first novel, was originally published in 1937 in a Swedish translation. It did not appear in German until 2019, and this translation by Philip Boehm is the first in English. Boschwitz’s second novel was published in translation in Britain and the United States in 1939 and 1940 respectively, and first appeared in German in 2018; a new translation into English (also by Boehm) was published in 2021, under the title The Passenger.

Berlin Shuffle is set in Berlin, sometime in the final years of the Weimar Republic. The action lasts perhaps thirty-six hours, beginning in the afternoon and ending in the early morning two days later. As is emphasised by the novel’s German title — Menschen neben der Zeit, which translates literally as “People Next To Time,” with the neben suggesting that the people are disconnected from their time — almost all the characters are marginalised in some way.

There is the beggar Sonnenberg, a blind war veteran married to a former prostitute named Elsi. Sonnenberg is acquainted with the unemployed Grissmann, and with another beggar named Fundholz, and Fundholz looks after Tönnchen, a man who was traumatised during childhood to the point of imbecility. Two further female characters are Minchen Lindner, the daughter of an ex-convict and the mistress of the aristocratic Herr von Sulm, and Frau Fliebusch, who is unable to cope psychologically with the loss of her husband Wilhelm in the Great War and of her assets in the hyperinflation, and who lives under the delusion that Wilhelm will return one day and restore them to the bourgeois security they enjoyed in 1914.

These characters are introduced at various points in the first half of the narrative, and they come together in an extended episode that takes up the second half, when they all go to a pub called The Jolly Huntsman. Sonnenberg and Elsi go because he earns money by playing the accordion there, and also wants to drink. Grissmann goes because he plans to lure Elsi away from Sonnenberg, Fundholz goes because he too wants to drink, and Tönnchen goes because he follows Fundholz almost everywhere. Minchen goes there to meet her father, and Frau Fliebusch goes because — having misunderstood when she overheard Sonnenberg talking about a pimp known as “Handsome Wilhelm” who frequents the pub — she thinks that her husband will be there.

When the novel concludes in the early morning, Sonnenberg has been fatally stabbed by Grissmann, Grissmann has been detained by bystanders, Elsi is facing a return to prostitution, Fundholz and Tönnchen leave to avoid the police, Minchen goes off with “Handsome Wilhelm,” and Frau Fliebusch departs to continue her search for her husband.

Although the publisher’s blurb says that Berlin Shuffle displays Boschwitz’s “extraordinary talent for capturing Germany’s self-destruction,” I believe that any reader who turns to the novel wishing to discover something about the politics, society or culture of the Weimar Republic will be disappointed.

First, there is little or nothing of substance to be gleaned from the characters’ back stories. Sonnenberg is presented without much elaboration as a blind war veteran, and while Grissmann’s problems began when he was dismissed from his job as a tram conductor, the immediate cause of his dismissal was the suspicion that he had stolen money collected as fares. Elsi turns to prostitution and then marriage, and Minchen turns to prostitution, because they can find no other way of supporting themselves, and Willi becomes a pimp for the same reason. Fundholz has no back story other than a few vague references to how a bourgeois life lay more than ten years behind him, and how his impoverishment was the fault of his ex-wife. Tönnchen appears as a finished product of a trauma which he suffered before the war, and Frau Fliebusch as a finished product of bereavement and poverty.

Of course, all the characters apart from Tönnchen and Frau Fliebusch would be able think about their various social positions in systematic terms, but they are largely preoccupied with satisfying their immediate material needs. Equally, the third-person narrative could generalise from the characters’ experiences but very rarely does so. For example, apart from a handful of minor exceptions, there is no reference to any political party, politician, economic theory, event of public interest, cultural work, cultural practitioner, or any other organisation, person, idea or phenomenon which would give the reader a point of reference from which to analyse the society in which the novel is set.

Admittedly, unemployment or the difficulty of obtaining work are important factors in several characters’ problems, but the causes of the late Weimar Republic’s mass unemployment are discussed only in a single (if lengthy) passage about economic rationalisation, and the numerous prescriptions for restoring employment that were current at the time receive no mention. Similarly, the only person in the novel who talks about politics is an unemployed locksmith called Müller who accosts Tönnchen while he is sitting on a park bench, delivers a diatribe which parodies Nazi conspiracy theories — about how the Jews and Freemasons want to destroy Germany, and how even national heroes such as Goethe and Hindenburg are Freemasons too — and then departs, having elicited no response from Tönnchen, and never to be seen again.

The only time the novel offers something approaching a coherent worldview is in its description of the fight between Sonnenberg and Grissmann, who are characterised as “two men caught under the wheels of life. They were crushed and crippled, physically or mentally. But the wheels lay outside their grasp and beyond their control. Their lives were what they were, and they could do nothing to change that.”

The narrative then declares that the two men fall upon each other “[j]ust as two nations suddenly attack each other for no good reason and let themselves be drawn into a war that only serves the interests of people unknown and unnamed,” before raising the symbolic stakes to the maximum:

To date, the World War and the Inquisition have achieved the greatest success when it comes to large-scale eradication of humanity. It is to be expected that in the coming years, we will experience entirely new episodes of annihilation.

Sonnenberg and Grissmann have undoubtedly been abandoned by their society, and wars are often fought for the benefit of the powerful. And the narrative’s vision of “entirely new episodes of annihilation” is chilling in the light of what Boschwitz knew had happened in Germany in the few years before he wrote the novel, and especially of what we know happened afterwards. But I consider Boschwitz’s suggestion that Sonnenberg and Grissmann — and, by analogy and extension, everyone in the world — can “do nothing to change” their fate to be superficial and alarmingly defeatist.

Many of the German-language novels written about Weimar Germany and Weimar Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s are available in English. For a nuanced description of the Berlin underworld, readers can turn to Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz. For a complex story of political disillusionment, Erich Kästner’s Fabian. For a confronting account of the damage caused to society by the Great War and the hyperinflation, Hans Fallada’s Iron Gustav. For a brilliant psycho-sociological study of a young woman who survives by attaching herself to more affluent men, Irmgard Keun’s The Artificial Silk Girl. With these works — and others such as Vicki Baum’s Grand Hotel and Gabriele Tergit’s Käsebier Takes Berlin — in mind, I found Boschwitz’s Berlin Shuffle rather uninteresting, and rather unrewarding. •

Berlin Shuffle
By Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz | Translated by Philip Boehm | Pushkin Press | $34.99 | 256 pages

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The quote is from William Graham Sumner, an economist and contrarian who opposed the American takeover of the Philippines at the turn of the last century. Sumner summed up the prevailing attitude of the American colonisers thus: “We know what is good for you better than you do yourself and we are going to make you do it.” Easterly’s contention is that such an attitude — haughty, high-handed, intolerant and with a distinct intimation of menace — has been all-prevalent over the past five hundred years.

Easterly is a former World Bank economist turned academic gadfly. He has been writing piquantly and unsparingly for decades about the arrogances, futilities and often-thin development outcomes rendered by foreign aid. He has long argued that aid is too top-down, managerialist and untethered from history.

A frequent cadence in his writing — and the focus of his previous book, The Tyranny of Experts — is that aid is too indifferent to the perspectives of people within the countries where it is delivered. The perspectives of experts in airconditioned rooms are preferred to those of the ostensible beneficiaries of assistance. As you can imagine, Easterly’s work is divisive. His admirers cheer his enunciation of inconvenient truths while his detractors accuse him of cherry-picking examples to boost his case.

Violent Saviours, a broader and deeper extension of these arguments, will probably divide his readers along similar lines. His case is that today’s prevailing attitudes aren’t new but, in many ways, are milder and less bloodthirsty strains of the intellectual ballast for centuries of conquest, colonialism and slavery. His is a disquieting story with many villains and far fewer heroes.

Easterly begins his tour du monde near present-day Boston with a chapter about the justifications used by John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, to take over land effectively owned by the Indian tribes of the area. Winthrop was one of the early Puritan settlers and the man who coined the phrase “city on a hill.” A lawyer, he realised that he needed to develop an official rationale for doing what he was planning to do.

The argument Winthrop settled on was as self-important as it was self-serving. He and his fellow Puritans had a right to the land because they had the know-how to improve it. This was his contention and his contention alone; as Easterly explains, none of the Indian tribes of what we now think of as New England was consulted. Nor did things end well for the putative recipients of Winthrop’s “beneficence.” Tribes that resisted the colony’s expansion were brutally put down and their members banished to slave plantations in the Caribbean, where they were subjected to similar rationalisations about positive economic ends justifying the means.

Easterly calls the wordplay of Winthrop et al “the Development Right of Conquest.” By this he means the “for the greater good” rationale used by people or companies that regarded themselves as enlightened to justify their rule over lands or control of other peoples. As a line of thinking it was seductive. It was used to justify slavery, create colonies across the world and turf native peoples off their lands. It served as the ideological basis for the atrocities that punctuated the early years of the United States’ “civilising mission” in the Philippines so scathingly critiqued by Sumner.

Even ostensibly charitable benevolence generated ghastly outcomes, as Easterly shows in chapters about efforts by American and British leaders to set up homelands for returned slaves in Liberia and Sierra Leone respectively. Neither the slaves nor the people indigenous to those lands were consulted. So awful were both places that many freed slaves in America and Britain wanted to stay put rather than take a free ticket to these malarial corners of Africa.

As the twentieth century progressed, some of the world’s most notorious leaders took the West’s self-serving argument and tauntingly served it back against them with interest. Lenin and Hitler pushed the examples of the Development Right of Conquest to ever more murderous extremes. Hitler was “delighted to cite some American precedents” such as the treatment of native Americans as justifications for his own racial policies, Easterly writes, and Stalin deployed similar arguments. Easterly sees a positive trendline but stop-start progress in the years since the war. The tendency to aggregate groups into “us” and “them” remains powerful.

At one level, there is nothing particularly new in Easterly’s argument. Elements of it are an abiding theme in the reading list of many postgraduate colonial and development studies course. What sets this book apart is its sheer intellectual verve and the depth of reading and understanding that powers it. Easterly hopscotches across centuries of world history but never in a way that feels like he is skimping on facts or overpowering or hectoring the reader. His tour lands on shores as varied as British India, Bandung, Caribbean islands and Vietnam.

I can see why detractors will argue this book again bundles too many diverse examples into one argument. Yet the prose is so compelling that I for one found myself swept along with it. Easterly is a joy to read, his style an engaging mixture of narrative, anecdotes and puckish asides. He particularly enjoys poking at the absurdities, arrogances, hypocrisies and stupidities of ruling classes and their intellectual and bureaucratic enablers throughout history.

American president William McKinley, for example, who presided over the takeover of the Philippines on the basis of the need to “uplift and Christianise” the locals. “God forgot to tell McKinley that devout Filipino Catholics were already Christian,” observes Easterly. He is particularly droll when drawing impish parallels between the past and the present ways development aid is organised. Recalling a young Cherokee activist, Easterly writes that he was “in a role familiar today in development efforts: the local working for a foreign NGO whom nobody listens to.”

Yet there is a profound pathos to the book, especially when he name-checks fellow stirrers through history. A few are still relatively well-known — the novelist Joseph Conrad, the anti-slave campaigner Frederik Douglass and the humourist Mark Twain, who lampooned the US colonisation of the Philippines — but most are forgotten. Poking at dominant narratives results in professional, personal and financial detriment.

At times, the book left me feeling me despairing about the state of the world. Easterly shows a bit too well how the game stays mostly the same, no matter the epoch. I found myself applying the Development Right of Conquest when I was reading news stories: I’d take in US posture on Canada, Cuba, Greenland, Iran and Venezuela and recall McKinley, an often-cited role model for Donald Trump. On social media, I’d see government officials trumpet weasel words about the “partnerships” they were creating, strengthening and building on, and see the term as poor camouflage for the real power dynamics at play.

Thus, the book seems well-timed for this present ruptured era. It offers us no easy answers, which is maybe just as well. As Easterly shows, it is those through history who have offered the most beguiling answers who we should probably worry the most about. •

Violent Saviours: The West, the Rest, and Capitalism Without Consent
By William Easterly | John Murray | $34.99 | 448 pages

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The International Society for Infectious Diseases ProMED website, which provides an early warning system for infectious diseases, has a long and disturbing list of reports from around the globe. Beyond the growing number of Ebola cases — now also from Uganda and suspected in Italy — come reports of the Andes Hanta virus spreading from an initial outbreak on a cruise ship as passengers have travelled further after disembarking. Covid-19 cases in Singapore have risen dramatically; measles cases have broken out in Spain and Mexico; Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever has resurged in Iraq.

Little of what we learned from the Covid-19 pandemic and previous outbreaks of Ebola has been implemented effectively. Despite widespread agreement that the risk of pandemics is increasing, only lip service is being paid to preparedness and global cooperation.

The Ebola epidemic, which appears to have been reported only after early cases went undetected for many months, is spreading rapidly and outpacing containment efforts. As of 27 May, the Democratic Republic of the Congo had reported more than 1077 suspected cases and 246 suspected deaths. Neighbouring Uganda confirmed seven cases and one death. With the DRC also sharing porous borders with Burundi, Rwanda and South Sudan, the fear of cross-border transmission is rising. The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention warns that ten African countries are now considered to be at risk.

Most of these countries have limited healthcare resources and many are experiencing major population movements as a result of political violence, famine and climate change. In Ituri province, where the outbreak began, multiple attacks have been reported on Ebola treatment centres, on hospitals treating patients with suspected and confirmed cases, and on the morgues that receive the dead, further hindering control efforts.

Fast detection and response are obviously crucial. But programs designed to support local health systems and international organisations at work in these countries — vital to detecting outbreaks and alerting communities, building medical stockpiles and dispatching response kits and personnel — have had their funding reduced or eliminated.

Particularly damaging has been the abrupt cutting of hundreds of millions of dollars in international health funding by Donald Trump’s administration. The United States used to fund robust disease surveillance networks across Africa and maintain emergency teams to respond to crises like this one. Most of this work ended with the shutdown of USAID and cutbacks at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A National Institutes of Health laboratory designed for Ebola work was closed last year and expert staff laid off.

The formal withdrawal of the United States from the World Health Organization has created a US$553 million gap in the organisation’s budget. While emergency response funds have been allocated by WHO and a number of other nations, the systemic damage is not easily repaired.

Making the situation worse is the fact that the outbreak involves the rare Bundibugyo strain of Ebola, for which no approved vaccine or treatment exists. Urgent efforts are underway to develop an effective vaccine, but American laboratories and expertise are notably absence from the push. The Oxford Vaccine Group is working to produce and scale doses of a monovalent Bundibugyo Ebola virus vaccine in partnership with the Serum Institute of India.

World Health Organization officials calling call for international cooperation caution that “no single country can respond to this magnitude of outbreak alone.” What the Trump administration fails to see is that American leadership delivered real benefits for the United States. It allowed US public health officials to learn first-hand about emerging threats and the coordinating of countermeasures; it decreased political and economic instability in fragile states; it protected American citizens at home and abroad in a world where any pathogen is just a plane flight away.

When Ebola tore through West Africa in 2014 and threatened to become a global catastrophe, the White House installed an “Ebola czar” to coordinate a massive response across agencies and governments. A detailed playbook was developed for responding to future outbreaks. The Trump administration has dismantled all that. Many US health agencies now lack key political leadership and senior staff.

Instead, the American focus is on minimising any direct impact on the United States. “We cannot and will not allow any cases of Ebola to enter the United States,” declared secretary of state Marco Rubio earlier this week. This approach extends to sending any Americans likely to be infected to offshore facilities in Kenya. In one case, reports the Washington Post, an American doctor with Ebola was flown to Germany for treatment after being refused entry to the United States.

Reports indicate the administration is blocking key US researchers from attending global virus response talks and, reflecting the current anti-vaccine stance of senior health personnel, no apparent efforts are being made to develop a vaccine against the Bundibugyo strain. Instead, American health officials are working with a small biotech company to provide an experimental treatment (a monoclonal antibody) that may be used in patients exposed to Ebola. With limited production and significant costs, this approach is clearly designed to help only those from wealthy countries.

The Ebola threat to Australia is also just a matter of one infected person arriving on an overseas flight. But the current response here seems rather too laissez-faire. The Department of Health, Disability and Ageing hasn’t made any changes to management strategies for airport arrivals. The website of the Australian Centre for Disease Control states the risk to Australians is very low and Ebola has never been diagnosed in Australia. If Australian volunteers working in Ebola areas become infected, or simply want to return home, how will they be managed?

The list of other recent failures in outbreak management doesn’t inspire confidence either. The Hanta virus outbreak on the Hondius cruise ship has produced thirteen cases and three deaths, with infected patients travelling to a number of countries and several isolated islands visited by the ship threatened with outbreaks. But international law still lacks clear rules for public health emergencies on cruise ships, despite the lessons learned from the Diamond Princess and the Ruby Princess during Covid-19

The Hanta virus’s transmission dynamics mean this outbreak won’t become a pandemic, but its long incubation period (up to forty-two days) and high mortality rate nevertheless require appropriate precautions to be taken. In a number of cases, people who might have been infected were allowed to travel without any precautionary measures to reduce airborne transmission.

In the United States, where Hanta virus infections are often reported in western rural areas, the news of a foreign strain soon had social media spreading rumours, speculation and falsehoods, including inevitable claims that the MAGA favourite, ivermectin, was an effective treatment. Health and human services secretary Robert F. Kennedy announced on 23 May that he had signed a targeted declaration to support the development and deployment of medical countermeasures to the Andes Hanta virus, noting specifically that this would not include the development of a new mRNA vaccine.

Worldwide, healthcare systems are being confronted with significant disease outbreaks entirely preventable with effective vaccination programs. They may not reach epidemic levels, but they cost lives, use up healthcare resources and demonstrate system failures, often as a result of political interference.

A measles outbreak in Bangladesh is estimated to have reached more than 67,000 and killed more than 500, mostly small children, since March. Bangladesh was getting measles under control until, in 2024, a new government upended vaccination efforts by attempting to revamp the program and how vaccines were ordered. Malnutrition, common in many parts of Bangladesh, is one reason this outbreak has hit hard; the number of severe cases and the death rate is considerably higher than typically seen in high-income countries.

Significant measles outbreaks in first world countries have been attributed largely to growing anti-vaccination sentiment. The United States is currently experiencing its largest measles resurgence since the disease was declared eliminated in 2000. A recent outbreak in Mexico, with some 17,000 infections and at least forty deaths mostly among unvaccinated people, is attributed to a young Mexican boy who visited relatives in Texas, a state where conscience- or religious-based exemptions for childhood immunisations have allowed a measles upturn.

Below-target vaccination rates are driving measles transmission across England — so much so that the WHO stripped the United Kingdom of its measles elimination status in January this year. This follows Canada losing its measles-free status in November 2025. Measles is extraordinarily infectious and for outbreaks to occur countries don’t need to slip much below the required 95 per cent immunisation rate needed for herd protection. The resurgence of measles transmission in England in 2024 occurred when coverage for the first dose of vaccine was 92.3 per cent and for the second dose 84.4 per cent.

In Australia, diseases like measles, whooping cough and diphtheria, once considered banished or rare, are making a comeback as childhood vaccination levels drop below herd-immunity levels and adults are missing booster shots. More cases of measles have been reported in Australia in 2026 (106 cases) than the same period in 2025 (seventy-eight). Most have been in unvaccinated or under-vaccinated people who acquired their infection overseas and then transmitted the disease locally to unvaccinated or under-vaccinated contacts.

Australia is facing the worst diphtheria outbreak in decades, with 223 notifications made as of 19 May. The majority have been cases of cutaneous diphtheria, but around 30 per cent have been more serious respiratory infections. The vast majority (94 per cent) of the affected have been Indigenous Australians. Factors contributing to the outbreak include low immunisation rates, specifically in adults whose immunity levels have fallen, the prevalence of skin infections in affected communities, overcrowded housing and limited access to healthcare services.

Other viral threats — old and new — loom. A paper from Gavi, the vaccine alliance, lists the following as immediate threats to global and regional health: conflict-associated outbreaks of disease such as cholera; climate change’s reshaping of the geography of diseases caused by mosquito-spread arboviruses; and Marburg virus, which is related to Ebola. Other viruses — including the H5N1 avian flu, which has acquired some ability to infect humans and for human-to-human transmission, and Mpox (related to smallpox), now been reported in 145 countries and territories — also demand timely reporting and monitoring and a coordinated global response.

It’s also important to note that a 2025 international workshop found that high-burden, endemic diseases of poverty — tuberculosis, hepatitis, cholera, malaria and others — are considered to pose a greater infection threat than novel or emerging pathogens.

At a time when the need is very obvious, it is concerning that WHO member states failed to finalise the pathogen access and benefit-sharing annex (which guarantees access to medical tests, vaccines and treatments in exchange for sharing information on emerging pathogens) to last year’s WHO Pandemic Agreement ahead of the World Health Assembly on 18–23 May this year. This annex is legally required for the broader treaty to enter into force, and so it remains in limbo until negotiators can bridge some stark divides.

As the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board points out, the growing distrust of public health expertise, attacks on science, global inequalities and geopolitics and nationalism are all undermining pandemic preparedness. •

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Treasury data shows how radically disproportionately the capital gains tax discount, negative gearing and trust arrangements have benefited the top 1 per cent of income earners compared to the median income earner since 2000: about 123 times more. Perhaps nothing better explains the force of the campaign to thwart the government’s objective to claw back this scandalous gift to the wealthiest.

Ever since Albanese won the prime ministership a drumbeat has sounded: “What do we want? Reform. When do we want it? Now!” Yet when Labor does reach for the higher-hanging reform fruit and its opponents ferociously bare their ideological teeth, at least some of those who had been advocates of change have responded fickly or tepidly to the budget measures.

While Labor’s tax plan monopolises attention, another frontier of change conscientiously advanced under Albanese’s leadership risks being overlooked. With ramifications that may prove highly significant, it shows there is more than one way to bring about a new order of things.

This is the Labor government’s deliberate and concerted strategy of appointing women to leadership positions in the public service and other key institutions and agencies. The championing of women under Albanese was something I first wrote about in the days after Labor’s resounding May 2025 election win — a result that underlined the trend of women’s votes skewing to the left-of-centre that had been evident since at least 2010, when the support of women effectively saved Julia Gillard’s prime ministership.

Suggesting that the “feminisation of Labor” was one reason for the Albanese government’s handsome return to office, I pointed to not just the record number of women in cabinet and caucus but also how the government was prioritising the interests of women in key policy areas: by moving towards universal childcare support, extending paid parental leave and supporting wage increases in care industries dominated by women workers.

I am conscious of the risks of characterising childcare as an issue of primary concern to women. But the reality is that mothers continue to shoulder the lion’s share of the responsibility for rearing the young and expanded childcare provision thus chiefly enhances their choice.

I also alluded to the operating style of the Albanese government, suggesting that its premium on collaboration and internal solidarity was consistent with a “feminalist” approach. A recent article by the Saturday Paper’s chief political correspondent Karen Barlow about how the prime minister manages the government’s record-sized caucus was striking in that context. The tight discipline of Labor’s party room can be attributed to several things. On the less flattering side, it is consistent with a longer-term marginalisation of caucus and centralisation of authority in the hands of the prime minister and senior ministers. On the positive side, it reflects a lesson learnt: a determination not to repeat the destructive and indulgent disunity of the Rudd–Gillard years.

In Barlow’s piece, an unnamed Labor MP — the absurd braggadocio of the quote all but gives away that it is a male speaking — ascribes the Albanese government’s internal discipline to the dictatorial control exercised by the Prime Minister’s Office. “PMO is like North Korea, right? They’re like Pyongyang.” No one can doubt that Albanese’s PMO, like the offices of all prime ministers at least since John Howard’s time, maintains strict oversight of the government. But Pyongyang, really?

More instructive was a reflection by an unidentified female Labor MP who contended that the government’s solidarity could also be explained by a caucus that comprises 56 per cent women: “There’s a lot of women and there is a much greater sense of working in a collaborative way… outcomes-focused, not ego-driven.”

Julia Gillard’s leadership illustrates the point. Unlike many of her male predecessors and successors, Gillard did not preen or chest-beat as prime minister. Her method was to put her head down and concentrate on managing her team and the nitty-gritty of the government’s legislative program. She let her deeds speak for her without much in the way of fanfare or flamboyance. A behaviour characteristic of women, Gillard’s disdain for the performative side of the job was ironically debilitating for her prime ministership.

The Albanese government’s feminine bearing is also undoubtedly a reflection of its prime minister. As with all holders of the office, Albanese, the son of a single mother, exhibits a belief system and leadership style powerfully stamped by his early life. His was an upbringing in which women — his adored and adoring mother and to lesser extent his grandmother — were the dominant adult influences. This has manifest in what the political psychologist Graham Little categorised as a “group” leadership style: one orientated towards collaboration and cooperation. It is also revealed in the prime minister daring to speak of kindness and compassion as positive leadership traits — at a time when the norm worldwide is uber-aggressive — and by his frequent displays of emotion. Only a little over a week ago, at the Victorian state Labor conference, he barely suppressed tears while defending his government’s budget measures.

Let’s not be doe-eyed about Albanese. He is also the product of the bare-knuckled school of NSW Labor politics. While there is ample testimony to his close and nurturing relationships with female Labor colleagues — Penny Wong and Katy Gallagher in the current government, Linda Burney and Jenny Macklin in the past — his never fully explained lack of generosity towards his neighbouring inner-Sydney Labor MP and one-time potential leadership rival, Tanya Plibersek, has been less becoming. And on occasions his empathy has gone conspicuously missing. His gratuitously callous declaration earlier this year that he had “nothing but contempt” for the “ISIS brides” is an example.

Even so, the advancement of women on Albanese’s watch is unmistakeable. Another dimension of that agenda, perhaps at least equally significant, is the appointment of women to posts that have previously been exclusively male domains. This trend began in the government’s first term with, among things, the appointment of Michelle Bullock as governor of the Reserve Bank and Danielle Wood as chair of the Productivity Commission, followed by Albanese’s handpicking of Sam Mostyn as governor-general.

Australia’s twenty-eighth governor-general, Mostyn is the second woman to occupy the office — the first having been Quentin Bryce, who filled the post between 2008 and 2014. When she was invited by Albanese to become governor-general, a surprised Mostyn asked him, “Why me?” to which he responded: “I want to modernise the office.” That modernising process, as the Australian’s Troy Bramston revealed in his record of an interview with Mostyn in January this year, is based on the guiding principles of “care, kindness and respect.” It suggests a close alignment of (feminine-style) values between prime minister and governor-general.

The announcement of Mostyn’s appointment provoked a sour response from the Australian’s Janet Albrechtsen. Under the headline “Cushy Job for the Wokest of Women,” Albrechtsen bemoaned the “utter predictability” of Albanese’s selection and sneered that if Mostyn’s “chromosomes were XY she wouldn’t have been considered for the role.” That seems a peculiar complaint given the XY chromosomal profile has been a foremost consideration in the choice of the vast majority of governors general since 1901.

Still more bizarre was Albrechtsen’s assertion that Mostyn’s appointment was symptomatic of a “new group of oppressors putting the squeeze on a new group of oppressed.” Presumably men made up that rising class of downtrodden.

The Albanese government’s strategy of placing women in high offices has proceeded apace in its second term, many of them pioneering gender appointments. Among the key examples are:

• Jenny Wilkinson as secretary of treasury
• Sarah Court as chair of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission
• Meghan Quinn as secretary of defence
• Krissy Barrett as commissioner of the Australian Federal Police
• Susan Coyle as chief of army.

Announcing Court’s appointment in February 2026, treasurer Jim Chalmers observed that the Albanese government had “ushered in a wave of female leadership across Australia’s top economic institutions”: the Reserve Bank, the Productivity Commission, Treasury and now ASIC.

The storming of the upper echelons of the public service by women — who now head eight of the sixteen Commonwealth departments — and their appointment to other institutions and agencies partly reflects a longer-term evolution. But the Albanese government’s role has been to accelerate that trend purposely and assiduously.

Does this campaign to promote women matter? We ought, of course, be careful about surrendering to essentialist assumptions about the kind of leadership women provide and the cultures they nurture around them. Each woman will steer in her own distinctive way — and not all will lead well. Nevertheless, research indicates that women, generally speaking, tend to be collaborative, team-orientated leaders who privilege “soft” values. Measuring the impact on the fabric of the nation of the rush of appointments of females to senior positions will be difficult, if not impossible. Its effects will take time to mature and mainly materialise osmosis-like.

Make no mistake, though. We are witnessing a quiet revolution. It suggests there is more than one way to skin the cat of societal change. •

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This new Pope Leo faces another such moment, this time fuelled by artificial intelligence, the subject of his first church encyclical. These documents are reserved for the most important facets of modern society, the very topics requiring the appearance of direct communion with the Almighty to resolve.

In the first generation of the digital age, the technology being created by the new geniuses was transformative. It could destroy the boundaries of time and place to allow people to find community alongside one another. A revolutionary act, it created a new form of political power.

For a long time, we understand that power to be held by citizens themselves, managed only in trust by the technology companies that facilitated (with search engines and social media platforms) but did not intervene. The internet was a sort of benevolent but absent God.

The AI age came with a renegotiation of that bargain. Power was no longer held in trust but actively managed by a small group of individuals and corporations who suddenly had the capability to decide what the rest of the world could understand to be true. At first, they were protected by a broadly shared acceptance of the value that they brought to the democratic world. Laws could be carefully interpreted to their benefit because it was in the public interest that a counterweight to political power be not just available but cultivated.

That logic has now flipped. The power these platforms have gained has surmounted the very institutions that they once held in check.

There have been small but meaningful reflections of this reality. Earlier this year two court cases in the United States reinterpreted the very laws that once protected Silicon Valley from liability for user-generated content. Now, the courts found, the companies have a responsibility to monitor content for its potential to cause harm.

But Pope Leo’s encyclical is the most important and substantial acknowledgement of the challenge. While it holds no legal weight — no tech company is headquartered in Vatican City — it reflects the opinion of one of the most powerful institutions on earth. These old regulatory institutions must come back to life, says the encyclical, to protect the human dignity being put at risk by a new technology that understands people as data points primed for optimisation.

Leo takes as his object both the technology and the people behind it. Of the technology, he is concerned by its ability to trick people, to remove the very idea of truth from human society. Of the people involved, he believes the concentration of a new form of power in the hands of a very few is as great a threat as any authoritarian regime. He nods to this parallel in his citation of Hannah Arendt’s On the Origins of Totalitarianism.

In both instances, citizens have been reduced to instruments of efficiency, revoking the agency that offers people their humanity. The Pope writes of a “crisis” in our relationship with life itself. That the limits of human life are now “seen primarily as a defect to be corrected, rather than as a reality through which our humanity matures and opens itself.” When a society pushes itself relentlessly toward optimisation, we lose the good and necessary possibility of humanity.

Institutions like the Church and many courts are beginning to acknowledge this new reality. The assumptions that underwrote the arrival of the AI revolution are changing, with moral authority and the law moving in the same direction.

And yet the Pope stands as the sole global figure to offer a meaningful perspective on the regulation of AI. In the United States, the Democratic Party has not bothered to put forward an agenda to counter the Republicans’ inclination to let these companies run amok, their profit motive being more important than any social or ecological disaster they may summon.

Europe has chosen the predictable path of bureaucratic nightmare, stifling the possibility of innovation in the name of endless red tape. The experience of European modernity is to permanently be stuck in the shallow end of the pool. Safe, but never able to grow. All the while, China’s model of AI acceleration operates in lockstep with its authoritarian regime, no daylight possible between its technological development and the anxiety of the state.

This has left countries like Australia waiting. It is clear that letting Silicon Valley run wild will only hasten economic and social crises, but there has yet to coalesce a vision for a future that sees a harnessed AI, one that can help power the future without destroying it entirely.

The Pope’s offering won’t directly cause any immediate changes. No technology company will fire its chief executive because of the commands of the Pontiff. And yet the very existence of the encyclical says a great deal about the moment we are in.

The governments that once cultivated the fruit of Silicon Valley as a democratic counterweight have found themselves impotent in the face of their own creation. The US administration has decided to leave the AI industry to regulate itself, and Europe is drowning itself in process. Everyone else is left watching, hoping to not be found wanting in the end.

Leo chose his name to invoke a moment when the Church stepped into a void and spoke about power and human dignity. But this encyclical is an act of moral authority, not political power. For that, we are still waiting. •

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Asia wants growing affluence and peaceful agreement. What it gets could be sharper and nastier. The balance between opportunity and risk means bad luck and major misjudgements could just as easily deliver massive misfortune: Asia becomes the international “crucible”; the temperature rises as the metals melt and meld.

Severe test is the headline metaphor of Nick Bisley’s Asian Crucible: Globalisation, Geopolitics and the Contest for the Future. La Trobe University pro-vice chancellor for research and professor of international relations, Bisley ponders how Asia might march or argue or stumble into war.

“An Asia of backward-looking nationalist grievance is one that will be doomed to fight,” he writes. “The long Asian peace showed the region could match its historical and cultural legacy with commensurate achievements in human development. The challenge is to break out of the current cycle of competition, nationalism and disintegration.”

Dispensing with the terms “Indo-Pacific” and “Asia-Pacific,” Bisley writes of modern “Asia” as a coherent political, strategic and economic system. Yet this integrated Asia is “on the cusp of a period of intense contestation” that will have a profound impact on the world.

At the centre of the crucible are the United States and China. America’s “partners and allies” in Asia are Australia, Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan, he says, with two other states, the Philippines and Vietnam, “tilting towards the US.” Note the complexity: the Philippines is a formal ally of the US while Vietnam is a former foe.

China’s “partners and allies,” he says, are North Korea, Myanmar, Pakistan and Russia. But the largest group of all is fourteen swing states, listed alphabetically from Bangladesh to Uzbekistan.

Bisley’s weighting of alignments shows the “considerable strategic fluidity in Asia and that the US advantage, while real, is less strong than it may appear.” Asia’s balance was long maintained by American military dominance. No longer. And Asia has “neither a set of spheres of influence nor a settled strategic landscape.”

US strategic strength confronts China’s central place in Asian economics. By 2020, Bisley says, Asia had a “China-centred but not Sino-centric economic system,” which means an integrated production system centred around China:

Asia’s economic integration was the product of market logic, not a political creation. Modern integrated Asia was bound together by economic ties that were created by the opportunities of market-led globalisation, not the dominant leanings of a powerful state or the rules of regional organisations. For the first time modern Asia had become a really existing economic system. It had intraregional trade volumes approaching those of the EU, which is regarded as the world’s most integrated economic zone.

In the recent past, Bisley says, northeast, southeast, south and central Asia were not sufficiently linked to share a sense of economic and security interests; by the late 2010s, however, “globalisation and geopolitics had bound them together.”

But the Covid pandemic years dimmed globalisation’s glow, Bisley writes, and “fundamentally altered Asia’s trajectory,” raising the temperature in the crucible:

Great power competition was accelerated as confidence in China collapsed. Critically, globalisation had previously been seen as a kind of golden guardrail that would keep Sino–American rivalry within manageable bounds. These rails were broken, and geopolitical competition became untethered from the constraints of economic interdependence. This pushed the world’s most populous region onto a much more dangerous path.

Integrated Asia was a creature of the era of markets. Bisley judges that period is over. The new era will recast the balance of state and market power. The Covid pandemic “showed just how finely balanced the global economy had become.”

The balance shakes again today because the Iran war has caused the biggest oil-supply shock in history. Asia has an extraordinary and enduring dependence on hydrocarbons from the Gulf: it takes 80 per cent of crude oil and oil products shipped through the Strait of Hormuz and nearly 90 per cent of LNG. Acute energy shortages hit at Asian needs, from fuel to food production.

By next year, the oil shock may be receding as a painful chapter. Yet it’s another lesson—like Covid or the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis—teaching that international disasters are an intricate mix of human action and accident.

For Bisley, Asia’s uncertain future is shaped by major changes:

• The global consensus about globalisation and the neoliberal economic policy is broken.

• US–China competition has become the most significant facet of Asia’s and indeed global security concerns.

• Asia has lost a shared belief in the underlying value of a broadly liberal structure to international economic relations.

Faith in markets and globalisation provided hardnosed incentives for Asian cooperation: “With the loss of faith, statism and nationalism are unfettered and now Asia faces a much more daunting future… The sad reality is that Asia faces a dangerous and uncertain future, in which military rivalry catalysed by nationalism and ambition is here to stay.”

The China–US contest is both personal and structural. The book mentions Donald Trump and his administrations more than eighty times, while China’s Xi Jinping scores more than ninety.

Xi believes China is on the right side of history, Bisley says, as Beijing works to reconfigure Asia to its interests, with a sense of “both opportunity and risk. It perceives that the balance of power is fluid, and that the US is weaker than it has been in decades.”

Trump’s second administration “seems likely to continue where it left off in 2020,” Bisley writes. “The US will remain focused on Asia and will continue to try to roll back Chinese power in the region.” Under Trump, Washington will be less worried about economic rules, instead seeking deals that ensure “the US benefits and that China suffers.”

“Trump’s taste for bellicose theatre notwithstanding,” Bisley says, the US has long had a consistent Asia policy — ensure the region is not “dominated by a power hostile to US interests and values.”

Bisley sees Xi kicking the race for supremacy into overdrive. China has built a military to match its economic might, and its leader’s ambition has transformed Asia’s strategic setting. Since Xi became general-secretary in 2012 and president in 2013, China has clearly abandoned its “hide and bide” foreign policy, which had been “cautious, deliberately low profile and risk averse,” Bisley says. Xi’s China pushes against the prevailing international order as made-in-the-USA to serve the values and interests of Washington. An “unsettled military balance is a critical factor in the return of geopolitics” in Asia, Bisley writes:

At the turn of the twenty-first century, China was a conscript-based military that, while large, was badly equipped, poorly trained and focused almost entirely on domestic defence. It had virtually no capacity to project power beyond its own territory and immediate approaches. Now it is a highly professional fighting force with a substantial inventory of high-quality equipment. Its navy has more ships than the US, it has more than 1000 fourth-generation or better fighter jets, dwarfing all others in Asia bar the US, and it has a strategic nuclear arsenal that is rapidly expanding in number, range and precision. China’s ability to contest American naval supremacy is real.

Despite China’s riskier military behaviour harassing opponents in the East and South China Seas, Bisley is relatively sanguine about its current intentions. China’s “overall risk appetite remains low,” he judges, seeing no evidence that Beijing “is prepared to make a radical push to achieve its goals in the short to medium term, nor that it is willing to sanction the kinds of risks to social order and regime legitimacy that a war-led change to the region’s setting would likely create.”

Bisley offers three scenarios for the future: Fractured Asia, Rebalanced Asia and Unified Asia:

• Fractured Asia is “the bleakest future, in which uncontained geopolitical rivalry reinforces deglobalising trends. These are amplified by nationalism to create a dangerously unstable and combustible world.”

• Rebalanced Asia manages to hold an “uneasy strategic equilibrium.” While political and nationalist imperatives distort some sectors, the logic of interdependence still shapes the region’s economy.

• Unified Asia is the optimistic picture, with geopolitical competition “corralled and a stable and structured strategic balance prevails, allowing the many shared interests across the region to drive collaboration to tackle problems like climate change, health crises and economic inequality.”

Major shocks would distort and drive each of these scenarios. Bisley imagines the different effects of four seismic impacts:

The US departs Asia: Donald Trump’s “mix of bombastic nationalism, grievance and mercantilism” make it plausible that the US might “initiate a full-scale drawdown of its military presence. This would fundamentally transform Asia’s military balance and create a period of tremendous geopolitical instability.”

China changes course: Don’t assume that the “authoritarian, nationalistic and thin-skinned China of Xi Jinping will be a system that we will have to live with for many decades to come.” China has “a young political system,” Bisley argues, without deep social roots, now just past the age of the Soviet Union when it collapsed. When Xi goes, a new leadership could take the country away from its current assertive trajectory, a shift of “immense consequence for Asia’s future.”

Climate change bites: Environmental impacts are readily visible across Asia. Summer heat records are broken across the region, and cities in Southeast Asia regularly have days with temperatures exceeding 45°C.  An “all too believable shock entails a series of climate catastrophes, such as an intense drought leading to a collapse in agricultural production twinned with widespread inundation caused by a series of super typhoons in the Western Pacific. These could be devasting to millions and also prompt political extremism and hyper-nationalism.”

Military Armageddon: “Major power war is now a plausible scenario in Asia’s short- and medium-term futures,” Bisley writes. The region’s flashpoints are combustible and escalation risks are growing, fanned by angry nationalism. Brinksmanship and tensions over Taiwan could spiral out of control, he writes, and escalate to a nuclear exchange that would kill millions.

To befit the times, this book is tense and tight. Part of the tightness is taut word count. Bisley is an academic who can write. His elegantly constructed book delivers ten chapters in 279 pages.

Because of a light touch on references in the text, Bisley then offers twenty-one pages of sources and reading, walking the reader through each chapter to show the ideas that shaped his thinking. He follows with twenty-eight pages of references and a thirteen-page index. Thirteen maps and tables show the strategic alignment of Asia’s states and the region’s political systems.

Asian Crucible starts with five chapters on how Asia got to here, covering imperialism, the cold war, Asia’s integration during the long peace among major powers, and the Covid pandemic years that brought “the end of globalisation.” The second half of the book offers five chapters on geopolitics and the great powers, flashpoints and zones of contest, risk and vulnerability, and paths to Asia’s future.

Bisley’s final paragraphs start by marvelling at the making of modern Asia:

At the end of World War II, Asia remained desperately poor, and it seemed as if it were doomed to remain stuck in a cycle of poverty and underdevelopment. Within a human lifetime the continent was transformed utterly. The resilience of its peoples, their entrepreneurship, creativity, hard work and ingenuity were the cornerstones of the greatest story of human development ever told.

Asia is on the precipice, Bisley concludes, entering a time of extraordinary opportunities but also immense risks: “War is not inevitable. It is imperative that it is avoided.”

The war-is-not-inevitable judgement is scary reassurance. Nothing in the human drama is inevitable except death and taxes. What is sure, though, is Asia’s unsettled balance. The reality that war is possible, even plausible. After an era of glorious growth, Asia must evade a future where it is doomed to fight.

One meaning for “crucible” is any severe test or trial. Asia will be severely tested. This region of diverse and dynamic nations must come together to ensure a rising strategic temperature does not crack the crucible that holds all their shared hopes. •

Asian Crucible: Globalisation, Geopolitics and the Contest for the Future
By Nick Bisley | Bristol University Press | 358 pages | $30.95

The post Asia between peace and war appeared first on Inside Story.

An opportunity lands at their feet in the shape of a ball. They guide it through space and time, avoiding obstacles with inexplicable grace. From their boot, the ball describes a magnificent arc to a teammate. Miraculously, the Beauty of the Second Touch is now enacted: the ball glides back to its original master. In seconds, a triangle has been formed that would delight Pythagoras. Then, with the precision of a Japanese sushi knife, the ball passes just out of the goalkeeper’s frantic reach and is welcomed by the net.

In the British director Asif Kapadia’s new documentary Kenny Dalglish, the eponymous hero, the great Celtic, Liverpool and Scotland player, is shown scoring goal after goal with this kind of preternatural skill. Each successful strike is followed by two unvarying rituals: Dalglish runs towards his adoring fans with his trademark sign of victory, both arms raised above his head; in the background, a crest fallen goalie looks on in abject bewilderment. Though literally made up on the run, every goal looks uncannily preordained.

If you love football — or just love seeing something done at its highest level of skill — these sequences would be worth the price of admission alone. (And I say that as someone who doesn’t even like soccer that much.) But if this were all that happened in Kenny Dalglish, it wouldn’t work as a film.

In Kapadia’s telling of the story, football is important, but it’s not at the heart of the film’s narrative. Kapadia clearly thinks Dalglish is a great man, and not just because he can kick a ball. When, in the latter half of the film, tragedy strikes, Kapadia has structured his film so Dalglish’s rising to the occasion looks as inevitable as one of his famous goals.

Kenny Dalglish was born in Glasgow in 1951. His family supported Rangers, the club of choice for Protestants in this famously sectarian city. That he went on to play for Celtic, the city’s Catholic club, and marry Marina Harkins, a local Catholic woman, tells you a lot about him. Dalglish and Marina have four children and are still married today.

Kapadia paints Dalglish as a supremely down-to-earth man; funny and cheerful; in touch with ordinary life despite his success. When he moved from Celtic to Liverpool for a huge transfer fee, he was asked by a journalist: “Do you think you’re worth all that money?’ Dalglish disarmingly replied: “I never paid it, I don’t know.”

Kapadia also wants you to understand Dalglish’s innate sense of loyalty: for his family, his team, and his community. For Dalglish, tribalism is not based on something as ephemeral as mere religion; it’s about who you’re related to, who you play for, and who you support.

Dalglish loved playing for Liverpool. After years of unparalleled success with the club as a player, in 1985 he became that rarest of football animals: the player-manager. Under his benign rule Liverpool continued on its winning ways. Then tragedy struck.

On 15 April 1989 Liverpool was playing Nottingham Forest at Hillsborough in Sheffield. Soon after the game began, overcrowding in one of the stands led to fatal crowd crush. In the end, ninety-seven people — all Liverpool fans — died of the injuries they received.

Merseyside went into mourning. In the days following the tragedy, Liverpool’s home ground, Anfield, became a shrine for the city’s grieving public. The pitch was covered with bouquets of flowers, Liverpool scarves, and other tributes. And then, completely without evidence, the Liverpool fans themselves were blamed by the police and parts of the media for inciting the disaster. Rupert Murdoch’s Sun newspaper ran a now notorious headline, “The Truth,” above an article full of lies. It alleged, for example, that Liverpool fans urinated on the police, that they picked the pockets of victims.

Dalglish immediately defended the Liverpool fans from this libel. When Kelvin Mackenzie, the rag’s powerful editor, rang him to make amends for the coverage, Dalglish suggested he run another headline: “We Lied.” Mackenzie refused, so Dalglish hung up on him.

The documentary reports that Dalglish attended every funeral of every killed fan, including four on one day. Many years later, and after many inquiries, the Liverpool supporters were completely exonerated. It is now accepted that the South Yorkshire Police were culpable for mishandling the situation.

Asif Kapadia is best known for documentaries that explore the notorious flameouts of famous and talented people. Senna (2010) is about the doomed Brazilian Formula One driver Ayrton Senna; Amy (2015), which won the Oscar for best documentary, is about the doomed singer-songwriter Amy Winehouse; and Diego Maradona tells the story of another footballer, but one whose genius on the pitch was never going to protect him from himself.

In Kenny Dalglish, he has found a new story to tell. It’s the story of a good man tested; a man who comes through for his community by never losing sight of the values he was brought up with. As a football fan, Kapadia wants you to appreciate Dalglish’s excess of playing skill, but primarily he wants you to recognise the man’s decency and humanity. By design, Kapadia has made Kenny Dalglish into a film about good leadership at a time when good leadership is often hard to find. •

Kenny Dalglish is available on the streaming service DocPlay and via Amazon Prime.

The post King Kenny appeared first on Inside Story.

Hope springs in the form of literary scholarship. At the University of the South Downs, Tom, an academic, is researching the early-twenty-first-century poet Francis Blundy, making regular visits by boat and “water-and-gravity powered funicular” to the Bodleian Library, no longer located in Oxford (which doesn’t exist) but on a mountain in North Wales. The fact that life — even academic life — goes on in such times is reassuring, and as readers of McEwan’s book we need all the reassurance we can get.

I’ve been clinging to the image of Tom in the Bodleian for the past week as I sort through a decade’s worth of papers — sketches and manuscripts, diaries and notebooks — packing them into archive and manuscript boxes for the National Library of Australia.

I’m not, by instinct, a hoarder, and once would have thrown most of this stuff away. Indeed, the last time I wrote about my old manuscripts was about thirty-five years ago in a slightly smug piece about decluttering. I was living in a tiny terrace in inner-city Sydney and had made more room by leaving out great piles of unwanted items for the garbage collectors. These included sketches and handwritten scores, among them the manuscript of my first opera — some three hundred-plus pages — and I wrote of my relief at getting it all out of the house. Marie Kondo would have been pleased with me. Not everyone was.

A short time after the article ran, I was in Canberra at some sort of reception. I forget the occasion but remember the intense stare of a woman in the room. Every time I glanced in her direction, she was eyeballing me. Eventually, she came over.

“Stop throwing your manuscripts away,” she said (in my memory, she also pushed me in the chest). “We’ll take them and you’ll get a tax deduction.” This was Prue Neidorf, the founding music librarian of the National Library, and I told her I couldn’t believe anyone would be interested in what I regarded as garbage. “It is not for you to decide,” she said, very firmly.

While a forceful person, Prue turned out not to be as intimidating as she at first seemed. In fact, she was good company, quite funny, and I’d bump into her semi-regularly over the following years. She would always ask if I was still hanging on to my papers.

Because I’d chucked everything out, it took me another ten years to accumulate enough boxes of scores and sketches to make my first donation, by which time Prue had retired and Robyn Holmes was senior curator at the NLA. She was every bit as passionate about the library’s collection of papers as Prue had been and offered to take me on a tour of the archives. The Canberra-based composer Larry Sitsky came, too.

On the face of it, the archive rooms at the NLA are much like the stacks behind the scenes at any library: row after row of shelf after metal shelf; but in place of the books you would normally see, there are cardboard archive boxes. The names on these boxes are for conjuring with. I remember Patrick White, Manning Clark and Mary Gilmore. (I will leave you to imagine my acute outbreak of imposter syndrome.) Larry Sitsky’s papers were there, too.

As we left the archive via an adjoining reading room, something extraordinary happened. A teenage boy in a school uniform was seated at a carrel with one of Larry’s boxes and he was reading Larry’s letters. It is hard to say who was more astonished: the student, looking up to see the subject of his research walking towards him; or the composer, realising that, beyond all doubt, the first part of his life was now history. I felt a similar realisation when the Library dispatched a London agent to my mother’s house to pick up the scrapbooks she had kept, since the mid 1970s, of my letters and concert ephemera.

Collecting papers is not as easy as it once was. Today, it’s rare to receive a handwritten letter. We correspond by email and text. Emails are already considered old hat by people under forty, and lately there’s a tendency for texts to self-destruct. Composers who use notation work mostly with software programs, their mistakes and first thoughts consigned to the trash with the click of a mouse. Prue, who died in 2023, would have been horrified.

Even as one of the remaining “long-hand” composers, I rub out more than she’d have liked, leaving little trace of those first thoughts, although sometimes I catch myself and reach instead for a fresh sheet of paper, putting the rejected bars of music in a drawer. I often write words longhand, too. These words, for instance, are being written in a notebook, which one day may end up in a box at the NLA, enabling a student of the future to see how I initially misspelt “carrel.”

Not that I can imagine who that student might be, and this is not false modesty. I loved McEwan’s novel, happy to suspend disbelief when it came to the quixotic Tom and his literary research. But in the twenty-second century, as the waters rise, will anyone really be interested in the jottings of a twenty-first-century composer?

Prue Neidorf would have said it is not for me to decide. At least Canberra is on high ground. •

The post Making history appeared first on Inside Story.

Without exception, these paramedics were steady and calmly spoken, intimidatingly so, and I was on my best behaviour, medically speaking. Sensing their intolerance of indecision, I stood aside as they scanned the ECG printout and replaced the cannula I’d already inserted with another, wider-gauged and better-sited.

Paramedics, as we generalists know, excel at emergencies. While our bread and butter are context and chronicity, the ambos know exactly what to do in a crisis. Shattered bones, massive blood loss, cardiac arrest: these devastations of the human body are their undisputed territory from the time of the triple zero call until the handover in the emergency department.

In Sirens, a delicately wrought work of creative non-fiction, writer Martin McKenzie-Murray goes beyond the steely professional front of first responders to examine the toll such a career can exact. His subjects are three admirable and articulate individuals: Peter, a paramedic; Brett, a copper; and Tara, a firie. While the reader learns of what can only be described as acts of heroism — delivering and resuscitating a preterm infant aboard a light plane; tackling an armed assailant on a staircase; working the dispatch phones during the Black Saturday bushfires —  McKenzie-Murray also sensitively explores the antecedents and downstream effects of choosing a job that’s, on a bad day, akin to being in a war zone.

These days we’re generally cognisant of the concept of trauma and its aftermath, PTSD. These terms have become common parlance; too common, perhaps. I worry about our increasing tendency to label life’s daily trials and disappointments — a less-than-glowing performance review, an altercation with someone in customer service — as “traumatic.” Surely we run the risk of rendering the word meaningless through overuse.

That Peter, Brett and Tara were for many years unaware of the extent of their own, very real PTSD is one of the saddest ironies of emergency work: that is, to do the job of saving others from fire and gunshot, first responders must risk harm to themselves. Physical harm, yes, but that will be attended to while the psychic harm might be pushed aside in the struggle to get up the next day and save others all over again.

Peter James had a long and distinguished career as a paramedic in Tasmania, on duty for two of the most unforgettable and psychologically potent events in recent Tasmanian history: the Port Arthur massacre and the Beaconsfield mine disaster. The scene at Port Arthur’s Broad Arrow cafe that day is recreated for the reader through Peter’s altered senses: the magical stillness, the inability to hear others speak or to feel his own breath, the room seemingly sucked empty of air. “Just know that the man who goes in there will not be the same man who comes out,” a police officer said grimly just before Peter stepped inside. “Never was a truer word spoken,” Peter tells us.

When the Beaconsfield mine collapsed, he was assigned to a small team of paramedics who supported the two trapped miners, Todd Russell and Brant Webb. All the world remembers the footage of their triumphant release two weeks later, rising from their wheelchairs as they emerged to fist pump the night air. What’s seared into Peter’s memory is the fortnight deep underground, teaching the two men over the phone how to dress their wounds and self-inject anticoagulant supplied to them via a narrow borehole drilled through rock. He worked twelve-to-sixteen-hour shifts, talking to the trapped men about the outside world, playing their favourite music, all the while responsible for their physical and moral health, treading the tightrope between hope and honesty. Against all odds Russell and Webb survived, and Beaconsfield remains one of Peter’s better memories.

With the skill of a therapist and the fine prose of the award-winning writer that he is, McKenzie-Murray weaves the adverse childhood experiences of each of his subjects into the fabric of their working lives. It seems, he suggests, that those who know violence and loss at an early age might yearn for a sense of control and security in work that is helpful and worthy with clear protocols and lines of command. Peter’s first childhood blow was the divorce of his parents when he was ten was, “an early lesson in the impermanence of things.” Then, five years later, his grandfather was brutally murdered on his way home. The killer was never found, and the murder, just like Peter’s parents’ divorce, was never again discussed. Just two years later, he was a trainee paramedic.

Of this, McKenzie-Murray writes with quiet devastation: “One of Peter’s first jobs was driving to the midwifery home for single mothers on Monday mornings to collect the gauze-wrapped bodies of stillborn babies and place them in cardboard boxes once used to pack margarine.” Peter was seventeen, unaware that this was “his first moral injury… the first time that the virgin smoothness of his values — in this case, respect for the dead — met the coarseness of reality.”

Such psychic blows are cumulative. Peter describes them as photographs taken by the brain, images that can be recalled as clear as day. Over his lifetime his brain has recorded thousands. Once tall, lithe and Clint Eastwood-esque, he’s now shuffling and stooped, very nearly a recluse, “his confidence and physical charisma long dissolved in the acid bath of trauma.” Retired in 2019 with an official medical declaration of incapacity, he has undergone multiple courses of ECT and countless hours of psychotherapy, and still takes clonidine to dull his PTSD-induced nightmares.

Brett Kersten’s childhood reads like something from the bleakest of Dicken’s novels: family violence, vagrancy and neglect, an alcoholic father, a mother who up and left with Brett’s little sister, and ultimately, alongside his younger brother, years of deprivation and abuse in a Christian Brother’s orphanage. How does a child survive such an upbringing? What sense does he make of it?

Current neuropsychology teaches us that a childhood of this sort shapes the brain circuitry in lasting ways. Constant exposure to threat and the stark absence or inconsistency of attachment figures can lead to compromised executive functioning, high or low emotional responsiveness, difficulty with attention and memory, increased reactivity to sensory stimuli and disruptions to sleep and other circadian rhythms.

Brett was physically strong, a leader of the orphanage pack, his physical prowess only as current as the last fight he won. Understandably, he later found a home in the tough, hierarchical environment of the army. He loved the hazing he received from a bullying sergeant, seeing it as part of how the army made soldiers strong by breaking them down before building them up again. “But whereas the orphanage’s cruelty had felt senseless,” McKenzie-Murray notes, “in the army he could glimpse the brutality’s purpose. It was making him a soldier, and he was making a self…”

And in the police force, too, he found a sense of purpose and order, a binary assignment of good and bad. He hated the drug users who passed out on the St Kilda backstreets only to spit in his face when they came to. Perhaps some of them had lived childhoods like his, but Brett’s strict moral code prevented compassion. Brett “talks about ‘compassion’ and ‘professionalism’ as two different, incompatible things — compassion is a weakness that can have terrible consequences,” McKenzie-Murray writes. He adds, “For Brett, compassion is a curiously charged and dangerous bipolar impulse, simultaneously holding the potential for love and injury.”

Brett was retired on medical grounds — major depression and PTSD — in 2009, years after his symptoms first emerged. But he still craves purpose, and a role in public life that feeds his self-esteem and identity. He speaks at RSL clubs and talks ex-cops down from the ledge with a sympathetic ear and endless cups of tea. Twice-divorced and alone, he “continues to hold his hand to the flame.”

Tara Lal, a physiotherapist turned firie, lost her mother to cancer when she was thirteen. Her father, incapacitated by severe depression, became her charge instead of her carer. This role reversal and Tara’s father’s inability to support her in her grief “left her a lifetime of guilty oscillations between anger and sympathy.” Then, some years later, her bright, sensitive older brother committed suicide.

Tara says of this litany of loss, “I didn’t think the world was safe. [I thought] that people could die at any time… and so I wanted things to be black and white, right and wrong, which is quite a normal response to trauma.” While her time as a firefighter provided camaraderie and the occasional brittle sense of achievement, she was continually plagued with guilt, shame and self-doubt.

But her response to her situation was different from Peter’s or Brett’s. She sought psychological help before medical retirement was forced upon her. And she enrolled in a PhD for which she interviewed firefighters about their experiences of suicide. This scholarly inquiry into the emotional pain of her peers afforded her new insights and a measure of catharsis.

While, Tara, too, has now retired, she left on her own terms. Her story, the last of the three, while coloured with personal loss and disappointment — not least in the institutional culture of the fire service — is also more hopeful. Of her retirement, McKenzie-Murray writes, “She now saw the blankness of her future not as an abyss but a clear canvas… She could now, as she told me, sit with the irresolution of things.”

To interview such wounded people about the darkest moments of their life and to recreate these narratives with tenderness and empathy requires a certain type of listener and writer. McKenzie-Murray is the person for the job, in part because of his own experience of trauma. As he writes, “my own diagnosis of PTSD came years after I began work on this book. After years of hearing about the symptoms of others it became harder to deny my own.”

It’s not hard to imagine why he was drawn to write this book, and why in the past he’s written true crime and worked as an adviser to the chief commissioner of Victoria Police. Unacknowledged and untreated trauma can take many paths in its rise to the surface. A double meaning of the book’s title presents itself: perhaps proximity to the trauma of others is a siren song for those who’ve suffered something similar but haven’t yet understood how to process it.

And finally, a gentle warning here: the subject matter of Sirens is undeniably grizzly. But in the hands of a writer as good as McKenzie-Murray it transforms into something necessary and deeply human. He imbues his subject’s lives with dignity and understanding, leaving the reader with immense gratitude for their bravery and dedication, and a clearer understanding of the personal cost of their work. •

Sirens: Inside the Shadow World of First Responders
By Martin McKenzie-Murray | Black Inc. | $34.99 | 240 pages

The post Collateral damage appeared first on Inside Story.

What went unmentioned was the question of how different, in practice, this would be from existing policy. Nor did opposition leader mention which groups are most likely to be affected, how much the government would save by restricting the payments, or whether the change in policy would actually be fair.

Eligibility for social security payments has never been restricted to Australians citizens, but various restrictions have always applied. Especially tight were the racial provisions in the earliest social security programs, which excluded people born in Africa, Asia and the Pacific — assuming they had somehow gained residence despite the White Australia policy.

From the time they were introduced in 1908, age pensions were subject to residential waiting periods. Initially, claimants needed to demonstrate twenty-five years of continuous residence in Australia, but this was reduced to twenty years in 1909 and then, many years later in 1962, to ten years. The invalid pension (now the disability support pension), introduced in 1909, required only five years’ residence, although the claimant had to have become permanently incapacitated in Australia. The widow’s pension, introduced in 1942, also had a five-year residence requirement.

Child endowment (now known as the family tax benefit), legislated in 1941, required mother and child to either have been born in Australia or resident for the twelve months before the claim. The unemployment benefit, legislated in 1944, only required twelve or more months of continuous residence immediately before application, and even that was waived if the director-general of social services was satisfied a claimant intended to reside permanently in Australia.

But requirements started to become more restrictive in the 1990s. In 1993 the Keating government introduced a “newly arrived resident’s waiting period” for all new permanent residents, which delays eligibility for certain social security payments. Initially twenty-six weeks for unemployment and sickness payments, the waiting time for those benefits was extended by the Howard government to 104 weeks in 1997, with shorter waits for other working-age support.

Further modifications came in 1999 and 2000, with the next major change in 2019, when the Morrison government extended the waiting period for unemployment payments to 208 weeks and extended waiting periods for supplementary payments. For the first time, a waiting period was applied to the family tax benefit.

The Morrison government also attempted to extend to four years the waiting time for a variety of other payments and concession cards, including paid parental leave, carer payment, carer allowance and family tax benefit, but its legislation failed to pass. During the 2025 election campaign it again proposed longer waiting periods, this time a uniform five years.

The decades of change have left a patchwork of waiting times:

• The four-year waiting period, the most common, applies to income support payments, among them JobSeeker, the parenting payment(single and partnered), youth allowance, Austudy and the special benefit, as well as to supplementary payments including the Commonwealth seniors health card, the ex-carer allowance (child) health care card, the farm household allowance, the low income health care card, the mobility allowance, the pensioner education supplement and the tertiary access payment.

• A two-year wait applies for the carer payment and parental leave pay. Partner provisional visa-holders only qualify for parental leave pay. An Australian citizen who has only just started living in Australia for the first time faces a two-year waiting period for parenting payment (single or partnered).

• A one-year wait applies for the carer allowance and family tax benefit part A (with no wait for part B).

Some groups are exempted from these waiting periods, the most important being refugees, former refugees and family members of a refugee or humanitarian migrant.

People can also qualify for the special benefit if they are in severe financial hardship, have become homeless or are at risk of becoming homeless, are experiencing family violence or a decline in health, or their visa sponsor is no longer able to support them. But while most people receiving special benefit were born overseas, fewer than 6000 people receive the payment.

Vital to considering the impact of Angus Taylor’s plan is an accurate tally of the overseas-born people who actually receive income support. Department of Social Services, or DSS, figures for the top twenty-five birth countries of social security recipients reveal that the largest number receive the age pension and the third-largest receive the disability support pension; as of June 2025 those two payments accounted for 71 per cent of all benefits claimed by overseas-born people. Both payments already have longer residence requirements and aren’t among the seventeen payments covered by the opposition’s proposed citizenship requirement.

Data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics and the DSS allows us to calculate the share of the population receiving income support according to country of birth. As the chart below shows, about 10.5 per cent of the working-age population receive these payments, comprising 12 per cent of people born in Australia and around 7 per cent of people born overseas. The share receiving payments ranges from 1.8 per cent of the Indian-born population and 4.4 per cent of the Chinese-born to around a third of Afghan-born residents, 39 per cent of Iraqi-born and 46 per cent of Syrian-born.

To assess the impact of the Coalition’s citizenship plan, we also need to know how rates of citizenship vary between different birthplace groups. Of the permanent migrants who arrived in Australia between 2000 and 2021, 1.8 million or 59 per cent are now Australian citizens. Broken down by visa, 64 per cent of those on skilled visas had taken out citizenship, as had 47 per cent of those on family visas and 61 per cent on humanitarian visas.

The chart below shows the top ten countries of birth for permanent migrants who took out Australian citizenship between 2000 and 2021. The proportion with Australian citizenship ranged from a little over a third of Chinese-born to more than 60 per cent of those born in Vietnam, India, England, the Philippines and Sri Lanka, and nearly three-quarters of those born in South Africa.

This second chart also shows whether migrants’ countries of origin allow dual citizenship. If they don’t, migrants will have to renounce their original citizenship in order to take out Australian citizenship. In general, migrants from countries that allow dual citizenship have higher rates of Australian citizenship.

India is an exception. Although it doesn’t allow dual citizenship, a relatively high proportion of Indian-born people take out Australian citizenship anyway. Along with China, it is the largest birthplace of migrant arrivals over this period, but both groups are much less likely to seek income support than other overseas-born Australians or Australian-born citizens.

No breakdown of NDIS participants by country of birth appears to be available, but data is available on the number of participants from culturally and linguistically diverse, or CALD, backgrounds.

In 2025–26, there were 66,600 from CALD backgrounds in the NDIS, or 8.7 per cent of all participants. Payments made to these groups were higher than the overall average, adding up to 10.5 per cent of total NDIS expenditure. With an estimated 23 per cent of the Australian population speaking a language other than English at home, CALD people appear to be underrepresented in the scheme.

Access to the NDIS requires either citizenship, permanent residence or a humanitarian visa. No data on the breakdown by citizenship status appears to have been published. It also needs to be borne in mind that all visa applicants need to meet health requirements, including passing the “significant cost threshold” for estimated healthcare of $86,000. For permanent visa applicants, these costs are generally projected over five years, though applicants with “a permanent or ongoing condition with a reasonably predictable course” can be assessed over a ten-year period. This seems likely to preclude entry to Australia for people with existing disabilities.

What does this patchwork of payments, conditions and waiting times mean for Angus Taylor’s proposed changes?

To apply for citizenship, a person must have lived in Australia for four years on a valid visa (including at least twelve months as a permanent resident). The process then takes a median time of eighteen months up until the citizenship ceremony. On the basis of these figures, the citizenship requirement would be similar to increasing the waiting period for social security payments to about five years and six months, with the number of people affected and the budgetary savings dependent on the number of new citizens and their subsequent need, if any, for income support.

When the Liberal Party proposed increasing seventeen waiting periods to five years during the 2025 election, the Parliamentary Budget Office estimated it would improve the federal government’s fiscal balance by $2.6 billion over the five years 2025–29. But it also noted that “the financial implications of this proposal are uncertain and sensitive to the assumed eligible population, which in turn is sensitive to the assumptions around the population of eligible visa holders and their interaction with the social security system.”

Crucially, the PBO assumed the eligible population “would access social security payments at the same rate as the overall population of Australia.” But — as the first chart above shows very clearly — different birthplace groups don’t access social security at the same rate as the overall population.

Given that the largest groups of recent immigrants — those from India and China — have much lower rates of social security support than people born in Australia, the PBO’s costings probably overestimate the savings from the measure. If more people were prompted to apply for citizenship then projected savings would also fall.

Importantly, the birthplaces with the highest level of income support are people born in Afghanistan, Iraq or Syria, who are highly likely to have arrived in Australia on humanitarian visas. The Coalition’s 2018–19 budget specified that humanitarian migrants “will remain exempt from all waiting periods, and hardship provisions will remain in place.” If the same policy applies in the event of a Coalition government, these birthplace groups would not be affected.

Replying to the federal budget, Angus Taylor declared, “We’ll remove Labor’s handouts for noncitizens.” Given what we know of existing waiting periods and patterns of payment, the impact of his proposal (which is already attracting controversy within his own party) would be nowhere near as simple as that.

On the one hand, the humanitarian and refugee groups most likely to receive social security payments because of their deep disadvantage are exempted from the proposal. On the other, the largest birthplace groups among the most recent permanent residents are unlikely to need payments. Combined, these two facts suggest the budgetary savings won’t even be as high as the Parliamentary Budget Office’s estimates.

But perhaps the savings are secondary to the desire to appeal to people who might otherwise vote for One Nation, which has a policy of increasing the waiting period for both citizenship and welfare payments to eight years, as well as withdrawing from the UN Refugee Convention.

Here, it’s worth noting that the share of the working-age population receiving social security payments fell to record lows in 2023 and 2024, partly because of very high employment rates among skilled migrants. Those rates translate into a very strong net contribution to the federal budget. •

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Many of the criticisms, of course, are beat-ups and bad faith speculation. The polls embolden the critics, whose overblown predictions in turn affect public attitudes. Welcome to policy-reform debates Australian-style. And now there’s the extra, ever-changing input from social media.

But to this not-very-finance-literate observer many of the criticisms are valid, an obvious one being the incongruity of applying the capital gains changes to forms of investment other than (established) housing when the government’s chief stated purpose is to steer investment away from property. Both Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers have offered nonsensical explanations for this contradiction.

Still, it’s facile and self-serving to assume, as many of the anti-government combatants seem to, that the public reaction shows how right they are and how truly dreadful the package is. Many of today’s complainers quite liked the Abbott government’s first budget, with its smorgasbord of spending cuts and broken promises. (Or they would have liked it if they’d been old enough to follow such things twelve years ago.) Voters loathed that one too.

Similarly, squeals about overturned election pledges tend to be selective. Governments pressing ahead with unpopular decisions can be cast as hopeless and out of touch with the common sense of the electorate or, alternatively, as possessing political courage, leadership and even, yes, “conviction!”

Voters’ attitudes to a budget will be influenced by many things, including general feelings about whoever’s in power. Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey no doubt believed they were replicating the Howard government’s politically successful first effort in 1996, which was similarly littered with reversed assurances (people of a certain age will remember core and non-core promises) and bitter medicine.

The spiel in 2014 was the same: our profligate predecessors left us no choice, we don’t like this any more than you do. (Bob Hawke and Paul Keating read the same script in 1983.) But it didn’t work that time, perhaps because they were inferior politicians, or perhaps because voters were getting more cynical. Those faux-Churchillian cigar-smoking snapshots didn’t help.

Or maybe Hockey’s budget was so reviled because the Abbott government and its prime minister were never well-regarded; in fact, barely two months after being elected they were consistently behind in the two-party-preferred polls, which is almost certainly unprecedented. John Howard, by contrast, was still in his election honeymoon when his government’s first budget came out in August 1996, on top of which sat the Port Arthur massacre gun buyback boost.

A chief reason we remember 2014 is that Hockey’s budget all (or mostly) came to nought, with the big, unpopular bits never getting through the Senate. Instead they were debated for months, even years, becoming more and more reviled, until they were quietly abandoned (or maybe until Abbott was deposed the following year). And Senate crossbenchers’ refusal to let the changes through must have been influenced by the public reaction.

Anthony Albanese did enjoy very high standing in his first year, but as with the uncourageous Kevin Rudd in 2008 he declined to perform the tough first-budget ritual. Now, in Labor’s second term, it’s difficult to blame painful decisions on predecessors. And these days Albanese and his government are very unloved. Their consistent (but declining) two-party-preferred leads in the polls bely their low primary-vote support, very poor approval ratings and high dissatisfaction. It’s just that the other side, or sides, seems even worse.

(It needs to be acknowledged that One Nation leader Pauline Hanson’s approval rating is higher than either Albanese’s or Liberal leader Angus Taylor’s. But the majority of voters would probably still view the prospect of her party in government with horror.)

Note that Newspoll’s most-well-regarded budget, in 1987, was another in the “this will hurt, but there’s no other option” category. In that case the Hawke government successfully laid the blame on all previous administrations, right back to 1949. And the Howard government’s second-best-received instalment came just months before it lost office.

Perhaps the closest template will turn out to not be a budget but the Gillard government’s “carbon tax broken promise.” Unveiled in February 2011, six months after the hung parliament re-election, it was immediately an object of fears that would not only hit the hip pocket ($100 roasts!) but also clobber the economy. Then, after it was introduced and no extra tax deductions appeared on payslips and nothing much else seemed to change, it subsided as an issue.

With former Jacquie Lambie Network/independent senator Tammy Tyrrell joining Labor’s caucus this month, the government plus the Greens easily have the numbers to get the budget through the upper house. Many Labor and Greens supporters celebrate this “progressive majority” and it’s certainly easier for the government than, say, the chamber the Rudd faced. But it’s still terribly stifling for them all the same. Oh, for last century’s self-consciously centrist Democrats.

Greens in formal alliance with centre-left parties in, say, New Zealand and Germany, have their policy discussions with their big-party allies mostly behind closed doors, and it’s in their interests not to make life unnecessarily difficult for the government. In Australia, by contrast, the smaller party has its own distinct political imperatives that mostly involve wresting support from Labor.

Yet the government will need to make concessions to various stakeholders, and indeed for the national economic interest, and most of that is not likely to be to the minor party’s liking. Albanese has said he wants the legislation passed in July this year and pushed off the government’s plate. But if he thinks that will end the hullabaloo, he’s mistaken.

The truly important date is 1 July 2027, when the capital gains and negative gearing changes are slated to take effect. After that, when the sky hasn’t fallen, they will be part of the furniture. By the next election the onus will be on politicians campaigning to undo them to explain where the money will come from. The Coalition and/or One Nation will find themselves taking tax policy to an election.

Those adjustments to discretionary trusts, on the other hand, aren’t planned to start until 1 July 2028. In effect, that means that even if they’re legislated this year they will be treated as a Labor campaign promise during the 2028 campaign.

It’s understandable if Labor’s brains trust expected the vast majority of Australians’ to eyes glaze over at mention of trusts, which are seen mostly as a tax minimisation tool of the wealthy. But thanks largely to lazy mainstream media picking up the Coalition’s catchy slogan (similar to the 2019 “retiree tax”) it’s already become the “death tax”: a dastardly attack (again!) on old people (or, less politely, their offspring) and possibly the thin edge of the wedge of a universal inheritance tax.

There must be reasons for its delayed implementation, but politically it would make sense to bring it forward to 2027. If that’s not possible, it would be in Labor’s interests to drop it altogether. •

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AI has arrived at another such moment, bringing with it a technological revolution unlike anything we have seen before. It is a fundamentally different kind of technology, one that can operate outside of direct human control and using levers that humans can no longer understand or see.  If politics is the art of making things possible, AI, through algorithms and generative forms, has added a kind of unknowable alchemy to that process.

As with past shifts, this has required a new generation of scholars, writers, critics, and advocates to emerge as society grapples with this question of the impact of AI on democracy. Among them is Northeastern University’s Beth Simone Noveck, who is also chief AI strategist for the US state of New Jersey.

Noveck’s Reboot is a serious book about a real problem. It is also, in important ways, the wrong book for this moment. It looks at AI as an institutional problem of democracy, not a framing I had encountered in any meaningful way before, and certainly not from someone with the experience and knowledge to speak with real authority.

The book is essentially a cross-stitch of case studies showing how AI can be implemented in the public sector to improve service delivery and help citizens engage more meaningfully with a government that has grown monstrously in its remit but shrunk in its capacity to give citizens a voice in their own governance.

Noveck’s work is at its best when it treats democracy not as an abstract concept, the thing we all love to eulogise, but as a set of administrative problems that can be improved with the thoughtful application of tools already revolutionising the private sector and so much of our daily lives.

That premise is also what makes the book frustrating. Noveck writes about democracy with the assumption that its crisis is one of institutional capacity and insufficient information processing. There are of course many places where AI can help, but the book treats these as process fixes devoid of cultural meaning, beyond the political will to implement new technologies in a system with planetary inertia.

Which is not to say the book is naive. Noveck makes sharp points about institutions as information-processing systems, and about how new AI tools can help manage the glut of data the modern world produces. The opportunities for better service delivery and for bridging gaps between citizens are real, and the case studies she mentions were the talk of the Smart Cities initiatives in Australia and elsewhere in the late 2010s.

But that was an era of optimism around these technologies, a very different world from the one we inhabit now, something Noveck only passingly addresses. The core tension I found on reading Reboot is that each of its case studies presumes a society comfortable with a new, AI-powered government. It is interesting and worthwhile to discuss how services might be improved, but it is lacking, irresponsible at worst, to give only short shrift to the citizens over whom this new AI-powered government would have authority.

On a stylistic note, this is a book very much written for the AI age. It repeats ideas and characters with the consistency of a television show designed to be watched in the background, making it perhaps the first book I have read made for the second screen. Noveck also writes consistently in the first-person plural. Everything is we. Whether that reflects academic inclusivity or an acknowledgement that we are never quite alone anymore, even reading on a plane, I could not honestly say.

Reboot feels, at times, like an extension of the American liberal obsession with fact-checking in the Trump era. Both share the same foundational assumption: that the dysfunction of democratic life is primarily a supply problem. Give people better facts, or give institutions better data, and the system self-corrects. But democratic dysfunction today is not a supply problem. It is a crisis of trust, and trust is not fixed by better processing. Lies are more powerful than truth because they tell a better story. Grievance is more honest than facts to citizens who sense the modern world collapsing under their feet.

Noveck’s techno-optimism is perhaps best encapsulated toward the end of the book, when she sketches out a future for representative democracy in which AI avatars of both voters and representatives debate the direction of the country, leaving the humans themselves alone. That is a dystopian vision beyond most science fiction. Even with the caveat that humans could still take back the wheel, it would describe a world in which the role of citizen is reduced to that of a driver half asleep at the wheel.

Noveck also gives the example of urban planners in Brazil and Indonesia tasked with deciding the future of their cities’ public transit systems, and suggests AI might have made better decisions than they did. That might well be literally true, but it gets at the core problem of the book. Thirty years of public–private optimisation has left public services so hollowed out that citizens no longer feel they live in a democracy worthy of the name. Democratic legitimacy is not a byproduct of good outcomes. It derives from participation, from citizens feeling that decisions were made with them rather than for them. A better bus route decided by an algorithm is still a bus route nobody asked for. To fight one brand of optimisation with another is to entirely miss why citizens are so frustrated right now.

There is a sadness that comes through in Reboot around the fact that the United States lags so many other countries in implementing technology in governance. Noveck laments that the home of Silicon Valley has not yet benefited from many of these adaptations, but she never quite answers why.

The answer may lie in the fact that these ideas belong to a time when technology was seen as something that could constrain the overreach of government. Now, much of the public views tech companies themselves as the overreach that needs constraining.

Noveck spends much of the book on city-level implementations, where many of her ideas make genuine sense. Municipalities are not tarred with the same brush as national governments, but they exist within the same political context.

These are, in the end, two versions of the same problem. Noveck’s techno-optimism is not just politically naive. It leads her to write a book about public administration when she thinks she is writing a book about democracy. The scope she chose reflects the assumptions she made.

Reboot is less a book about improving democracy in the age of AI than a book about how public sector services can be improved through the thoughtful application of new technologies, an argument that the private sector should not be the sole beneficiary of such innovation.

That makes it a worthwhile read for city administrators and those interested in the finer points of public administration. But anyone hoping to understand the relationship between the rising tide of AI and the very real concerns we should all have about our democracy will be left wanting. •

Reboot: AI and the Race to Save Democracy
Beth Noveck | Yale University Press | $67.99 | 384 pages

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Comparing statistics across countries with differing mental health systems is risky, but WHO figures have Australia leading the Anglosphere on this metric. Only Argentina, Costa Rica, Finland and the Netherlands are more generously equipped. Even so, there is a widespread view that we need not just more psychologists, but many more. Finding a psychologist who doesn’t have a lengthy waiting list has been especially difficult since the pandemic hit.

The mental health crisis narrative has been successful in shaping public opinion and governments are taking note. A report on the psychology workforce released in April by the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing recognises the profession plays a key role in the mental health system, providing roughly half of Medicare-billed mental health services. It finds that Australia’s demand for psychologists vastly exceeds the current supply, and that the situation is going to get much worse.

Based on its estimate of unmet demand for services, the report finds that in 2025 the nation’s mental health system needed 58 per cent more psychologists than it had. Despite projected growth in the profession, workforce modelling predicts that by 2038 the shortfall will swell to 97 per cent: we will only have half the psychologists we need.

The report is clearly a call to action: more on that later. But it also makes some puzzling claims. On the demand side, its estimate of the size of the current shortfall is astonishing. The report also predicts that the required quantum of psychologists will rise by 92 per cent between 2025 and 2038. This represents a compounding annual increase of 5.2 per cent, almost five times the expected rate of increase in Australia’s population.

Why this steep projected growth in need for psychological services should occur is opaque. It sits uneasily with epidemiological evidence that rates of common mental disorders have not risen significantly in recent years, except among young people, and that they have stabilised since the pandemic. Why need for treatment should race ahead of population growth is a mystery.

The supply side is equally mysterious. The number of registered psychologists has been growing at steady clip — around 4.8 per cent annually this decade after roughly doubling in the previous one — but the report anticipates that from 2025 to 2038 growth in the number of psychologists in the health workforce will be a sluggish 2 per cent annually. Why the slowdown, when psychology remains stubbornly popular among students and universities continue to roll out new training programs?

It is hard to escape the conclusion that these forecasts inflate the psychologist shortfall by overestimating the rising need for services and underestimating the robust growth of the psychology profession. Moderate the unrealistic demand increases and extrapolate existing growth and the shortfall dwindles.

Whatever the merits of the government forecasting, it is worth asking whether many more psychologists will indeed improve the nation’s mental health. Psychologists can do a lot of good, but it doesn’t follow that proliferating them will turn things around. Studies on the “treatment-prevalence paradox,” some of them carried out by leading Australian researcher Anthony Jorm, suggest it won’t.

Research around the world shows that the large increases over recent decades in the proportion of unwell people who receive treatment have not been accompanied by reductions in rates of mental ill health. Successful treatment would be expected to help people recover from episodes of illness and prevent relapse, thereby reducing rates of diagnosis, but these reductions have not eventuated. Opinions differ on why that might be — some think it reflects the limited efficacy of treatment, especially for chronic cases — but the disconnect between rates of treatment and of ill health is real.

Studies of the efficacy of psychological treatment in Australia are equally sobering. Recent evaluations of the Medicare’s Better Access scheme, which subsidises psychotherapy delivered primarily by psychologists, have found that although 50–60 per cent of clients improve with treatment, 20–30 per cent experience no meaningful change and 10–20 per cent deteriorate. Importantly, people who enter treatment with milder problems obtain substantially less benefit. A 2024 review of the Ten to Men program also found that receiving more Better Access sessions had no effect on depression or anxiety symptoms in men.

These findings suggest that funnelling more psychologists (or other psychotherapists) into Australia’s existing system of care is unlikely to move the dial on our population’s mental health. It also raises awkward questions about whether well-meaning efforts to boost access to treatment by tapping into a supposedly deep reservoir of unmet need may backfire.

These efforts may simply direct people experiencing less severe difficulties into treatments unlikely to help them and may even do harm. They may also increase what is sometimes called “met un-need”: the delivery of services to people who don’t require them. It is surely wiser to focus resources on the more severe end of the mental health spectrum and find more effective and less psychologist-intensive means of dealing with the milder end, scaled up by technological developments or other social initiatives.

This argument implies that tackling the nation’s mental health predicament requires systemic change, not just a larger workforce. Part of the problem is not how well resourced the system is, but how well those resources are distributed. Beyond our major cities psychologists are thin on the ground, as they are outside Buenos Aires. Per capita, psychologists are four times as prevalent in metropolitan areas as in small rural towns. Simply producing more of them will not fill the geographical gaps.

Psychologists are also maldistributed across the private and public sectors. New graduates are flocking to private practice settings and the share of psychologists in the public sector is in decline. Between 2019 and 2023, the increase in full-time equivalent psychologists working in the private sector exceeded the increase in the public sector by a ratio of forty-two to one. Training more psychologists (and other professionals) to dispense private therapy in our cities is the current trend, but it is unlikely to boost mental health meaningfully.

Universities have a large stake in these questions. Australia’s alleged need for a radically increased psychology workforce is the primary rationale for a proposed overhaul of training programs. The plan put forward by the Psychology Board of Australia, responding to a directive from the federal minister, is to replace the existing model, which requires completion of undergraduate and postgraduate qualifications, with one in which a five-year undergraduate degree is the sole pathway to professional registration.

The many critics of the new model argue that it relegates professional training to a lower level in Australia’s qualifications framework, erodes the commitment to a broad-based and science-led education, and makes the psychology profession less accessible to equity groups, among many other concerns. Most of these critics accept the premise that there is an urgent need to produce more psychologists, disagreeing only on the means to that end.

That premise needs more careful scrutiny. We are indeed facing significant mental health challenges, there is unmet demand for services, and psychologists do have a large role to play in dealing with these problems. We could do with more of them, and there is strong momentum within the field to boost their numbers incrementally. But the case for a massive expansion of the psychology workforce is weak, especially via an imposed revolution in professional training. •

The post Do we need more psychologists? appeared first on Inside Story.

Caro’s little book (published by the Australia Institute in its new Big Ideas in Small Packages series) is the beneficiary of her media profile, a clear and forceful voice, and fire in the belly. To her great credit Caro maintains her rage rather than join the general indifference to a setup in which some can choose but many can’t; in which schools for rich kids define everything else as second rate; in which those who need least get most (as well as public subsidies); and which is segregated along social, religious and ethnic lines yet supported by nominally Christian churches and backed by governments of all stripes.

With rage comes a series of dilemmas. Blame the sector system for everything? Or concede that many government schools and systems play the choice game too (selective schools, zones that can be bought into, out-of-zone enrolments)? Point to the deep-in-the-bones damage done to the government schools or trumpet their virtues? Be frank about the scale of the reform problem? Or keep the spirits up with assurances that progress is possible? Go for modest but attainable gains? Or call for a substantial restructuring and get nowhere?

Perhaps unnerved by the fact that none of Australia’s nine governments wants to disturb a sleeping dog and aren’t up to big change anyway, Caro opts for a bit of everything, including canvassing Tom Greenwell and Chris Bonnor’s proposal for a restructured sector system. For that transgression she has been rewarded with a stern rebuke by another prominent commentator who still thinks that fixing up the government schools will do the trick.

We can hope that Geoff Masters’s The Children We Leave Behind will be a turning point but fear that it won’t.

Masters’s conclusion, authoritative, compelling and widely shared, is that schooling can and must be “transformed.” When he says at the outset that his book is “not so much about teachers and teaching practices as the policies, structures and processes that governments and school systems create and within which teachers work” he is belling the cat. Governments and their bureaucracies have spent decades telling schools and teachers that they’re the ones that need to be reformed. Masters begs to differ. In fact, he insists, it’s the other way about: schools and teachers can’t do reform or be reformed unless and until the powers-that-be reform themselves and the framework of curriculum, assessment and reporting requirements within which schools and teachers work.

This is so far as I am aware the first time a system insider has said, clearly and adamantly, that Australian schooling is on the wrong tram and heading in the wrong direction. Masters was until his recent retirement head of the Australian Council for Education Research; in that role he was for many years confidante of and adviser to governments and systems at both state and national levels.

His argument is that things go wrong from the very first day of school: kids arrive knowing different things in different amounts, but schools treat them as if they’re all the same. For the most part students are taught the same grade-level curriculum at the same time and for the same amount of time. The reality is that some are years ahead of the starting point, some years behind. The way-behind fall further and further behind “as each grade’s curriculum becomes increasingly beyond their reach.” Most of the way-behind come from what Masters refers to as “poorer backgrounds.”

Masters laid out the bones of this case in a much-discussed paper well over a decade ago but has now expanded it in several ways: he insists that the fast-expanding learning sciences do not demand “direct” or “explicit” instruction, as is so often claimed, but support the case for a restructured learning process; he details fundamental things mainstream schools can learn from “alternative” schools (many of them catering to the left-behind, by the way); and he teases out the many ways in which centrally imposed curriculum, assessment and reporting requirements hobble schools and frustrate teachers’ deepest motivations and professional aspirations.

For all its value The Children We Leave Behind understates the problem, and is stronger in analysis than prescription. Emphasising the plight of the badly educated, Masters under-emphasises the mis-education of the majority, and the consequent need for change in the scope and content of the curriculum. Kids described as “disengaged” or “discouraged” are in reality often humiliated, hurt, angry. To talk about the bad “design” of the “machinery” of schooling is to imply that the required change is just a matter of persuading the powers-that-be to get on with the obviously desirable redesign.

The reality is much less sunny: as students advance in their school careers they are pressed into a narrowly cognitive curriculum and an increasingly intense and explicit competition of each against all. The many components of this way of organising schooling are tightly integrated, capable of absorbing change in any part without disturbing the whole, and heavily defended both internally (curriculum associations, industrial regulation, and so on) and externally (vested interests, popular images of “school,” national testing and school surveillance systems and the like).

All this is not with us by chance or merely as the legacy of a distant era; it is schooling functioning as a central site of fierce struggles to maintain or advance social position. Along with many others trying to divine why schooling works as it does, Masters has been reading Michael Young’s 1958 classic The Rise of the Meritocracy but has yet to work through the full implications of Young’s argument about schooling’s central role in allocating social places and class power.

Facing up to structural realities means facing up to structural change — a very different thing from the bit-by-bit gains contemplated in Labor’s National School Reform Agreements, not to mention the literally reactionary efforts of states going so far as to mandate centrally developed lesson plans.

The commendable but so far modest efforts of the South Australians may prove me wrong, but a long history suggests that neither governments (never more than three years away from the next election) nor their bureaucracies (under the ministerial thumb and devoted to their own top-down power) will opt for structural reform unless and until they are forced into it.

The best hope lies in a movement from below, a bigger and more sustained version of the “I Give a Gonski” campaign of 2012–13, bent on loosening the ties that bind schooling to its socioeconomic role so that it can move toward the kind of schooling Masters wants.

First movers in any such effort would have to be, as in the Gonski campaign, the teacher organisations. They in their turn would have to grasp, at last, that terms and conditions matter but would matter a great deal more if grounded in teachers’ most fundamental desire: to do really good, satisfying work with the kids. For such a movement The Children We Leave Behind would be required reading. •

Rich Kid Poor Kid: The Battle for Public Education
By Jane Caro | Australia Institute Press | $19.99 | 128 pages

The Children We Leave Behind: How School Could Be Done Differently
By Geoff Masters | Taylor & Francis | $41.99 | 220 pages

The post Stuck appeared first on Inside Story.

Queensland’s voice in the Australian polity has been growing steadily louder since it joined five other colonies in a federation ten years after those labour men got together in Barcaldine. The change is mainly a matter of arithmetic, for there are now so many more Queenslanders.

The House of Representatives embodies the consequences. When Australians elected their first national parliament in 1901, they voted in seventy-five electorates. Nine were in Queensland, 12 per cent of the total. This was more than in South Australia (seven seats), Tasmania and Western Australia (five each), but a lot fewer than in New South Wales (twenty-six) and Victoria (twenty-three).

Today, the House has twice as many members but the number from Queensland has more than trebled. Of the 150 electorates at the 2025 election, thirty (or 20 per cent) were in Queensland. South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales have gained seats since Federation too, but have reduced their share of the enlarged total — South Australia (ten seats) down from 9 to 7 per cent, Victoria (thirty-eight seats) from 31 to 25 per cent, New South Wales (forty-six seats) from 35 to 31 per cent. Tasmania still has the five seats it had at Federation, so its share of the total has halved. Only Western Australia, like Queensland, has increased both its number of seats (to sixteen) and share of the total, from 7 per cent in 1901 to 11 per cent in 2025.

Though louder, the political voice from the north carries confounding accents. Baby Boomers remember the Moonlight State of premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen, dominating much of the three decades of conservative rule between the Labor split and 1989. Yet Labor had been out of office for just one term between 1915 and 1957 and has now governed in Queensland for thirty of the nearly thirty-seven years since Wayne Goss’s victory in 1989.

Within the state, the big political voices have moved south. Labor once chose its premiers from the north and west, elevating the members for Barcoo, Chillagoe, Cairns and Mackay before the second world war; since then, they have come from Brisbane. No less than three have been the member for the southwest Brisbane seat of Inala (Ned Hanlon, premier 1946–52; Goss, 1989–96; Annastacia Palaszczuk, 2015–23) and two South Brisbane (Vince Gair, 1952–57, and Anna Bligh, 2007–12). Sydney-born Peter Beattie (1998–2007) was raised on the Atherton Tableland but moved to the capital and had represented Brisbane Central.

The last Labor premier, and now opposition leader, Stephen Miles, is a Brisbane boy, initially the member for Mt Coot-tha and now for the outer-northern suburban seat of Murrumba. Even in the era of conservative ascendancy, Country Party premiers Frank Nicklin (1957–68) and Bjelke-Petersen were from electorates in the southeast.

Victorians go to Queensland, I was once told, for two reasons: to holiday and to die. It was not true even then. For decades, they have been going there to live. Their numbers help make this the only state to have recorded positive net interstate migration every financial year since the early 1980s.

In Ray Lawler’s famous Doll trilogy, the Victorians don’t go there at all. The travellers come south. By December 1953, when the Summer of the Seventeenth Doll opens, sugar-cane-cutters Roo and Barney have spent sixteen summers in Melbourne’s inner-city suburb of Carlton.

The south is more than a holiday. After seven months working in the far north, “the lay-off” is “not just playin’ around and spendin’ a lot of money, but a time for livin’.” The pattern is established in the two prequels, written in the mid-1970s long after the Doll. In Kid Stakes, set in 1937 — “nothing to win and nothing to lose” — Roo and Barney meet young milliners Olive and Nancy and talk their way into staying in the boarding house Olive’s mother Emma runs. Other Times begins as the war is ending in 1945 and the women are waiting for their men to return, having hosted shorter summers of leave away from the fighting.

The Doll trilogy is a landmark in Australian theatre and culture. Red Stitch Actors’ Theatre in St Kilda ran a season of the three plays from February to April this year and is now touring it to cities including Hobart in late May and Ballarat in June, selling out “Trilogy Packages” with the three plays run end-to-end, performed over a single day by the same small ensemble cast, as Lawler preferred.

On its premiere in Melbourne in 1955, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll was celebrated for its urban setting, its assailing of myths about masculinity, its radical alternative to conventional marriage. Taken to stages in London two years later and then Broadway, the play “carr[ied] on its back those first timid assertions of national pride in ourselves since Federation,” Katherine Brisbane wrote in the Bulletin two decades later.

All three plays take place in the same sitting room in the same Carlton boarding house, a site dramatically different from the elemental landscapes that dominated the imaginations of Australia’s turn-of-the-century nationalist poets and storytellers. Those landscapes would feature again in the film renaissance a decade or two after the Doll. Red Stitch says Lawler’s characters “personify the friction that arises in a society transitioning from rural life to urban metropolises.” One metropolis stands for them all. Of the playwright himself, one of eight children who grew up in Footscray, Brisbane later wrote “Lawler belongs to Melbourne.”

The audience never sees Queensland but the distant place resonates through all three plays. Lawler, whose early career included a stint in Brisbane as a stage manager, a lyric rewrite man and a “filler-in” for a fortnightly variety show, gives it a dual identity. It is a dreamscape as well as a workplace.

Extensive stage notes require the sitting room for the Doll to be decorated not just with the sixteen kewpie dolls from previous summers but also with “colourful mementos” from North Queensland — “brilliantly plumaged, stuffed North Queensland birds, coral pieces and shells from the Great Barrier reef, and picture frames backed with black velvet to which cling crowds of shimmering-winged tropical butterflies.” These are Olive’s choices, acquired from her annual visitors, evidence of the unseen north but also signs that, over the three plays, “household power” has passed from tough, practical Emma to her endlessly romantic daughter.

The Queensland that Roo and Barney occupy, though, is a place of work, hard manual work, of masculinity and competitiveness. Only when the work is done does the north acquire colour and shimmer, wages for men to spend with women, trinkets to adorn a Carlton sitting room, wealth to last a southern, urban summer.

Filmmaker John Ruane tried “to imitate Summer of the Seventeenth Doll in reverse” in his mid-1970s Queensland. The movie was “a sort of Northcote version of Midnight Cowboy,” he said in a 1995 interview, “not the story, but the fact that they were headed for a dream. Their dream was Miami. Our film was obviously about heading to Queensland.” Ruane’s working class dreamers never make it, the film ending with one of them pushing a broken-down Holden up a hill, unable to get beyond inner-suburban Westgarth.

The Doll too ends tragically and in Melbourne. Roo has had a shocker of a season up north, humiliated in the canefields by a younger, stronger rival. He decides it is time to settle down, to marry Olive, get a job in Melbourne and start a new life. Olive is appalled. She doesn’t want years, she wants summers. A cane-cutter, not a worker in a paint factory. “You think I’ll let it all end up in marriage?” Roo thinks she’s “gone mad, or somethin’?!… You dunno what you want!” She does. “I want what I had before!,” she cries as she beats Roo’s chest with her fists. “You give it back to me — give me back what you’ve taken!”

The play and the trilogy end with Barney leading Roo away, suggesting they “go off on our own… Make a fresh start.” It could be the West, or Rum Jungle — “I bet fellers like us could really clean up there” — or maybe “that bloke up in Warwick, he always said he’d take us on.”

The North that Henry Reynolds looks from was no dreamscape for nineteenth century colonists. In his exploration of “Australian History from the Top Down,” the line that matters is the Tropic of Capricorn, a geographic feature with profound political consequences.

Above it, right across the continent, lay a zone of possibility and anxiety for southern colonists. Anxiety because they feared their claim to the land would be ceded to other colonial powers if they didn’t exploit it, and because they soon learned the land was already occupied by people who would fight for it. Possibility because those who ventured there sent back reports of economic potential, lush grasslands in the interior, a fertile coastal strip with reliable rainfall, pearls and bêche-de-mer (“sea cucumbers”) in the shallow seas, gold in the Palmer River. “Peopling the north became a generations-enduring obsession for policymakers in the south,” writes Reynolds.

Colonists from Port Jackson, Port Phillip, Port Adelaide, the Swan River and Moreton Bay wanted to develop the north but struggled to match their aspiration with people like them to do the work. Those who tried often found the best workers were already there or came from further north or east — Indigenous stockmen and women and crews for the pearling fleet, Pacific Islanders brought in to work on sugar plantations, Chinese miners, merchants, shopkeepers and market gardeners, Japanese and Filipino divers and crew. They provided the cheap labour British convicts had supplied for the economic development of the south. White workers didn’t much like the blistering, monsoonal, cyclonic north with its debilitating tropical diseases, and tended not to stay long. Many were “sojourners rather than settlers,” Reynolds says.

When the colonies federated, the more numerous politicians of the south, with “almost universal” support from electors throughout the new nation, insisted that a defining feature of Australia should be its whiteness. The federation would be British. Having never travelled north of Capricorn and seen the multicultural workforces and communities, they wanted Pacific Islanders sent home, Chinatowns demolished, non-white immigration ended. Over the first half of the twentieth century, they had their way.

Queensland no longer has as much difficulty getting people from the south. They don’t come just to holiday or retire in the sun but to work and live. When Adept Economics reported on Queensland’s decades-long record of net interstate immigration in January this year, it put the figure down to “lifestyle preferences, climate, employment opportunities, and relative affordability, particularly compared with Sydney and Melbourne.” Deputy Queensland premier Jarrod Bleijie recently said it was “an influx of people leaving the People’s Republic of Victoria,” individuals from the rest of Australia saying “we want to invest and we want to not only invest, we want to move our families up here and get a job and build a home in Queensland.”

The migration is not just from other states. New Zealanders who move to Australia are especially choosing Southeast Queensland. A third of Kiwis living in Australia are in Brisbane or on the Gold Coast, says Adept. But Australia’s broader population growth story is about more than Queensland: in 2024–25, Western Australia’s population grew faster than Queensland’s, and Victoria’s increased at the same rate. And population growth has costs. House and unit prices have grown faster in Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth in recent years than they have in Sydney and much faster than in Melbourne, jeopardising one of the factors that made the smaller capitals more attractive in the first place.

Australia has a geographic north and south but the boundaries of economy, society, culture and politics are harder to draw. The nation is dynamic, a network of exchanges, of movements across and within its borders.

Federal elections freeze Australia’s voting population every three years, locking electors into their residential addresses for the political stocktake. Once the numbers are counted and the government is determined, movements resume. Trends and counter-trends, the country and the city, North and South, fly-in fly-out, the season and the lay-off. The country is continually remade.

People like the poet and activist Judith Wright move south, from Tamborine Mountain to Braidwood and Canberra, “tired now, summers, of cutting you back to size.” Others head north, like the leftover Fitzroy Lions who merged with a team of Bears already on the Gold Coast: they all arrive in Melbourne as the Brisbane Lions these days, celebrating AFL premierships first at the Brunswick Street Oval before flying back to fans at their newish home ground in Springfield, near Ipswich.

Occasionally, someone or something returns home, like the literary journal Meanjin, established in Brisbane in 1940 and named for the finger of land where Brisbane’s central business district stands. A few years after its founding, it moved to the University of Melbourne, near Carlton. Last year, after eighty years, it went back, this time to the Queensland University of Technology on “Gardens Point.”

Even the university’s predecessor, the Queensland Institute of Technology, didn’t exist when Meanjin was founded. Vice-chancellor Margaret Sheil said the return “nods… to founding editor Clem Christensen’s naming of the journal to relate “culture… to place.”

Brisbane has got back what it had before, an old cultural institution in an unrecognisably changed place, an innovation from an era when the North was about to become Australia’s frontline. There’s a new publisher and a new “establishing editor.” There will be a new editorial advisory board and finally a new ongoing editor, someone who might move north, south, east or west, across the river, or who might not need to move at all. •

The post Geography of the Seventeenth Doll appeared first on Inside Story.

It’s as if Holland wants to avoid the conventions of the biopic as much as she can. Her portrait, co-written with Marek Epstein, is an accumulation of vignettes and fragments that envelope the viewer in a concentrated, dense, sometimes playful fashion. It deals with aspects of an individual life and elements that lie beyond it. It is not chaotic, exactly, but the pieces don’t always add up or fully cohere.

Holland, seventy-seven, a Polish director whose strong, varied body of work includes Europa, Europa, In Darkness, The Secret Garden and Green Border, went to film school in Prague, where the German-speaking Kafka was born and lived most of his life. She first read his work as a teenager, and in 1980 adapted his novella The Trial for television.

In her approach to Franz, Holland is still committed to the notion of character and performance. German actor Idan Weiss, who bears a striking resemblance to Kafka, embraces every aspect of his role: anxieties, idiosyncrasies, obsessions and philosophical speculations, as well as Kafka’s impulsive, light-hearted side. The relationship with his overbearing father (an impressive Peter Kurth) has a defining power from his earliest years.

Figures from Kafka’s life sometimes address the camera as if they were appearing in a documentary. They are not shown as conventional taking heads, but in the midst of activities of one kind or another. At times, their reflections serve a kind of narrative function; on other occasions they emphasise the contradictions inherent in trying to sum up a life.

Nor does Franz follow a strict chronology. Holland’s timeline extends well beyond her subject’s life: although Kafka died in a sanatorium in 1924, the film takes us into the future, sometimes only by a matter of years, sometimes directly into the contemporary world. We see Franz’s beloved sister, Ottla (Katharina Stark), wearing a yellow star as she discusses with her husband why it might be advisable to divorce. (She was to be murdered in Auschwitz in 1943.) We see Kafka’s close friend Max Brod (Sebastian Schwarz), encountering an SS guard on the train as he flees with his wife to Palestine carrying Kafka’s papers.

Holland plays with different possibilities when it comes to Kafka’s authorial afterlife and posthumous celebrity; there is a scene, for example, that imagines that Brod might have followed his friend’s wishes, and burned all his manuscripts. And her depictions of the Kafka-based tourist industry that flourishes in Prague have a heightened, often satirical tone, a mixture of the imagined and the real. A cafe offers Kafka Burgers; a kinetic sculpture of Kafka’s head, bigger than the Statue of Liberty’s, stands in a square. A Kafka museum is a stylised location. Theories are circulated: a tour guide claims him as a quintessential third millennium figure — a man who preferred to write to people rather than meet them in person. Another guide tells us the ratio of words written by Kafka to words written about Kafka is estimated to be around one to ten million.

A writer’s life and a writer’s work are different things, as Holland clearly acknowledges. There are scenes of Kafka reading aloud, but no attempts to capture surreal, nightmarish “Kafkaesque” moments, although — as Franz presents his short story “In the Penal Colony” to a stunned audience — Holland introduces a slightly disconcerting, visceral recreation of the hideous torture machine Kafka has imagined. It is a rare literal moment in a film that is generally elusive and allusive, alive to the impossibility and undesirability of locking down and defining a subject, especially one this complex.

Isabelle Huppert plays the title character in Thierry Klifa’s The Richest Woman in the World, a tale of affluence and influence closely based on a real-life scandal that rocked France from 2010 onwards.

In this fictionalised version Huppert is Marianne Farrère, who rules her billion-dollar cosmetics empire with an iron hand and exercises the same control at home. When she poses for a magazine shoot with photographer Pierre-Alain Fantin (Laurent Lafitte), everything changes: her life is turned upside down and her authority redefined. Before long Fantin takes charge of almost every aspect of her existence, reorganising her decor, her clothes, her social life, her holidays, her spending habits. Everything seems to be on the table. Frédérique (Marina Foïs), Marianne’s daughter, tries to fight his influence, but he’s a formidable opponent.

In many of its details this resembles the real-life story of Liliane Bettencourt, who presided over the L’Oréal conglomerate founded by her father. A power struggle within the family led to a scandal that included revelations of wartime collaboration, allegations of political bribes and favours, financial impropriety and elder abuse.

Klifa, also a co-writer, steers clear of the political dimensions, focusing mainly on the relationship between Marianne and Pierre-Alain. The performances are a study in contrasts. Huppert has an extraordinary less-is-more gift, a way of suggesting inner life with the smallest of details: a slight movement of the head, a sidewise look, the fluttering of eyelids. She can also be a commanding presence. Her Marianne has been sustained by the certainty that comes from knowing that wherever she is, everyone in the room must defer to her. She answers to no one. But in Pierre-Alain she has met her match.

While Huppert works with tight restraint, Lafite goes over the top. He’s a versatile actor accustomed to playing villains, and he gives Pierre-Alain a snarky, insouciant, gleefully provocative edge. He likes to humiliate others, to throw his weight around, to shock when he knows it’s safe to do so.

His relationship with Marianne is not sexual — he makes it clear he is gay and has a younger lover. He is more like a co-conspirator inviting her to share in his adventures. It’s as if the brash, bullying, wayward Pierre-Alain gives the tightly wound Marianne permission to indulge herself in ways she never dreamt of.

At the same time, he assumes her position of power. She allows him to order her around, to make decisions for her. She rewards him compulsively in the only way she knows how: by showering him with money and gifts. Over time, she becomes more vulnerable, a little vague, and he amps up his demands; finally, Frédérique decides that enough is enough, and she is willing to risk the publicity that is bound to follow.

In the end, however, there’s something cautious at the heart of this film, a lack of ambition. No matter how strong the performances, there is a limit to what the actors are able to achieve in a work that dilutes the strength of the material and its possibilities.

David Lowery’s heavyweight pop confection Mother Mary is not a biopic or a ripped-from-the-headlines drama, but it does revolve around a central figure who suggests a number of real-life inspirations.

Anne Hathaway plays the title character, a pop megastar who goes by the name of Mother Mary (no other name is mentioned). Her signature look involves a halo that appears in various forms in every costume iteration. She comes across as a kind of a diva soup: a little bit of Lady Gaga with a touch of Madonna and a sprinkling of Taylor Swift. Hathaway does her own singing, with new material courtesy of Charli XCX and FKA Twigs.

The performance footage of these songs is skilfully handled: Lowery has the resources to conjure up the look of a stadium show. But Mother Mary is essentially a chamber piece, a claustrophobic drama about the intense relationship between Mary and her onetime costume designer, Sam (Michaela Coel) re-ignited after a long estrangement.

The film opens with a bedraggled Mary finding her way to Sam’s home and studio workplace, ostensibly in search of a new dress for her imminent comeback performance. But it gradually emerges that she wants more than this.

Coel is masterful as the composed Sam, whose response is simultaneously guarded and ruthless. She coolly interrogates the seemingly penitent Mary about what she wants, and about their shared history, in scenes that are long on dialogue but short on detail. Coel carries them with the force of her delivery, which has both a forensic precision and an incantatory, mesmerising charge.

These scenes start to drag, however. Buried secrets threaten to resurface, but the mystery of Mother Mary concerns not so much the characters or their past, or whatever Faustian pact might exist in their shared narrative: in the end, it’s more a case of “What kind of film is this?”  Halfway through it flips, taking a supernatural turn that feels almost arbitrary, a lurid conjuring trick that might be intended to haunt but barely lingers. •

The post Life lines appeared first on Inside Story.

Historically, the concept is associated first with German and then with British and American strategic thinkers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. More recently University of Melbourne political scientist Michael Wesley recast it as “not an ideology or a theory but a cast of mind” that “challenges governments to think spatially about threats and opportunities: how their territories, topographies, waterways and seascapes make them either vulnerable or powerful.” As an analytical approach it informs choices about the use of (always scarce) resources to “limit the weaknesses and exploit the advantages conferred by geography.”

Geopolitical thinking inevitably deploys terms linking geography (North and South, East and West, Europe and Asia, the Americas, the Pacific) with political, social and cultural features. The emerging amalgams link geography, power and history in terms as familiar as they are ill-defined: “the West,” “Europe,” “the Global South,” “Eurasia.”

Here, I want to explore two of these concepts — “Eurasia” and “the West” — through two recent books: Brands’s The Eurasian Century, from which I’ve already quoted, and Georgios Varouxakis’s intellectual history of The West. I am particularly interested in whether these two books, written mainly for audiences in Europe and North America, make sense for Australia: a country located in the southern hemisphere and east of the Americas but usually seen as part of the “West” rather than the “Global South.” Do they offer useful insights for democratic middle-power strategy in the Asia-Pacific?

The history of “the West”

The West and The Eurasian Century are very different books. Varouxakis is an intellectual historian and his nearly 500-page book is a close reading of a dizzying array of sources and their interrelations. He rejects the notion that “the West” emerged as a concept after the second world war — when the United States sought a historical justification for its hegemony by constructing a line “from Plato to NATO” — but also takes issue with those scholars who argue the concept gestated as a corollary to high imperialism in the 1880s and 1890s.

Instead, Varouxakis shows that “the West” developed much earlier in the nineteenth century as an alternative to the term “Europe.” The distinction was a reaction to the Russian empire’s rise as a major European power: “It was as opposed to Russia, primarily, that ‘the West’ emerged and gained a meaning.”

The major theorist was the French philosopher Auguste Compte (1798–1857), who dreamt of a “Western Republic” as the avant garde of humanity. Having abolished all empires and replaced them with peaceful federation, it would be joined voluntarily by other parts of the world convinced of the superiority of “Western civilisation.” Its centre would be France and its capital, “naturellement,” would be Paris. Over the course of seven centuries, Compte believed, all of humanity would freely become part of the West and the West would thus wither away. The capital of the free republic would then move to Constantinople.

As the logical extension of this “supranational cultural identity… based on civilisational commonality and shared historical antecedents,” the West included the European colonial powers’ settler colonies. After 1871 the Russian empire’s “otherness” was allied with Prussia-dominated Germany, further entrenching the West’s Francocentrism.

While German and Russian thinkers were puzzling over whether they were part of this sociopolitical space (and whether that would be a good thing), Compte’s disciples had spread the concept to Britain. The United States was more resistant, as the young republic defined itself both against the moral and political corruption of “Europe” and its violent embrace of its own “West” — wild as it might be, but also central to the self-understanding of the American settlers. There, exceptionality was the dominant intellectual stream.

The first world war began to change this state of affairs. The journalist Walter Lippmann (1889–1974) was at the forefront of those who argued the United States needed to overcome isolationism and join “the West” because it was part of “the Atlantic community,” another product of Lippmann’s word-smithery (the “cold war” and “stereotype” are attributed to him too). Terms like these would help make American intervention in a European war thinkable.

As American troops were being shipped to Europe in 1917, American universities began to teach what would become that staple of US higher education: the “history of Western civilisation.” As one of the most influential textbook authors in that tradition, William McNeill (1917–2016), later put it, “Western Civ was designed to teach soldiers what it was they would be fighting for in Flanders Fields.” American exceptionalism thus transmogrified into a new manifest destiny: to lead the West (though initially against the Teutonic rather than the Russian barbarians, who had exited the war with the Russian revolution).

In the interwar years, then, Germans celebrated The Decline of the West (Oswald Spengler’s multi-volume work, 1918–23), British thinkers developed large-scale theories of the histories of civilisations, and many others tried to grapple with exactly what the new world order might be in the aftermath of the most destructive war since Napoleon’s campaigns of conquest and the American civil war. Bolshevik Russia transformed from a revolutionary republic into a severe, brutally modernist dictatorship, its grim totalitarianism enhancing “the established perception of Russia as alien and non-Western.”

This long-term attitude towards the Russians was interrupted by Hitler. At first, his alliance with Stalin in 1939 seemed to confirm a world divided between a liberal-democratic West and a totalitarian East. But his turn against Stalin in the summer of 1941 brought together the world’s greatest capitalist economy, the world’s largest empire, and the anti-capitalist, anti-imperial, revolutionary Soviet Union in a temporary Grand Alliance. For a moment, the Soviets joined the free world and expanded “the West” all the way to the Urals. Meanwhile, talk of “Western civilization” and the “Atlantic community” swirled around the heads of those daydreaming, in Britain and the United States, about how the aftermath of war would be ordered.

As the postwar order solidified into a confrontation between the United States and the enlarged, victorious Soviet Union, the terms were thus available to quickly conceptualise it as a conflict “between East and West.” Germans, once part of the “Eastern” opposite of Western civilisation, now quickly became “Westerners” — or at least those of them who had ended up under US, French or British occupation. Westorientierung, an “orientation towards the West,” became the watchword of the Federal Republic of Germany (“West Germany”) while the increasingly fortified borders with the German Democratic Republic (“East Germany”) now marked the frontier of Western civilisation.

Central Europeans, meanwhile, stuck on the other side of that line, complained that their countries had been “kidnapped” from a West they were a hereditary part of.

All this set the scene for the enthusiastic embrace of NATO and the European Union once the Soviet empire imploded in 1989–91. Today, there is much talk about whether the term “Eastern Europe” is a permissible categorisation for these Westerners. If you ask your trusted AI companion if Poland is part of the West, for example, you receive the paradoxical answer that “Poland is generally considered part of ‘the West’…, despite its geographic location in Central Europe.”

The problem with “the West”

As Varouxakis’s book demonstrates, then, nobody really knows where the West begins and where it ends. Is Japan part of it? Here, AI is more categorical: no, it is not, says that statistical aggregator of received wisdom. Why? Because “it is located in East Asia.” Evidently, geography matters more for categorising Japanese than Poles.

But Japanese intellectuals frequently disagree with such robo-wisdom. Like Russia or Germany, Japan has long struggled to find a place in a world where being part of the West comes with considerable prestige and claims to civilisational standing. If what the term refers to is the part of the globe that is democratically governed, economically prosperous and committed to the rule of both domestic and international law, then post-1945 Japan is self-evidently part of this “confederation of like-minded polities.”

But Japan’s inclusion in this civilisation is always tenuous, as Varouxakis points out: “Japan came to be considered a member of ‘the West’ during the cold war; but then it found itself… regarded as the main (economic) threat to ‘the West’ immediately after the collapse of the Communist bloc in the late 1980s.” And a little later, in political scientist Samuel Huntington’s 1996 map, it became the one country that formed a civilisation of its own: neither East nor West, but “Japanese.”

If the United States stops behaving like a member of the West — as it has been doing under Donald Trump — that would do more than just exclude it from this like-minded grouping of countries. It would threaten the edifice as a whole, with analysts declaring that “the ‘West’ cannot conceptually exist” when the United States “appears hostile to liberal democratic values under the rule of law.”

Confusing? The muddle stems from marrying a geographical concept (European countries to the West of either Germany or Russia, plus their settler-colonial outposts) with a set of political, economic and ideological commitments. Given that the latter were, and are, neither universal in Western Europe and its settler colonies nor absent from other places, the term is of little analytical value.

Indeed, its inherent Eurocentrism is a hindrance in a world where democratic middle powers need allies from a huge variety of cultural and geographic backgrounds. Thus, it is best discarded as a remnant of earlier geopolitical era — consigned to history, if you will. That is not Varouxakis’s conclusion, but it is one possible reading of the evidence in his book.

The borders of “Eurasia”

At first glance, “Eurasia” seems to refer to a more clearly defined geographical space: the Euro-Asian landmass. Upon closer inspection, of course, doubts creep in. Here is how Brands defines it in The Eurasian Century:

Eurasia consists of the combined expanse of those two Old World continents of the Northern Hemisphere, Europe and Asia. It includes the outlying islands of those continents, which are closely connected to them by Eurasia’s marginal seas, as well as north Africa, which is as thoroughly linked to Europe by the Mediterranean as it is blocked form the rest of Africa by the Sahara. Eurasia thus runs from littoral Asia in the east to the Iberian Peninsula and the British Isles in the west, from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Indian Ocean in the south.

Comprising steppes, mountains, plains, deserts, jungles, and nearly every other topography, Eurasia accounts for more than one-third of the land on Earth. It possesses some 70 per cent of the world’s population as well as the bulk of its industrial might and military potential… In short, Eurasia represents a prize without equal; it is the strategic centre of the world.

This is a quite different “Eurasia” from the one scholars of the post-Soviet region imagine. The term became ubiquitous after 1991 as “a convenient way of referring to what had been Soviet territory.” When the implosion of the Soviet empire in 1989–91 showed the old equation of the Soviet Union with “Russia” had been fundamentally flawed, Russian studies departments rebranded as “Eurasian studies.”

The American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies became the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, the Slavic Research Center at Hokkaido University became the Slavic-Eurasian Research Center, or SERC, and scholarly journals started to feature “Eurasia” more and more often in their titles. In most cases, the change didn’t penetrate much beyond the surface: what was taught and researched remained deeply Russo-centric. SERC was a remarkable exception. Located to the south east of Russia, the Japanese scholars could build on a long tradition of paying attention to the Asian part of the Russo-Soviet empire rather than to its European core alone.

In Russia, meanwhile, “Eurasianism” (евразийство) made a comeback. This 1920s émigré philosophy had portrayed Russia as a sui generis civilisation located not in Europe or Asia (as in the older debate between Westernisers and Slavophiles) but thoroughly rooted in the broader region of Eurasia. Russia was thus destined to be a territorial super-state and the saviour of the rest of the world. The most prominent post-Soviet apostle of this reinvigorated ideology was the fascist philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, author of The Foundations of Geopolitics (1997).

This appropriation of “Eurasia” by Russian neo-imperialists, including (occasionally) Russian president Vladimir Putin, prompted former subjects of the Soviet empire and victims of Russia’s contemporary aggression to condemn the term. In one memorable essay, a historian of Ukraine denounced “Eurasia” as the functional equivalent of “Lebensraum,” a central term in the German, including Nazi, school of geopolitics.

Geopolitical nightmares and realities

A historian of US foreign policy, Brands is blissfully ignorant of such polemics among post-Soviet scholars. He comes to “Eurasia” from the Anglo-American geopolitical tradition. Its founding fathers were Halford Mackinder (1861–1947), the inventor of “heartland theory,” and Nicholas Spykman (1893–1943) with his “rimland theory.” Its central concern is that a single power might come to control the “world island” of Eurasia, and with it the world. The twentieth century’s two contenders were Germany and the Soviet Union. Today, the threat allegedly emanates from China, possibly in an axis with Russia and Iran.

Spykman’s rendition of Mackinder’s “world island.”

The problem with this theory is twofold. For one, Brands’s expansive definition means the region encompasses nearly everything in the northern hemisphere except the Americas and sub-Saharan Africa. If that is so, the theory’s major thesis — who controls Eurasia controls the world — is circular: any one power dominating 70 per cent of the world’s population or well over a third of the world’s land area would, ipso facto, control a vast segment of the globe’s resources.

This leads to the second problem: at no point in history has any one power dominated this widely defined “Eurasia.” A contender would have to cover some fifty-five million square kilometres, or 37 per cent of the world’s land area. The three who have come closest — the Mongols, the Germans and the Soviets — were off by a large margin.

At its peak, the Mongol empire (the largest land empire in history) covered maybe twenty-four million square kilometres, or 16 per cent of the world. It did take in much, but not all, of Asia and subjugated the lands of the Rus and other parts of Eastern Europe, but it never took Vienna, let alone lands further to the west. The British Empire — a maritime, non-Eurasian affair — was considerably larger, covering nearly a quarter of the world.

Even at its largest expanse, the Third Reich was considerably smaller. It claimed only 3.3 million square kilometres, or 2 per cent of the world, taking in much of Western and central Europe as well as the Baltic states and Norway in the northeast and Ukraine and Belarus in the east. But it only ever held a small section of European Russia, and none of the vast expanse of Siberia, Central Asia and the South Caucasus.

The Soviet Union was based further to the east and covered larger sections of the Eurasia’s Asian part. The historical successor of the quite successful Russian empire, it managed to add an outer rim of satellites to the west after 1945, but at no point penetrated further into Europe or effectively controlled China or even North Korea. At its greatest extent, it covered some 22.4 million square kilometres, or about 15 per cent of the world’s land area. Adding the satellite states in Eastern Europe brings that number up a little to 23.4 million (nearly 16 per cent), similar to the Mongol empire but more to the north and west than its historically closest rival in the contest of Eurasian supremacy.

That proved a lot of territory, people, and resources for the Soviets to swallow, even with twentieth-century technology. Having indeed bitten off more than they could chew in 1945, they spat out areas they had occupied in the Asian “heartland” without trying to digest: they discarded Manchuria in 1945–46 and the northern part of Korea in 1948. In the “rimlands,” they abandoned northern Iran in 1946; in Europe, they let go their Austrian zone in 1955.

Might it be that both the dreams of German Nazis and Russian “Eurasianists” — not to mention the nightmares of Mackinder and Spykman — were always unrealistic? Is it possible to rule a region as enormous, diverse, and geographically as well as climatically challenging as “Eurasia”?

The thought that it might not be possible has crossed Brands’s mind. At the very end of his book he writes that the “history of the modern era might make one think Eurasian gambits are doomed to fail — that seeking hegemony is tantamount to committing strategic suicide. After all, from Mackinder onward, every Eurasian challenger was defeated, because every challenger provoked a pack of enemies that killed its prey.” But he dismisses such obvious conclusions as “pleasing” but “profoundly dangerous.”  “Each fight for Eurasia could have gone differently,” he writes. And it was the United States that saved the day.

The second world war exemplar

Did it? Let’s take the second world war as an example. Here, Brands over-emphasises contingency in order to heighten the role of the United States. The Battle of Britain was won much less “narrowly” than he claims. German bombing caused significant damage but did not bring Britain to the brink of surrender. Germany had no amphibious invasion force able to overcome Britain’s moat, the English Channel, and then “fight on the beaches,” in Churchill’s memorable phrase.

As the leading historian of Britain’s war machine, David Edgerton, has pointed out, Britain sat at the centre of a global, seaborne economy that included the Empire and much besides. German submarine warfare never effectively interrupted the globalised network supporting Britain’s war effort. The island nation was “never alone.”

Nor was it helpless or unarmed. In the 1930s, it had been the world’s leading arms exporter. As Edgerton concluded, when Britain went to war in September 1939 it was “well-armed, united and confident of victory. It was under no immediate threat.” The bombing campaign of the Battle of Britain was “considerably less intensive, and less deadly,” than war planners had predicted.

As far as rescue by the United States is concerned, Edgerton was unequivocal: “The aggressive, defiant and powerful British Empire of 1940–41 had not been saved by the USA but rather had been spectacularly overtaken by it, not in 1940 but in 1942, in the wake of defeat in the East [that is, the fall of Singapore].”

Unable to defeat Britain, Hitler went to war against the Soviet Union, which he hoped to knock out quickly in order to appropriate its significant resources to continue the fight. This was indeed a “Eurasian” strategy: the goal was to make the Europe–Asia landmass the basis of a German bid for world power. According to Brands, it might well have succeeded: Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union “almost worked.” That is a highly misleading interpretation, though, and his claim that “only winter and a thrown-together defence of Moscow saved Stalin’s regime” ignores the mainstream of professional historiography on this war.

War, of course, is always unpredictable. But waging war in “Eurasia” is extremely difficult, as Putin’s forces are learning the hard way. The road to Moscow was always long and winter comes every year in “Eurasia.” Moreover, the Soviet Union outmanned, out-gunned, and out-tanked the Germans from the start of the war; the Red Army fought an aggressive retreat, which cost the Germans much blood, treasure and time; the German army was largely horse-drawn; and throughout the war the Soviets outproduced their enemy in all classes of weaponry. The margin for German victory was extremely narrow.

Brands instead focuses on the role of American aid (“lend-lease”). Like many American historians he overestimates its significance, going as far as claiming “the United States delivered a quarter of the vehicles and much of the gas that helped Stalin’s forces defend Moscow in December 1941.”

As the standard operational history of this war points out, “Lend-Lease aid did not arrive in sufficient quantities to make the difference between defeat and victory in 1941–1942.” The vast majority of new tanks the Soviets received in late 1941 were British, not American, and while these foreign tanks did “play a role in both the defensive and offensive fighting near Moscow” (as a major archival study demonstrates) this assistance was “far from decisive.”

Hitler’s gamble of 1941 was not truly Eurasian either: it ignored the Far East of the Soviet Union as well as China. “Had Japan and Germany teamed up against the Soviet Union in 1941,” Brands writes, “the democracies might have faced a consolidated Eurasia.” But Germany and Japan did not team up, because they could not. Japan had fought, and lost, an undeclared border war with the Soviets in 1938–39, and that led the government to confront the United States instead (a fateful decision, as it turned out).

Even if a different decision had been made in Tokyo, Japan didn’t have troops available to attack the Soviets. Much of its land force had been bogged down in China since 1937. Well before the US Navy began to draw away Tokyo’s attention and resources, Stalin’s support for China’s desperate war of survival helped keep the country in the war and hence the Soviet Union’s back free from Japanese attack.

Eurasia — large and diverse as it was — could not easily be conquered, however well-armed, modernised and aggressive the attacker. Japan’s aggression, moreover, was not built on a Eurasian base but on a maritime empire surrounding the waters of the Sea of Japan, the Yellow Sea and the East China Sea. Once it was decided not to attack the Soviets, this regional empire expanded into southeast Asia as well.

Discarding the terms of an earlier era

Thus, the second world war was not a Eurasian war in any meaningful way. It was a global war, with nodes in Asia, Europe, Africa and the Pacific. In Europe, its centre of gravity was not a war between a Eurasian land power and a non-Eurasian maritime power, but a struggle between the German and Soviet land empires. Britain and the US did play a role, but it was secondary.

In the Pacific, meanwhile, it was a confrontation between two maritime powers, Japan the United States, the latter supported by Britain. None of this fits neatly into any “Eurasian” theory.

But historical accuracy is perhaps beside the point here. In its major thrust, Brands’s book is an attempt to jolt US foreign policymakers into re-embracing the idea of their country as a liberal world hegemon. To this end, Brands mobilises the old nightmare of a Eurasia dominated by a Sino-Russian axis of authoritarians. That might well be a worthy cause to fight from Baltimore or Washington, but for analysts and policymakers outside the United States this book’s “lessons of the past” are misleading: we can’t wait for the Americans to come to their senses on the assumption that history teaches us we are otherwise doomed. Instead, we need to urgently figure out how to live without them.

As we do so, we need to look at the present rather than the past. At stake today is not dominance over “Eurasia.” China is not trying to dominate that “world island” but is instead focused on East and Southeast Asia, with the South China Sea and the straight of Taiwan as centres of gravity. The alliance with Russia is of mutual benefit because it keeps both countries’ backs free: for Russia to wage war in Europe, for China to entrench itself in Asia.

The real threat is China’s growing naval power, not some combined Sino-Russian march on Warsaw, Berlin and Paris. If it takes over Taiwan, as many fear it will, its ability to project power across the Pacific will open up. That would be a problem for the United States, but it would be a fundamentally un-Eurasian challenge.

From Australia’s perspective, meanwhile, the issue is China’s attempt to build a sphere of influence in Southeast Asia, not its hypothetical potential as a “Eurasian” superpower. In both these quests China stands much more in the tradition of imperial Japan (“Asia for Asians!”) than of any of the land-powers who tried, unsuccessfully, to control Eurasia.

In building alliances to counter these threats, we need to overcome both dreams and nightmares from the cold war. The fear of a “Eurasian” superpower is one of these nightmares. And the desire for something called “the West” to serve as a counter-weight is one of these dreams.

Today, the geography of democracy is global rather than regional.  Democracies still make up about half of the world’s countries and can be found in Asia, the Pacific, Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Nor are potential allies for democratic middle powers like Australia exclusively to be found in the democratic world. Many non-democratic nations share similar geopolitical interests, not least a preference for a stable international environment not dominated by a small set of uncontrollable great powers. But the geopolitical terms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are of little help in this quest, and are best discarded. •

The West: The History of an Idea
By Georgios Varouxakis | Princeton University Press | $69.99 | 512 pages

The Eurasian Century
By Hal Brands | W.W. Norton | $49.99 | 320 pages

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The Australian government announced it would allow public universities to enrol fee-paying international students back in 1986. This decision, enacted from 1990, built on strong foundations. Australia’s participation in the Colombo Plan had earned goodwill and a reputation for offering high-quality English-language education. Thousands of students from developing countries had studied in Australia from the 1950s, with many of them later enrolling their children in Australian schools so they, too, could study on an Australian campus.

The decision to open courses to fee-paying international students was a small component of a policy package that ended free university education for Australian students and introduced HECS, all with the professed aim of expanding access. Numbers from abroad were expected to be modest, and the minister’s staff debated whether international income should stay with the institutions or be returned to Canberra.

Yet something important had stirred. Australia’s public universities quietly but effectively built a new industry. The pieces were assembled at speed — expanded courses and facilities to cater for student demand, international agents to recruit students, new student housing to provide accommodation and, in some cases, offshore campuses for students not able to move to Australia.

The timing was fortuitous. Suddenly Australian universities — close to Asia and in proximate time zones — could offer degrees to a huge, rapidly developing region, particularly China with its profound need for tertiary level skills but as-yet insufficient domestic supply. The circumstances were right for a happy accident — an opening up at just the right historic moment. Like like Australian mining companies, universities were soon growing at the pace of the Chinese economy.

From a handful of international students in the early 1990s more than 550,000 enrolled in January this year. Estimates of the return to the Australian economy vary, but hover around $50 billion annually, roughly the national cost of the NDIS. In many towns and cities universities are among the largest employers, attracting industry, private accommodation and precinct investment. Tourists visit to see children, siblings or friends studying in Australia. Some graduates stay on for a year or two after study concludes, and around 25 per cent apply for permanent residency to become citizens.

International education has always attracted — and retains — many critics. International students have been blamed for housing shortages, despite the boom in specialist student accommodation. Coded messages hint at too many foreign faces on campus or, recently, demand an end to group assignments that require working across cultural boundaries.

Much disquiet plays into general community concern about migration, but some is specific to universities. The view that the educational experience has deteriorated is not necessarily shared by students, though: despite larger classes and higher costs, overall satisfaction rates with the university experience remain around 78 per cent across the nation, the long-run average.

Undoubtedly international students have changed the campus experience. As the late Emma Johnston commented when launching the University of Melbourne’s international strategy:

[A]ll our staff and students bring diverse perspectives to university life and society. Our international students are individuals and valued members of our university community. They are learners, researchers, friends, colleagues and our future alumni. We will continue to promote and celebrate staff and student diversity precisely because it enhances our education, research, engagement, and contributions to the public good.

International education has proved a major contributor to new teaching facilities across the nation. Through internal cross-subsidies international income supports expensive research infrastructure. It has made possible Australia’s stellar international standing, with multiple universities ranked in the global top 100, a per capita performance matched by few other nations.

Yet a happy choice can have unhappy effects. As income from international students rose, governments slowed increases in public funding. Under the Coalition’s Dan Tehan the portion of student funding nominally allocated for research stopped and investment in courses such as arts and business fell sharply. Universities were expected to make up the difference from international revenue.

Which brings us to a nervous present. Australia’s public universities depend on international students; the parents of Shanghai subsidise not only their own children but those of Australian families. Federal governments too have grown to depend on the income; alongside higher domestic fees for many degrees, international student income has allowed Canberra to fund an expanded national system without the public investment otherwise required.

What happens if international students stop showing up in their accustomed numbers?  Location and first-mover advantage helped Australia in the short term, but the flow is slowing.

Since 1990 China has created its own impressive university system. Chinese investment in scientific and technical research now tops the United States, and Chinese researchers have reached parity with their American counterparts as authors of the top 1 per cent cited academic papers. As that nation reaches out, globally mobile students who might have chosen Australia now opt for a Chinese university. And China isn’t the only country in the region to have invested heavily in their tertiary sector.

For Asian students still looking for an overseas English-language education, numerous options now exist closer to home, from international campuses in South Korea to highly ranked universities in Singapore and elsewhere, all of them actively recruiting.

European universities have joined in with enthusiasm. As SciencesPo proudly advertises, a student can now study at undergraduate or masters level in Paris in English with “no need to speak French.”

In this global market, Australia has lost some of its shine. Applications from China fell around 25 per cent this year alone, following smaller but steady declines in previous years. Overall, the number of Chinese students seeking a place at an Australian public university has nearly halved since 2019.

Those changing opportunities within China, the strong Australian exchange rate, higher living costs and an abundance of choice are not the only factors. Influential too is the decision by the Australian government to cap the number of international students and discourage applications by charging the highest (and non-refundable) visa application charges in the world.

Responding to public disquiet about migration, both government and opposition risk treating international education as a problem to be managed rather than a remarkable Australian success story.

Universities meanwhile have long recognised the hazard of relying too heavily on one source of students. Some 17 per cent of the international student cohort, or around 92,000 students, are now drawn from India, not far behind the 23 per cent recruited from China. Universities have paid close attention to other markets, including Indonesia, Nepal and Vietnam, but these have expanded more slowly, and none has the unique scale and circumstances of China in recent decades. One leading indicator — enrolments in ELICOS English-language courses ahead of applying for study in Australia — fell 32 per cent last year.

Australia has probably passed peak international education. If the recent fall in applications continues, a sector that has enjoyed decades of significant growth must contract. The impact will be felt across the sector and, fairly swiftly, in the national economy.

The effects may be more far-reaching, touching on Australia’s place in the world. Sir Steve Smith, the UK’s International Education Champion, recently noted that international education is the primary vehicle for building enduring trust and comity between countries. Australia has reaped diplomatic and strategic benefits from educating Asia’s best and brightest for more than seventy years. These graduates have been pivotal in creating stable, prosperous societies in our region well-disposed towards Australia. Though such goodwill won’t end with falling international numbers, Australia could surrender a powerful avenue for soft power.

The biggest question is how governments will react should domestic higher education be required to pay significantly more of its own way. The federal government is already reluctant to repeal the Coalition’s Jobs Ready Graduates legislation because of the cost — around $1.9 billion annually according to work by the Innovative Research Universities group. With around 1.08 million domestic students enrolled in Australian universities, the cost of maintaining current class sizes, student facilities, research teams and capital expenditure without the contribution of international students would be formidable.

At a minimum governments may require more domestic students to pay up to 90 per cent of their own degree costs, a regime already applied to some graduates by Jobs Ready Graduates. Contraction means less capacity to tackle disadvantage, and fewer of the professionals urgently needed in health and other key sectors.

Are political parties, students and parents ready for the cost of a tertiary system more dependent on our own resources? Will the promises to make further education available to an even wider cohort survive an ugly encounter with fiscal reality? Now, before we hit a crisis, is the time for a candid discussion about how this nation supports its public universities. •

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Chalmers’s centrepiece tax reforms are of course nowhere near as comprehensive as those introduced by Bob Hawke and Paul Keating in the mid-1980s or by John Howard and Peter Costello in 2000, and they don’t involve as many dollars as Scott Morrison’s three-stage tax reforms of the late 2010s and early 2020s. But they represent the most adventurous set of tax reforms seen so far this century.

For all that, there were almost no surprises in the treasurer’s speech last night. To a greater extent than in any recent budget, almost all of the “announceables” had been leaked — intentionally or otherwise — in the preceding weeks. That’s given both supporters and opponents plenty of time to construct and hone their arguments for or against the major measures.

Needless to say, the most attention-grabbing elements — and rightly so — were the changes to income tax. As widely foreshadowed, the government will prevent purchasers of established residential properties from offsetting net losses on their investment against other income after 1 July next year. This “negative gearing” will be retained, however, for purchases of new dwellings (and for shares and other assets), and existing property investments will be grandfathered.

Capital gains accruing after 1 July next year will no longer be taxed at half the applicable marginal rate (as has been the case since 1999) but instead subjected to the full marginal rate less an allowance for the impact of CPI-measured inflation on the cost base of the asset (the system that applied between 1985 and 1999). This change will apply to existing investments, including those acquired before the capital gains tax was first introduced in 1985, though only to capital gains accruing from July 2027. But investors in new residential properties will still be able to access the 50 per cent discount on nominal gains if they prefer.

Capital gains will also be subject to a minimum tax rate of 30 per cent to prevent investors from reducing their tax by crystallising gains in years when their marginal rate would otherwise be less than that figure.

The government says these measures will improve the prospects of younger Australians seeking to own their own home — a goal that has become significantly more difficult over the past thirty years as prices have increased at multiples of the growth rate of incomes.

Treasury modelling suggests these measures will slow the rate of house price increases by around two percentage points a year and enable around 75,000 more Australians to buy their own home over the next decade. But it also suggests the slower rate of increase in house prices will result in 35,000 fewer homes being built than would otherwise be the case — although it asserts that this will be more than offset by the budget’s additional funding for infrastructure in new housing estates.

The opposition will no doubt seize on this latter element of Treasury’s modelling to support its assertion that “if you tax something more you will get less of it.” In one sense they’re right — the budget measures do represent an increase in the tax on (prospective) investors in existing residential property. But getting less of that would actually be a good thing. That’s because investments in established properties (which account for over 80 per cent of the money lent to property investors) do nothing to increase the supply of housing. All they do is add to upward pressure on housing prices and on the demand for rental housing (by out-bidding would-be home buyers).

Although it’s not guaranteed, there’s a reasonable chance that restricting tax breaks for investors in established housing while retaining them for investors in new housing will encourage new builds, which would also be a good thing. And I’m not persuaded that the prospect of slower price rises will dampen the demand from owner-occupiers — who account for almost 60 per cent of lending for new builds — in the way Treasury seems to assume.

So although the budget’s tax changes won’t solve Australia’s housing crisis on their own, over time they will make a meaningful contribution towards solving it.

Combined with the proposed 30 per cent minimum tax to be imposed on distributions from discretionary trusts, the tax changes also have an inter-generational dimension. According to the latest available statistics from the Australian Taxation Office, only 4.4 per cent of taxpayers under thirty-five report capital gains, compared with 8.6 per cent of fifty-five to sixty-fives and 14.3 per cent of those aged sixty-five or over. That latter group — the sixty-fives and over — accounts for 62 per cent of all capital gains, compared with only 4.2 per cent for the under thirty-fives.

In fact, just 3 per cent of taxpayers aged under thirty-five are negatively geared property investors, compared with 10 per cent of those aged between forty-five and sixty-four, who account for almost half of all reported net rental losses. And almost 19 per cent of taxpayers in the top tax bracket are negatively geared property investors, compared with just over 6 per cent of those who are not in the top tax bracket.

The budget also introduces two small tax breaks directed at people earning wages and salaries: the working Australians tax offset and the $1000 instant tax deduction (in lieu of documented claims for work-related expenses). In no way do these represent a substitute for the indexation of the tax thresholds, which many observers have called for, although the first of these measures is likely to be the primary vehicle for delivering future income tax cuts. But they do represent an attempt to narrow the differences between the way income from labour and capital are taxed.

The government may well pay a political price for breaking its promise not to make changes to negative gearing or the capital gains tax. But if it can convincingly articulate the strong arguments for these changes — as they did when they re-jigged the Morrison government’s “stage three” tax cuts despite having promised to “deliver them in full” — then that price may turn out to be both small and ephemeral.

If this turns out to be the case, then I’d like to think the government will feel emboldened to break another promise it should never have made — to keep giving Western Australia up to $7 billion a year of GST revenue more than its government needs to provide its population with the national average level of public services while levying the average level of state taxes. That’s something a government professing a commitment to equity and responsible fiscal management shouldn’t be doing. •

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Britain doesn’t have American-style mid-term elections, of course: last week’s voting was for the Scottish and Welsh parliaments and local authorities in England. But Labour’s extraordinary rout has seismic implications for national politics. If the results were replicated in a general election, Britain’s next prime minister would almost certainly be Nigel Farage, leader of the far-right populist party Reform UK, chief architect of the Brexit referendum and figurehead of the anti–European Union “Leave” campaign.

Projected nationally, Reform’s 26 per cent vote last week would see it comfortably ahead of the newly populist and leftist Greens, who finished in second place on 18 per cent. Labour would limp in joint third with the Conservatives on just 17 per cent, with the centrist Liberal Democrats on 16 per cent.

Britain doesn’t need to hold a general election till June 2029, so none of that is imminent. But it already marks an extraordinary turn in British politics. Less than a decade ago, in the general election of 2017, the country’s two major political parties, Labour and the Conservatives, won 82 per cent of the popular vote between them, with the Liberal Democrats on 7 per cent. The remainder was shared mainly between the Scottish and Welsh Nationalists and the separate Northern Ireland parties. The Greens won just 1.6 per cent (and one seat). Reform’s predecessor, the UK Independence Party, won 1.3 per cent, and no seats.

Now Britain has entered the uncharted waters of seven-party politics. Not only that: the most popular two parties are on the far right and the left, and neither has any experience of government. The Conservative Party is facing an even more existential threat than Labour, having effectively been replaced by Reform as the principal party on the right of British politics.

Britain’s antiquated first-past-the-post electoral system looks likely to buckle under the strain. Labour’s victory two years ago was broad but shallow, with a vote share of less than 34 per cent. Depending on how the various parties’ votes are distributed across constituencies, Reform could win a parliamentary majority in 2029 with just 27 per cent of public support (and less if non-voters are included). That risks looking not merely disproportionate, but illegitimate.

Last week’s results have sent shockwaves through the Labour Party. It has been the dominant party in Wales since 1922 and has governed there continuously since the devolution settlement of 1998. (Wales and Scotland have devolved powers comparable to those of Australian states.) Last week its representation in the Welsh parliament, the Senedd, fell from forty-four seats to nine, and it was beaten by both the Welsh nationalist party Plaid Cymru, which will now form the Welsh government for the first time, and Reform UK.

In Scotland, Labour looked on course two years ago to retake the government from the Scottish Nationalists, or SNP, who have ruled since 2007. But last week it lost a fifth of its seats and had the humiliation not just of seeing the SNP retain power with fifty-seven out of the parliament’s 129 seats, but also of ending up level with Reform in second place with seventeen.

In the local elections in England (which are also contested between the national parties), Labour shed more than 1400 council seats, the worst result in its history, and lost more than half the authorities it controlled. The defeats came thick and fast, right across the country, with seats and councils lost to Reform in many of Labour’s traditional working-class heartlands, and even more voters lost to the Greens in London and other cities.

Labour’s door-to-door canvassers reported the same message from the public in every constituency. Voters are angry that the cost of living seems to be rising without end, with skyrocketing energy prices, unaffordable rents and food prices increasingly reflecting the impact of the Iran war. (Charities warn that millions of families are going without food to make ends meet.) Labour was elected on the slogan of “change,” but little change seems visible: healthcare waiting lists are still high (though falling), town centres still depressed, potholes still unrepaired.

Most of all, though, the public has taken against Keir Starmer. He is now on some measures the most unpopular prime minister since such records began, with a public approval rating between minus 50 and minus 57 per cent. Even more significant is the personal vitriol meted out on the doorstep: for reasons no one can quite explain, Starmer is viscerally loathed by very large proportions of the public.

It’s this personal animus heard by Labour MPs in their constituencies that has led many of them to move against him. By Tuesday this week eighty-seven MPs had called publicly for him to stand down, four junior ministers had resigned from the government, and several cabinet members had apparently told him privately that he could not carry on. The media were delightedly reporting on the content of Labour MPs’ WhatsApp groups and the plotting of potential leadership challengers.

Starmer declared he had no intention of resigning of his own free will. On Monday he sought to save his premiership with a speech inevitably billed as his “most important ever.” Declaring that he took responsibility for the election losses but was determined to stay on and “prove my doubters wrong,” he announced policies he hoped would represent a new start: nationalisation of the stricken British Steel company, moving the UK back to “the heart of Europe” and a new youth employment guarantee.

It didn’t work. The reaction of his MPs was almost universally negative. Indeed, in many ways the speech exemplified the problem. He said nothing about the issue most of concern to voters, the cost of living. And none of the policy announcements was actually new: each had been trailed before. The “back at the heart of Europe” claim was just empty rhetoric: so far from committing to rejoin the EU, as many in his party have urged, Starmer couldn’t even bring himself to say that the government would seek to rejoin the EU’s Customs Union or Single Market, which would at least be meaningful steps to stimulate economic growth.

Starmer emphasised his commitment to traditional Labour values, but still offered no overarching vision or story by which his government or his personal beliefs might be defined. He acknowledged Labour needed to offer people more “hope.” But as one Labour observer bitterly noted, acknowledging it is not the demand being made of him. People want him actually to do something that offers it.

Two paths are available for the party to remove Starmer. One is for more ministers to resign from his government, making his position untenable. That is how Boris Johnson was persuaded to leave office in 2022. You can’t be PM if no one will serve under you. If that happens, Starmer could say he will resign in September, say, and initiate a party leadership election to identify a successor by then.

Alternatively, Labour’s rules make an election mandatory if one-fifth of the Parliamentary Labour Party (currently that means eighty-one MPs) declare in favour of a challenger. Starmer could then choose whether to contest it or not.

Two people have long seemed the most likely challengers. On the Blairite right of the Labour Party, the combative health secretary Wes Streeting has been accused for some time of preparing a leadership bid (a charge he has of course denied). On the party’s left the overwhelming favourite is the popular mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham.

Burnham is not just liked within the Labour Party. He is by far the most popular politician in the country. He was a minister in the last Labour government under Gordon Brown and stood for the Labour leadership in both 2010 and 2015 (in the latter case when it was won by left-winger Jeremy Corbyn). But he resigned his seat in 2017 to become the mayor of Britain’s fourth-largest city.

In that role he has been a vociferous champion of devolved government and especially for the interests of the North of England. Manchester has enjoyed an investment boom, and Burnham’s policies of integrated public transport and social housing have been widely admired. He has been re-elected twice, the last time, in 2024, with a remarkable two-thirds of the popular vote.

Affectionately known as the “King of the North,” Burnham has an ability to speak to voters in a manner unmatched by any other British politician. Over the last year he has articulated a political project he has called “Manchesterism,” founded on the belief that if governments are to control the cost of living they need to own the major price levers. He favours not just integrated public transport under local authorities, but rent controls, mass public house-building and public ownership — in some form — of the energy and water sectors.

While this is not yet a fully fledged program for government, these ideas and Burnham’s popularity have made him the leading candidate of Labour’s centre-left — but only if he can get back into parliament first. Only MPs can stand for the leadership.

And this is where his problem lies. Just a couple of months ago Burnham successfully encouraged a Labour MP in Manchester to resign their seat, creating a by-election for which Burnham put himself up to be the candidate. But Starmer blocked his candidature, demanding that Labour’s National Executive Committee, or NEC, refuse him permission to give up the Manchester mayoralty. The Greens subsequently took the seat. Polls suggested that, had Burnham been the candidate, he would have won it.

So the questions on everyone’s lips this week were: can Burnham persuade another Manchester MP to fall on their sword for the greater good? If so, would Starmer and the NEC change their minds and allow him to stand? And when is Streeting going to announce he has eighty-one MPs on his side and initiate a leadership election – before Burnham can get back into parliament?

After days of feverish speculation, on Thursday both Streeting and Burnham made their moves. At lunchtime Streeting resigned from cabinet, issuing a scathing letter of criticism of Starmer’s leadership. A few hours later a Labour MP in Greater Manchester said he was resigning his seat to allow Burnham to return to parliament, and Burnham declared he would put himself up for the consequent by-election.

But it didn’t then go the way the media has assumed. Much to everyone’s surprise, Streeting didn’t trigger a leadership election. On the contrary, he said that he thought that in any such contest Andy Burnham should be able to stand. It almost looked like they were collaborating.

So there is no leadership election for now. Rather, there is a very difficult by-election for Burnham to win. Members of Labour’s NEC have already said they will not stand in his way this time. But the constituency of Makerfield, which lies on the edge of Greater Manchester, voted Reform in last week’s local elections. The party took all the council seats available on a vote share of 50 per cent, more than double Labour’s 23 per cent. Burnham is by no means guaranteed to win.

In a curious way, whether he does or not will settle the leadership question. If Burnham loses to Reform he is finished: no longer mayor and not an MP. But if he wins, he will have proved precisely what his party want to know: that this is indeed the leader who can defeat Reform and win the 2029 general election, an election last week’s results showed Labour under Keir Starmer would almost certainly lose.

At that point — the by-election will be on 18 June — Labour MPs and members won’t need convincing that Starmer should stand down. Either he goes of his own accord, setting out an orderly timetable for Burnham to become leader and prime minister, or Burnham will challenge him and he will be defeated in a membership vote.

Starmer’s one hope of remaining in office is therefore that Burnham loses the by-election and he then fends off an alternative challenge from Streeting. It’s not a good look for a prime minister to want to see his party defeated, just to save his own skin. •

The post Starmer on the brink appeared first on Inside Story.

As Hitler prepared for war, the Lüneburg Heath region on the northwestern German flatlands was increasingly used for military exercises, with army barracks built in the area around the small town of Bergen and the nearby village of Belsen. After war broke out in September 1939 the army used these barracks as prisoner-of-war camps. After the invasion of the Soviet Union, Belsen POW camp and its environs held tens of thousands of Soviet POWs who suffered a horrendous mortality rate from disease, hunger, overwork and mistreatment. Around 50,000 Soviet POWs died in Belsen and the camps in its vicinity.

In the spring of 1943 the SS acquired part of the POW camp to use as a special camp for foreign Jews. This plan for a Bergen-Belsen concentration camp originated in a cynical calculation by SS chief Heinrich Himmler: with Germany chronically short of hard currency to finance its war effort, individual Jews could be ransomed to foreign countries, such as neutral Sweden or even the United States, where Himmler assumed many European Jews had wealthy relatives prepared to pay large sums for their release.

Belsen was thus intended as a transit camp for a relatively privileged group of Jews selected as potential hostages for exchange. (Jews for sale, to borrow the title of Yehuda Bauer’s book on the subject.) Conditions were intended to be more survivable than in the death camps in occupied Poland. The camp was supposed to hold up to 3000 prisoners.

In the last few months of the war, however, the Belsen transit camp was overtaken by the conditions that prevailed in the death camps in the East. As advancing Soviet troops approached, prisoners were evacuated westwards, typically on gruelling death marches during which many died or were murdered outright. Some prisoners and guards from Auschwitz, including its last commandant, Josef Kramer, ended up in Belsen. The overcrowded camp was inadequately supplied with food, medicine, and other necessities and, by the time it was liberated by British troops, was ravaged with typhus that had already killed thousands. The SS and the local German army authorities even negotiated with the British army a peaceful handover of the camp in an effort to quarantine the contagion.

The dramatic British takeover of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp is vividly narrated in close detail in the first part of Nadia Wheatley’s new book, Strange New World: Belsen’s First Year of Freedom. The scene that confronted the British liberators of the camp earned Belsen the name of a “Horror Camp.” Newsreel footage and still photographs of thousands of emaciated, unburied corpses being thrown and even bulldozed into mass graves, with SS guards pressed into service for the task, went around the world.

The British subsequently burned down all the camp’s huts, which were rife with typhus, and moved the surviving inmates to neighbouring barracks and camp facilities. An estimated 52,000 prisoners died at Belsen, with 14,000 lives lost after liberation as a result of the typhus, malnutrition, and other conditions.

Wheatley’s Strange New World then moves to a thoroughly researched and fine-grained account of the year that followed the camp’s liberation. Her work on the book stretched over at least a decade, including her attendance at ceremonies marking the seventieth and eightieth anniversaries of the camp’s liberation, where she became acquainted with the site and with survivors (including some born after liberation in the displaced persons’ camp at Belsen). In between, she also attended the seventy-fifth anniversary commemoration, which was delayed by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Wheatley’s focus is on the Jewish survivors and how they sought first to survive and then to try to negotiate some kind of future with their British liberators turned captors, as the displaced persons, or DP, camp took shape next to the former concentration camp. (She has little to say about the fate of the Russian POWs, or about the 10,000 Polish DPs who were temporarily accommodated in the Belsen camp complex, except in so far as their actions impinged on the Jewish survivors.)

Among many other sources, the book draws on the diaries and letters of nurses, including civilian volunteers, doctors and medical students who were recruited to try to care for the camp’s survivors, and who initially had to work under catastrophic conditions. Remarkably quickly, some of the former prisoners who had trained as nurses or doctors also assisted, once they had had enough to eat and were provided with new clothing.

Wheatley quotes the ranking British Royal Army Medical Corps officer at Belsen making contemptuous comments about the prisoner nurses being untrustworthy as they stole other prisoners’ food. She argues that this only applied in the first days after liberation when all prisoners were near starvation. Soon after they were able to eat again, prisoners started to care for each other, with remarkable cases of compassion being recorded.

With evident sympathy, Wheatley describes the compassion of the volunteer nurses and British medical students who ministered to the surviving Belsen Jews. She is critical, indeed scathing, about the shortcomings of the British authorities at Belsen, starting with their underestimation of the degree of emergency medical assistance needed by tens of thousands of starving inmates in an overcrowded camp ravaged by typhus.

A failure to enforce quarantine restrictions on the newly liberated inmates resulted in typhus infections continuing to spread for days, causing a spike in deaths from the disease eighteen days after liberation. An experimental attempt to administer a protein called hydrolysate to emaciated prisoners caused some violent reactions among patients and seems to have done more harm than good.

Prisoners also reacted violently when German nurses and army doctors were pressed into service by the British army to help care for survivors. The German army doctors still wore their Wehrmacht uniforms under their white coats, and the prospect of receiving an injection from a uniformed German could cause panic among camp survivors.

One of the British army doctors who favoured the employment of German army doctors and German nurses in the Belsen DP camp was one John Norman Wheatley, who became medical superintendent in September 1945. (His appointment came after a brief appearance at Belsen by the Queensland tropical diseases specialist Raphael Cilento, who Wheatley describes — accurately — as a sympathiser with fascism and an antisemite.) Wheatley, as it happens, was the author’s father, which lends her account an unusual personal perspective.

Nadia Wheatley has already described her (non-)relationship with her father in her memoir Her Mother’s Daughter. In this book, she confines herself to noting that her father signed letters to members of his own family with the formal “J.N. Wheatley.” But she is unsparing in her account of the blind spots of the British medical and military hierarchy.

As the Jewish DPs at Belsen succeeded in establishing some semblance of a normal life as a community while waiting for the chance to leave Germany, leaders and spokespeople emerged, a community newspaper was published, and Jewish ceremonies and festivals could be observed. For a time, Belsen’s Jewish DP camp (which took on that identity against the initial resistance of the British authorities) even attracted Jewish DPs from elsewhere in Germany.

The British refused to recognise Jews as a national group, instead seeking to repatriate them to their countries of origin. But Polish Jews were unwilling to return to Poland, where some Jews who had sought to recover their prewar homes were met with pogroms (most notoriously, in Kielce in July 1946). Nor did many German-Jewish survivors wish to remain much longer in the land of the perpetrators of the Shoah.

While many Jews were attracted to the prospect of emigration to the United States, or other distant destinations like Canada or Australia, migration to Palestine increasingly offered the prospect of a safe haven for Jews and a place where Jewish communities could be rebuilt. Overwhelmingly, Belsen’s survivors became Zionists.

The commemoration of the first anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camp in April 1945 coincided with the Passover festival. A German Jew, Norbert Wolheim, the deputy of the Jewish DP camp council’s leader, gave a speech in English aimed as much at the British soldiers present as at the 7000 Jewish DPs gathered there, in which he emphasised that the Jews’ liberation was still incomplete and called on the British to open the gates of Palestine. Several weeks later, British troops were deploying fire hoses to quell unrest in the camp.

Wheatley’s book is both deeply researched and acutely sensitive to the human dimension of her subject. Her account of Jewish survival and self-reassertion concludes by relating the baby boom that occurred exactly nine months after the liberation of the concentration camp. Wheatley got to know a few of the surviving “babies,” now elderly, on her anniversary commemoration visits to Belsen. The book thus ends by reasserting the agency of the Belsen survivors. The survivors were more than the passive victims they first appeared as upon their liberation. The birth of babies within sight of the former Horror Camp testified to the survivors’ determination to defy the Nazis’ attempt to exterminate a whole people. •

Strange New World: Belsen’s First Year of Freedom
By Nadia Wheatley | Monash University Publishing | $39.99 | 416 pages

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For this reason, candidates tend to matter more in by-elections, although in this case an objectively poor one romped home anyway. The party name, synonymous with its leader Pauline Hanson, was more than enough. David Farley’s roughly 39 per cent primary vote (on latest counting) doesn’t reflect much of anything outside Farrer in May 2026 — certainly not the party’s likely national support at the next election, or even “if an election were held today.” The national opinion polls, which have One Nation averaging around 25 per cent, are the tools for that. But a general election that saw One Nation get 25 per cent overall would certainly include electorates where the minor party received 39 per cent or more. And they’d mostly be rural, as Riverina is.

Labor didn’t contest Farrer. The big parties tend not to run these days in by-elections they have no chance of winning (although the Albanese government made an exception in Fadden in its first term). Would it have made a difference if they had? Actually, it might have. We’ll come back to that.

This will not be the first time One Nation has sat in the House of Reps. After winning the Queensland seat of Oxley as a Liberal in 1996 (despite having been deselected just weeks earlier), Pauline Hanson formed the first iteration of the far-right party in 1997–98 and unsuccessfully contested the 1998 federal election in Queensland’s Blair. Although she topped the primary vote with 36 per cent, she lost after buckets of preferences flowed to the Liberal candidate, thanks mainly to Labor how-to-vote cards.

In Farrer, a whole lot of preferences sat ready and willing ready to flow to the Liberal candidate Raissa Butkowski against Farley, but they didn’t matter because Butkowski didn’t get to the two-candidate-preferred count. Instead it was Farley who was deluged by preferences in the final count. His roughly eleven-point primary lead over independent Michelle Milthorpe increased after preferences to fourteen or fifteen points. That was the work of Liberal and National how-to-vote cards, which favoured One Nation over the independent, and of course the natural resistance of many Coalition supporters to any independent candidate with a highly publicised Climate 200 connection.

It’ll be several weeks before the Australian Electoral Commission publishes individual candidate’s preference flows, but the back of my napkin suggests that Liberal and Nationals voters’ preferences, combined, went very approximately 65 per cent to Farley and 35 to Milthorpe. Could the Coalition, via its how-to-vote cards, have delivered victory to Milthorpe? It’s unlikely. She would have needed to receive more than 70 per cent of total Liberal and Nationals flows (perhaps more than 75 per cent), and it stretches credulity to believe the two parties exercise such influence over their supporters.

Anyway, it’s now a given: the Coalition preferences One Nation over virtually everyone else — certainly Labor, the Greens, and Climate 300–funded independents — and that’s not going to change before the next federal election, if for no other reason than the Coalition parties’ memberships would go ballistic, sending even more of them to the far-right alternative. (On the other side, imagine the outrage from Labor’s true believers if the party preferenced the Coalition over the Greens.)

Given Saturday’s results, the only way Farley could have conceivably lost would have been if, like Hanson in 1998, he had faced-off with the Liberals’ Butkowski in the two-candidate-preferred count. The current tally of first-preference votes suggests the Liberal didn’t come close to reaching the top two. (The AEC had correctly picked the identity of the final two candidates who all other preferences needed to distributed to, and is currently concerning itself mostly with that count.)

But what if Labor had contested Farrer? It would have done embarrassingly poorly, struggling to hit double digits. But most of its votes would have come at Milthorpe’s expense, pulling her down closer to Butkowski. To meaningfully assist the Liberal (and admittedly the thought of party strategists doing this is a stretch) Labor could have preferenced her ahead of Milthorpe (while still putting One Nation last of course).

On the current counting, that probably still wouldn’t have been enough to elevate the Liberal to the final count. It’s not certain, though, and we’ll know more when final figures are available. But if Labor wants to minimise One Nation’s House of Representatives wins in 2028, this is the sort of preference action it would take, selectively, in seats where One Nation has a good chance. It might also mean installing the odd Coalition MP at the expense of a teal one, disadvantaging Labor in parliament. Look, they probably won’t do it. But they could.

In the meantime, the Liberals and Nationals can take some consolation from the fact that Farrer was unusual in having such a strong Climate 200–backed candidate, strong enough to have come second at last year’s general election. She came second this time too, which tolled the end for the Liberal candidate.

In a two-candidate-preferred count Butkowski would have easily defeated Milthorpe, while Butkowski versus Farley could’ve gone either way. But the Liberal and National parties’ combined primary support was just too low to reach that contest — thanks partly to Climate 200.•

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On bitterly cold January mornings I’d sometimes cycle to school on a route that took me past a private school where two or three dozen men in white shirts and khaki shorts were doing “lathi drill” — practising combat with metre-long staves. They were members of the RSS, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (national volunteer corps), which championed an aggressive Hindu nationalism.

One or two teachers at my school were, I think, members of the RSS, and a few others spoke of it sympathetically. But my teacher friends mostly regarded the “knicker-walas” as grown-up boy scouts.

About this time, a thousand kilometres away in the state of Gujarat, a boy in his early teens was lapping up RSS doctrine and discipline. Ten years later Narendra Modi was a full-time RSS worker and on the path that took him, the RSS and its affiliates to the dominance their doctrines enjoy in India today.

The results of elections in four Indian states, released this week, gave Modi, prime minister since 2014, a prize that he, the RSS and its offspring, the Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, have hungered for: the election of a BJP government in West Bengal and control of its capital Kolkata. Once upon a time, Calcutta (the name was changed in 2001) was the intellectual centre of India, home to anti-colonial organisation, cosmopolitan thought and many of the ideas, events and heroes celebrated by the RSS and BJP.

For nearly fifty years, however, West Bengal has been ruled either by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or the Trinamool Congress of Mamata Banerjee, a three-time chief minister. A confident lawyer and battle-scarred stirrer, Banerjee, seventy-two, successfully presented herself to voters as both the defender of Bengal and as “Didi,” a caring, elder sister to the poor and weak.

The BJP threw a kitchen full of sinks at Banerjee and her party. Modi and his menacing home minister, Amit Shah, spent days campaigning in West Bengal. Preparations had begun a few years earlier when the central government began constricting funding to West Bengal from various national programs.

The Modi government also changed the process for appointing the chief commissioner of India’s once-admirable election commission to ensure the central government got the appointee of its choice. The new commissioner began a hastily contrived “special intensive review” of the voting register (long overdue) and quickly deleted nine million voters from the list, 2.7 million of whom claimed to have submitted citizenship documents establishing their right to vote. Because the process was hurried and poorly executed, it is not clear — and may never be — how many deleted names were Muslims, who constitute more than a quarter of West Bengal’s population and were considered to be Mamata Banerjee supporters.

Ten days before polling began, the Enforcement Directorate, a central government entity with wide powers to pursue financial crime, detained members of the consultancy firm advising Banerjee’s campaign. They were released after polling was completed.

The result was everything Modi could have hoped for. Banerjee’s fifteen-year-old government had long overstayed its welcome, and she lost her own seat by 15,000 votes to a former member of her party running as a BJP candidate. This BJP recruit, who had deserted her when she made a relative her deputy leader of her party, worked so hard for his new party that he now aspires to become its chief minister in the state.

The BJP won 70 per cent of West Bengal’s seats (206 in a house of 294) with 46 per cent of the vote. Banerjee’s party was not far off the voting pace with 41 per cent, but gained only eighty-one seats.

Banerjee’s CV has never claimed “gracious loser” as one of her attributes, and her reaction to the loss was captured in the page one Indian Express headline: MAMATA LOSES SEAT, SAYS “LOOT, LOOT, LOOT… AN IMMORAL VICTORY.”

The Modi mystique had taken a hit after the 2024 national elections. He began that election campaign proclaiming that the BJP aimed to increase its strength in parliament to 400 seats. Instead, the party lost sixty seats and its majority. In the current parliament, it needs support from two small regional parties.

The victory in West Bengal, and Modi’s part in it, repairs much of the damage and provides a powerful boost to the “Hindutva” project that aims to transform India into a Hindu-supremacist state. The ultimate goal is an all-powerful central government dedicated to infusing every level of Indian life with the RSS version of what it is to be Hindu. That means erasing much of India’s Muslim history of the past thousand years and treating 200 million Indian Muslims not so much as citizens as inhabitants.

What makes Modi and the Hindutva project so ominously impressive is its relentlessness. Partly, that’s because there is always another past grievance or present threat to rectify — another case of poor, uneducated people being converted by crafty Christians, another innocent Hindu girl converted to Islam by sly Muslim youths, another illegal structure put up by Muslims and needing to be bulldozed.

The Economist’s Asian columnist “Banyan” asked the cheeky Monty Python question: “What did the Mughals ever do for India?” The answer: “They gave political Hinduism its eternal, indispensable villain.”

In the other states where elections were held, one incumbent government was re-elected and, in the other two, governments were defeated in ways characteristic of each state’s political culture.

In Assam in the northeast, the BJP and its vituperative chief minister won a third term, cruising to an increased majority with a campaign riddled with anti-Muslim slurs. Assam is about one-third Muslim, the numbers padded, the BJP assures voters, by “illegal immigrants” from neighbouring Bangladesh.

Tamil Nadu in the southeast changed one movie-industry protégé for another. For nearly a hundred years, Tamils have demonstrated their love of Tamil movies, and the film industry, its fan clubs and welfare groups have been integral to Tamil life. Most of its chief ministers since the late 1960s have been associated with the industry as stars, writers or producers.

M.G. Ramachandran and J. Jayalalitha were legendary film stars before founding political parties and becoming long-time chief ministers. The outgoing chief minister, M.K. Stalin, born 1953, is the son of a chief minister who was a veteran scriptwriter.

The new chief minister is expected to be… you guessed it — another film star. His full name is Chandrasekhar Joseph Vijay, but his film name is simply Vijay. His mother is Hindu, his father Christian, and both were in films. Vijay has been acting in films since he was twelve. When he formed his own political party, he brought his fan clubs with him: the new party won 108 of the 234 seats; the outgoing government managed only fifty-nine. He is expected to form government with support from half dozen minor parties.

Vijay’s films have made him a fortune, but his record as an administrator remains to be proved. He arrived very late at rally of thousands of avid fans in September 2025, crowd management was appalling and forty people were killed in the crush.

In Tamil Nadu, the BJP won just a single seat.

In Kerala, in the southwest, the election result was so matter-of-fact that the New York Times failed to mention it at all in a wrap-up of these state elections. An irate Keralan wrote to the editor to complain, pointing out that Kerala, though a mere thirty-six million people, led India in health, and (most of the time) harmony among Hindus, Muslims, Christians and, long ago, Jews too. Just because the state was the most sane and sensible in India, he added, it should not be ignored. (The letter does not seem to have been published.)

Since the 1950s, Kerala has had a virtual two-party system. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) forms the core of one, and the Congress Party the other. Until 2021, they alternated at an election every five years. In 2021, the communists broke the mould and won two elections in a row, but it got its comeuppance in the latest poll. The Congress alliance won ninety-six of 140 seats and will form the next government.

The BJP won three seats in Kerala and about 10 per cent of the vote. But it will be back, just as it will be in Tamil Nadu. Its unattainable yet easily imaginable goal means it can keep on keeping on. And now it has a new how-to manual from West Bengal to work from. •

The post À la Modi appeared first on Inside Story.

As it happens, the blinking had occurred sometime before. Almost as soon as Moscow learned of the blockade it ordered Soviet ships to stay clear. Contrary to the apprehensions of Kennedy and his advisers, all Soviet ships were far away from the quarantine line by the time Rusk made his comment.

Nor was that the moment of greatest danger. More blinking would be done before the crisis was over. The big test was getting the Soviet missiles out of Cuba. Nonetheless, that moment showed the crisis was potentially manageable and the Soviets were wary about escalation.

Not one but two blockades are currently in place in the Strait of Hormuz. The first, imposed by the Iranians in response to the initial US–Israeli strikes, effectively shut the Strait. Iran’s leaders did, however, intend to allow their own and other favoured ships through, as well as those prepared to pay a toll to Tehran. That led to the second blockade, this one imposed by the Trump administration to deny Iran those benefits. Both blockades are being enforced, with merchant ships fired on and Iranian vessels seized.

In 1962 the world watched the developing crisis in the Caribbean with anxiety. Everything was dependent on decisions being made by a few people in Washington and Moscow. If the crisis got out of hand then all would suffer the consequences of what could be a nuclear war. In 2026 the world watches a contest of wills between Tehran and Washington, also with anxiety. Much economic damage has already been done: the longer the standoff the greater the prospective chaos.

For the standoff to end both sides must blink together to end their respective blockades. That might have happened on 17 April when Iran announced that the Strait was open. Trump welcomed the move but still decided to keep his blockade going to demonstrate the US had the upper hand. Iran immediately reimposed its blockade. Trump appeared to think the pressure on Iran would increase if it could not export its oil. It would have to keep more in storage tanks, which would soon fill up, and shut its oil wells. This has not happened.

The formal positions of the two sides on peace negotiations still seem to be far apart. Yet Trump on Tuesday suggested that “tremendous progress” was being made towards a deal. We have been here many times before, with Trump claiming some imminent breakthrough only for imminent peace to turn out to have largely been in his imagination. From the start Trump’s utterances on this war have sown confusion and got in the way of serious peace-making. (The Washington Post has a useful compilation of his many and inconsistent claims on the timeline of the war and the likely prospects for peace).

Yet that burst of optimism from Trump was combined with statements to the effect that the active stage of the war was over. After looking at whether Trump has started blinking, I’ll consider in this post the incentives for the Iranians to do some blinking of their own, and the possibility that the Strait might be opened soon.

Trump blinks first

On 3 May Trump announced yet another initiative — somewhat unoriginally named “Operation Project Freedom” — intended to undermine the Iranian blockade. The US would “guide” ships through the Strait of Hormuz from the next day, with a warning to Tehran that any attempt to prevent them getting through would be met by force. This was presented as a “humanitarian” move. On Truth Social, Trump said:

The Ships movement is merely meant to free up people, companies, and Countries that have done absolutely nothing wrong — They are victims of circumstance. This is a Humanitarian gesture on behalf of the United States, Middle Eastern Countries but, in particular, the Country of Iran.

We have told these Countries that we will guide their Ships safely out of these restricted Waterways, so that they can freely and ably get on with their business.

If, in any way, this Humanitarian process is interfered with, that interference will, unfortunately, have to be dealt with forcefully.

The humanitarian issue is real enough. The International Maritime Organization, in passing a resolution condemning Iran’s blockade, noted the threat posed to the “welfare of seafarers” as well as the danger to life and the “serious risk to the marine environment.” The Pentagon says 22,500 mariners have been stuck on 1550 vessels for more than nine weeks.

In the event, two US-flagged tankers that had been trapped were guided through the Strait. But compared with the scale of the problem this was of only modest value. Without Iranian cooperation, which was never likely, ships’ vulnerability to drones or sea-skimming missiles, even if they stayed close to the Omani coast, was enough to deter commercial vessels from taking any risks. Other than guidance the idea was that the US would use all its available assets to create some sort of security “umbrella.”

Seven Iranian small boats were sunk and some Iranian cruise missiles and drones were intercepted, but Iran still made its point by attacking several merchant ships and an oil port in the United Arab Emirates. So despite the US secretary of defense claiming a path had been secured and that commercial ships were lining up to pass through, the reality was much more precarious. Then, after forty-eight hours, Trump paused the operation, ostensibly because of progress in the negotiations, but also because it was not going to provide a way out of the impasse. The Iranians gloated that they had thwarted yet another American attempt to gain the upper hand.

The move certainly underlined just how much the administration wants to get out of this mess of its own making, preferably without losing too much face. Pete Hegseth was at pains to stress that none of the drama around “Project Freedom” affected the ceasefire. We were then told that active operations were effectively over, and so the ceasefire was effectively permanent. This was also in line with Trump’s insistence that he could ignore the sixty-day limit in the War Powers Act because the ceasefire meant that the war was over.

With the blockade still in place, however, this is not the case, as a blockade is an act of war. Trump said “It’s a very friendly blockade. Nobody is even challenging it,” but by 6 May he seemed to be having second thoughts about whether he really wanted to take the option of a return to bombing off the table.

Despite his apparent insouciance Trump doesn’t want this situation to continue for much longer. The war is unpopular in the United States. If it was successful then the political and economic price being paid might be acceptable. But so far this war has been far from successful, with many negative consequences and no positives. This became painfully apparent during last week’s congressional hearings when Hegseth acknowledged that the war had already cost $25 billion.

Hegseth sought to hide its limited achievements by engaging in a rhetorical confrontation with Democrats, at one point accusing them of being the enemy within. He praised Trump for his “bravery” in taking on the Iranians, explained how the Iranians had been allowed to do terrible things against the US for forty-seven years without anybody doing anything about it, and mentioned how dangerous it would be if the regime getting nuclear weapons. He emphasised that the regime has lost layers of leaders, along with lots of ships, missiles and other military capabilities.

But any boasts seem more than premature when the regime appears to be in a stronger position internally than it was in February and is far from being fully disarmed, with the status of its nuclear program thus far unaffected. The main change is that the Strait of Hormuz was open in February and isn’t now. The other difference is that US relations with its allies have deteriorated badly because Trump blames them for insufficient support. This is not what a victory looks like.

When he launched the war he seemed to have had in his head the Venezuelan model in which, once he had abducted president Nicolás Maduro, everyone left in the government was happy to work with the US to ensure their own survival. The differences with the Iranian situation are too numerous to mention. Trump’s key difficulty is that, having presented Epic Fury as a stunning victory for the US that left him with “all the cards” in the negotiations, Iran has clearly not been defeated and has a bargaining position that cannot be ignored if the aim is to bring the war to a close.

Will the Iranians blink?

Part of Trump’s preferred narrative is that the Iranians are desperate for a deal, and are only held back by splits within the regime and a consequential inability to take the hard decisions. Differences of opinion undoubtedly exist inside the regime, but not fragmentation. The IRGC (revolutionary guards) has used the war (as they used the Iran–Iraq war of the 1980s) to consolidate its position and suppress dissent. It is riding high on its defiance of the Americans, which has done wonders for its international reputation, at least among those sections of the international community deeply hostile to the United States.

And yet. The immiseration of the Iranian people continues. People must scramble for the essentials of life. Many are not getting paid, cash is hard to come by, and inflation is out of control. The regime’s supporters have been energised by the conflict but a large portion of the population remains disaffected, suffering in silence, unable to share their thoughts because of fear of the IRGC. The internet is still down.

The American blockade has emphasised the difficulty of turning Iran’s control over the Strait into a money-making venture, but it does allow the IRGC to sustain a state of emergency and maintain its grip over the country. It must wonder about what will happen when it must declare the war over and the dire state of the country can no longer be ignored. With no quick fixes to Iran’s internal problems, perhaps that is one reason why the its leaders have had few incentives to make big compromises to end the conflict. The IRGC’s determination to show no sign of weakness is why it responded so vigorously to the American attempt to find a way to break the blockade.

But they can’t sustain the current position indefinitely. Many of those who are pleased to see the American embarrassed are being hurt by the closure. This includes China, which is getting increasingly nervous about the long-term impact of the Strait — through which it imports about a third of its oil and gas — staying shut. President Xi Jinping will soon welcome Trump to Beijing and doesn’t want the summit to be dominated by this issue. Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi has recently been in Beijing.

Iran’s attacks on its neighbours have also left it regionally isolated. Few in the Gulf region are disposed to help it out of its troubles given the harm already caused to their own economies.

Fitful negotiations

Iran’s demands have been as maximalist as Trump’s. The Trump administration’s proposals start with Iran’s nuclear activities. It seeks severe limits on uranium enrichment, verifiable guarantees Iran will not develop nuclear weapons and long-term monitoring of nuclear facilities, as well as a re-opening of the Strait of Hormuz and no Iranian control over shipping passing through.

The key feature of Iran’s response was to postpone the nuclear issue until everything else was sorted to its satisfaction. This would require the US to withdraw all its forces from near Iran’s borders and end its blockade of Iranian ports, and for all hostilities — including Israel’s offensive in Lebanon — to cease. It wants guarantees of no future US or Israeli attacks and also reparations for the damage caused, it wants sanctions lifted and billions of dollars of frozen assets released, and it still wants to manage shipping through the Strait. Only then could discussions begin on its nuclear program (without which there is no prospect of sanctions relief). It will not abandon uranium enrichment but does seem ready for a long moratorium.

When this latest Iranian proposal was received, via Pakistan, last week Trump dismissed it. He could not “imagine that it would be acceptable.” He wrote in a post on Truth Social on 2 May, suggesting that Iran deserved punishment: “They have not yet paid a big enough price for what they have done to Humanity, and the World, over the last 47 years.”

Nonetheless, last Sunday the US sent another proposal, and Trump spoke of “very positive discussions.” Presumably “Project Freedom” was designed to strengthen the US position and force the Iranians to take its proposal more seriously. Yet now Trump is signalling he has had enough. His position had been that if there was no deal “fighting resumes.” He appeared to have taken this threat off the table but then on Wednesday he put it back on again. In a post on Truth Social he said that failure to agree a deal will result in bombardments “at a much higher level and intensity” than Epic Fury.

Meanwhile, secretary of state Marco Rubio, who has not played a prominent part in the administration’s presentation of its case until now, has suggested the blockade was sufficient to keep up the pressure because it denied Iran revenue for “whatever remains of their frail economy.” He insisted that “we’re done with Epic Fury” and are on to “Project Freedom.” Unfortunately for Rubio’s credibility, Trump immediately paused Project Freedom and promised yet more bombing at a greater intensity than before if the peace plan was rejected.

Blinking at last?

Anything Trump says on peace deals as well as his more lurid threats must be discounted. There are other reasons for some optimism. Despite Monday’s events, and despite a flare-up on Thursday, the Iranians want to sustain the ceasefire and foreign minister Araghchi has also said that “talks are making progress.” A number of other countries, including Saudi Arabia and China, are now part of the conversation. International pressure to get this sorted is growing. The Iranians have now said that the Strait of Hormuz could be reopened if there was an “end of the aggressors’ threats,” but without specifying whether all ships could pass through and whether it would still want to collect tolls. (The IRGC statement refers to “the shadow of new procedures”).

The current focus is reportedly on a one-page memorandum which includes, according to Axios, a suspension of Iranian nuclear enrichment, the lifting of sanctions, and a restoration of free transit through the Strait of Hormuz. Rubio has suggested the nuclear clauses will be more of an agreed general framework for further discussions rather than a final agreement.

“We don’t have to have the actual agreement written out in one day,” he said. “This is highly complex and highly technical. We have to have a diplomatic solution that is very clear about the topics that they’re willing to negotiate on and the concessions they are willing to make at the front end in order to make those talks worthwhile.”

This is sensible enough, although clearly far from what the administration originally wanted. If that is all the Americans get out of this war — about the same as they could have got without its attack — then it will be even harder for the administration to brag about a great victory.

Internationally the nuclear issue will attract far less attention than whether the Strait can be opened and ships can start moving again. Even if there is a negotiating breakthrough it is unlikely to come quickly. Everything is going through the Pakistanis. There are no current plans for direct talks.

We have probably reached the stage where both sides are dissatisfied with what the other is proposing but neither wants the talks to collapse. External pressure to get the Strait opened is becoming more persistent. Conceptually it is not hard to work out what needs to be done, but the detail is difficult and any engagement by Trump can scuttle a promising initiative. We are probably inching towards a deal. But for now it is more a wink than a blink. •

The post Who will blink first? appeared first on Inside Story.

The idea in a nutshell was this: Two giant American tech companies, Google and Meta, had abused Australian news publishers by “taking” their stories and including them in their search results and social feeds. Publishers were due compensation for this wrong — but the tech giants refused to negotiate over how much. So the government ordered these negotiations to take place; Google and Meta would need to strike individual deals to pay some undetermined number of publishers some undetermined amount of money.

If the government felt they’d paid publishers enough, then that’s that. If it didn’t, though, the government could mandate further bargaining and, eventually, require third-party arbitration that could cost companies bigly.

I am in favour of publishers getting money, and I am in favour of Google and Facebook being the ones writing the cheques. But the system had major problems, both philosophical and practical.

Last week, the Australian government announced a successor to the News Media Bargaining Code — the (annoyingly similarly named) News Bargaining Initiative. It’s a clear improvement. Indeed, with a single change, it’d be close to an ideal system. But without that change, I suspect it’ll end up repeating many of the old system’s flaws.

You can read my 2022 piece for a lengthy discussion of those flaws, but here’s a summary of the two big ones.

Problem 1: The code lied about what problem it was addressing

Australian media companies, like their peers around the world, have long complained of the tech giants’ “theft” of their intellectual property. That “theft” consisted of… letting Facebook users link to news stories and Google including news stories in search results. Those things are not theft; social media platforms and search engines are legal. And if you want to argue that they are theft, then why are they theft only for a small set of news companies and for not every site on the internet?

The intellectual-property theft claims have always been a way to paper over publishers’ actual complaint, which is what this has always been about: Google and Meta have a near-monopoly on digital advertising revenue. More than 80 per cent of all Australian digital ad dollars go to those two companies. It turns out that putting ads next to search results and social feeds is a much more lucrative and scalable business than putting ads next to news stories. News outlets used to make enormous sums from advertising in print and broadcast media, but online they only earn a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of what these two tech giants do.

This is, to be clear, a very legitimate complaint! Google and Meta having that much market power is a dangerous thing from an antitrust perspective. It is perfectly appropriate for both Australian publishers and the Australian government to be concerned that their nation’s media is being undercut by a new revenue paradigm they can’t win at. Liberals will argue quality journalism is a civic good essential to an informed democracy. Conservatives will argue this is an important Australian industry that deserves protection. Populists will argue the need to confront American cultural imperialism. They’re all correct.

But it’s not the complaint the News Media Bargaining Code was based on — the complaint that including news stories in search results and social feeds is somehow a violation of publishers’ rights and that they are due financial compensation for it.

You might say that’s just a philosophical quibble. But Meta turned it into a very practical one when it called Australia’s bluff — twice. First, in 2021, it announced that, if the problem was really how Australian news appeared in Facebook feeds, it had a solution: banning Australian news stories from Facebook. Problem solved, right? Of course not — because the “theft” of letting someone share your story on Facebook was never the actual problem. Meta lifted the ban after extracting concessions from the plan. (It repeated the move in Canada when faced with a similar program — except there, it’s never lifted the ban, making it clear to governments that it considers news very much optional on its platforms.)

Then, two years ago, Meta announced that it was done negotiating these deals with publishers and let all existing ones expire. Did the government then follow through with what the News Media Bargaining Code allowed — declaring Meta in violation of its obligation to negotiate fairly and force them into mandatory arbitration? No. Instead it did… well, nothing, really. It didn’t pursue further action (called “designating” Meta, in the code’s parlance) because it believed that doing so would just lead to Meta blocking news on Facebook again, and it wanted to avoid that outcome.

This has never, ever been about the platforms’ “theft” of news. It has always been about the platforms’ dominance of the digital advertising market and the hole that has left in publishers’ budgets.

Problem 2: The code had zero transparency and uneven power

The code set no firm requirements on what these “negotiations” needed to entail. It didn’t set how many publishers needed to be paid or how much. It just said that Google and Meta needed to show a good enough effort that the government wouldn’t designate them as unfair bargainers. Which basically came down to vibes — the companies weren’t required to share the totals with other publishers or even with the government itself. It was all done in secret. Deals contained clauses forbidding publishers from revealing how much they got.

That’s an artifact of the code’s fundamental lie that this was about business negotiations between private companies. Google was supposed to figure out how much it “owed” News Corp for the crime of including Brisbane Courier-Mail stories in search results, and News Corp could keep saying “higher” until it got a number it was happy with. It was a private act of theatre.

This had several negative knock-on effects. First, the country’s largest news publishers — Rupert Murdoch’s aforementioned News Corp and Nine Entertainment, owner of the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age — had some actual power in the negotiations, because they were big enough to plausibly complain to the government if they felt they weren’t getting enough. But smaller fry were either given perfunctory take-it-or-leave-it offers or excluded altogether.

(It surely didn’t hurt that the largest reported payments went to News Corp, which just happened to be a big supporter of the conservative prime minister Scott Morrison, whose government came up with the scheme.)

The contracts were also dishonest about what the tech companies were buying. On paper, the deals were all about Google and Meta licensing news stories for Google News Showcase and Facebook’s News tab. In reality, those products were constructed in part to be vessels for these payments to happen.

These are significant problems, and they all come down to that fundamental act of pretending what this is all about. If this is about how individual companies have been wronged, and all the government is doing is bringing the two sides to a negotiating table, then you can argue this secrecy and imbalanced power is fine. But cloaking a government-mandated subsidy in the language of “bargaining” made the system worse at every turn.

What the News Bargaining Initiative changes

Morrison’s party was ousted in 2022 and he was replaced by the Labor government of Anthony Albanese. While Albanese’s government was the one that declined to “designate” Meta after it stopped paying publishers, it recognised that a new approach was needed. After much process, it unveiled its proposed result last week: the News Bargaining Incentive.

It’s an improvement. But unfortunately, the Albanese government seems intent on continuing to dress up a public policy decision as the marketplace at work, and that will continue to weaken the system.

The NBI, as the name implies, still aims to offer an incentive for Google and Meta to bargain with Australian publishers. But it creates a different backup mechanism if they don’t do so to the government’s liking.

It expands the targeted companies from two to three — Google, Meta and now TikTok. Second, it creates a 2.25 per cent tax on those companies’ Australia-generated revenue, which the government expects to generate more than A$300 million a year. And it gives the companies a way out of paying that tax by instead negotiating deals with publishers.

Here’s how it would work: For every A$1 Google pays to News Corp via a negotiated deal, Google’s tax liability will be reduced by A$1.50. And for every A$1 Google pays to what the government defines as a “small or medium” publisher, that tax liability will be reduced by A$1.70.

That’s a good change. Instead of an incentive to overpay the loudest potential voices (*cough* Murdoch), tech companies will have a (mild) incentive to pay more to smaller outlets. The NBI also adds a (minimal) requirement to spread the money around by saying companies must make deals with at least four different media companies to offset their entire tax liability. (Under the old system, there was no rule saying a company couldn’t just give News Corp or Nine a giant lump sum and declare itself done.)

Is the NBI more honest about what this money is actually for? Well, yes and no. Not rhetorically — at his announcement press conference, Albanese still paid homage to the idea that this was about compensation for content being “taken”:

We think that investment in journalism is critical to a healthy democracy. It matters. It’s something that defines the way that Australian society operates. And frankly, if the work is being done by the people here at this press conference and in other places right around Australia, then your work needs to have a monetary value attached to it. It shouldn’t just be able to be taken by a large multinational corporation and used to generate profits for that organisation with no compensation appropriate for the people who produce that creative content.

Still talk of “taking” without “compensation,” alas. At the same press conference, assistant treasurer Daniel Mulino was closer to the mark: “What we know is that news media organisations are having to deal with large digital platforms which have very substantial market power, and that’s undermining the traditional business model.”

But what’s important is that the Albanese bill itself actually gets this right. It makes it clear that tech giants will be subject to this scheme regardless of whether they have anything to do with the news. As the government’s own explanation of the bill puts it, “A significant social media or search service does not need to carry news content to attract an NMI [News media bargaining incentive charge].”

In other words: Meta, don’t try to pull that banning-news-on-Facebook trick again.

The addition of TikTok to the program also shows how little this has to do with news “theft.” Google and Facebook do at least display headlines from news stories in the act of directing users’ attention to them. But TikTok? TikTok bans the sharing of links in all but a few specific contexts, and it wants nothing more than to keep you scrolling from vertical video to vertical video, forever. The idea that it is engaged in compensation-worthy theft of news is laughable.

Unfortunately, the NBI is only marginally better on transparency and market imbalance than the old code was. Tech companies would have to report their deals to the government in order to cancel their tax liability — so at least someone would know how much money was changing hands. But there’s no language requiring those deals to be reported publicly. Which means that Australians will still have no idea how much money outlets are getting — and, more importantly, other publishers won’t know either. So smaller outlets won’t be able to be more informed bargainers, and tech companies will still be able to play politics or favourites however they wish.

The solution that’s under everyone’s nose

So what happens under the NBI if the tech giants decide not to play along? What if Meta sticks to its guns and says we still won’t make any deals?

Well, they’d have to pay that 2.25 per cent tax to the government. And what would the government do with that money? It would give that money to Australian news organisations based on a simple formula — how many journalists they employ. Albanese:

Importantly as well, this is not about government revenue. Every single dollar will go back to journalists to pay for the journalism that you all produce here in the Gallery, but newsrooms right around the country produce as well.

Here’s Anika Wells, the government’s minister for communications:

The News Media Bargaining Incentive means if a platform doesn’t do a deal with a news publisher, the money will come to us and we will deliver that funding to news organisations based on how many journalists they employ. The more journalists they have, the more money they will get under this proposal.

That sounds… awesome?

A straightforward formula that directly incentivises news outlets to hire journalists. (There is zero requirement that tech company money given directly to publishers be spent on journalism at all. News Corp could use it all on a new jet for Lachlan if it wanted to.) It would completely eliminate the uneven bargaining power among small and large outlets. It would eliminate the need for kabuki-theatre “negotiations.” And of course there’d be more money to go around, since tech companies are getting those 150/170 per cent incentives to make deals.

Such a plan would create a reliable, sustainable revenue source that Australian news publishers could count on. No more need to hope that your corporate office did a good job debating made-up numbers at the negotiating table. I think it’s fair to assume that Google, Meta, and TikTok will keep increasing revenue in the coming years, which means that the amount going to publishers would automatically increase as well. And if some new platform comes along that starts to eat up ad revenue, they’ll get automatically added to the program when they reach a certain size.

In fact, a tax like the one Albanese is proposing is exactly what I proposed back in 2022:

Google and Facebook are too big and powerful for the good of society. Their business, highly targeted advertising, is one that naturally tends toward monopolies: the more data you have, the bigger you get; the bigger you get, the more data you have. And while they make some fine and useful products, they aren’t creating the civic good that the earlier advertising gods — newspapers and other local news organisations — did by doing good journalism on a huge scale.

So tax them. Say you’re going to put a 1.5 per cent tax on the targeted digital advertising revenue of all companies with a market cap over $1 trillion, or annual revenues over $20 billion, or whatever cutoff you want. That would generate billions of dollars a year in a way that doesn’t warp competition or let Google and Facebook use their cash as a tool for targeted PR payoffs.

Then decide how to spend it. Maybe you subsidise reporter salaries in a big way… Maybe you give it all to public media… Maybe you distribute it as vouchers to [Australians] so each of them can spend $100 a year on news subscriptions at no cost to them.

There are lots of ideas! Some you might like, some you might not. But they’re all better than giving Rupert Murdoch $50 million a year and small local publishers zilch because of who they know and how much the tech giants value their silence.

What’s frustrating about the News Bargaining Initiative is that it… incentivises bargaining. It creates this powerful, transparent system to sustain journalism — and then asks everyone involved to make the same sort of shady secret deals the old system encouraged. The Albanese government has been very clear that it doesn’t want tech companies to pay this tax and would rather they keep striking deals. Albanese:

We have engaged in extensive consultation. At this point, the three organisations, Meta, Google, and TikTok as well have been consulted with and we’ll continue to engage with. But we want to see these deals done as were previously done under the previous regime.

Mulino:

I’ll just conclude by saying that the intention here is that digital platforms will enter into deals, and that’s very much the way this has been designed.

Wells:

The News Media Bargaining Incentive encourages platforms to enter into deals with news outlets and to contribute its fair share to Australian laws. Platforms should do deals with news organisations. If they decide not to, they will end up paying more.

Albanese again, in response to a question about what happens if Meta decided not to do deals:

Then they will be subject to higher payments than they will if they do a deal with the news organisations. That’s why there’s this incentive being put in and the distinction that’s there between paying 2.25 per cent or paying 1.5 per cent. And by having that incentive, what we’re encouraging is for organisations to sit down with news organisations, get these deals done, and then we can move forward.

In other words, the Albanese government wants to create an efficient, equitable way to give more than A$300 million to Australian news outlets — and then ignore it, because it would rather give around A$200 million to a subset of those outlets who can do well in secret negotiations.

To make the News Bargaining Initiative better, all it has to do is reverse the incentives. Instead of offering tech companies a discount for striking secret deals with the most powerful news companies, give them a discount for paying the tax. Or don’t offer them a discount at all! There is no reason to believe that Google’s negotiators are going to distribute money more equitably than a clear, uniform government pass-through program that pays per journalist. Australia shouldn’t be asking them to. Relying on backroom deals will benefit the tech companies (by paying less) and the Murdochs (by emphasising their market power), but no one else.

This one change would repair the damage done by the News Media Bargaining Code’s fake free-market framing. This isn’t about individual news companies seeking compensation for imaginary thefts — it’s a question of public policy. The Australian government has good reasons to want to support its local media industry, and it has designed a good mechanism to do so. It should use it. Kill the bargaining — keep the tax. •

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GLAM institutions — galleries, libraries, archives, museums — love an anniversary or any excuse to publish a thumping great coffee-table book about themselves, although as a veteran GLAM worker myself I feel I’ve seen fewer of these in recent years. Resource constraints (certainly among national institutions) might be a reason. The Library that Made Me, co-published by the library and NewSouth Publishing, weighs in at nearly 350 glossy large-format pages and is certainly a thumper. Philanthropic support for the project presumably explains the very modest retail price of just $50.

Two hundred years of operation makes the State Library the oldest continuously running library in Australia, and that demands respect. State librarian Caroline Butler-Bowdon claims in her preface that the anniversary project “places a stake in the ground that speaks to the might and value of this library,” and she continues: “It signals that libraries — enduring, free, and open to everyone — must never be taken for granted.”

First, however, the book reckons with the library’s past. Regular users of its Mitchell building will know the entrance is guarded by three sets of massive bronze doors featuring relief panels depicting historical scenes. Two sets of doors are devoted to images of Aboriginal people. Damien Webb, a Palawa (Tasmanian Aboriginal) man, the library’s manager of Indigenous engagement, opens this book with an aptly named, deeply felt essay, “Stained Bronze: About Us But Without Us.”

The Mitchell Library opened in 1910 specifically to house the collection donated to the library by the celebrated collector of Australiana, David Scott Mitchell. The bronze doors date from extensions to the building completed in 1942. The doors project was personally managed by the principal librarian, William Ifould, who wanted the portrayal of Aboriginal people to be based on photographs taken in Australia’s central desert region because he shared the widespread belief at the time that Aboriginal people existed there in their “purest” and most “wild” state.

Intended as a tribute to the last of the “real” Aborigines who were “dying out,” the images on the doors are for Webb a “stark reminder of the white gaze”. His tone is blunt but not bitter. He writes:

Plucking Aboriginal people out of photographs and combining mismatching elements in this manner is deeply offensive and reductive, and suggests that actual Aboriginal culture mattered far less than non-Aboriginal people’s depictions of them.

Other embellishments to the building, in stone and metal, represented ancient stories woven into European myth.

Yet here we were: our ancestors and our kin cast as relics of ancient history even while our culture continued, breathed and adapted. It feels like a profound insult and a theft of our present, enacted by those who benefited from our ongoing destruction.

After a considerable effort, Webb managed to identify in the library’s collection many of the photographs, which were taken by South Australian anthropologist Herbert Basedow in the 1920s and 1930s, used for the designs. Working his way through these, any one of which could encompass sensitive cultural knowledge obtained without informed consent, was a personal challenge for Webb as an Aboriginal man.

He perseveres because the continuity of culture is the point he wants readers to understand. One image, taken in 1923, shows a young Aboriginal mother holding a baby, and as he points out, by the time the bronze doors were complete, the baby would have been eighteen. Her descendants could be alive today, walking among us.

Something needs to change, the author concludes. Does artistic merit warrant the cultural violation perpetrated in the designs on the doors? Should they be taken down, or left there as a reminder of past practices? There are no easy answers, and yet something undoubtedly has changed if the library feels able to open up a space for one of its own staff to identify and call out these practices.

There is much more of this work to do, in this library and other memory institutions in Australia and elsewhere, and precious few First Nations professionals to lead and guide it.

A photographic essay, “A Day in the Life of the Library,” with images taken by Joy Mei En Lai and Bruce Ford, follows. The emphasis is on people: the staff who keep the library running from day to day. We see librarians, conservators, curators, educators, and building maintenance staff including a gardener and a cleaner — all named — going about their daily work in a purposeful hum of focused activity. One shot takes us into the multicultural book stack, where staff are packing books to be sent to local libraries. At any one time 35,000 books in more than forty languages circulate among NSW public libraries in a service that has been running for more than fifty years.

The photographs easily succeed in challenging any notion the reader might have that libraries are gloomy repositories of mouldy books and dusty archives. Damien Webb makes this explicit: the library, he says, is not “a passive receptacle for the past, but a moving feast of curiosity, bias, power and stories.”

This theme is further explored by his colleague, Mitchell librarian Richard Neville, in a short history of the library from 1826 until today. The struggle for adequate buildings is a thread running through the history of this and countless other collecting intuitions. This and many other aspects of the library’s history: its wide-reaching collecting ambitions; its cultivation of wealthy donors and benefactors; its distribution of books and reference services in country districts; its support for the state’s local libraries; the role of women in the library; its rivalry with what was then called the Commonwealth National Library for the right to regard itself as “national” library for all of Australia; and its exploration of new technologies for copying and sharing its collections with new audiences.

The library’s desire to collect material related to pioneers, explorers and founders of Australia led to a triumphalist view of Australian history which, Neville observes, did not admit “the violence of its dispossession and occupation — even though it was hidden in plain sight in the records in its collection.” First Nations histories and cultures could be glimpsed only obliquely, because, as with women, working classes and non-European people, their records were collected “accidentally, marginally or not at all.” This situation prevailed until the 1970s when cultural historians and First Nations historians began interrogating the collections with fresh questions, drawing on lived experience. When exactly the library began actively collecting in these areas, Neville does not say.

Unsurprisingly for a multi-authored book, there are inconsistencies in perspective. These are not papered over but left for readers to ponder. For Caroline Butler-Bowdon, the library is “beautiful, safe and free,” but Damien Webb’s essay shows it may be far from safe for some First Nations staff and visitors. One set of the bronze doors is especially problematic for him, and he no longer walks with Aboriginal Elders through them.

And while Richard Neville describes the 1942 building as “didactic: a three-dimensional lecture on the foundations of British-Australian ‘civilisation,’” Webb goes much further. For him, the bronze doors and exterior designs constitute “a piece of the larger puzzle of Empire and appropriation, a gaudy pastiche of global iconography that drapes the Mitchell building.”

The “library that made me” concept has been running for several years in the library’s magazine, Openbook. Prominent Australians from different backgrounds, ethnicities and abilities have been responding to an invitation to reflect upon a library — any library — that has been formative for them. These essays comprise the second half of this anniversary book. “If we are made by the books we read,” the editors suggest, “the libraries that allow us to find them will have an impact beyond our wildest dreams.”

The idea denotes a departure from other anniversary thumpers I’ve seen. Here, the power and authority the library has built for itself over many decades, probed and critiqued earlier in the book by Damien Webb and Richard Neville, is decentred. The book is hospitable to the notion that libraries can only survive if they are used. So why not embrace the voice of the library user, and indeed, why stick to the State Library? Probably everyone who crosses the library’s threshold or logs on to its website has already been a reader at — has been “made” by — some other kind of library somewhere else. This all-embracing perspective reaches out beyond walls of the institution and the pedestals upon which libraries usually place themselves (often quite literally).

Naturally the fifty-eight external contributors were not selected at random from a bunch of library users who happened to wander in on a slow Tuesday wanting to take advantage of the free air conditioning. Such an approach is hardly going to sell many books. (It might, however, have turned up some interesting results when you consider one of Sydney’s most famous identities, Bee Miles, was once banned from the Mitchell Library’s reading room for smoking, though her manuscripts were later readily accepted into the collection.)

Anyway, one cannot help but be curious about how libraries have nurtured and inspired successful writers including Anna Funder, Sarah Krasnostein, Sheila Ngọc Phạm and Yumna Kassab; journalists (Annabel Crabb, Anne Summers), historians (Michelle Arrow, Mark McKenna) and many other public intellectuals. The library also invited contributions from governor-general Sam Mostyn, artist Cressida Campbell, violinist Skye McIntosh, bookseller David Gaunt, actor and director John Gaden, celebrity chef Nagi Maehashi and netballer Liz Ellis.

A pattern emerges in many of the narratives, beginning with a school or local library and moving onwards and upwards to a university library or celebrated institution overseas. For some contributors, library-love began with just a simple shelf of books in the family home. Together, these contributions are like a joint coming-of-age story, as each library advances the reader in their search for identity and voice. Some contributors still marvel at the glorious freedom granted them by a simple library card of their own. The enormous impact of local libraries (and librarians) in the post–second world war era is fully evident here.

Some contributors barely refer to a library at all, for what is a library, after all, other than a way to systemise knowledge? Architect Glenn Murcutt admits, having struggled to read, he learned from his father that observation is a different method of reading and learning. For him there’s legibility in the structure of a landscape; how, for instance, trees erupt from the ground, or how leaves hang from trees and turn to follow the sun over the course of the day. Reading the landscape is totally integral to his life, has says.

The written word is not everything. By the age of thirteen, writer Ellen van Neerven had read omnivorously from the Albany Creek Library in Brisbane, but when they came across the CD rack, they felt they had discovered a goldmine, for there was no music at home. They picked up a CD by the American rock band Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and at home fell into a “passionate spell,” partly because of the music but also because of the library they realised they could cultivate in their mind from the books and music to be borrowed.

“Dancing around in my bedroom… I rocked out in the moment without feeling the thoughts and judgements of others,” van Neerven writes. “I carefully curated an internal world brighter than everything around myself. Nobody loved my mind more than me.” •

The Library That Made Me: 200 Years of the State Library of New South Wales
Edited by Richard Neville and Phillipa McGuinness | NewSouth | $49.99 | 344 pages

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ANU researcher Marcus Mietzner’s Ruling Indonesia is a timely, insightful and measured picture of the Jokowi presidency. His considerable access to key figures is reflected in the book’s useful insights into events and decisions. His conclusion has a hard edge: “While Jokowi was a lazy reformer of political institutions — in both the progressive and autocratic directions — his influence on Indonesia’s democratic culture was strong and primarily detrimental.”

Jokowi came to the job with a can-do attitude and an image as a man bent on practical measures to improve Indonesians’ lives. His headline priorities in both his terms, from 2014 to 2024, centred on infrastructure projects and skills development. The former, Mietzner found, arose from an early meeting with Chinese president Xi Jinping; the latter was never meaningfully tackled, despite a considerable investment of both rhetoric and cash.

Today, Indonesia’s roads, ports and airports are generally much improved. A fast train, the first in Southeast Asia, runs from Jakarta to Bandung. Yet Indonesia’s relative economic progress — measured by its share of global GDP — barely changed over the decade. Vietnam, a country Indonesians notice, has lifted its share by a third. More pointedly, Indonesia’s middle class shrank during his second term — by 20 per cent, according to official statistics.

Mietzner cites the presidencies of B.J. Habibie, Abdurrahman Wahid (known as “Gus Dur”), Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and Megawati Sukarno Putri, all of whom delivered notable, lasting reforms. “It is less clear what will remain of Jokowi’s rule,” he concludes, allowing one exception. “By actively enthroning his successor, Jokowi became politically liable not only for his own decade in power, but also for whatever Prabowo [Subianto, his successor] would or would not deliver.”

Jokowi comes across as a man who crashed into Indonesia’s power elite through the sheer force of his personal appeal. He was a man who kept an extremely close eye on public opinion (and on his own colleagues and opponents), quickly dislodging the yoke of Megawati, his ostensible patron, and establishing a “coalition” that ultimately took in virtually all of the parliament. Despite everything, he managed to retain the favour of 80 per cent of the electorate right up to his last day.

A clue to this contradiction between popular power and policy weakness emerges when Mietzner explores the popular view of Jokowi’s erosion of Indonesia’s core democratic institutions. Among voters, political success was weighted heavily to economic outcomes — which is what Jokowi projected, relentlessly. Democratic safeguards rated well below rice and cooking oil.

Yet, as much as Jokowi used his popularity to effect and drove his agendas against (at times) firm opposition, the evidence is of a man who failed to penetrate Indonesia’s establishment. His infrastructure agenda suited the elites, and even his much-maligned national capital relocation — to Nusantara in Kalimantan — was humoured with (largely meaningless) support. He gradually imposed his own people to head the military and the police and, late in his presidency, wielded his influence over the anti-corruption commission and courts to improper ends. He emerges as an outsider who wielded his popularity largely to hold power without acquiring the authority to make deep or lasting changes.

Mietzner points to evidence of unusual interventions by police and government agencies to influence voting in the 2024 election, driven by Jokowi’s desire to plant his son, Gibran Rakabuming Raka, in the vice-presidency and thereby create a dynasty. The book’s epilogue includes post-election evidence that Prabowo scuttled Gibran’s political efforts and largely dismissed Jokowi’s efforts towards a continuing personal association.

While successive administrations have made much of Indonesia’s potential, the country’s signal achievement has been its stability. Many observers forecast serious disruption, including possible regional secessions, after the 1997 financial crisis and the fall of Suharto. Instead, the country has held a series of open, successful national elections in which — with occasional challenges — polling integrity has been confirmed and winning candidates have peacefully taken their place. Along the way, important reforms removed the military from civil affairs, introduced a globally recognised anticorruption agency and settled secessionist challenges, notably in Aceh.

Critically, Indonesia maintained a firm fiscal discipline that has helped to keep inflation under control and underpin wider economic stability. But the Jokowi years saw some of those stabilising planks decayed, and the signs from Prabowo suggest Indonesia may be ill-equipped for the challenges emerging in a more fractious and unstable global environment.

Even before the 2024 election, informed Indonesians were critical of loose spending. Sri Mulyani Indrawati, Jokowi’s highly regarded finance minister, was said to have quaked under pressure, absorbing into the budget the costs of supposedly private projects in the new national capital and the losses of the Jakarta–Bandung fast train. Since the election, Prabowo has reversed direction on military spending, adding substantial new allocations for soldiers and equipment. Along the way, his signature election promise, a massive program of free school meals, was handed to the military to deliver. Criticised initially for its budget impact and later for its efficacy, evidence has emerged of extremely poor delivery and even food poisoning.

Now, with volatile oil prices boosting domestic prices and government spending (Indonesia outlays a large public subsidy for fuel) and new spending priorities testing the legislated deficit cap (3 per cent of GDP), Indonesia’s middle class is likely to demand attention. In the years from 2003 to 2014 the middle class tripled in size. But in Jokowi’s second term, from 2019, and since, it has shrunk markedly. Managing that problem is likely to be the key to continuing political stability, especially if global economic conditions worsen.

Indonesia’s tax base can’t support a widening of its social spending. Its shrinking middle class, the driver of domestic consumption, has lost its dynamic influence over recent years. At the same time, flagrant displays of political indulgence — ranging from politicians voting to double their own housing allowance to a fuel embezzlement scheme run by executives of the national oil company that is alleged to have cost US$12.6 billion — highlight diverging public and political interests.

Jokowi’s almost exclusive focus on economic development might have been the foundation for more solid growth, potentially presenting Indonesia’s large market and labour force, like Vietnam’s, as a China+1 manufacturing location. Yet while he improved transport and logistics he didn’t tackle the bog of regulation and corruption that handicaps ventures attempting to operate domestically or export. His emasculation and later weaponising of the anticorruption commission appears even to punish people, like former ministers Nadiem Makarim and Tom Lembong, for having challenged an ethos of widespread indulgence in public administration.

Mietzner summarises Indonesia’s uncertain outlook and Jokowi’s lasting image in plain terms. “It was Jokowi’s particular blending of a stubborn focus on goals and a strategic willingness to moderate that made up the core of his political persona. Indonesians liked what they saw. Whether they will still be so kind to him in the future will largely depend on what Jokowi’s handpicked successor will do to them.” •

Ruling Indonesia: Jokowi’s Presidency in an Age of Democratic Crisis and Great Power Competition
By Marcus Mietzner | University of Michigan Press | US$39.95 (Free for onscreen reading) | 282 pages

The post The can-do president who didn’t appeared first on Inside Story.

Mark Mazower would disagree with that description. As his new book On Antisemitism: A Word in History documents and persuasively explains, experience elsewhere (especially in the United States) suggests that Commissioner Bell risks underestimating the threat the definition itself poses to “social cohesion,” free speech, and academic freedom. Mazower is especially concerned by how the widespread adoption of the IHRA’s formulation has been weaponised to conflate criticism of Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people with antisemitism. “How we came to find ourselves in such a quandary,” he writes, “is the question this book tries to answer.”

Unsurprisingly, as a distinguished British-born Jewish historian based at Columbia University, Mazower insists we must view antisemitism in its historical context. The term “has been used to mean different things at different times,” he writes. “Because words do not exist outside time and place, we need to understand them in their setting.”

His observations apply equally to his own book, written in the wake of the political retribution Columbia suffered as a result of its students’ pro-Palestinian encampments provoked by Israel’s Gaza onslaught. After Trump labelled these protests as “antisemitic” and imposed significant financial and legal sanctions on the university, Mazower was forced to ask “What had happened to the concept of antisemitism? A term that began as a way to describe the hostility faced by Jews as a minority struggling for their legal rights is now used to defend a Jewish majority state depriving the minority within it of theirs.”

On Antisemitism opens with a “historical sketch that looks at the rise and fall of antisemitism as a chiefly European political movement” before shifting gears to analyse the origins and spread of a reframed understanding of antisemitism that originated in the 1970s, “largely as a way to rationalise growing criticism of Israel.” In other words, Mazower’s primary focus throughout On Antisemitism is not with “attitudes, symbols, or stereotypes but with political actions, theories, organisations, and outcomes.”

Mazower sees the rise between 1880 and 1914 of antisemitic political movements in Europe — then home to 80 per cent of the world’s Jewish population — as a right-wing response to their increasing civic emancipation. (The prototype for these movements was the German “League of Antisemites,” founded in 1879.) Their success depended “not so much upon persuading people of negative stereotypes about the Jews — these were common currency — but rather in getting them to believe that the Jews were a serious threat to their core social or political concerns.”

While most Jewish people welcomed their new freedoms, some were concerned greater emancipation would not only encourage increased hostility but dilute their own communal and religious solidarity as well. Still others were adherents of Zionism, a new ethno-nationalist movement which argued “freedom for Jews was impossible so long as they lived amid societies that hated them,” proposing instead the creation of their own nation-state in the Holy Land. But this distant prospect had little appeal, especially to those Jews living in Western Europe.

It was the first world war that proved to be a catalyst for a boost to the fortunes of both the Zionists — with British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour’s fateful pledge to support the “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” — and the antisemites, with Hitler’s eventual rise to power in 1933. Nazism was originally a movement against Jewish emancipation, but once Jews were deprived of their freedoms, rights and economic opportunities the push was on to somehow rid Hitler’s ever-expanding Reich of them altogether. By 1945 half the total population of European Jewry had been wiped out, along with the antisemitic architects of their genocide.

The story of antisemitism was transformed after 1948 not only demographically — the US and Israel would supplant Europe as the epicentre of world Jewry — but geopolitically as well. Hence, as Mazower observes, Jewish life around the world would now “be shaped politically by the dynamics within and increasingly between these two poles.” One consequence of this shift was that “the concept of antisemitism acquired new political associations in new settings.”

The three million Jewish migrants entering the US prior to 1945 had immediately enjoyed full civic emancipation and were regarded racially as “whites.” By the 1920s, however, they were enduring both antisemitic prejudice as well as antisemitic ideologies promoted by the likes of industrialist Henry Ford, high-profile Catholic priest Charles Coughlin and various neo-Nazi organisations. Jewish defence organisations emerged in response, among them the Anti-Defamation League, or ADL, and the American Jewish Committee, which were careful to distance themselves from Zionism for fear of being accused of having divided loyalties.

In the immediate aftermath of the second world war, the prevalence of antisemitic rhetoric and restrictions shrank remarkably. Hailing “the virtual end of overt antisemitism” in the US, a director of the ADL observed in 1972 that the postwar decades were a “golden age” in which American Jews enjoyed security and social acceptance to a degree unprecedented in history. This was also, Mazower adds, the period when antisemitism “was not widely seen … as something that could or should be treated separately from other kinds of bigotry or discrimination.”

Likewise, the birth of Israel neither raised suspicions of where American Jews’ loyalties lay nor inspired them to emigrate en masse to the newly created Jewish state. In fact, a number of left-wing American Jewish commentators like William Zukerman were already deeply critical of Israeli Zionists’ violent dispossession of Palestinian Arabs. Attacked by American Zionist organisations as a “self-hating Jew,” Zukerman noted, criticisms of Israel were now being “denounced not only as anti-Israel but as anti-Semitic.” As Mazower notes, “the era in which antisemitism could be discussed without reference to Israel was about to end.”

Nevertheless, there was at this time “an extraordinary tussle for power between the community notables of American Jewry… and the Jewish state and its leaders.” While Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion’s priority was to win over non-Zionist Jewish leaders, he infuriated them with his repeated calls for American Jews to settle in Israel. Nor were they happy that “Israeli officials had begun the practice… of discussing antisemitic incidents abroad directly with governments over the heads of local Jewish communities, as though it were in fact their primary protector.”

What transformed the relationship between Israel and American Jewry was the Six-Day War of 1967. As one Israeli historian observed, “not only was Zionism ‘Americanised,’ American Jewry became ‘Zionised.’” One contributor to this remarkable turnaround emerged from research undertaken soon afterwards by the American Jewish Committee of a Midwestern Jewish community. Their heightened awareness that the state of Israel — the one good result of the Holocaust — could be destroyed was experienced as a threat to their own security and well-being. This increased vulnerability helped to catalyse American Jewry’s increasingly impassioned political engagement with Israel.

Following Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War and its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Mazower writes, a group of Third World countries “took up the Palestinian cause in the UN as part of the larger struggle against colonialism” — as did portions of the American left. This anti-Israel commentary inspired the ADL to castigate Americans’ “unwillingness to comprehend the necessity of the existence of Israel to Jewish safety and survival in the world.” The source of the problem? The radical Left’s support for a “new antisemitism” manifesting itself as hostility to Israel.

Following what was perceived as Israel’s narrow escape from defeat in the 1973 Arab–Israeli War, Mazower notes, “American Jews also started to embrace the idea of the Holocaust not merely as history but as a warning for the future and an integral part of their sense of themselves.” Hence political attacks on Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and threats to Israel’s safety “were regarded by more and more American Jews as an attack on themselves.”

From this point onwards the political mobilisation of American Jews accelerated, building up “not only a widely feared lobbying apparatus to enlist politicians in support of Israel, but also a vast, sprawling network of communal philanthropic organisations.” The question was who would wield this power, how would it be deployed, and to what ends.

Beginning in the early 2000s, as Mazower documents, “a number of American Jewish organisations, American policymakers, and Israeli officials began to focus on raising international awareness of antisemitism.” The US got behind this push early. In 2004 Colin Powell announced the creation within the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe of a new bureaucracy to track antisemitic incidents and advise members on new legislation, and Congress created the State Department’s Office of the Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, including the “vilification of Israel.”

By the end of 2023, twenty-four or more countries had set up similar posts, “creating a new cadre of antisemitism watchdogs… Their emergence had the consequence of splitting antisemitism campaigning from the larger world of antidiscrimination activism.”

The further conflation of antisemitism with criticism of Israel was ensured when, in 2018, the Israeli Knesset passed legislation, strongly backed by Benjamin Netanyahu, to define Israel as “the nation-state of the Jewish people” despite its significant non-Jewish population. The problem for America’s leading Jewish advocacy groups was that this ethnonationalist reframing of the Israeli constitution threatened “the cherished assumption that Israel could be both Jewish and democratic.” This mattered to many American Jews who, as Mazower reminds us, “tended to be more progressive and liberal” than the leading Jewish advocacy groups, “whose leadership and main donors tended… to show deference to whichever Israeli government was in office.”

Despite its many successes, what the American-Israeli alliance still lacked in its battle against the “new antisemitism” was a clear yet nuanced definition of what exactly antisemitism is — and what it is not. “Was it ethnic prejudice?” asks Mazower. “Was it a singling out of Israel for blame? Were these conceptions related and where was the boundary between them to be drawn? And perhaps the most important question of all: Who got to decide?”

Mazower believes two forces drove the search for and enforcement of a single uniform definition of antisemitism. First, the tracking of antisemitic incidents and enforcement of race-hate crimes required one for use by statisticians and the legal profession. Second, it was important for the dominant advocacy groups to devise a definition that legitimised their preferred meanings of antisemitism and prohibited others.

A suitable definition developed by the American Jewish Committee’s Kenneth Stern was presented around 2016 to an obscure intergovernmental agency, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. As it happened, the IHRA’s subcommittee on antisemitism was chaired by a representative of the US-based Simon Wiesenthal Centre. (At one time the centre’s list of the world’s top ten antisemites included Ben & Jerry’s founders alongside Hamas and Iran.) After being lobbied by a number of Israeli and American Jewish advocacy groups, the IHRA adopted Stern’s definition of antisemitism in 2016.

The IHRA “working definition” reads as follows.

A certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.

Mazower finds this formulation imprecise and confusing, especially its use of may be, “since a definition generally tells us what something is.” Furthermore, “hatred is not the only and not necessarily even the most important expression of antisemitism.” Unfortunately, the definition’s accompanying examples only confuse things further, because they fail to define the circumstances in which they may (or may not) be considered antisemitic.

In Mazower’s view, there exist far better definitions of antisemitism, including the Jerusalem Declaration of Antisemitism:

Antisemitism is discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews (or Jewish institutions as Jewish).

This declaration goes on to define explicitly examples of behaviour or beliefs that are antisemitic and those which are not. For example, it is not antisemitic to support “the Palestinian demand for justice and the full grant of their political, national, civil and human rights, as encapsulated in international law.”

However perverse it may seem, Mazower believes it’s precisely the confusing nature of the IHRA definition that recommended it to those seeking its adoption. “If organisations are told that contravening the IHRA definition will expose them to legal or bureaucratic jeopardy, and if they are unsure what exactly does contravene the definition, they will likely err on the side of caution. It is in this way that the definition threatens intellectual freedom.”

Nevertheless, the IHRA definition has been increasingly adopted by American and European public and private sector organisations in response to unrelenting pressure from both American Jewish advocacy groups and Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism. As of June 2025 more than forty governments had endorsed it, including almost all members of the European Union. The US went one step further in 2023 when Congress passed an antisemitism bill that “explicitly rules out the use of rival definitions.” Meanwhile dozens of American universities and most in Britain have adopted “the IHRA” in one form or another.

For Mazower, one of the most worrying consequences of the widespread adoption, interpretation, weaponisation and enforcement of the IHRA definition has been to legitimate accusations of antisemitism against those who are protesting Israel’s efforts to dispossess Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank as a forerunner to the creation of Eretz Israel “from the river to the sea.” As a result, some countries (notably the US) are now “attempting to dictate what their own nationals may or may not say about another country. There seems to be little precedent for this, and the potential consequences for freedom of expression are profound.”

The promotion of the IHRA’s “highly contentious and problematic” formula has come at “a time when polls have consistently shown a long-term hardening of global opinion against Israel.” This is true even in the US, especially among young Americans and within an increasingly divided Jewish community.

Inevitably, this trend has been most visible on university campuses, where student protests have attracted fierce debate and opened up a new front for Jewish advocacy groups to clamp down on what they see as “rising antisemitism.” In the US, the ADL has devised what it calls a Campus Antisemitism Report Card — to grade universities on how well they are doing — which Mazower derides as both “a gimmick” and a sign of how far it has fallen far short of its “predecessors in tackling serious issues of discrimination.”

What does Mazower offer as more promising alternatives to turning down the heat and more seriously addressing the issues surrounding the current debate over antisemitism? For a start, “perhaps we need to question whether the idea of antisemitism is sui generis and best tackled apart from other forms of bigotry.” A revival of the broad anti-racist campaigns Jewish advocacy groups like the ADL supported in the 1950s — along with more effective counterterrorism efforts — would certainly tackle the very real hatred of Jews still to be found within both the neo-Nazi right and radical Islamic fringe groups.

But in this century it is Israel’s “cycle of wars” that has been the primary driver of spikes in “antisemitic incidents.” This is why one of the leading historians of antisemitism, Steve Beller, has suggested we have been “hunting the wrong elephant.” Put simply, as quoted by Mazower, he notes that “antisemitism was historically built around the ‘Jewish Question.’ What we have in Israel/Palestine today is not so much a Jewish Question as a Palestinian Question.” Until it is resolved there will never be peace for Israelis, Palestinians, the Jewish and Arab diasporas, indeed all of us.

Our own royal commission is currently holding a fortnight of hearings, a primary focus of which will be the nature and prevalence of antisemitism. But what I hadn’t fully appreciated before reading On Antisemitism is how profoundly the sweep and force of recent international history has shaped the commission’s creation and agenda.

Australian readers of this review might now better appreciate how and why so many of the steps taken by both our federal and state governments have mimicked the responses of their American counterparts over the last two decades to the “new antisemitism.” In 2021 the Morrison government adopted the IHRA definition. Three years later Albanese appointed Jillian Segal as “special envoy to combat antisemitism,” partly in response to the plethora of pro-Palestinian protests at Australian universities.

In February 2025 Universities Australia issued its own “working definition” of antisemitism, which drew on not only the IHRA definition but also recommendations from, among others, Columbia University’s Antisemitism Task Force. Segal welcomed UA’s statement as “an important first step,” with the implied caveat that it could do better.

Then, last December, Albanese announced an Antisemitism Education Taskforce chaired by David Gonski with Segal among its members. An important item on its agenda will be the development of an antisemitism report card to grade universities on their compliance with the taskforce’s recommendations. What the penalties might be for non-compliance is not yet clear.

Meanwhile, both the NSW and Queensland state governments passed laws that, respectively, restricted the rights of pro-Palestinian groups to protest and banned the use of the phrases “from the river to the sea” and “globalise the intifada” “when used to menace, harass, or offend.” The NSW law has since been ruled as an unconstitutional assault on the “freedom of personal communication.” The Queensland law has also been appealed.

Over at the royal commission, Virginia Bell might wish — in the light of Mazower’s well-documented history — to reassess her earlier judgement that the IHRA definition was “uncontroversial.” While it may be her view that “criticism of the policies… pursued by the government of Israel… is not of itself antisemitic,” the interpretation and use of the IHRA’s hopelessly confused definition in other countries suggests it will leave the door to such conflation wide open. •

A personal coda: I’d like to acknowledge that my account of Mark Mazower’s powerful and timely work reads more like a precis than a review. Apart from limitations of time and space, this piece reflects how much I share his commitment not only to a disciplined and engaged historiography but also to providing a history that speaks to the “better angels” of his subjects as well as his readers.

This is the approach I’ve attempted to follow for six decades. And during that time I have shared this journey with a number of American and Israeli Jewish historians, whose work and humanity I have loved and respected. Principal among them was my Harvard PhD supervisor, the late Everett Mendelsohn. Everett combined the vocation of history with his tireless work as a public intellectual both in the United States and Israel, where he was a prominent proponent of the Israeli peace movement’s efforts to seek a just resolution of the Palestine question. I hope this article reflects and honours the skills and values he transmitted to me and so many others.

On Antisemitism: A Word in History
By Mark Mazower | Allen Lane | $55 | 333 pages

The post Beyond the looking-glass appeared first on Inside Story.

Curious crossovers haven’t helped. Rupert’s divorce settlement with his fourth wife, Jerry Hall, barred her from giving story ideas to Succession’s scriptwriters. At one stage Lachlan told Rupert his brother James was leaking stories to those same script-writers. After daughter Elisabeth saw the TV patriarch Logan Roy die on-screen she began making plans with James and Prudence (Murdoch’s daughter from his first marriage) for how they would respond to their father’s death.

Essentially, though, none of the main characters in the TV series resembles any of the main players in the Murdoch dramas. Nor do any of their conflicts.

But the real life Murdoch story could make a good TV series of its own.  The story would begin in 1998 with a departing wife (Anna) giving up a large fortune in return for an irrevocable trust to protect Rupert’s four children against future usurpers. Decades later, the father and oldest son Lachlan, fearful the favoured son could be outvoted three-to-one after Rupert’s death, sought to overturn the irrevocable trust — and actually called the move Operation Family Harmony. Unsurprisingly, the other three siblings refused. Father and son mounted a legal action in Nevada; equally unsurprisingly, it failed. Then, in a denouement only accountants could be excited by, the three siblings were paid a huge amount of money to go away (thereby ruling out a second season). The anointed heir’s future control is assured, but at a huge cost.

Gabriel Sherman’s new book, Bonfire of the Murdochs, is the first biography of Murdoch to be published since that sequence of events was revealed in the 3000 pages of discovery documents and legal testimony from the Operation Family Harmony court case leaked to the New York Times. More than any other Murdoch biographer, Sherman puts family relationships and dramas at its heart. His conclusion is brutal: “Over seventy years, Rupert said he was building a family business. But what he built was a business that destroyed his family.”

Sherman comes to his task with impeccable credentials. He wrote an excellent book about the boss of Fox News, Roger Ailes, has just written the reality-based TV drama The Apprentice — acclaimed by critics and attacked by Donald Trump — and has been a leading chronicler of Murdoch machinations over the past two decades.

First, the bad news. Sherman’s first chapter is, quite simply, terrible. It seems to be compulsory for American writers to be error-prone whenever they write about Australia. Among many lapses comes this: “Rupert also watered down [Rohan] Rivett’s coverage of a local murder trial because it undermined Rupert’s effort to curry favour with government officials who approved lucrative television licences.” Presumably this is a reference to the Adelaide News coverage of the trial of Max Stuart, which was appealed all the way to the Privy Council and prompted a royal commission into claims that police had written Stuart’s confession. Murdoch was just as active as his editor Rohan Rivett in a courageous campaign that climaxed with a threat of criminal defamation charges against the paper. And, of course, television licences are a federal not a state government responsibility.

As the action moves closer to the present day and New York, the standard fortunately improves greatly. Developments in Australia, Britain and China, though, are essentially a backdrop to changing family relationships.

That means Sherman’s account of the British phone-hacking scandal doesn’t mention the five years after 2006 when News Corp claimed the hacking was the work of just a single rogue reporter, or the frustrations and courage of Nick Davies and the Guardian in trying to penetrate their lies, or the efforts by some lawyers to hold the company to account, or the shameful passivity of the London police. Nor is the momentous Leveson inquiry and its report mentioned.

The family was still largely united when Rupert and James testified to a parliamentary committee in 2011. Lachlan and Prudence flew in to support them, and even Rupert’s ex-wife Anna came to support her son.

The only dissenter was Elisabeth, who thought James — the son in charge of the company’s UK branch — should resign. When she said this to Rupert, he agreed. “Rupert then made as cruel a request as a father could make,” writes Sherman: he told Elisabeth to fire James. “Dad and I think the only way to stop the noise is for you to step down,” she told James, who was “gutted” not only by his sister’s betrayal but also by their father’s cowardice. James told his sister that if Rupert wanted to fire him he should say it to his face. The siblings didn’t speak for years. Elisabeth later described her action as one of her greatest regrets.

This was not the only occasion when Rupert had one of James’s siblings deliver bad news. In 2015 Fox chief executive Chase Carey, who was in his early sixties, grew tired of being caught between the “warring brothers,” Lachlan and James, and told Rupert he wanted to leave after his contract ran out. Rupert was forced to make a decision on which son would take over. When James arrived for lunch with Carey and Lachlan at a club near the office he was told Lachlan would be chief executive and James would report to him. James recalled feeling hot anger surge through his body. Having Carey and Lachlan ambush him in public was, he felt, pathological, a corporate execution.

James felt — and Sherman argues — that while Rupert went to great lengths to foment competition between his children there was always only going to be one winner, Lachlan. Rupert’s treatment of Elisabeth seems particularly unfair. Despite her business successes, Rupert clearly thought her gender ruled her out from being his successor.

Lachlan was annoyed, meanwhile, that James “peacocked” around as if he were a better businessman than their father, and that James should show more respect. Others in the company thought James was happy to take the money earned by Fox News while also looking down on the network. In turn, James felt he had put in the hard yards for the company, in Hong Kong and with BSkyB, while Lachlan ran away to Australia and presided over a string of business failures.

Apart from anything else, James’s relations with his father were often confrontational, while Lachlan was much more emotionally supportive. Lachlan was most in tune with Rupert’s attitude to Fox News and its unwavering support for Trump, and was the only one who shared Rupert’s fondness for tabloid newspapers.

There is no doubt who the book’s chief villain is. While Rupert himself was vaccinated and took many precautions during the Covid-19 pandemic, he let Fox rail against lockdowns and often air anti-science stances. While Rupert had no doubt that Biden legitimately won the 2020 election and thought Trump should concede, a dip in ratings led him to encourage Fox News to stoke viewers’ prejudices; this proved a financial disaster when Dominion Voting Machines successfully sued for defamation.

Sherman chronicles the ups and downs of Rupert’s marriages, and particularly his resistance to looking back. Once he deems a relationship to be over, he is cold, unbending and unwilling to engage in any dialogue. This is true not only of his marriage break-ups, but at least sometimes with his children.

After the hearings in Nevada wound up, but before the verdict was handed down, James and his sisters sent Rupert a letter seeking to reconcile. “Thanksgiving and Christmas are upon us and the three of us wanted to reach out to you personally to say that we miss you and love you,” they wrote. “We are asking you with love to find a way to put an end to this destructive judicial path so that we can have a chance to heal as a collaborative and loving family.”

When Rupert replied a couple of days later, he said he’d read the children’s trial testimony twice and concluded that he, Rupert, was right: they were unfit to inherit the business. He said he only wanted to speak through lawyers henceforth, and signed off “Much love Dad.”

While the general thrust of Sherwin’s case against Rupert is sound, a couple of times he seems to overstep the mark. He writes, for example, that James denied knowing about the phone-hacking by his London-based tabloids, yet Rupert used the biggest scandal in the company’s history to demote him and promote. James’s wife Kathryn makes a similar point: she “later realised that Rupert had used James’s promotions as opportunities for James to fail so Lachlan could inherit the company.”

Rupert was not the author of James’s mismanagement of the phone-hacking crisis, James was. He signed off on payments of around a million pounds, he says, on the advice of the lawyers that misled him about the scale of the misdeeds. The lawyers deny this. At best, this shows an amazing lack of curiosity, indeed a lack of due diligence. True, he was much more interested in BSkyB, but newspapers were a big part of his job in Britain. (Rupert eventually defied the many calls that James should be forced to resign, and moved him sideways to a senior position in New York.)

Both James’s and the company’s behaviour stems from their sense of invulnerability. After the Independent ran an advertisement declaring “Rupert Murdoch Won’t Decide This Election. You Will,” James barged unannounced into the editor’s office and yelled “What the fuck are you playing at?”

Back in 2010, Rupert had taken an extraordinary step: he asked the children to join in family therapy. A therapist met with Rupert and the kids (no spouses allowed) on their farm in Australia. Ostensibly the family saw it as a chance to help James and Rupert get along. Each family member had to stand with their back to the others and let them vent their grievances. It was a car crash, James later said. By the end, they were more alienated from each other.

It was another move that would make great TV. •

Bonfire of the Murdochs
By Gabriel Sherman | Simon & Schuster | $36.99 | 256 pages

The post Murdoch versus Murdoch appeared first on Inside Story.

For Hope and the literati of mid-century Australia, poetry was sacred and pivotal. This was not their private delusion, but a state of affairs that generally prevailed in the civic life of this time. Only poetry, it was felt, could express the entire universe, from its most profound metaphysics to its most profane politics, in its irreducible particularity. In the words of Hope’s lifelong friend James McAuley, poetry offered a “grammar of the real.”

From the 1930s to the 1960s it was possible to speak in this way with the general assent of the literate world. But by the 1970s this view had already started to seem preposterous. Poetry, now free of the formal constraint Hope and his followers demanded, lost its status as a metalanguage and slid once more into the bohemian margins.

Lever begins her book by acknowledging the fall of A.D. Hope in the public estimation. It was a double demotion: not only had poetry itself fallen from its ascendency but Hope’s brand of poetry was thoroughly defeated by the newer forms he had derided. To the extent that Hope is remembered at all these days, it tends to be as a stuffy and rigid formalist. His derision of new varieties of poetry helped keep Australian creativity captive behind the bars of his classical delusions.

Lever’s biography acknowledges this caricature had some basis in the words and actions of the man himself. But she gently sets aside such suppositions and assesses Hope’s life in light of the world that existed for him. Her approach marks a refreshing change from the reflexive presentism that has become an occupational hazard in contemporary biography. Hope’s life stretched the length of the twentieth century and encompassed its momentous changes and calamitous collapses. The ardent investment by Hope and his generation — which included Judith Wright, James McAuley, Douglas Stewart, David Campbell, Gwen Harwood, Francis Webb and Rosemary Dobson — in poetry as an enduring testament has to be understood in the light of these cataclysmic times.

Despite a reputation for elitism, neither Hope nor most of his generation were born with silver spoons in their mouths. Indeed, they grew up in a material hardship that would shock many of us today. Hope was born on a snowy July night at the Presbyterian manse in Cooma in 1907. His father Percival was the local minister and young Alec grew up in rural Presbyterian parishes in New South Wales and Tasmania. After mediocre marks in his final year at Bathurst High School, he managed to get into Fort Street Boys’ High to repeat his final year. On that basis, he scraped into the University of Sydney, where he studied English, Philosophy and Psychology. It was here he began to write poetry seriously.

Still, while he was a well-known and charismatic figure at university, Hope was generally outshone academically by brighter stars. It was only after someone backed out at the last minute that he was offered a bare-bones scholarship to Oxford University in 1928.

Hope’s memories of this period are not joyous, but instead paint a picture of penury and loneliness. At least the syllabus at Oxford was in sympathy with Hope’s inclinations. Over at Cambridge radical new methods of “practical” criticism were being introduced, but Oxford’s approach was resolutely philological, concentrating on early and middle English and drawing a sharp line in 1832 with the romantics. Hope’s time at Oxford coincided with the appointments of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, though before either had become famous for their fantasy novels.

Back in Australia after two poverty-stricken years and with a third-class degree to his name, Hope trained at Sydney Teachers’ College in 1931. As the Depression tightened its grip, work was scarce even for a massively over-qualified teacher, and he took relief jobs in Katoomba and Newcastle. He eventually found work as a vocational counsellor in the NSW Department of Labour in 1934, a job he held until he accepted a position with the Department of Education. This took him to Canberra, which at the time boasted a population of around ten thousand people and resembled a sheep paddock crossed with a building site.

Hope spent two years in Canberra, not knowing then that he would return there after the war and spend the latter fifty years of his life in the capital. It was also in Canberra in 1936 that he met his future wife, Penelope Robinson. He left Canberra in 1938 to take up a lectureship at Sydney Teachers’ College, located on the campus of Sydney University, bringing him back into proximity with Sydney’s literary life.

The late 1930s proved a remarkably fertile period in Australian literature. At Sydney University, Southerly magazine, the first scholarly journal for Australian writing, began its life in 1939. That same year in Brisbane, Clem Christesen founded Meanjin. The following year, Douglas Stewart began an influential tenure as editor of the Bulletin’s “Red Page,” which reviewed Australian literature and culture. In Adelaide, competing schools of poetry emerged in strident new magazines such as the Jindyworobak Review, Max Harris’s Angry Penguins and Flexmore Hudson’s Poetry.

It is at this point in Hope’s story that things really start to heat up. He was a central figure during the tempestuous literary upheavals of the 1940s, a period that suffers from having been endlessly studied by literary historians and largely forgotten by the Australian public. Lever deftly copes with this predicament by bringing the events to life again, but as if for the first time. The freshness of her account comes from the fact that she is attempting to understand them from Hope’s position.

The era’s contest of literary ideas was brought to a fever pitch by the existential crisis posed to Australia by the Pacific War. The cultural nationalists were exemplified by the “Jindyworobaks,” who sought to ground Australian poetry in the continent’s unique landscapes and Indigenous cultures. Then there were the avant-gardist “Angry Penguins,” who were inspired by surrealism, dadaism and experimental literary modernism. And finally, there were the classicists led by Hope and his younger protégés James McAuley and Harold Stewart.

The simmering resentments and playful jousting erupted into a fully blown national scandal when McAuley and Stewart submitted poems to Angry Penguins under the pseudonym “Ern Malley” complete with a fictional biography sent to them from his fictional sister “Ethel” who had discovered these poems after “Ern’s” recent death. The poems were published with great fanfare, only for McAuley and Stewart to reveal they had invented Ern and composed his pseudo-poems to expose what they saw as the fundamental vacuity of the modernist boosters. While he had no direct role in the hoax, Hope was in on the joke from an early point and celebrated its success. The whole matter descended into farce as police, missing the point of the hoax, decided to prosecute the editor Max Harris for obscenity.

Whether this was a watershed moment in Australian literary culture or a colourful sideshow is a question Lever’s book helps us to answer. It is possible it was both of these things. Because Hope and McAuley went on to occupy lofty positions in the academy, becoming celebrated national and international poets, and exercising significant cultural influence in the 1950s and 60s they appear to be the victors. But in more recent accounts of this history, both Hope and McAuley are typically cast as the villains.

What is helpful in Lever’s biography is that the hoax doesn’t fall into these easy categorisations. One of her claims, indeed, is that despite his vigorous assertions to the contrary, it is probably right to consider Hope’s poetry modernist insofar as it was in quite clear dialogue with Yeats, Eliot, Pound and Auden.

Lever’s biography is greatly enriched by her training as a literary historian and critic. This might seem natural enough, but it is not always the case with literary biographies. Even biographers who have a literary background will sometimes seem to forget this training when they write about writers and treat their works as survey points for their real lives. What Lever does is to give Hope’s poems their own biographical status. They sit next to the more conventional biographical facts as documents of Hope’s most intimate thoughts. His early poems, “The End of a Journey” (1930), “The Damnation of Byron” (1934) and “Pygmalion” and “Standardisation” (both 1938) are read as biographical, offering a compressed but detailed image of a young man’s interior life.

Many consider crossing from a fictional literary work into the life of its author fraught with risk. But Lever shows us it can be done if one is able to understand how a poem makes it subjective claims. In the years before confessional poetry, for instance, there were accepted codes of self-revelation: in this respect, the mythic figures and situations of Hope’s poems (Ulysses, Byron, Pygmalion) offer up an image of the author in coded form. Certainly, Hope’s contemporaries understood his poems in this way, just as he understood theirs to be doing similar work. It is why Judith Wright, who admired Hope’s poems and the rigour of his work, could also say she found them to be “self-pitying.”

What struck me in reading Lever’s biography was how Hope’s work was well known to his literary community well before he finally published his first book of poems, The Wandering Islands, in 1955. People had already come to know his individual poems, and on their basis alone had concluded he was a poet of the highest order. Within contemporary standards, Hope’s achievements might seem meagre. But his contemporaries, even his enemies, never thought of him in this way. They all understood him to be a person of gravity and substance. This was true even though he was also notorious for his risqué comic verse, much of it as unpublishable then as it would be today.

Individual poems meant something at this time, and in Hope’s case they were often composed over many years. For example, he composed the opening stanzas of his most famous poem “Australia” in 1933. He then added the final stanzas some years later, in 1939. The complete poem, with its seven seismic stanzas, was eventually published in Meanjin in 1943. During the decade the poem was being composed it remained a living statement Hope was not quite ready to release. He understood it needed to be tempered by the long seasons of his soul and exposed to the unsparing criticism of his confidantes.

“Australia” offers a withering assessment of the nation as a “vast parasite robber-state / where second-hand Europeans pullulate / Timidly on the edge of alien shores.” But it ends by asserting Australian possibility. It is true this affirmation is wafer thin, but it is there all the same.

In many ways, that poem is exemplary of the contradictions and counter currents Lever so evocatively traces in her biography. Hope, the grave prophet is put against Hope, the wicked satirist. The ferociousness of his literary reviews sits next to the hidden generosity he extended to so many colleagues and friends. In the embryonic Canberra of the early 1950s he rubbed genial shoulders with Robert Menzies, but by the end of the decade ASIO had opened a file on him. He envied and respected McAuley’s conversion to Catholicism but could not follow him down that path and remained an agonised atheist. He consistently maintained there was neither the depth nor the quality of Australian literature to warrant it being taught at university, yet Lever reminds us he was also one of Australian literature’s most important champions.

Susan Lever’s biography faithfully follows the arc of Hope’s life. The account comes to life in those middle decades when it seemed everything was up for grabs — when Australia’s moral future seemed to rest improbably in the hands of poets. The final stages of the book slow down again. By the late 1960s, Hope was finally acclaimed as a great poet in Britain and America, forcing his way into influential anthologies. But the whole game was about to shift again and these achievements, seemingly so lasting, would drift into polite oblivion.

Lever does a great service by salvaging Hope from the wreckage of the ideals he had helped forge. Her clear-eyed biography is not blind to Hope’s failings, but is also not unduly detained by them. Instead she provides us with the terms to understand the dignity and meaning of his life. •

A.D. Hope: A Life
By Susan Lever | La Trobe University Press/ Black Inc. | $36.99 | 311 pages

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