The Best Australian Essays 2014

by Robert Manne

  When the country’s first female PM has been stalked from office in a tide of sexist abuse and the perpetrators have the same power they always had, when the number of women in Australian parliaments has peaked and declined, and when the country’s most infamously sexist political leader can blithely describe himself as a feminist (as Abbott did again at the International Women’s Day event), the argument that if women learn the right skills they will soon justly prevail has been blown apart.

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  Perhaps, then, it’s time to move on from the justice argument and acknowledge that women are different – and that their different perspectives are exactly what we need.

  This question of difference was tackled recently in a Time magazine piece by the American banker Sallie Krawcheck, who’d run Smith Barney (a part of Citigroup) in the wake of the global financial crisis. Krawcheck recounts how she was first howled down and then lost her job after suggesting the bank partially reimburse investors for losses on unintentionally high-risk products it had sold them. While at first she didn’t see the experience as a gender issue at all – understanding it instead as her failing to toe the party line – she later saw research suggesting it was quite normal for women to be more risk averse, to place higher value on client relationships and take a longer-term view. Perhaps her non-conformity was a gender issue, after all.

  Australian opinion polls consistently show that men and women both view and prioritise issues differently. The ABC’s Vote Compass, which saw 1.4 million Australians privately express their views ahead of the 2013 federal poll, showed for instance that women were substantially less likely than men to support higher defence spending, but that the opposite was true of university funds. Women were more likely to support higher foreign aid spending and less likely to back deficit reduction if it came at the expense of social services.

  In politics, the Australian woman who has spoken most compellingly about the observed differences between men and women in positions of power is not one of the highest profile figures but Meredith Burgmann, who was a member of New South Wales’s upper house from 1991 to 2007.

  Burgmann says that in her years in parliament two of the key issues on which she saw men and women split along gender lines were gun control and swimming-pool fences. Her observations are compelling because they at once seem predictable – of course women will have different views on some issues – but also fly in the face of conventional thinking that would suggest that the classic ‘women’s issues’ – those things about which women might be expected to take a distinct and united view – are abortion and childcare.

  Burgmann points out that abortion splits on religious lines and childcare on ideology. Gun control, and particularly the question of unsecured guns in homes, is a matter of how women see personal security. Pool fencing is crucial because mothers know to the core of their being that a child can slip away in the blink of an eye.

  Half a world away, and on a bigger stage, another political figure offers a very different take on different male and female thought processes. The International Monetary Fund’s managing director Christine Lagarde has repeatedly opined that the global financial crisis was caused by too much testosterone. ‘In gender-dominated environments, men have a tendency to … show how hairy chested they are,’ she said in 2011. ‘I honestly think that there should never be too much testosterone in one room.’ It’s not known whether a response to her comments has been sought from her immediate predecessor at the IMF, Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

  As every era has perennial issues – health, education, economic growth, inequality and the like – so too are times defined by existential concerns, issues that grip the public consciousness in overarching terms. Today, there is of course the serious matter of slow growth in the long shadow of the global financial crisis, but there is also the rise of China and the age-defining threat of climate change.

  Thinking people are forced to decide: either reject the well-established science of climate change, a move which essentially involves rejecting the supremacy of science in modern thought, or reflect seriously about our social and economic assumptions in order to find a way forward.

  The new chief executive officer of the Australian Conservation Foundation, Kelly O’Shanassy, says she sees differences between how men and women respond to the challenge of sustainability. ‘With climate change, people tend to see the issue either from a technological perspective or a social and behavioural one. Men tend to look at technology while women innately understand the different kinds of lives and different kinds of behaviours we will have to have. They see the long-term, massive social issues like health problems that will come if we don’t respond to climate change.’

  Australia’s head-in-the-sand model of selling our resources to China and buying their cheap consumer goods is unlikely to give rise to the pioneering thinking needed to go on living sustainably. The environmental challenge and the rise of China are closely linked. If the rise of China is effectively the result of that nation’s adoption of the Western business model, particularly of competition, science and consumerism, then we must also confront an inescapable reality that Chinese development to Western standards, along with that of the rest of Asia, will add enormously to carbon emissions.

  Queensland University of Technology sustainability expert Jim Gall describes the change needed as an intellectual revolution akin to the Enlightenment, and he reflects a wide body of writing when he suggests feminism is a central part of it.

  ‘It’s not about women having a fair role in this model that is failing us, it’s about asking what it is about the way women think that gives us a way out of this mess,’ he says.

  ‘What Abbott’s trying to do is reinforce the old system, but there’s no future in that … People might want to take shelter in this harbour for a short time but in the end we know these environmental issues are real and we know we have to change.’

  As environmental campaigners, too, men and women often behave differently. ‘Men sometimes get caught in the bravado of a particular campaign and can lose heart if we don’t win,’ Kelly O’Shanassy says, ‘but women tend to stay focused on the fundamental reason for change. They can see it and are resilient whether the immediate battle is lost or won.

  ‘Living sustainably requires a different, more collaborative and less top-down leadership approach. Diversity is an important part of that.’

  Former Queensland environment minister Kate Jones agrees. For her, women are in it for the long term, because they see the environment as a security issue. ‘It’s a cliché but it does become even stronger and clearer once you have kids.’

  The opinions of O’Shanassy and Jones are backed by research. A major CSIRO scan of available polling data conducted in 2011 showed that across a range of polls, women were six per cent to eleven per cent more likely to believe in anthropogenic climate change and to support action. This is consistent with other data showing that, as concern about climate change declined from its 2007–08 peak, the desertion was starker among men; when it came to concern about climate change, women were more likely to stick around.

  The CSIRO climate change study is not the only hard data showing Australian women take a distinctive view. A Newspoll survey published in early April showed the Abbott government’s primary vote had plunged across mainland states by an average of around six per cent. The key reason for the collapse? Women’s personal satisfaction with Abbott had fallen from a net satisfaction of zero (forty-one per cent positive, forty-one per cent negative) in the last polling period to a net satisfaction of minus eighteen per cent just three months down the track.

  ‘If one thing can be blamed for the lack of a honeymoon for the Abbott government, it must be the speed with which women have turned off the PM,’ observed Peter van Onselen in the Australian.

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  Tony Abbott recently claimed, yet again on the occasion of International Women’s Day, that ‘true equality is always the result of more economic opportunity’.

  T
he comment was a scripted one, made in support of the government’s controversial paid parental leave scheme. The reductionist perspective it represents, that government is essentially a matter of economic management, appears central to the Abbott government’s approach. After all, its only real foreign policy wins have come on economic matters – prioritisation of growth at the G20 in February and the trade deals in Asia more recently. Its significant appointments have overwhelmingly been of conservative company directors, and now the prime minister describes gender equality as an economic matter, too.

  As a minister who privatised $10 billion of assets (two ports and a railway), I’m as committed as anyone to the big, hard, serious business of economic reform. This is not, therefore, an argument that we should avoid troubling ourselves with the economy but rather an assertion that economic reform alone is not enough.

  The country’s challenges are far more complex than the economic problems confronted during the Hawke and Keating years or those addressed by Howard as he created what is now the model for Abbott’s leadership. The Australia of 2014 is a precarious place. Its economy sails in troubled waters as manufacturing goes offshore and a post-GFC lag in confidence sets in. Its environment is threatened and its per capita emissions remain among the highest in the developed world. Its region is influenced by China, now stretching its muscle and its money through the region with soft and hard diplomacy.

  Tony Abbott has a woman problem and he has an agenda problem, too. He must develop an answer clear and simple enough to convince people there’s a future for jobs. He needs a consistent economic and national security response to China and a coherent position on climate change. Doing that will require diverse and complex thinking, something unlikely to come from the uniform advisers he’s so far engaged.

  And while it is one thing for the women of Australia to be offended by their exclusion, it is quite another for all of us to see our future endangered by a narrow band of conservative older men set on returning us to a past that can no longer exist.

  The exclusion of women is the exclusion of diverse thinking. For the whole country, the price paid for the prime minister’s sexism may yet turn out to be very high indeed.

  The Monthly

  Freedom Abbott

  David Marr

  In Tony Abbott’s Australia, a young woman faces jail because word got out that one of his daughters was given a $60,000 scholarship to study at the Whitehouse Institute of Design. This scholarship was never advertised. Students at the college in Sydney had no idea such largesse was available. News of Frances Abbott’s win provoked a two-month investigation by the New South Wales police and a charge of accessing restricted data without authorisation. Penalty: imprisonment for a maximum of two years.

  How different it was all those years ago when young Tony won his Rhodes. Now that’s a scholarship. The win wasn’t a secret. No one faced jail when the news broke. But the young man and the prime minister have this in common: a most uncertain respect for free speech. Abbott had made his name at the University of Sydney as one of Bob Santamaria’s acolytes working to silence student unions by starving them of funds. The day the Rhodes was announced, in November 1980, he told the Sydney Morning Herald that John Kerr, Malcolm Fraser and the uranium industry were not ‘legitimate concerns’ of student unions. ‘In my view, vast amounts of student money are being spent on extreme causes.’

  Abbott never seemed the sort of man who would go out on a limb for liberty. In parliament he made a spectacle of himself early on by suing over a silly slur in Bob Ellis’s book Goodbye Jerusalem. He was up to his neck in the legal manoeuvring that landed Pauline Hanson in jail. He had the courage to demur when John Howard put WorkChoices before cabinet, but there is no record of him standing up to his patron when Howard prosecuted whistleblowers; stripped NGOs of funding; whipped museums into line; widened sedition laws; imprisoned the innocent Dr Mohamed Haneef without charge; and subjected the ABC to a decade of partisan abuse. When it came to liberty, Abbott was one of the Coalition pack.

  Yet one morning in August 2012 he walked into the Amora Hotel in Sydney and pledged to take up arms in the Freedom Wars. ‘We are the freedom party,’ he told an exuberant crowd gathered by the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA).

  We stand for the freedoms which Australians have a right to expect and which governments have a duty to uphold. We stand for freedom and will be freedom’s bulwark against the encroachments of an unworthy and dishonourable government.

  No Coalition leader has ever talked freedom as Abbott did that morning. The passion, the rhetoric and the undertakings he gave were new in the politics of this country. He might have been an American on the stump. Angels sang and trumpets sounded. He was promising to do more than stop the boats, axe the tax and end the waste. As prime minister, he would restore our lost freedoms. A new Abbott had appeared from nowhere to join the others who jostle for our attention. Politics Abbott is the one who rules them all. Values Abbott has his commitment to faith and a unique political past. Intellectual Abbott can turn out opinion pieces on anything from reshaping the federation to the future of marriage. But here on the stage of this big city hotel was Freedom Abbott:

  Without free speech, free debate is impossible and, without free debate, the democratic process cannot work properly nor can misgovernment and corruption be fully exposed. Freedom of speech is part of the compact between citizen and society on which democratic government rests. A threat to citizens’ freedom of speech is more than an error of political judgement. It reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the give and take between government and citizen on which a peaceful and harmonious society is based.

  Two years later, I sit here writing Freedom Abbott’s obituary. I’ll honour the form with the story of his rise from nowhere, the hopes he raised in his brief life, his impact on the politics of the nation, and his sudden death in August in the same week the cops charged the supposed Whitehouse whistleblower. They were rough days for liberty. By the time the prime minister abandoned his crusade to gut the Racial Discrimination Act, promised new powers to ASIO and prepared to store our metadata for the use of intelligence agencies, Freedom Abbott was on the slab.

  The death wrecked Tim Wilson’s Free Speech 2014 symposium. Gathered in Sydney that week by the new human rights commissioner were figures from the Left, Right and Centre, a peace council of the factions called to explore the great prospects for liberty under an Abbott government. But the day was a wake, with the same coffee and smoked salmon that come with a funeral – and the same gloom. The attorney-general, George Brandis, found another funeral to go to at the last minute. It wasn’t brave, but what could he have said to us? His libertarian rhetoric, even more lyrical than Abbott’s, had just been junked by his master. The Freedom Wars seem over without a shot being fired. So much praise had been wasted, so many hopes dashed, and now so much blame is being dished out. Abbott’s naïve admirers have turned on him for betraying Australia. In the aftermath of an abandoned war, the politics of liberty have shifted to a dark place.

  ‘Dead is dead,’ said Gertrude Stein. ‘But dead is not done. Not over.’

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  Abbott could always talk freedom. It was a topic fit for think tanks: civilised, big-picture, fundamental but tame. He always saw the dangers. They went back to Genesis: ‘In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve could do almost as they pleased. But freedom turned out to have its limits and its abuses, as this foundational story makes only too clear.’ Cynics might argue the church had to be fought tooth and nail for liberal democracy to emerge. But Abbott has always said we have Christianity to thank for freedom and ‘the presumption of innocence, universal suffrage, limited government, and religious, cultural and political pluralism’. Among today’s great defenders of ‘freedom under law’ he lists the crown and the papacy.

  He never thought freedom owed much to the Left. Tom Paine is not among his heroes. No revolution, not even the French, is given credit for liberty’s rise. Nor are unions, the labour move
ment and Marx. He is polite to Americans: he acknowledges the overthrow of George III matters to them, though he’s sure it means nothing to us. His praise stops short of the First Amendment. He doesn’t gush about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

  For the past few centuries, freedom has spoken English. True, there were one or two upheavals along the way, but Abbott has always seen peaceful England setting the standard for liberty’s rise. He doesn’t turn to the great legal theorists to make this point. He quotes Tennyson’s lines about ‘A land of settled government, / A land of just and old renown, / Where Freedom slowly broadens down / From precedent to precedent’. This is his go-to quote when he talks freedom. He finds these lines pithy and beautiful. He loves to quote them when he’s talking liberty to American think tanks. Sometimes he rolls on to the next verse, condemning another England where ‘banded unions persecute / Opinions, and induce a time / When single thought is civil crime, / And individual freedom mute’.

  An Oxford man is expected to dish out this sort of stuff. But an Oxford man might also have a closer look at what Tennyson is writing here: a Tory attack on the Great Reform Act of 1832 and the political division it provoked in England. His favourite quote on freedom is, in fact, an attack on one of the key, hard-fought victories against aristocratic power in Britain. Perhaps Abbott has no idea of this. Perhaps he’s just smitten by the poetry. What’s certain is his affection for the idea that liberty evolves naturally over time, dropping gently from the heavens. This is not freedom made by great upheavals or witnessed in declarations. There is nothing hard and fast about it. More than anything, it’s a matter of instinct. You know it when you feel it.