Quarterly Essay 26 His Master's Voice

The Corruption of Public Debate Under Howard

David Marr

• Publisher: Quarterly Essay
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9781863954051
• eBook ISBN: 9781921825255
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Global Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

John Howard has the loudest voice in Australia. He has cowed his critics, muffled the press, intimidated the ABC, gagged scientists, silenced NGOs, censored the arts, prosecuted leakers, criminalised protest and curtailed parliamentary scrutiny. Though touted as a contest of values, this has been a party-political assault on Australia's liberal culture.In the name of "balance", the Liberal Party has muscled its way into the intellectual life of the country. And this has happened because we let it happen. Once again, Howard has shown his superb grasp of Australia as it really is.In His Master's Voice, David Marr investigates both a decade of suppression and the strange willingness of Australians to watch, with such little angst, their liberties drift away.'More than any law, any failure of the Opposition or individual act of bastardry over the last decade, what's done most to gag democracy in this country is the sense that debating John Howard gets us nowhere.' —David Marr, His Master's Voice 'This is an essay born of despair, an angry cry from the heart about the impoverishment of mainstream public debate in this country, delivered with passion and eloquence.' —Julianne Schultz, Sydney Morning Herald 'Marr's analysis … clearly delineates the national somnolence and the consequences for the country when its people are sedated: power is unchecked.' —the Age 'With customary eloquence, it mourned an Australian public service cowed by the Prime Minister into abject fear and supine silence.' —Peter Shergold, Canberra Times David Marr is the multi-award-winning author of Patrick White: A Life, Panic and The High Price of Heaven, and co-author with Marian Wilkinson of Dark Victory. He has written for the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age and the Monthly, been editor of the National Times, a reporter for Four Corners and presenter of ABC TV's Media Watch. He is also the author of five bestselling biographical Quarterly Essays.

HIS MASTER’S VOICE

The Corruption of Public
Debateunder Howard

David Marr

As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade …
—W.H. Auden

THE OLD VOLTAIREAN

The habits of luxury hotels are hard to break. Though Saigon is now the communist metropolis of Ho Chi Minh City, the best hotels cluster where they always have, around Lam Son Square. There in the Park Hyatt John Howard faced the Australian press in November last year. The event was low-key: no podium, no flags and little time. These were the last hours of the Prime Minister’s first visit to Vietnam and his motorcade was about to leave for the airport. Howard had called the press together to plug nuclear power and farewell Ian Thorpe from the pool. He was relaxed. A week of hobnobbing with the leaders of APEC had climaxed late the night before in a restaurant where the Bushes and the Howards feasted alone on crabs and lotus-seed soup. The President paid.

David Speers from Sky News caught the Prime Minister’s eye. “Just before you leave Vietnam, can I ask you, do you think the Vietnam War was a mistake?”

Someone had asked at last. From the moment Howard arrived in Vietnam, he had been lavishing praise on the communist regime. He spoke of the Vietnamese as people after his own heart with “entrepreneurial flair and spirit” committed to “the role of small and medium-sized enterprises.” He imagined a future in which Australia and Vietnam were “forever linked in the fastest-growing area of the world economy.” One night at an Asialink dinner, he made a vague allusion to the war: “Australia’s relations with Vietnam have, of course, gone through a number of iterations.” It’s an awkward word for ten years of combat.

Once the Howards and their entourage travelled south from the APEC meetings in Hanoi, the war was everywhere. They lit incense at a cemetery for the war dead of Vietnam at Go Cat. They drove in convoy to the rubber plantation at Long Tan where eighteen Australians died in a single night of fighting forty years ago. John Howard laid a wreath and expressed a few regrets: not for the 500 Australians, the one and a half million Vietnamese military and the two million civilians who died in the war. To a handful of Australian veterans gathered at the white cross that marks the battlefield, Howard acknowledged the shabby treatment soldiers had back home when they returned from the fighting. “We won’t make that mistake again.”

Speers woke next morning thinking it odd that no one in the press pack had asked Howard – simply and directly – what he thought of the war. “He had been telling us a lot during the week about the success of Vietnam and the great opportunities it afforded for Australian business,” he told me. “But the question of the war hadn’t been raised.” This seemed particularly odd because of the obvious parallels with Iraq. “I must confess it didn’t strike me until the day we were leaving that, hang on a minute, does he still think that fighting the Vietnam War was the right thing to do when the rest of the world has moved on?”

Howard took his time answering Speers’ question. He was thinking it out carefully as he spoke.

I supported our involvement at the time and I don’t intend to recant that. I believe that in public life you are accountable for the decisions that you take. I mean, I didn’t hold any position of authority then, but I supported the reasons for Australia’s involvement and nothing has altered my view that – at the time, on the assessments that were made then – I took that view properly. And I don’t intend to indulge this preoccupation that many have in recanting everything that they supported when they were in positions of authority.

Journalists glanced at one another. Was he bagging Malcolm Fraser? Or perhaps Robert McNamara, the former US secretary of defence who now says the Vietnam War was “wrong, terribly wrong”? Howard wasn’t naming names. His point was that conceding the truth isn’t his style.

I think in public life you take a position and I think particularly of the positions I’ve taken in the time I’ve been prime minister. I have to live with the consequences of those both now and into the future. And if I ever develop reservations, well, I hope I would have the grace to keep them to myself … You take a position and you’ve got to live by that and be judged by that – and that’s my position.

At the heart of democracy is a contest of conversations. The tone of a democracy is set by the dialogue between a nation and its leaders. For the last decade, Australia has had a prime minister who thinks it beneath him to admit mistakes. Speers could hardly believe his ears: “He was virtually saying, even if I think I’m wrong, I’m not going to tell you.” In one of the few press commentaries on this extraordinary moment, my colleague Peter Hartcher wrote of Howard putting himself “beyond political resolve into a realm of almost superhuman recalcitrance.”

Debate ploughs on in Australia. Hansard is fatter than ever. The Prime Minister is always at the microphone. But after being belittled for most of his political career, Howard came to power determined public debate would be conducted on his terms. They are subtle, bizarre and at times brutal. This essay is about those terms and why Australians put up with them. Since 1996, Howard has cowed his critics, muffled the press, intimidated the ABC, gagged scientists, silenced non-government organisations, neutered Canberra’s mandarins, curtailed parliamentary scrutiny, censored the arts, banned books, criminalised protest and prosecuted whistleblowers.

This is not as Howard advertised himself on arrival. Then he spoke proudly of his party’s tradition of defending individual liberty and the rule of law. He still does. He painted his victory as a repudiation of “stultifying political correctness” that left Australians able “to speak a little more freely and a little more openly about what they feel.” The ravings of Pauline Hanson he represented as a triumph of free speech over stifling orthodoxy. And after Aboriginal protesters burnt the flag on Australia Day last year, he rejected calls for their prosecution. “Much in all as I despise what they did, I do not believe that it should be a criminal offence,” he told Neil Mitchell of radio 3AW in Melbourne. “I do hold to the old Vol-tairean principle that I disagree with what he says but I will defend to the death his right to say it, and I see that kind of thing as just an expression, however offensive to the majority of the community, an expression of political opinion.”

The Old Voltairean has fallen a bit short. He leads a government notably uncomfortable with freewheeling debate. Uncomfortable is too kind a description: the dislike is profound. For a decade now, public debate has been bullied and starved as if this were an ordinary function of government. It’s important not to exaggerate the result. Suppression is not systematic. There are no gulags for dissidents under Howard. We reserve them for refugees. The occasional victories liberty wins in Canberra are illuminating. There are limits. But Howard’s government has been the most unscrupulous corrupter of public debate in Australia since the Cold War’s worst days back in the 1950s.

We haven’t been hoodwinked. Each step along the way has been reported – perhaps not as thoroughly and passionately as it should have been, but we’re not dealing in dark secrets here. We’ve known what’s going on. If we cared, we didn’t care enough to stop it. Boredom, indifference and fear have played a part in this. So does something about ourselves we rarely face: Australians trust authority. Not love, perhaps, but trust. It’s bred in the bone. We call ourselves larrikins, but we leave our leaders to get on with it. Even the leaders we mock.

We’ve watched Howard spin, block, prevaricate, sidestep, confound and just keep talking come what may through any crisis. Words grind out of him unstoppably. He has a genius for ambiguity we’ve almost come to applaud, and most of the time he keeps himself just this side of deceit. But he also lies without shame. Howard invented the breakable or non-core promise – the first was to maintain ABC funding – five years before those children weren’t thrown overboard. The truth is we’ve known he was a liar from the start – though we didn’t know, until he said so in Ho Chi Minh City, that he sees denying the obvious as a virtue, as the act of a graceful leader. Howard can admit error, but it is extremely rare. Apologies are almost unknown. More than any law, any failure of the Opposition or individual act of bastardry over the last decade, what’s done most to gag democracy in this country is the sense that debating John Howard is futile.

One response has been to turn away and wait for him to disappear in the belief that Australia will once again be what we remember it was: free, open, principled, fearless, fair etc. It wasn’t. Most of what troubles us now about the state of public discourse began under Labor. Many of us complaining now did not complain loudly enough back then as Paul Keat-ing bullied the press, the public service and the parliament. But Howard has come to dominate the country in ways Keating never could. To the task of projecting his voice across Australia, he brought all the ruthless professionalism that marks his government. Perhaps the man has now exhausted his welcome, but even when the Howard years are long gone, we will be left confronting the damage done and the difficult question of how we let this happen.

As I started writing this essay, I began to keep a diary of outrages. I thought one or two examples of government bullying would be good to throw into the rhetorical mix. But they kept coming week after week: attacks by Howard and his ministers on open and honest debate. They continue as we go to press. Quite unexpectedly the essay turned into a snapshot of a couple of months of free speech sabotaged in a country that seems to be showing signs at last – though this could just be the Pollyanna in me – of being worried about what’s at stake.

February

13 FEBRUARY: Joe Hockey monsters Professor David Peetz Joe Hockey’s office was caught on the hop when journalists began ringing about lunchtime. Usually the minister’s people sniff out trouble like this much sooner. Up on the Gold Coast, ACTU secretary Greg Combet was using research by Professor David Peetz of Griffith University to attack the government’s WorkChoices laws. Hockey’s press secretary, James Chessell, responded to press gallery questions by sending out a dirt sheet:

Peetz

• In 2001 he undertook an academic study on the work of union officials – sponsored by the ACTU

• His CV lists his research interests as “union membership”

• He has been reported as being a singer in a “trade union choir”

• He writes poetry for the “Workers Online” web site, which is “the official organ” of Unions NSW, which describes him as its “resident bard.” Some of these poems include such partisan and infantile material like:

• “Slug a worker or two” (to the tune of “pick a pocket or two”) – “Why should toffs break their backs, stupidly paying tax? … Better to slug a worker or two”

• “You’re fired” (to the tune of “Rawhide”) – “My hearts calculating, for Johnny will be waiting, be waiting when we tell him, ‘you’re fired’”

• “Downsized” (to the tune of “Downtown”) – “Listen to the workers as they open their surprises; Carve notches on your desktop as the count of bodies rises”

• In the aftermath of September 11 2001 he wrote a rather tasteless poem entitled “The Terrorist,” which was published on the Sydney Morning Herald web site on September 17. In a week in which the world was in shock and extending its sympathy to the victims of this atrocity, David Peetz was writing a poem which included a verse about a terrorist telling “the President”: “Evil will be overcome by good, but sir, you see, I know you are the evil one, and good is on my side! You are the force of Satan – and that is why I died!”

• His CV says that prior to becoming an academic he “worked in Parliament House in Canberra”

• In October 1999 Gough Whitlam gave a speech where he thanked “the men and women who have worked with me.” This included David Peetz.

Later in the afternoon, Hockey’s office issued a “backgrounder” attacking Peetz’s findings, plus on-the-record comments from the minister ramming home the message that this man was a union fruitcake:

Peetz makes some wild claims based on selective and shifting assumptions. Much of his data is out of date. We are surprised anyone is taking seriously a man the unions’ online newsletter once described as its “resident bard.” Peetz has described employers as “toffs.” He has worked with Gough Whitlam. He has described the President of the United States as “the force of Satan.” He is not credible.

Ruthless attacks on experts have defined the Howard years. The rough rule of thumb is this: the more unpopular the policy, the more brutal the government’s response to its critics. Bring independent authority to bear on the Iraq catastrophe (Andrew Wilkie) or global warming (Professor Graeme Pearman) or WorkChoices (Peetz) and experts can expect rough handling. Frontal attacks are conducted by Howard and his ministers; more feral operations are carried out by parliamentary brawlers like senators Eric Abetz and the departed Santo Santoro. Work too grubby for them is left to reliable columnists, their efforts facilitated by ministers’ offices giving them any assistance they need. The rest of the press can only watch and wonder at the access, the interviews and leaked dossiers that come the way of these attack dogs.

Howard’s problems with WorkChoices won’t go away. Australians took the passing of the legislation with characteristic passivity. There was none of the violence that saw France abandon, at roughly the same time, modest plans to reform its own employment laws. But the voters haven’t settled down with WorkChoices. We’ve learnt to live with so much unwelcome change under Howard – even the GST – but not this. By late last year, industrial relations had come to concern Australians far more than Iraq, national security and threats to the environment. Peter Beattie was helped across the line in Queensland, and Steve Bracks in Victoria, by WorkChoices. When Joe Hockey turned his guns on David Peetz, New South Wales was also facing an election and opinion polls there were showing more voters worried by industrial relations than by any other issue.

The Howard government had responded to this wave of public disapproval by cutting off the flow of information about WorkChoices. A few months after the new laws came into operation in March 2006, the Office of the Employment Advocate – a division of Hockey’s department – published some striking analysis of the impact of the new laws: everyone in the sample had lost at least one key award condition. Half had lost overtime; half lost loadings for shift work; 60 per cent lost penalty...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• CONTENTS
• HIS MASTER ’S VOICE: THE CORRUPTION OF PUBLIC DEBATE UNDER HOWARD
• CORRESPONDENCE