FACTION MAN: Bill Shorten's Path to Power DAVID MARR

FACTION MAN: Bill Shorten’s Path to Power

DAVID MARR
Quarterly Essay No. 59, Black Inc., 2015

Review by Phil Shannon

Yesterday, upon the stair,

I met a man who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today,
I wish that man would go away…….

This old and highly serviceable piece of doggerel seems almost custom-made for Australian Labor Party leader, Bill Shorten.  Even the usually perceptive journalist, David Marr, in his latest political profile for Quarterly Essay, is defeated by the indistinct and bland Shorten who, in public opinion polls, trails behind ‘Someone Else’ as preferred leader of the Labor Opposition.

Personable and capable, but not memorable, is the assessment, says Marr, of Shorten’s  time at the wealthy Catholic Xavier College, which specialises in processing Melbourne’s future judges and surgeons but which took on the working class grandson of union men.  An effective factional engineer, but politically uninspiring, was Shorten’s hallmark at Monash University in the early 1980s as a “star of the Labor Right” in the ALP Club.

Subsequent factional powerplays by this “tough backroom fighter” were the means to fulfilling Shorten’s undisguised personal ambition – first as National Secretary of the Australian Workers Union, then as Leader of the Opposition (a Labor Caucus choice, with 86 of those parliamentarians having as much say as 30,000 rank-and-file party members), and finally with the Prime Ministership in his sights.

Marr does not think Shorten will get the top job.  Personally congenial, and not without a certain small-room persuasiveness (“his best work is done face to face”), Shorten lacks the qualities to move a nation.  He is numbingly wooden and formulaic as a public agitator.  He is personally and politically close to big business - his first marriage was to a wealthy Liberal blue-blood, whilst Business Review Weekly once declared that Shorten (Master of Business Administration, Melbourne Uni) would make a fine corporate chief executive.  He is uncritically pro-US and conventional on national security and defence (Shorten was a member of the University Regiment at Monash).

He robotically intones the hollowed-out stock ALP brand identifiers of “jobs, education and health” but, says Marr, “he stands for nothing brave”.  He has no galvanising political philosophy.  He is distrusted in his own party and within the electorate as a “plotter who brought down two ALP leaders to clear his own way to power”, a “shape-shifter” always accompanied by “so many new best friends” in his self-advancement crusade.  These negatives were not debilitating whilst Shorten was pitted against the hard-right Liberal Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, but his substance is now exposed to more scrutiny following Abbott’s replacement (which post-dates Marr’s essay).

The electorate, says Marr, finds Shorten “hard to read”.  So does Marr.  Shorten slips through the fingers of Marr, who, in desperation for biographical material, resorts to an analysis of Shorten’s mirthless ‘zingers’.  Marr’s difficulties are partly due to Shorten’s sheer vapidness but also because of Marr’s failure to situate Shorten as a symptom of Labor’s fundamental political bankruptcy.

Whilst Marr delves into the grungy workings under the hood of the Labor machine, he doesn’t address just where Labor is headed or why.  For whether Shorten, the master factional mechanic, or any of the nominally ‘Left’, ‘Right’ or ‘Centre’ drivers is at the wheel, the Labor jalopy sputters along the same road to nowhere, dispensing, at best, modest, piecemeal and utterly inadequate reform whilst dedicated to its larger goal of maintaining the wealth and power of the corporate class.

Nevertheless, Marr is spot on in his observation that Shorten “has no radical designs, no great plans for reform” and “represents nil challenge to capitalism”.  The same, however, applies for Labor as a broader political entity.  The party might be running on (Mr.) Empty at the moment but even when tanked up, the party’s business-friendly and pro-capitalist political design makes it a complete lemon.

INTERESTINGLY ENOUGH: The Life of Tom Keneally
STEPHANY EVANS STEGGALL
Nero, 2015, 408 pages

Review by Phil Shannon 

In 1960, the trainee priest, Thomas Keneally, abandoned the seminary at Manly on Sydney’s North Shore without any qualifications other than a Bachelor of Theology and with no skills other than Medieval Latin.  His escape from his crisis of confidence in the Catholic Church, says Dr. Stephany Steggall in her biography of the Australian novelist, was through writing, which was both Keneally’s attempt to understand, and keep at bay, the ‘madness and melancholia’ of the human lot, and his own course of personal therapy for exorcising the mental demons that haunted him from six years in an uncaring, dogmatic institution with its ‘anti-human moral code’.

The son of Irish grandparents, Keneally topped the state in English in 1951, his secondary school aptitude for the written word only reviving after his abortive religious vocational training.  He found a popular audience because of his powers of characterisation, wit and story-telling, and for his focus, through the vehicle of the historical novel, on the great moral choices faced by humanity.

Keneally’s academic critics were less universally won over, debating whether the ‘fibro’ boy from the western suburbs was a legitimate contender for the national literary pantheon.  Their doubts were not without some foundation as Keneally, with a mortgage and a young family to provide for, adopted a self-imposed income-generating regime of an annual novel (he has so far notched up 33 published novels in 49 years) which has sometimes been at the expense of patient textual polishing.

Keneally’s financial pressures significantly abated thanks to Hollywood’s Steven Spielberg, who turned Keneally’s Booker-winning novel, Schindler’s Ark, into a memorable, and lucrative, film (Schindler’s List) about the real-life German industrialist and conflicted Nazi-collaborator, Oskar Schindler, who saved over a thousand Jews by employing them in his factories in the eye of the Holocaust.

Keneally, who has always aimed to live to write, no longer needs to write to live.  In 2015, he was able to request that the $50,000 prize money that came with an Australia Council’s Lifetime Award be given instead to a mid-career writer but he continues to write at Stakhanovite pace because that is who he is.

Politically, Keneally is a moderate, centre-left social democrat.  He is a member of the Australian Labor Party and is interested in but has spurned Marxism for being a “theological” belief system, a Cold War legacy of his Catholic anti-communism which saw his early stories depict Australian communism as brutal, full of fear, deception and alcoholic Leninist wife-beaters.

A republican (Keneally was the first Chair of the Australian Republican Movement in 1990), he has refused a Royal-granted Commander of the British Empire title but, as an Australian nationalist, has accepted a locally-ordained Order of Australia. 

Keneally has, however, an undimmed commitment to social justice.  His novel on the anti-Semitic genocide illustrates Keneally’s dedication to social justice.  He regarded the Holocaust as the most extreme example of ‘race or group hate’, all targets of which (Indigenous Australians, refugees) he has outspokenly stood up for.

Unfortunately, the origins and trajectory of Keneally’s political and social values, and how they inform his novels, are underdeveloped by Steggall whose biography is heavily skewed towards the how rather than the why of Keneally’s art.  There is a rather pedestrian parade of the agents, contracts, advances, royalties and other sinews of the book publishing industry, vital matters to the working writer from Homebush, but which are so much commercial gristle crowding out the more literary meat in Steggall’s biographical dish.

Nevertheless, Steggall is able to demonstrate that Keneally (whose bulging literary locker sometimes sacrifices quality to quantity) “approaches greatness” and well-deserves his artistic stature.  For an absorbing story fluently-told, Keneally usually delivers, as he does for his resilient conviction that, in a world darkened and saddened by far too much tragedy, even the most flawed can find a certain moral heroism.

DANGEROUS GAMES: Australia at the 1936 Nazi Olympics

DANGEROUS GAMES: Australia at the 1936 Nazi Olympics
LARRY WRITER
Allen&Unwin, 2015, 338 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

There were none so brave in the Australian team at the Berlin Olympics in 1936 as Werner Seelenbinder, a wrestler, was in Germany’s team, says Larry Writer in Dangerous Games, his history of the 1936 Australian Olympians.  Seelenbinder was a communist, one who had miraculously slipped through the Nazi net, who planned to protest Nazism on the world stage, right in front of Hitler (the Games’ official patron), from the victory podium should he win a medal.  He finished in fourth place, however, narrowly missing his chance.  During the war, Seelenbinder joined an underground anti-Nazi resistance group which aimed to infiltrate and destroy the Nazi Party from within.  He was discovered, tortured and beheaded.

To the Australian athletes, however, the Olympics was their once-in-a-lifetime dream and they would not let reality interfere.  Reality like the first Nazi concentration camp, Sachsenhausen (only 35 kilometres north of Berlin), opening just one month before the Games, or German troops being despatched to support General Franco in Spain just two weeks before the Opening Ceremony.  Or reality like Nazi Germany’s massive re-armament, and racial persecution and discrimination including the banning of German Jews from the Olympics.

‘I put my blinkers on’, recalled one Australian athlete, adding that ‘we allowed ourselves to be used as Nazi propaganda pawns’.  ‘Of course we knew’ about fascist outrages, said another, but the Australian athletes preferred not to act on their knowledge as they rejected international calls for a boycott of the Nazi Olympics and rebuffed the messages smuggled into the Athletes’ Village by anti-Nazi groups pleading for the athletes to protest fascism.

The only Australian competitor to withdraw, fearing what may happen to him as a Jew in Nazi Germany, was the boxer, Harry Cohen, a decision made easier for him by, or prompting (he was never entirely clear), his move to turn professional.

With athlete backing, and the support of Australian politicians who saw fascism as a political prophylactic against socialism, the Berlin Olympics went on to become a propaganda showpiece for the Nazi regime.  Hitler, who had reluctantly inherited the 1931-awarded Games from Germany’s pre-fascist social-democratic government, was cool on sports generally, and the Olympics in particular, calling them a ‘Jewish-nigger-fest’, but he had come to embrace them.

They would allow a demonstration of ‘Aryan supremacy’ on the sports field, primed by the ‘shamateurism’ of under-the-table regime, corporate and private funding of Germany’s ‘amateur’ athletes.  They would facilitate the Nazi regime’s deception of  their foreign critics through suspending overt displays of anti-Semitism (temporarily removing signs such as ‘Dogs and Jews not allowed here’), keeping convict and camp labour out of sight, and reprieving prostitution, gay bars and American jazz for the visitors.  The Games would offer the prospect of uniting, or intimidating, the German population through swastika-saturated nationalism and patriotic pageantry.

The Australian team did not disrupt their Nazi hosts’ plans, their one act of defiance being to refuse to comply with their Nazi attaché’s strong suggestion that they give the straight-arm Nazi salute to Hitler during the national teams’ parade at the Opening Ceremony.  The Nazi salute was one endorsement too far of Nazism for the Australian athletes who had become unsettled by the martial atmosphere surrounding the Games, the nightly war games and the menace of Hitler’s brown-shirted thugs.

For some athletes after the Games, their unease solidified into disillusionment with the Olympics altogether for their rampant nationalism, crass commercialism and intrinsic politicisation.  The swimmer, Evelyn de Lacy, boycotted the official dinner for pre-war Olympians at New South Wales Parliament House during the 2000 Sydney Olympics.

Larry Writer unfortunately doesn’t live up to his surname.  His book grinds along largely in orthodox sports journalism gear whilst his industrious emphasis on the athletic narrative relegates the political drama, and, more pointedly, the political and moral failure of Australian athletics, to a subordinate marring of the plucky Australian sporting legend.  Clutching at the old lie that ‘sport is above politics’, Australia’s ‘apolitical’ 1936 Olympians wound up as green-and-gold propaganda performers in the Nazi darkness.

ATMOSPHERE OF HOPE Tim Flannery

ATMOSPHERE OF HOPE: Searching for Solutions to the Climate Crisis
TIM FLANNERY
Text Publishing, 2015, 245 pages

Review by Phil Shannon 

The Australian scientist, Tim Flannery, became fascinated with proposals to extract excess CO₂ from the atmosphere and oceans when the billionaire aeronautics carbon-polluter, Richard Branson, in response to Flannery’s first book on climate change (The Weather Makers), invited Flannery to be a judge on Branson’s £25 million Virgin Earth Challenge prize for methods of carbon withdrawal and storage.

Amongst the entrants, writes Flannery in his latest book, Atmosphere of Hope, he found a dozen which could become “indispensable tools for our survival”.  He calls these the ‘Third Way’ of tackling global warming, superior to adaptation (living with the global pathologies of a warmed world) and safer than geo-engineering to reflect solar radiation back into space (a dangerous ‘cure’ potentially worse than the disease).

Flannery believes that some climate engineering techniques are more acceptable because they simply accelerate natural processes of atmospheric and hydrological carbon management.  Using photosynthesis to grow, for example, vegetation dines on CO₂  and stores the waste carbon as plant matter but this process is only 1% efficient.  We can force nature to do better, believes Flannery, by dramatically boosting the pace of the natural carbon cycle and storing the extracted carbon in biological (forest, seaweed, biochar) form or in synthetic products, or by sequestering it through deep or frigid (South Pole) burial.

‘Third Way’ techniques range from the unobjectionable (afforestation and wetlands reclamation) to the more problematic such as ocean fertilisation, chemically-enhanced weathering of rocks, production of carbon-negative cement and plastics, and carbon capture which is not designed simply to prolong the life of fossil fuels.

Flannery is excited by the technical possibilities and challenges of his ‘Third Way’ carbon-suckers, and his desperate desire to resurrect a habitable world is genuinely passionate, but his ‘Third Way’ project is unconvincing and, in the end, self-defeating.

To be fair to Flannery, he does temper his enthusiasm with an acknowledgement of the problems that beset ‘Third Way’ climate salvation (scientific complexity, environmental risk, intimidating cost, problems of scale, decades-long lead-times, etc.) but he argues that these issues necessitate embarking on the ‘Third Way’ now to overcome such difficulties in time to avoid climate catastrophe.

This approach, however, detracts attention and resources from the urgency for economic and political campaigning to tackle global warming and its fossil fuel industry culprits now.  Although Flannery argues that ‘Third Way’ de-carbonisation must not be used as an excuse for the failure to cut fossil fuel emissions, his Pollyanna view of a capitalism-friendly techno-fix to bypass political failure on climate change is most likely to contribute to the global warming inertia of business-as-usual, no matter how bad the climate gets.

Human ingenuity, coupled with market mechanisms such as carbon pricing and trading, Flannery believes, will triumph through technological innovation propelling market economics to a greener future by making renewable energy cheaper and fossil fuels (and uranium) more expensive to energy capitalists.  This plan to skirt the major roadblock of the economic power and political influence of fossil fuel interests through science, green entrepreneurship and the market is doomed to be, at best, too gradual and ineffectual, or, at worst, counter-productive.

By not scaring the sacrosanct GDP horses, by not challenging the capitalist god of economic growth, Flannery obscures the link between global warming and the capitalist economic system that has given rise to it, a link which, as Naomi Klein has argued, is grasped by smokestack-hugging political conservatives better than most, and which underlies their climate denialism and their fierce and extremely well-funded resistance.

Flannery’s ‘Third Way’ is the grand, and risky, illusion of geo-engineering, albeit shorn of its dangerously wilder fantasies, that will keep capitalism humming all the way up to environmental Armageddon.  The ‘Third Way’ is predicated on the inviolability of economic growth with its imperative of making more profits by selling more stuff to more people.  Flannery’s future of low-carbon, ‘Third Way’ cement and plastics and electric cars would colonise ever more of the biosphere in a victory for the capitalist growth principle over a liveable planet.