UNDESIRABLE: Captain Zuzenko and the Workers of Australia and the World by KEVIN WINDLE

UNDESIRABLE: Captain Zuzenko and the Workers of Australia and the World
KEVIN WINDLE
Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2013, 274 pages, $39.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

On the 7^th of November, 1917, when the Winter Palace was stormed in Petrograd, sealing the victory of the Russian revolution, Alexander Mikhailovich Zuzenko, one of the revolution’s most loyal servants, faced a local court in Ingham in northern Queensland, where he worked on the canefields, and was fined 10 shillings for losing his ‘aliens registration certificate’.  Zuzenko was tragically to pay a much heavier price two decades later under Stalin, writes Australian National University academic, Kevin Windle, in Undesirable.

The young Latvian revolutionary had hurled himself into Russia’s abortive 1905 revolution, dodging the post-uprising repression by escaping to Australia where thousands of other Russian exiles and job-seekers were concentrated in the labour-hungry workplaces of Queensland.  Zuzenko was one of their leaders, in the militant and anti-war Union of Russian Workers and the anarcho-syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).

Attacked by violent patriots in Brisbane and arrested for carrying a banned red flag, Zuzenko was deported to Russia in 1920, where the former anarchist joined the Bolsheviks, now seeing anarchism as pretty much the same thing as Bolshevism, not least in the proclamation that the ‘complete abolition of the state’ was the end aim of the Moscow-based Third, or Communist, International, the organising body for world socialist revolution.

Zuzenko’s Australian experience impressed Lenin and he was assigned to establish an Australian communist party which he successfully forged from the rival claimants before being arrested and again deported in 1922.  In Russia, Zuzenko found an exhausted socialist state where idealism was in reluctant retreat against the chaos and dislocation from civil war, invasion, blockade, political isolation and economic backwardness.

Undaunted, Zuzenko became captain of the Smolny in the Soviet merchant fleet on the Leningrad-Hamburg-London route.  Zuzenko relished his role as unofficial envoy of Soviet Russia, once teaching an on-board English jazz band the tune of the Marxist anthem, the Internationale, much to the delight of the dockside German audience other than the fuming Nazi brownshirts.

Zuzenko wasn’t to have known it at the time, however, but his travel to capitalist countries provided some of the hostages to fortune in the murderously paranoid new Stalinist reality, along with his anarchist past, his ship’s costly accidents and long lay-ups for repairs (when the labels of economic ‘saboteur’ and ‘wrecker’ carried great jeopardy) and his prominence as an ‘Old Bolshevik’, the politically heroic and visionary socialist generation targeted for liquidation by Stalin at the head of the rising new class of privileged party-state bureaucrats.

It did Zuzenko no good to denounce, at a crew meeting in 1937, the ‘vile Trotskyites and Rightist renegades’ who were framed at Stalin’s ‘Show Trials’ in Moscow.  Peril awaited even those most admiring of Stalin.  Awareness of the bankruptcy of the Stalinist regime came too late to Zuzenko who, shortly after complaining in private of the ‘fascism’ sweeping Soviet Russia, was shot during the purges of 1938 as a ‘British spy’.

Windle regards Zuzenko’s tragic end as the shameful murder of “a brave and lifelong revolutionary”.  Windle shows a Zuzenko who, as a journalist, may have been woodenly didactic but who made up for his lack of literary flair with the energy and drive of a tireless organiser and the commitment and sincerity of a motivational leader.  As even his Australian secret-police taggers conceded, Zuzenko’s ‘fluency and forcefulness as a speaker’ rightly scored him high on political effectiveness.

Zuzenko’s political competencies, however, came at the cost of a sometimes divisive bluntness when berating local communists for ideological deviation, organisational incompetence and lack of revolutionary ardour.  Zuzenko, a veteran of high political and industrial drama in revolutionary Russia, also tactlessly vented his frustration with the ‘apathy and inactivity’, and xenophobia, of the Anglo-Saxon proletariat.

In the end, however, what betrayed Zuzenko’s socialist hopes were not these hurdles but Stalin’s counter-revolution.  Windle, despite his warm regard for Zuzenko, is dismissive of his socialism – an ideology, says Windle, which may once have had some potency but which “now belongs firmly in the past”, a “misguided conviction” of purely historical interest.  To so blithely dismiss what inspired Zuzenko, with no consideration of the new language, forms and political fronts of a still-evolving socialist politics, is to betray Zuzenko and the other Bolshevik pioneers of socialism a second time.

THE PRINCE: Faith, Abuse and George Pell by DAVID MARR

THE PRINCE: Faith, Abuse and George Pell
DAVID MARR
Quarterly Essay, Issue 51, 2013
Black Inc., $19.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

The police had, writes David Marr in his Quarterly Essay on paedophile priests in the Catholic Church in Australia, “vigorously, for a very long time, protected the church”, leaving the clergy’s sex crimes to be looked after in-house.  This entirely suited the clerical child abusers until the international tide of Catholic sexual abuse revelations engulfed Australian shores and sparked police of conscience into action.

In 2012, police whistleblowers in Victoria and New South Wales linked dozens of adult suicides to clerical child sexual abuse and accused the church of protecting paedophile priests, hindering investigations, destroying evidence, silencing and discrediting victims, and moving guilty priests to fresh pastures and fresh crimes.

Community outrage prompted the then Federal Labor government to call a Royal Commission into institutional sexual abuse, a judicial inquiry of which even Tony Abbott, the then Liberal Opposition leader and Catholic hard-liner, approved, noting a poll showing 95% popular support for a full-throttled inquiry.

For Cardinal George Pell, Australia’s No. 1 Catholic, deserted by his political and police allies, the challenge was immense.  His failure to rise to it is no surprise, says Marr, of the young Ballarat Catholic who fell under the 1950s spell of B. A. Santamaria, the anti-communist, anti-Labor, anti-union, Catholic extremist.  Pell’s subsequent seminary training established his reputation for rigid orthodoxy, unquestioning obedience to Rome, and ideological and physical bullying.

Pell’s loyalty and conservatism impressed the Pope, who promoted Pell up the clerical career ladder.  Priests raping trusting and defenceless altar boys did not disturb the Catholic moralist’s gaze which remained fixed on the Vatican-ordained sex crimes that really mattered - homosexuality (‘a much greater health hazard than smoking’), masturbation, pre-marital and extra-marital sex, abortion, contraception, ‘mail-order divorce’.

Where sexual abuse by priests could not be ignored, it could be ‘treated’ by prayer, or, in a display of Christian virtue, forgiven.  Offending clergy, wrapped in the protective mystique and aura of the priesthood, were deemed scared persons, Christs on earth, and not, therefore, subject to secular law or police handcuffs.

Secular justice was not the only temporal trouble that Pell, the Vatican’s man in Australia, had to repel.  Second only to the threat of communism was ‘secular liberalism’.  In Australia, and from his powerful Vatican posts, Pell opposed a charter of human rights, heroin injecting-rooms, ‘the climate change bandwagon’, the Greens, gay adoption and other ‘progressivist’ transgressions.

One merit of the earthly world, however, was its public treasury coffers from which Pell, heading the Catholic education business, demonstrated a remarkable talent for extracting money, winning federal funding for sectarian higher education institutions.

The High Court of Australia, too, gave its lay blessing to the Church, deeming the Church’s property trusts, where it had parked its immense, tax-free wealth and assets, as unable to be held responsible for the sexual conduct of Catholic priests.  Australia thus remains “the only country in the common-law world where the Catholic Church cannot be sued” because it is “just an association of believers with no corporate entity, rather like a mothers’ club or a bridge circle”, its legally-quarantined riches off-limits to potential litigants.

Pell’s non-spiritual concern for Church finances had earlier been on miserly display, whilst archbishop of Melbourne, with the so-called ‘Melbourne Response’, a private church tribunal with all the trappings but none of the power or independence of a royal commissioner.  This process catalogued 304 proven complaints against sixty priests in Melbourne but not a single case was referred to police.

The victims, in return for secrecy, received payouts averaging a mere $32,500, the only compensation alternative being a long and financially exhausting battle through the real courts.  Compared to an average Catholic child sexual abuse settlement of $1 million in the US, Pell saved his church in Australia hundreds of millions of dollars.

If the sex crimes, their cover-up and bargain basement hush-money had not trashed the Catholic brand by now, Pell’s stumbling attempt to deflect blame in response to the announcement of a Royal Commission would.  Pell’s contempt for the media and its ‘disproportionate and repetitious’ reporting of the sex crimes of the clergy surfaced in spades with Pell portraying his Church as the victim of journalists.

Marr’s case against Pell is convincingly, and elegantly, made – he communicates ideas and anecdotes clearly and concisely, with his moral tone set to coolly incandescent.  Marr, however, could have been more analytical.  His focus on Pell, and on enforced priest celibacy, as the root of Church paedophilia, tends to  subordinate a broader and more theoretical examination of the role of Catholic Church material interests, authoritarianism, democratic unaccountability and theology in the criminal behaviour of the powerful men of religion.

Marr is right, however, to warn of the danger posed by the current conjunction of the two most powerful and reactionary Catholics in Australia, both ‘Movement’ men from the Santamaria tradition – the Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, and his spiritual adviser and close friend, Cardinal George Pell.  What further Catholic abuses and scandals lie in wait?

FORGOTTEN WAR by Henry Reynolds

FORGOTTEN WAR
HENRY REYNOLDS
NewSouth, 2013, 280 pages, $29.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon 

The contrast is striking, says Henry Reynolds in Forgotten War, between the “relentless, lavishly funded public campaign to make [overseas] war the central defining experience of national life” in Australia compared to the historical amnesia surrounding the domestic war which raged across the continent’s settlement frontiers for 140 years from the 1790s with its scores of thousands of Aboriginal dead.

Whilst a few Indigenous men, Aborigines who “fought for the empire” as members of the armed forces, are increasingly celebrated, the many more who fought against the savage encroachments of empire on their traditional lands are lost to official recognition.

The “ongoing carnival of military commemoration” honouring every Australian soldier who died overseas is loud, government-driven and a sacred national obligation.  The ‘line of blood’ which accompanied white settlement, in which 30,000 or more Indigenous inhabitants were killed by British soldiers, Australian police and settlers, is, however, denied or skirted around with vague references to “unspecified wrongs and regrettable blemishes”.  The historiographical mentor of mainstream politicians and conservative historians would seem to be Basil Fawlty – ‘whatever you do, don’t mention the war’.

When frontier conflict is acknowledged, its status as war is repudiated by official Australia.  On every significant metric of war, however, other than the trappings of “smart uniforms and well-drilled marches of returning heroes”, the frontier war a very real war.

Although the war’s sporadic skirmishes and small-scale clashes may have lacked the major set-piece battles of conventional European armies or the occasional “dramatic confrontations between frontier settlers and aborigines of the kind witnessed in the United States, New Zealand and South Africa”,  it was persistent and the bodies piled up in comparable, if not greater, numbers.

The Australian frontier war dead (30,000 Indigenous and 2,500 soldiers and settlers) outstrips the contemporaneous American Indian War dead (15,000 and 6,500) and the New Zealand Maori War dead (2,100 and 750).  The Australian frontier war dead also rank with Australian deaths in World War 1 (62,000) and World War 11 (40,000).

Its status as war now suppressed, the picture of the Australian frontier conflict was different at the time, however.  It was recognised as war at the “highest levels of colonial society and by the many experienced military officers who had served in the Napoleonic wars”.  In the absence of land acquisition through negotiation, purchase or treaty, war was seen as inevitable by all the early colonial governors.

The governors also adopted ‘total war’ as a key strategy to, as Governor Phillip declared, ‘infuse a universal terror’ (his specialty was decapitation, Governor Macquarie’s the hanging of bodies in trees) to discourage further Aboriginal resistance.  There was no distinction between warriors and non-combatants – the common policy was to shoot on sight and to fire indiscriminately into the men, women and children in  sleeping Aboriginal camps.  The retaliatory, punitive raids to avenge Aboriginal spearing of settlers and destruction of their property were “quite disproportionate” (up to ten-fold ratios).

There is no Hall of Infamy to match the iconic Stockmen’s Hall of Fame for the cattle drovers and pastoralists who, with the notches on their rifle butts safely excised from view, are now the gritty, stoic stars in the nation-building narrative of a “hard and heroic fight against nature itself” in which the “frontier became a site of struggle with the land, not a fight for possession of it”.

Territorial conquest - in Australia’s case, the forced transfer of all the most productive land from  40,000 years of Indigenous ownership and control – has always been the main prize defining all wars.

This violent theft, “one of the greatest appropriations of land in world history”, was accompanied by abundant rhetoric about the need for ‘utter annihilation’ of the Aborigines, a people seen as ‘inhuman savages’.  Few were the voices of “humanitarian disquiet”, even rarer the voices of political dissent which recognised the legitimacy of Aboriginal war in defence of their homeland, a patriotism, as one letter-writer put it, which ‘we would esteem as a virtue in ourselves’. 

The war stopped short of genocide when the out-gunned Aborigines admitted defeat and accepted their dispossession, spared further annihilation because the squatters and cattlemen “had a desperate need for Aboriginal labour” in the face of the scarcity and high wages of white workers.

The comforting motif of the “peaceful settlement” of Australia, which had long dominated history-writing on colonial Australia, has been profoundly upset by the new history of violent conquest whose proponents, such as Reynolds, have been dubbed ‘black-armband’ historians and accused of “fabricating evidence and engaging in a hate-filled crusade to denigrate the nation’s history and undermine its moral legitimacy”.  Historical veracity, and addressing contemporary Indigenous disadvantage, however, requires a recognition of the human devastation and land theft of Australia’s frontier wars.

Whilst it is “easy to romanticise” Australia’s khaki wars fought at a geographical distance, fusing militarism with nationalism through the “sacred incantation” of ‘Lest We Forget’, says Reynolds, it seems that ‘Best we forget’ applies to the brutal reality of the frontier wars.  Reynolds’ compelling book challenges, with academic and moral vigour, a still damaging historical forgetting of Australia’s true past.

BATTLERS AND BILLIONAIRES by Andrew Leigh

BATTLERS AND BILLIONAIRES: The Story of Inequality in Australia
ANDREW LEIGH
Black Inc. Books, 2013, 210 pages, $19.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon 

In Australia, notes economist Andrew Leigh, the poorest 20% of the population own just 1% of total household wealth.  The top 20%, however, hog a fat 62%, the top 1% indulge in 11%, the richest one in every thousand Australians delight in 3% whilst the richest one in every million Australians (the top 0.0001% of the population, including Australia’s 32 billionaires) luxuriate in 1.4% of total wealth, 14,000 times their population share.

Never has the shaggy myth of the vaunted Australian ‘egalitarian spirit’ been so exposed on the rock of material inequality, says Leigh in Battlers and Billionaires, since the 1900s when vast extremes of wealth divided rich and poor.  Decades of partial income redistribution via means-tested welfare reforms and real wage growth, which saw income inequality decline to its lowest point by around 1980, have been undone by rising inequality in the current era.

The rich have accelerated away from the pack, says Leigh, who illustrates the widening wealth gap by comparing  two BHP chief executives.  Essington Lewis (BHP head from 1921 to 1950) had a lifetime wealth accumulation equal to 100 times the annual average wage but Marius Kloppers (BHP head from 2009 to 2013) took in “between 180 and 270 times the average wage in every year of his tenure”.  Over the last 30 years, Australia’s top 100 CEOs have helped deliver to the richest 1% of Australians 13% of total aggregate household income growth, a $403 billion shift in income from the bottom 99% to the top 1%.

The rising tide of economic growth does not lift all boats.  Middle income earners are paddling harder to stay still whilst the lowest are slipping below the waves.  Contributing to rising inequality have been tax favours for the rich (tax-free inheritance, marginal tax cuts), a decline in trade union strength (in 1980, one in two workers were in a union, today less than one in five are) and a skewed political process in which politicians (many themselves quite well-to-do, all paid more than the average worker, and most in policy debt to corporate donations) reflect the interests of their wealthiest constituents.

Leigh’s recipe for turning economic inequality around, however, fails to match his indictment.  A Labor member of federal parliament, Leigh dutifully follows the party script.  Productivity is favoured – a worthy means (if it means better skills and training) but one that contains the ever-present ‘micro-economic reform’ sting of labouring harder and longer with fewer workers.

Better education for children of the poor is also meritorious.  The average Year 12 student from a disadvantaged background, says Leigh, has the same literacy and numeracy skills as a Year 8 or 9 student from an advantaged background, a “brutally high barrier to further study” and higher waged jobs.  Leigh, however, avoids anything too radical such as shifting government education funding to public schools from wealthy private schools, helping to terminate these bastions of privilege from their role as transmission belts of inequality through the generations.

Leigh also advocates a progressive taxation system but he is coy on whether this means increasing personal top marginal tax rates (which would scare wealthy voters) and he is averse to income redistribution through increases in corporate tax.  Besides, “hard-working entrepreneurs are vital to our nation’s success”, he says, and they must not be hindered by business taxes or by capping CEO salaries as this will, apparently, result in low quality business executives. 

Leigh’s greatest political blind spot, however, is his failure to notice that the “great divergence” in equality that resumed from around 1980 coincided, not without cause, with the advent of ‘neo-liberalism’, the religious revivalism of a lightly-fettered market economy ideology ministered, in Australia, by the deregulators, privatisers and union-hobblers of Leigh’s party under the baton of Prime Ministers Hawke and Keating, and uncorrected by the later Rudd/Gillard leadership.

Leigh notes that a large majority of Australians believe that differences in income are too large and that government has a role to play in fixing this.  More leopards have changed spots, however, than will Labor governments take to the policy barricades in the cause of equality.

Leigh refreshingly notes that economics is not about “maximising money” but “maximising wellbeing” but this will not be assisted by his advocacy of ALP market managerialism as the only ‘left’ alternative to socialism.  Leigh simplistically cites the economic and social failure of the former Soviet Union as evidence of the failure of the Marxist egalitarian principle of ‘from each according to their ability, to each according to their need’.  Leigh concludes that “perfect equality” is “impossible and undesirable”, producing only neo-Stalinist monotony and greyness, and that society must “reward effort” through cash.

This prescription depends on measuring personal worth by money and calibrating the merit of ideas, arts and technology by a money culture.  By contrast, a democratic socialist material equality, where the battling majority would not have to worry about their next meal whilst a rich few, as Leigh notes, quaff their $900 bottle of 1971 Penfolds Grange Hermitage at “about $20 a sip”, is both possible and desirable.

KILLING FAIRFAX (Pamela Williams) and FAIRFAX: The Rise and Fall (Colleen Ryan)

KILLING FAIRFAX: Packer, Murdoch & the Ultimate Revenge
PAMELA WILLIAMS
HarperCollins, 2013, 352 pages, $39.99 (hb)

FAIRFAX: The Rise and Fall

COLLEEN RYAN
The Miegunyah Press, 2013, 302 pages, $32.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

When Australia’s richest person, the multi-billionaire mining magnate Gina Rinehart, moved to add the title of media mogul to her CV, the inspiration came, say Colleen Ryan and Pamela Williams in their books on the Fairfax media, from the Rinehart-financed climate change denier, Christopher Monckton, who advised his wealthy patron in 2011 to take over a newspaper to give Australia ‘a proper dose of free market thinking’.

Alarmed by the former federal Labor government’s tax on mining super-profits, Rinehart had become a barricades activist, shouting herself hoarse at anti-mining-tax rallies before eyeing off a powerful stake (19% at last count) in the Fairfax stable of newspapers, The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Financial Review.

The wealthy have long invested in Australia’s establishment media as a money-making venture but Rinehart’s aim was not further immediate enrichment, which was unlikely given the shape of Fairfax’s business model (busted) and share price (tanking), but political influence.

Rinehart is not the first member of “Australia’s moneyed establishment with deep enough pockets to fund a dream to control Australia’s quality (sic) press”, says Ryan.  From the founder, John Fairfax in the 1840s, to the half-century reign of the “moneyed intellectual”, Warwick (Snr), the Fairfax press was solidly conservative, the family ruling with a heavy hand, punishing any independent-minded editor lest, as board minutes recorded, ‘we might wake up one morning and find the communist line taken in any of our papers’.

Only with the accession from 1977 of Warwick’s son, James, did the Fairfaxes realise the value of ‘quality journalism’ as a corporate brand, although this was not merely a marketing ploy - employed during this “new era” were such gifted and progressive journalists as David Marr and Wendy Bacon.

What undid the successful Fairfax business, says Ryan, was a convergence of “managerial incompetence, family rivalry, vengeful politicians and boardroom bastardry”.  Labor premiers and prime ministers were upset by the accountability they were subjected to in the Fairfax press and Prime Minister Paul Keating retaliated with changes to media laws which favoured Fairfax’s media rivals, Kerry Packer and Rupert Murdoch.

Fairfax’s slide accelerated from 1987, when the youngest Fairfax, Warwick (Jnr), believing he was being denied his inheritance, launched a “financially insane” takeover, his greed driving the business into crippling debt and receivership.

These financial tempests might have been weathered, however, were it not for the internet.  Fairfax had had a virtual monopoly of classified print advertising for jobs, homes and cars in Sydney and Melbourne and these ‘rivers of gold’ ($700 million in 1997, for example) subsidised the papers’ better, investigative, journalism.  When internet advertising start-ups with their cheaper on-line rates came looking for capital injections for their fledgling businesses, Fairfax missed the boat and James Packer and Lachlan Murdoch cashed in, taking Fairfax’s classifieds business from them and thus turning off the financial life-support.  As James Packer rightly put it – ‘Fairfax thought they had a journalism business when what they had was a classified advertising business’. 

Fairfax’s response was massive cost-cutting and sackings, beginning a corporate death spiral where the job cuts eroded journalism resources, leading to further revenue decline - a recipe for self-defeating organisational cannibalism.

Whilst both books focus on the mind-numbing minutiae of intra-corporate rivalry, with the narrative wheels spinning furiously in the bog of “conflicted deals and relationships at the top of the media world”, only in passing does the broader picture of Australia’s big media emerge, revealing that the ‘free press’ is free only to those rich enough to buy or inherit it, including the ‘quality press’.

The Fairfaxes were all millionaires as were most Fairfax board chairs and directors mentioned in the books.  The board government treat the Fairfax media in the same way as Fairfax’s major investors do – as a profit-making enterprise.  As one such investor put it - ‘This is a business.  You have to maximise return on capital.  It is not there for the workers, the public or the politicians …’

The real business, of Fairfax as of any other corporate newspaper, is ‘monetising’ their readership, to a small extent through sales (thus needing to provide a small and sternly policed space for diversity of views) but primarily through advertising.  The corporate media are capitalist businesses, selling a commodity (their market audience) to capitalist advertisers who will withhold their dough if newspapers become tribunes of democracy instead of material generators and ideological defenders of the dollar.

Rinehart is simply less sophisticated about hiding this reality.  After her success through board membership at Channel 10 in getting the irritating conservative and climate change denier, Andrew Bolt, his own Sunday morning television show, Rinehart demanded that her shares do the same at Fairfax  by giving her the power to hire and fire editors.  For good reason, the in-house joke amongst Fairfax journalists was that the Sydney Morning Herald would become the Sydney Mining Herald. 

The Fairfax media may have, as a minority hobby, strayed from the pack by “holding politicians accountable, scrutinising the bureaucracy, exposing corporate crooks and environmental bastardry”, as Ryan puts it, but this was only ever a calculated strategy of ‘corporate badging’.  Fairfax pursued only the ‘bad apples’, individual corporate crooks and political rorters, not the rotten capitalist system as a whole, a system which has buttered the Fairfax bread for 150 years but which is now starting to turn rancid for Fairfax through the far-sighted digital greed of its big business media rivals.

Damned If I Do PHILIP NITSCHKE with PETER CORRIS

Damned If I Do
PHILIP NITSCHKE with PETER CORRIS
Melbourne University Press, 2013, 237 pages

Review by Phil Shannon 

Dr. Philip Nitschke has chalked up a couple of unwanted achievements – as the author of the first book to be banned (in 2007) in Australia in 35 years, and as only the third person in the 190 year history of the Oxford University’s Oxford Union debate to have had his invitation withdrawn, sharing this tainted honour with Holocaust denier (David Irving) and the founder of the far right British National Party.

As the biography by Nitschke and Australian crime novelist, Peter Corris, shows, however, the offensive iniquities of the latter are poles apart from Nitschke’s transgression which has been to be the public face of the humanitarian cause of voluntary euthanasia (VE), the right of the incurably and intolerably ill to end their physical agony and mental anguish through a merciful assisted death - a thumpingly popular, but still illegal, policy supported by 85% of the Australian population.

Nitschke never intended to make VE his life’s work, though it flowed seamlessly from his progressive political antecedents -  an Adelaide and Flinders University sixties’ activist at on the Vietnam War, Aboriginal rights, apartheid, nuclear weapons, uranium mining and US military bases.  By the mid-1990s, Nitschke’s championing of the Northern Territory’s bill to legalise VE, and his use of the new law to assist four patients to die, had thrust him into a campaigning role he took to with expertise and passion.

His opponents did not lack passion, either, but theirs was a rigid zealotry shorn of compassion as well as logic and respect.  A palliative care Professor sledge-hammered fascist innuendo from a play on words (‘Nazi-Nitschke-Euthanasia’) whilst the Australian Medical Association’s Northern Territory Branch President, ignoring Nitschke’s history of land rights activism, accused him of being a racist, seeking to use the Territory’s VE law to exterminate Aboriginal people.

Fanaticism also marks the conservative Christian lobby whose influence on governments and mass media is way out of proportion to their tiny base.  Censorship of Nitschke has been rife in the Murdoch press (with savage opinion pieces and ad hominem attacks), the Fairfax press (which denies Nitschke fairness and right of reply) and commercial television (which banned a VE advertisement).

BBC reporters are obsessed with the smear-laden question - ‘Aren’t you making a lot of money out of death’ – which resists all answers by Nitschke that his VE organisation (Exit International) grosses $500,000 a year from which Nitschke draws a modest $50,000, a fraction of the income he could earn as a doctor.

Cyberspace is filled with censorship (YouTube content removed, Google sponsored ads disallowed, PayPal accounts frozen), cyber-vandalism (Wikipedia’s content on Nitschke hacked) and the rancid extremities of the blogosphere inhabited by extremist Christian moralists.

The former federal Labor Government has attempted to add an e-book by Nitschke to porn sites slated for their proposed mandatory internet filter, whilst the Queensland state Labor government authorised police raids.  Last-minute cancellation of speaking and workshop venues has curtailed Nitschke’s freedom of speech and Nitschke is periodically threatened with medical de-registration.

More surprising is the level of hostility to Nitschke shown by some erstwhile comrades in the right-to-die movement who want to restrict VE to only the terminally ill, in contrast to Nitschke who believes that VE is a fundamental human right that should be available to all who understand death (i.e. excluding children, the mentally impaired and those with psychological conditions able to be helped through medical means) and also including those with chronic, but not terminal, suffering and those who have compelling non-medical reasons to seek death.

Those with a limited, doctor-mediated VE approach focus exclusively on law reform whilst Nitschke’s is a DIY strategy which places control of VE decision-making, and its technical means, in the hands of patients, a practical approach which he combines with political activity for reform (Nitschke has been a Greens and an independent candidate in federal elections, and has most recently campaigned for the Australian Sex Party).

Less strong on making the philosophical case for VE (covered more comprehensively in Nitschke’s earlier book, Killing me Softly), Corris’ interview-biography fills out Nitschke the person, including his life outside VE, from the South Australian country boy born in 1947, through all the emotional storms of failed relationships, to what the future may hold if he is de-registered (a career in stand-up comedy, not something that a genuine ‘Dr Death’ would contemplate).

Peter Corris has made a useful addition to his stable of ‘collaborative autobiographies’, profiling those, like Fred Hollows and environmentalists, who have led “an active life, devoted to a cause I approve of, and pursued with a courage and commitment I admire”.  At last, Nitschke has found more appropriate company than those of fascist bent that his enemies assign him to in their holy war in the cause of human suffering perpetuated by the cruel moral tyranny of church and state.

CLIVE: The Story of Clive Palmer by SEAN PARNELL

CLIVE: The Story of Clive Palmer
SEAN PARNELL
HarperCollins, 2013, 328 pages, $39.99 (hb)

Review by Phil Shannon

When the local council denied planning permission for the Queensland National Party’s media director, Clive Palmer, to build a sixty-six townhouse development on peaceful rural land in Caloundra on the Sunshine Coast in 1984, Palmer’s party and state government mate, Russ Hinze, helped the rich guy out by overturning the council decision.  Shortly after, Palmer made the second largest donation ever to the Nationals, writes Sean Parnell in Clive: The Story of Clive Palmer, “directing $15,000 from his company that had purchased the property”.  Palmer well knew the utility of politics for personal business.

The lure of money governed the business family that Palmer was born into in 1954.  Anti-communist, conservative Catholics, they stamped their son with the same template.  At the University of Queensland in the early 1970s, Palmer took on the campus socialists and feminists, most vigorously through the Right To Life Association and its anti-abortion ‘pregnancy counselling’ front, and he became close to the Liberal and Country Parties and their state government headed by the authoritarian, anti-democratic Premier, Joh Bjelke-Petersen.

Dropping out of university into a law firm, Palmer’s potential legal career came to a rapid halt when he complained to a Liberal politician of police verballing of suspects which he had uncovered.  An anonymous death threat soon after led to Palmer harbouring a lingering bitterness towards the police-protecting Liberals whilst remaining reliably conservative, and avaricious.

Palmer became a self-made real estate millionaire during Queensland’s interstate-migration-driven property boom on the Gold Coast where he bought cheap and sold dear, a strategy which was to deliver him billions during the mining boom, beginning with iron ore deposits in Western Australia followed by the promise of even richer returns from coal in Queensland’s Galilee Basin.

If Palmer, a lavish donor to, and life member of, the National Party thought that he owned the new Queensland Liberal National Party government then he was disillusioned as he ran into a government speed-bump.  His new China-export coal project lost its Labor-ordained ‘significant project status’ when his claim to favoured state support for rail and port infrastructure was out-lobbied by Galilee Basin competitor, Gina Rinehart, and her coal export deal with India.

The taste of sour grapes infused Palmer’s deteriorating relationship with the conservative parties.  His opposition to the new state government’s public sector job cuts was a pretext (he had sacked a hundred workers at his Queensland nickel refinery) for a swipe at a government which had materially harmed his business interests.  Seen as destabilising or splitting the ruling conservative party, Palmer was jettisoned by the Nationals and went on to form his own, eponymous, conservative party.

Lest anyone think that this latest political venture is a merely a continuation of protecting Palmer’s profits and conspicuous consumption (high-end cars and boats and planes, racehorses, soccer clubs, Club Med Resorts, replica Titanics and robotic dinosaurs), Palmer presents a front of selfless generosity through philanthropy and gifts to his employees.

The climate change denialist doesn’t, however, bother with any green camouflage about global warming from his coal exporting, exposure of the Great Barrier Reef to pollution from his nickel refinery’s tailings dam, or the threat to the protected dunes and bush posed by a massive expansion to his luxury resort at Coolum on the Sunshine Coast.

Whilst Palmer can only speak ill of environmentalists, he will hear nothing bad about his former National Party idols and mentors convicted of, or who narrowly dodged, corruption charges for misappropriating taxpayer funds and accepting bribes from developers.  These noble souls (Bjelke-Petersen, Hinze, et al) are, according to  Palmer, persecuted innocents, ‘brave and courageous’ all.  Legal prosecution, however, is a course of first resort for the highly litigious Palmer towards any person or entity which threatens his profits or reputation.

One outcome of Palmer’s legalistic aggression is that voices critical of Palmer are, for fear of being sued and bankrupted, under-represented in Parnell’s book.  The result is an overly benign portrait of Palmer, the celebrity miner-politician, in a book that is fascinated by the “colourful Queenslander’s” every new venture but which is short on analysis of Palmer’s political philosophy, ethical values and social policies, which, like Palmer, offer nothing to those not love-struck by money and power.

BIG COAL by Pearse, McKinght & Burton

BIG COAL: Australia’s Dirtiest Habit
GUY PEARSE, DAVID McKNIGHT, BOB BURTON
Newsouth Publishing, 2013, 257 pages, $34.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

You don’t have to look far to see why Australians are locked in an absurd and vicious circle of climate change, burning more coal to, for example, run more air-conditioners to cope with the more severe heatwaves from the global warming resulting from burning more coal.  The reason why Australia is hooked onto such coal-mad absurdities, say Pearse, McKnight and Burton in Big Coal, is because the economic and political power of Australia’s coal industry has pushed a more than willing political elite to support the mining and export of coal in a country which is the world’s 4^th largest producer, and 2^nd biggest exporter, of the largest single source of global greenhouse gases – coal.

The climate change cost of coal to Australia (devastating weather extremes, bushfires, droughts and floods) is the latest pricey instalment of the addiction to coal, following that fossil fuel’s grim history of lung-blackened, maimed and dead workers, and toxic landscapes and poisonous air in mining communities.

Whilst Australia’s coal-fired power stations produce one third of the country’s domestic greenhouse gas emissions, it is the $48 billion coal export industry which is Australia’s main contributor to global warming.  Whether burnt in Mumbai or Shanghai for electricity generation or steel-making, Australian coal is at the forefront of catastrophic climate change.

Unconcerned with planetary survival, whilst lavishly enriching themselves from the coal rush, are the mining nouveaux-riche, billionaires like Gina Rinehart, Clive Palmer and Andrew Forrest, who have mastered the art of picking undervalued coal reserves that can then be on-sold to multinational mining companies at many times their initial value, in turn rewarding the giant companies’ owners - the big banks and large institutional investors - with bloated profits.

Greasing the money-making wheels with $9 - $12 billion in subsidies are coal-friendly Australian governments.  State governments further assist with a genial mining lease approval process, compulsory purchase of prime agricultural land for mining, public funds on tap for private company rail and port infrastructure and obedience to coal industry lobbyists’ commands to hamstring renewable energy alternatives such as cutting household solar-panel feed-in tariffs and tightening the regulatory screws on wind farms.

In return for governmental services rendered are the royalties paid by the coal mining industry to state government coffers (plus occasional personal enrichment along the way for corrupt ministers).  These royalties, however, mask the long-term cost to the states of climate change - one major natural climate-change-related disaster can wipe out several years of royalties (cyclone Yasi cost the Queensland public purse $7 million in 2011).

The federal government also chimes in through winding back mandatory renewable energy targets, and the tried-and-failed market mechanisms of emissions trading schemes and carbon taxes with their generous and self-defeating industry compensation.  Where any sign of government resistance is met (through mining super-profits taxes, for example), the industry’s propaganda power and deep pockets are mobilised for poll-damaging “big budget advertising blitzes to turbo-charge their behind-the-scenes lobbying campaigns”.

Corporate-government harmony is always maintained, however, in the public spruiking of the grossly exaggerated economic benefits of coal mining.  The coal industry’s 46,000 employees is a tiny percentage of a total labour force of over 11 million, whilst the industry’s self-portrait of itself as an altruistic job creator is undermined by its programs for driverless trucks and trains, and automated drilling rigs, loaders and shipping operations.  Sucking up valuable capital, infrastructure and government funds, as well as labour, the coal mining industry results in a structural distortion of the economy away from job-rich economic sectors towards an environmentally dead-end industry.

This is not, however, the message delivered by governments, which act as Big Coal’s public relations hacks.  State Premiers and Treasurers have been quick to dismiss as a ‘politically correct debate about climate change’ any concern that the bushfires, droughts and floods of recent years may be related to coal-burning in favour of stump-speeching the economic credentials of their state’s coal-fired power stations and coal export markets.

Close behind government on the image management is the coal industry.  For fiscal peanuts, coal corporations and peak mining bodies buy good-will and a permanent stake in the community through funding local, state and national groups.  Recipients of the don’t-mess-with-the-sponsor goodies include sports of all kinds, helicopter rescue, kindergartens, universities, hospitals, koala habitat restoration and many more.  Xstrata Coal is typical, providing $14 million to fifty community organisations in 2012, a barely visible half a per cent of its $2.2 billion profit.  Such cheap philanthropy is a common corporate strategy but the coal industry’s calculated benevolence is of grave concern because “no other industry in this country has ever threatened to cause harm on the same global scale – not asbestos, nor tobacco, not even uranium”.

The soothing corporate syrup flows with added sugar-coating from the public relations barrel with reassurances that coal’s carbon can be rendered harmless through technical fixes.  Carbon capture and storage (CCS) still has its hymn-singing corporate zombies and political droids, despite decades of fanfare having been muted by commercial reality (carbon-scrubbers are expensive), time constraints (even if CCS works it would be deployed too late globally to avoid critical climate warming), practical hurdles (distant storage sites requiring a vast network of pipelines) and health risks (in high concentrations, CO2 is a toxic, potentially fatal, gas).

As CCS has been shown to be a mirage, however, so, too, is its ‘green’ cousin - carbon capture and recycling (CCR).  For algae, CO₂ acts as a growth steroid and feeding them in algal ponds adjacent to power stations and steel mills can turn the green weeds into bio-fuels, fertilisers, soil-enriching biochar and food for cattle and fish farms.  The process, however, depends on a non-renewable fossil fuel, releases the carbon when consumed, and only works in sunlight, therefore, at best soaking up only a half of its CO₂ food source.

The book’s authors have done a superb job in digging up the dirt on coal.  Ending the world’s addiction to this dangerous product starts here in Australia, in King Coal’s castle.

THE BRACEGIRDLE INCIDENT by Alan Fewster

THE BRACEGIRDLE INCIDENT: How an Australian Communist Ignited Ceylon’s Independence Struggle
ALAN FEWSTER (with a Foreword by Humphrey McQueen)
Arcadia/Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2013, 173 pages, $39.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

In 1937, Ceylon’s British Chief of Police reported that ‘it is clearly dangerous’ to allow the Australian Communist, Mark Bracegirdle, to remain in the country ‘stirring up feelings against employers of labour and against the British Government’.  Ceylon’s top cop found a willing listener in the colony’s Governor who authorised Bracegirdle’s deportation.

As Alan Fewster recounts in his account of the ‘Bracegirdle incident’, the deportation was technically bungled, setting off a political crisis in Ceylon and igniting “an altogether more systematic and aggressive attack on British rule”.

The English-born Bracegirdle had left  Australia for Ceylon in 1936, ostensibly to become an apprentice tea-planter.  The working conditions of the 600,000 imported, bonded Indian Tamil labourers appalled him – living in dismal barracks unfit for cattle, subject to fines and corporal punishment, bending their backs even if sick with malaria, and denied education - literacy ‘will give them ideas in life above their station’, said Bracegirdle’s superintendent, who soon sacked his ‘rather Communistic’ protégé for ‘fraternisation’ with the labourers. 

Joining Ceylon’s small communist party, the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP), Bracegirdle played a highly effective role, as a first-hand witness of, and defector from, the planter class.  This made him an ‘undesirable’ to Ceylon’s imperial authorities, too, but their attempted deportation of Bracegirdle overstepped the mark by demonstrating Britain’s absolute power over everyone, including the compliant indigenous elite (the Sinhalese aristocracy, rich land owners and others collaborating, for their own gain, in the administration of British governance) who had been granted limited authority via a restricted suffrage local parliament.

When this tame assembly of conservative nationalists and moderate reformists recognised that Britain’s colonial power could potentially be used not just against white communists but Ceylonese worthies like themselves, they protested with fist-waving, sarcasm and a resolution opposing Bracegirdle’s deportation.

The Supreme Court decision that Bracegirdle’s arrest was illegal capped a huge political humiliation for British rule and a significant propaganda, and membership, victory for the now-800 strong LSSP which went on to become the “dynamic new force” in Sri Lanka’s independence struggle.

Fewster, a former diplomat, is most focused on the ructions in the colonial governmental apparatus in Colombo and Whitehall whilst Bracegirdle the Marxist is more insubstantial, mainly because his motives and deeds (reported, inaccurately at best, by police spies) were sparsely recorded.

So, whilst Fewster is on sure, if rather dry, ground in the upper civil service strata, the rest of his political analysis is somewhat unconvincing speculation, namely that Bracegirdle did not come to Ceylon to radicalise the tea estate workers but, as a Stalinist agent, to pull the Trotskyist-leaning Ceylonese Marxist leadership into pro-Moscow orthodoxy.  That Bracegirdle actually succeeded in the former and failed in the latter suggests, rather, that loyalty to Moscow for the communists of the 1930s could nevertheless coexist with a genuine commitment to revolutionary activism.

No definitive answers are presented in the book on Bracegirdle’s ‘ulterior motive’ but what is clear is that he continued his left wing enterprise until his death in 1999, including smuggling refugees from Nazi Berlin through fake marriages to young Jewish women.  From Sri Lanka to Germany, Bracegirdle lived and breathed true internationalism and solidarity.

THE PASSION OF BRADLEY MANNING by Chase Madar

THE PASSION OF BRADLEY MANNING: The Story Behind the Wikileaks Whistleblower
CHASE MADAR
Verso, 2013, 181 pages, $19.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

The issue in the trial of Bradley Manning, the source of tens of thousands of US military and state secrets leaked to Wikileaks, is, in some eyes, simple.  ‘He broke the law’, lectured President Obama, conveniently overlooking, as Chase Madar comments in his book on Manning, the routine violation, when it suits the political upper crust, of the principle that ‘rules are rules’.

“Washington leaks intentionally as a communication medium between elite officials and their preferred journalists”, much of it top secret, a classification higher than anything Manning released, says Madar.  Laws (against aggressive wars, torture or “mass illegal wiretapping”, for example) are also not laws when broken by the powerful (the White House, the Pentagon, the CIA, the federal domestic security bureaucracy).

The perpetrators of these criminal infractions are not arrested and held in abusive solitary confinement for years, facing show trials, life imprisonment or possible execution, like Manning, but “receive solicitous treatment in the media and Sunday morning network gabfests”.

It was the official secrecy surrounding the political elite’s habitual criminality that prompted Manning, a US Army intelligence analyst, to blow the whistle on what his government “has done – and is doing – all over the world”, documented in war logs from Iraq and Afghanistan and in State Department cables which explain through ‘non-PR-versions of world events and crises’, as Manning put it, ‘how the first world exploits the third … from an internal perspective’.

Manning’s intent was “historically informed and political”, says Madar, aimed at, in Manning’s words, ‘worldwide discussion, debates and reforms’ concerning transparency in government.  Manning’s detractors, and even some of his more liberal sympathisers, have, however, done their best to ignore his clearly stated political motive, focusing instead on Manning’s sexual preference, gender identity, a ‘troubled’ psychology and, as a gay, “alienated and brutalised by the Army’s macho culture”, his military dysfunction.

It is tempting, though trite, says Madar, to see Manning’s political dissent as a result of mental health problems.  As Madar argues in response, the numerous gay soldiers in the US military, and its plentiful mentally ill soldiers (“the leading cause of death among active-duty US troops over the past four years has been … suicide”) are not psychologically predisposed to “declassify public records”. Stereotyping information rebels as being a bit weird deliberately devalues their moral conscience and political courage. 

As Manning himself has noted, the red herrings of his personal psychology matter only in the sense that ‘I’m way way way too easy to marginalise’.  His status as a gay, soon-to-be-transgender atheist, says Madar, “unsuits Manning thoroughly to be a poster-child for the cause of transparent government” by allowing the powerful to pathologise rather than politicise him.

Where the real sickness lies, says Madar, is with Washington’s self-interested and paranoid “over-classification of government documents”.  The National Security Agency has just got around to declassifying military documents from 1809, the CIA still keeps documents from World War 1 classified whilst the Department of Defence has finally declassified the Pentagon Papers (which document the secret history of the Vietnam War) a hardly-more-sprightly four decades after they became publicly available in book form.

This government mania for document secrecy, plus censorship of former officials, will continue to “distort and stifle public debate on vital issues of war and foreign policy”, says Madar, whilst a “national panic about leaks”, sauced with “chauvinistic nationalism”, is meant to discourage potential leakers from letting in any sunshine on what the American government gets up to in its citizens’ names.

This anti-leak deterrent has been exercised most energetically by President Obama, who came to office as the “whistleblower’s friend” promising a government Age of Aquarius but whose Department of Justice has launched more prosecutions against leakers, including Manning, than all previous presidencies combined.

Completed just before Manning’s trial verdict which carries up to 135 years jail, Madar’s book is a highly useful, thoroughly spirited contribution to the campaign to free Bradley Manning, the next stage in the task of liberating truth from its jail of government secrecy.

MADLANDS: A Journey to Change the Mind of a Climate Sceptic by ANNA ROSE

MADLANDS: A Journey to Change the Mind of a Climate Sceptic
ANNA ROSE
Melbourne University Press, 2012, 357 pages, $19.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

Anna Rose, a climate change youth activist and leader, was warned by her many colleagues in the environment movement of the risks of agreeing to do a television documentary, screened earlier this year by the ABC,  pitting her against the former Liberal Party senator, science minister and climate change denialist, Nick Minchin.

The “whole show will play into the denialists’ strategy of framing the science as disputed when it actually isn’t”, she was told, and it would serve merely to give the infinitesimally tiny bunch of cranks and denialists prime time exposure to market their shonky product, ‘doubt’.

Rose had heard that the respected scientist, Tim Flannery, and the ABC’s science journalist, Robyn Williams, had declined to ‘balance’ the scales on an issue for which the time for weighing up the science is long past.  Nevertheless, the documentary was going ahead, so Rose decided it may as well be her and pinned her hopes on exposing the weaknesses of the denialists’ case to sway the undecided viewer.  Madlands is her account of the experience.

Her first meeting, with Minchin’s hand-picked right wing libertarian bloggers, “a mum and dad team from Perth” who “had discovered that thousands of climate scientists and all the world’s main scientific academies were wrong”, set the tone for incredulity which was not dispelled by subsequent denialists.

Meanwhile, a stubborn Minchin proved impervious to the patient persuasion of Rose’s chosen climate scientists.  Pillow-punching frustration at Minchin’s smug (‘I remain to be convinced’) irresponsibility is punctuated by Rose’s dawning realisation that his intransigent denialism is not really about the science at all but the implications of the science for the future of, and for the massive profits from, a fossil-fuel-based economy.

Minchin’s claim to be an ‘open-minded sceptic’ is hollow, says Rose, showing how Minchin relentlessly denies scientific fact because of his core conservative political and economic values, especially his opposition to environmentalism as ‘the new religion’ of the ‘extreme left’ and his dread of government interference and regulation of the free market - except, of course, for favoured causes such as government subsidies ($9 billion annually in Australia) that make fossil fuels so much cheaper in relation to assistance-starved renewable energy.

By book’s end, Rose, having despaired of changing Minchin’s politically-shuttered mind but determined to find “common ground” with denialists, joins hands with Minchin in celebrating “competitive economic advantage” through energy efficiency, a solitary policy plank which sidesteps the central issue of replacing carbon-dirty energy with clean renewables.

This not only concedes scientific ground to ratbag denialists but Rose’s concluding plea that the climate change movement needs “people who understand markets”, like Minchin and other free market ideologues (“harmonising the market with the environment” is “what this whole project has been about”, she concludes), is a crippling political concession given  the carbon tax and emissions trading scheme failures of the capitalist market to solve a world-threatening crisis of its own making.

PROJECT REPUBLIC: Plans and Arguments for a New Australia by JONES & McKENNA

PROJECT REPUBLIC: Plans and Arguments for a New Australia
BENJAMIN T. JONES and MARK MCKENNA (eds)
Black Inc., 2013, 251 pages, $29.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon 

If the Australian Republican Movement (ARM) represents those who wish to make Australia a republic yet the ARM sends congratulations to the Queen in 2012 on her sixtieth year of rule from London, what hope is there for Australia becoming a royal-free zone?  Not much, must be the conclusion, after reading the ARM’s call-to-republican-arms book, Project Republic.

Republicanism has majority public support (48% versus 39% at last count in 2012) despite the defeat of the 1999 referendum when a monarchist Prime Minister and conservative republicans, including the ARM, opted for the referendum question on a republic to decide on the highly unpopular model of parliamentary appointment of a President as Australian head of state rather than direct election by all voters.

When republican ‘direct electionists’ made the politically short-sighted error of advocating a No vote to a republic in the mistaken assumption that a direct-election model would be put at an imminent second referendum, the majority republican sentiment (75% at the time) was split, the referendum lost (45% voting Yes), ushering in a long and continuing period of “indifference and silence on the republic”.

To re-ignite republican fervour, Professor Mark McKenna and comedian Julian Morrow, in their contributions, adopt anti-monarchical irreverence although this is frowned upon by the National Director of the ARM who frames republicanism as being all about patriotism and not criticising the Queen or the rest of the royal bludgers.

Obsequiousness towards the monarchy peppers the book, including the opening salvos by erstwhile political opponents, the Liberal’s Malcolm Turnbull (admiring the Queen for a ‘lifetime of service’) and Labor’s Wayne Swan (loving the Queen for her ‘unfailing record of public duty’).  Both also chummily agree that another word for republicanism is patriotism (Turnbull – a republican is “simply, purely, patriotic”; Swan - an Australian republic will be better positioned to “take advantage” of the region during the ‘Asian Century’).

Quite how this lame royalty-reverence and limp nationalism will help the republican movement to “find a new language that will connect with the electorate” and fire the republican imagination is not immediately apparent.  McKenna notes that today’s republicans have shed their historical image as “radical, atheist, anti-British left-wingers hell-bent on revolution” but, in thus “normalising the republican case”, they have “sanitised the argument to the point of blandness” and narrowed the vision to ‘minimalist’ constitutional change (replacing the Queen with an Australian head of state).

The reaction of many people to this minimalism, says Larissa Behrendt (Indigenous Law professor), is “a collective yawn”.  The republic must be about more than token symbolism, and any constitutional revamp must embody values of democracy, multiculturalism, fairness and equality.

Decorative symbolism is only important for the substance it adorns, agrees Henry Reynolds who grasps the political nettle - monarchy “cements in place at the apex of the political system the principles of hereditary power and privilege which … are profoundly undemocratic”.  Biology should not decide who sits at the top of the power heap.  The res publica (‘people’s space’) should.

Even at the level of limited democratic reform, republicans need to be bolder and to consider issues of popular, democratic power instead of contenting themselves, as nearly all contributors do, with waffly sentiment about an Australian head of state instilling some variant of nationalism (‘national identity’, ‘national dignity’, ‘national pride’, etc.) to the office.

Whether a hereditary, foreign royal or an elected Australian citizen occupies the post, the occupant should not have the present, coyly termed, ‘reserve powers’, most notoriously the ability to sack an elected government (as happened in 1975).  As head of state, a republican President would still be the head of a state (police, courts, bureaucracy, army, etc.) that serves the Australian capitalist class and will dismiss  a government they fear, rightly or wrongly, will harm those class privileges.

Abolishing the British monarch as Australian head of state, nevertheless, remains an essential, immediate-term, democratic reform.  Wiping out one undemocratic bastion of privilege should, however, be just the overture to tackling other fortresses of class wealth and power in Australia.  The politically tepid Australian Republican Movement, and its book (which often gets lost in arcane constitutional ponderings), can help with the former but not, one despairs, with very much, if any, of the latter.

EARTHMASTERS: Playing God With The Climate by CLIVE HAMILTON

EARTHMASTERS: Playing God With The Climate
CLIVE HAMILTON
Allen&Unwin, 2013, 247 pages, $24.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon 

‘Never let a good crisis go to waste’ seems to be the philosophy, says Clive Hamilton in Earthmasters, of the fossil fuel companies, the World Bank and the billionaire ‘techno-entrepreneurs’ like Bill Gates and Richard Branson who are funding research into geo-engineering schemes for “large-scale intervention in the climate system designed to counter global warming”.

Geo-engineering advocates are coming in from the ‘mad scientist’ fringe to plug “the yawning gap between the urgent response scientists say is needed and the timid measures governments are willing to take”, says Hamilton, including Australia where coal exports over the next decade will be eleven times greater in CO₂ emissions than any reduction due to the carbon tax.

“If Plan A (persuading the world to cut emissions) is failing, shouldn’t we have a Plan B?”, plead the Earth engineers fondling their blueprints to manipulate cloud cover, change the ocean’s chemical composition, install a solar shield of sunlight-reflecting sulphate particles, sequestering carbon in the soil, and other even more exotic proposals.

Hamilton makes short work of such ideas, diagnosing their many technical defects, unintended consequences and the expensive and vast industrial infrastructure required to implement them.  Pursuing these “highly speculative technologies fraught with political and scientific uncertainties and risks” when “we could just stop burning fossil fuels” is a particularly fraught version of environmental roulette based on unjustified technological hubris. 

There is, says Hamilton, something “increasingly desperate about placing more faith in technological supremacy when it is the unrelenting desire to command and control the natural world that has brought us to this point”.  This faith is particularly marked amongst the leading geo-engineering advocates whose “common institutional and ideological origins” in Cold War nuclear weapons programs has primed them for further big technological schemes to defend free market capitalism.

Conservative politics explains the apparent paradox of fossil-fuel-friendly climate change deniers supporting a solution (geo-engineering) to a problem (anthropogenic global warming) they say does not exist.  For if the science of climate change were to win out against their best efforts at delay and denial, any policy response must involve no “infringement of economic freedom, or require social change  which challenges the structure of economic and political power” of the market economy.  Those who made the climate change mess are to remain in charge to profit from the (illusory) geo-engineering clean-up.

Hamilton cites Naomi Klein’s observation that climate change deniers ‘understand much better than liberals the political implications of accepting the science’, namely the revolutionary changes which would be required to ‘the underlying logic of our economic system’ which is based on continued material growth and consumerism.

Although such radical social transformation is routinely dismissed as utopian, Hamilton notes that it has been part of the “daily discourse of western society from the French Revolution to the 1980s when the neoliberal revolution brought about the ‘end of history’” and that today’s political quietude represents a pause in revolutionary history rather than a finale, a temporary stasis that climate change has the potential to dramatically upset.

In the end, Hamilton doesn’t take the plunge into anything as specific as a socialist solution to human and environmental crisis (he is more comfortable, and highly proficient at, philosophising) but his book sets up a useful platform for others to take the leap into changing the world.

DRONE WARFARE: Killing By Remote Control by MEDEA BENJAMIN

DRONE WARFARE: Killing By Remote Control
MEDEA BENJAMIN
Verso, 2013, 246 pages, $24.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon 

‘Never before in the history of warfare’, boasted the Wall Street Journal, ‘have we been able to distinguish as well between combatants and civilians as we can with drones’.  The Obama administration has helped in this claim, writes Medea Benjamin in her book on the ‘unmanned aerial vehicle’, by conveniently defining every military-age male in the strike zone as a combatant.

The 60% domestic support which drones enjoy in the US rests largely on the reputation of the drone as “the cost-free magic wand that can eliminate terror”.  ‘Don’t you want the bad guys to die?’ is the argument used to silence doubters as drone killings of Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and north Africa comes with the bonus of zero American military casualties.

As Benjamin shows, however, the ‘good weapon’ status of the drone is undeserved.  From eight thousand miles away in Nevada, a drone ‘pilot’ “can watch an Afghan as he lights up a cigarette … or goes to the bathroom” but the problem is that a “a tall, bearded man in a robe” who may be a terrorist “can look just like another tall bearded man in a robe” who isn’t.

The innocent, as wrongly identified targets, are not only thus killed accidentally but also incidentally as ‘collateral damage’, as bystanders caught in the blast radius of a drone missile as it strikes a suspected terrorist.  Others to pay with their lives are those with a ‘pattern of life’ of a militant, an ill-defined category which accounts for most drone strikes.  So, of the estimated 3,400 people killed by CIA drone strikes in Pakistan, most have been either innocent civilians or those whose assumed terrorist sympathies were untested by the right to trial.

The US drone network powers on regardless, turbo-charged by Washington’s global ‘war on terror’ which has boosted the Pentagon’s drone fleet from fifty (primarily for battlefield surveillance) a decade ago to 7,500 including 800 of the larger, weaponised drones up to the size of commercial jet planes.  Drone stocks are added to by the CIA (which operates the most drones), the Department of Homeland Security and the mercenary forces of Blackwater (now known as Academi).

These agencies pump bucket-loads of recession-proof money into the veins of corporate America for   the drone hardware, the surveillance software and the missiles.  General Atomics, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon all line up for a share of the Pentagon’s annual $5 billion procurement program and the CIA’s unknown amount from its ultra-secretive ‘black budget’.

Cheaper only in comparison to nine-figure fighter jet price tags, drones are still mighty expensive (the most popular model, the Predator, rings up $5 million per drone, the Reaper $28 million) whilst the Hellfire missile rakes in a tidy $68,000 a pop.

The drone has not completely solved the ethical problem of human agency, however.  Drones have been explicitly designed to exploit “youth gaming culture”, the drones’ teenage ‘pilots’ trained to adopt a “PlayStation mentality” to real killing.  The in-house US military slang for drone deaths is ‘bugsplat’.

Real-time video-feed, however, allows the ‘pilots’ to witness the results of their murders up close which can be distressing (“It’s hard to go home to one’s own family after wiping out someone else’s”, comments Benjamin) so the ‘pilots’ are taught to compartmentalise their lives between work and home, and to rationalise their actions as doing a bit of evil in order to do good, whilst research into enhanced robotisation with pre-programmed, computer-automated drones seeks to eliminate the “troublesome emotions and consciences” of even the ‘cubicle warriors’.

Keen to keep the reality of drone warfare from public consciousness, the White House has recently (after Benjamin’s book went to press) been forced to cede more transparency and tighter restrictions on drone use to better manage their image.

This is in response not only to campaigns by anti-war and anti-drone activists (such as Benjamin, herself) but also because of Washington’s growing realisation of the harm that drones are doing – not to the civilians killed by them or who live in constant fear from their ominous hovering and buzzing but the harm being done to US geo-political interests from nominal allies such as Pakistan where three quarters of the population now consider the US an enemy.  Obama’s summary execution of suspected terrorists, rather than Bush’s inhumane detention and torture, has not solved the US administration’s problems of international embarrassment and regional hostility.

There are peaceful purposes for non-weaponised surveillance drones, says Medea.  They were used by governments to check radiation levels at the stricken Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan and to monitor wildlife after floods in Australia, whilst the anti-whaling Sea Shepherd uses them to detect illegal whaling in the Pacific Ocean.  This, however, is a far cry from, and a fiscally wasteful gulf between, the state-sponsored assassinations, semi-covert wars and militarised thinking of the US government.