Dirty Secrets: Our ASIO Files by MEREDITH BURGMANN (ed)

DIRTY SECRETS: Our ASIO Files
MEREDITH BURGMANN (ed)
Newsouth, 2014, 464 pages, $32.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

The only thing worse, notes Meredith Burgmann in Dirty Secrets, than discovering that your personal file held by Australia’s domestic political police, ASIO, is disappointingly thin is to find out that your official subversion rating hasn’t warranted a file at all.

Flippancy aside, two dozen of ASIO’s many thousands of targets (from High Court judges to gardening identities) take a serious look at their watcher which has doggedly spied on, and imperilled the jobs and personal relationships of generations of left wing and progressive activists engaged in traditional, and entirely legal, political dissent. 

The official justification for all this was combating communism but the miniscule ring of those Australian communists actually involved in Soviet espionage was but a pretext for the establishment in 1949 of ASIO whose riding instructions specified countering ‘subversion’, a hugely elastic term which covered all opposition to the conservative political and corporate status quo.

None of the political activity on the Vietnam war, apartheid, feminism, gay rights, nuclear disarmament or trade unionism was remotely concerned with ‘national security’, that magic incantation which chloroforms any concerns about the infringement of civil liberties and democratic rights by political spying.

A protected bureaucratic species, ASIO’s files inexorably mounted, devoid of any understanding of left wing politics and padded out with mind-numbing minutiae, innocuous trivia, cavalier mistakes, malicious gossip, third-hand tittle-tattle from paid informers and worthless ‘intelligence’ from agents reporting what their superiors wanted to hear.

Some targets have sympathy for the working lives of, for example, ASIO’s telephone bugging transcribers which must have comprised “utter tedium punctuated by short bursts of not very interesting activity”.  Forgiveness is also shown by David Stratton, film critic, who says “no real harm was done”, an ‘I’m alright, Jack’ attitude shared by an equally complacent Jack in the book - “I am not greatly concerned”, writes Jack Waterford, a Canberra Times editor and now occasional ASIO ‘consultant’.

Whilst ASIO’s often bumbling incompetence earns it the deliciously mocking humour of ABC broadcaster Phillip Adams, such irreverence is complemented by more solid reflection on ASIO’s highly effective reality as a conservative political force.  As Burgmann notes, ASIO’s history of error and political bias casts serious doubt on whether it can be trusted today.  “Do we simply ignore the history and cross our fingers about the future?”, she asks sceptically.

The Cold War may have ended but ASIO’s budget and powers have been hugely expanded over the last decade.  The rise of terrorism is the official rationale for ASIO’s growth but, as some contributors show, public oversight and legal processes are lacking from ASIO’s response whilst the organisation’s track record for poor quality information must compromise its non-reviewable ‘adverse findings’ against asylum-seekers.  ASIO may dress itself up as a ‘security service’ or an ‘intelligence agency’ but it should be called after its real function - a political police.  Political police belong in a police state not a democracy.

ASIO also continues its political mission by spying on coal protesters but these files remain exempt from public access under the ‘thirty year rule’.  So, only if you were causing political disorder more than three decades ago can you check to see if ASIO has a file on you (start by checking series A611 http://recordsearch.naa.gov.au/SearchNRetrieve/Interface/DetailsReports/SeriesDetail.aspx?series_no=A6119  at the National Archives of Australia website, www.naa.gov.au).  But beware - by requesting access to a file that may not exist you “may well be able to start one by demanding to see [your] file”.

ANZAC’S LONG SHADOW: The Cost of Our National Obsession by JAMES BROWN

ANZAC’S LONG SHADOW: The Cost of Our National Obsession
JAMES BROWN
Black Inc. Books, 2014, 184 pages, $19.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon 

A former army officer criticising the Anzac cult – this attack from an unexpected quarter, not from the usual Marxist and Quaker suspects but from James Brown, a military insider and analyst from the conservative think-tank, the Lowy Institute, has grabbed much attention in the lead up to Anzac Day 2015, the centenary of the disastrous Allied invasion of Turkey. 

Brown’s muscular assault on Anzac squares off against the “enormous commercial enterprise” of the Anzac industry, taxpayers being stung $325 million in government funding for the centenary and the cultural obsession with the dead of Gallipoli and its noble lies of ‘heroic sacrifice’ that glamourise war.

It is no surprise, therefore, that the militarist right’s response to Brown’s book has been one of fury for querying their patriotic foundation stone.  More unexpected has been the benign response by the more thoughtful, centrist, commentariat.  Pleased at Brown’s sacrilegious critique against the key icon of Anzac Day, they have taken on board the aim of this critique – to direct social attention and government dollars from the military diversion of Anzac to the “parlous state of our defence sources”.

Unlike progressive critics of Anzac, Brown wants more, not less, spending on the “magnificent institution” of the Australian Defence Force.  Brown wants a de-mythologised, more modernised and professional Australian military.  Contemporary wars and serving soldiers are poorly understood, he argues, because the Anzac myth hogs the limelight.

There is some special pleading here by a true-believing veteran of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, “deeply unpopular” exercises whose soldiers he fears being “crowded out” by the Gallipoli legend, the Anzac gloss apparently not working for these, or for future, Australian wars.  This thesis, however, defies the cultural reality that the very point, and a highly successful one, of Anzac is that its celebration legitimises all of Australia’s khaki adventures.

Brown also substitutes one myth (Anzac’s romantic aura of mateship, egalitarianism and national bonding) with another – the ‘clean’, almost bloodless, modernised wars of today.  The human cost to those on the receiving end of Australia’s military deployments is strikingly absent from Brown’s book.  His more modernised and efficient military would simply deliver a more modernised and efficient killing machine.

If Anzac’s Long Shadow is as good as dissent gets in the Australian military intelligentsia, then those who value human life, peace and true internationalism will need to look elsewhere, starting with the “shrill anti-war activists” that Brown recoils from, than to those who, whether old-school Anzac fetishists or latter-day military renovators, assist the worship of armed force at the shrine of patriotism.

TAKING GOD TO SCHOOL by MARION MADDOX

TAKING GOD TO SCHOOL: The End of Australia’s Egalitarian Education?
MARION MADDOX
Allen&Unwin, 2014, 248 pages, $29.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

To the traditional ‘three Rs’, Australia has added a fourth – religion – as religious private schools, religious instruction in public schools, and religious counsellors have found generously-funded favour with successive federal and state governments, writes Macquarie University politics professor, Marion Maddox, in Taking God to School.

The taxpayer-funded rise of private, religious schools, many of them extremely wealthy, is a massive retreat from the demands of the egalitarian, nineteenth century education reformers whose campaign for ‘free, compulsory and secular’ education gelled with a ‘nation-building’ capitalist state which needed, for social cohesion and economic reasons, an educated (and obedient) workforce beyond the minority catered to by the fee-charging, church-run schools of colonial times.

From the mid-1970s, however, Whitlam’s federal Labor government, in the first outing of a repeated “quest for electability”, instituted significant government funding of private schools (90% of which are religious) and, with every successive government being quick to pander to the lobbying zeal of the churches (mainstream Christian, ‘happy-clappy’ Pentecostal and non-Christian) by promising that ‘no school will lose a dollar’ under their watch, the fiscal disparity between the private and public education spheres has worsened.

Religion has also been favoured with beachheads in public schools through government-funded religious instruction and through outsourcing student welfare services to private religious providers through a school chaplain program (massively expanded under Labor’s atheist Prime Minister, Julia Gillard).  A majority of these are provided by aggressively proselytising, conservative, evangelical versions of Christianity.

All governments have subscribed to the “neo-liberal” chant of ‘public bad, private good’, defending their privatising educational push under the rubric of fostering ‘choice’, leaving public schools under-resourced and stigmatised as inferior whilst only those who can afford it get to ‘choose’ government-enriched private schooling.

Government hand-holding for religion in education should matter, says Maddox, because what is taught (creationism and Bible literalism, for example) is anti-science, how it is taught is antipathetic to critical thinking, and who it is taught to, and by, is exempt from laws against discrimination by, for example, sexual orientation or marital status.

Maddox goes beyond this standard atheist critique of religion in education, however, by arguing against the influence of both “money and religion” which are tightly conjoined in the Australian education system.  She reminds us that  wealthy private schools are public-funded breeding grounds for entitlement to private privilege - in the top echelons of business and government, the privately-educated disproportionately predominate (St. Peter’s College in Adelaide, for example, has produced nine State Premiers and two federal education ministers).

Both the dollar and the dog-collar, she concludes, need to be minimised in Australia’s schools.  In fact, with the modern capitalist state now firmly wedded to private, religious education, the old reformist demand for all education to be free and secular, divided by neither creed nor class, is now deliciously revolutionary.

A SPY IN THE ARCHIVES by Sheila Fitzpatrick

A SPY IN THE ARCHIVES
SHEILA FITZPATRICK
Melbourne University Press, 2013, 346 pages, $32.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

 

When Sydney University Professor, Sheila Fitzpatrick, was doing some crafty archival sleuthing as a British PhD student in the late 1960s in Moscow, it was not unexpected that any state guardians might suspect a female spy at work.  Fitzpatrick could see some justification - “any suspicious archives director who thought I was trying to find out the secrets of Narkompros was dead right”, she notes in Spy in the Archives, her memoir of her research on the ministry (the Commissariat of Enlightenment, or Narkompros) headed by Anatoly Lunacharsky, the Bolshevik’s first minister for education and the arts.

Fitzpatrick was indeed ferreting out forbidden information but, unlike her mentors, the anti-socialist Western Sovietologists, her goal was to understand, not discredit, the Soviet Union, although she did not start out with this aim.  She had chosen Lunacharsky mainly because the cultured, liberal patron and protector of the arts was pretty much untilled academic territory but her initial mocking tone towards Lunacharsky gave way to that measured objectivity which she brought to all her work on the Soviet Union.

It is not surprising that Fitzpatrick’s career should be trademarked by dispassionate detachment.  Although from a left wing family, she did not imbibe their radicalism - the revolutionary sixties (Vietnam, campus revolts) passed her by whilst she fixated on her job as an “anthropologist” of the Soviet Union.  Her books give an impeccably accurate depiction of everyday Soviet life, not only its shortages and frustration (epitomised by a Moscow University buffet sign, ‘No milk.  And won’t be any’) but also its political complexity (the tangled dance of neo-Stalinists, dissidents and reform communists).

One constant, however, was the maddening bureaucracy – obstructive, capricious and unpredictable.  Fitzpatrick enterprisingly learned how to negotiate the archival administration and access sensitive documents, how to “read the silences” from official records when someone was falling into political disfavour, and how to discern the conflicts that existed behind the “bland generalisations of formal resolutions”.

The “excitement of the game of matching my wits against that of Soviet officialdom” may not offer the most exciting material for a spy tale but Fitzpatrick flirted with career disaster when outed as a quasi-spy, an ‘ideological saboteur’, avoiding denial of access to visas and archives only through some hapless Russian PhD student informer confusing her real identity.

To compensate for the deficit of espionage drama, Fitzpatrick’s book has diverting accounts of her romantic entanglements, gossip about historians, surprisingly civilised encounters with her KGB watchers, and warm tutelage by Irina Lunacharskaya (Anatoly’s adopted daughter) and Igor Sats (Anatoly’s literary secretary and brother-in-law, an ‘Old Bolshevik’ and implacable enemy of privilege and connections, including his own).

Fitzpatrick’s books are useful resources but somewhat bloodless.  Her scholastic excitement about all things Soviet is not animated by an affinity with the political passions which drove the revolution’s makers.  Although she admires the “revolutionary idealism” of Lunacharsky, she shares, not his visionary spirit, but the cynical negativity of the conservative Sovietologists about what she calls “the pathos of revolution, with its inevitably disappointed hopes”.  Spy in the Archives is one more solid brick in Fitzpatrick’s worthy scholarly edifice but, reflecting her belief in the doomed failure of socialist transformation, one more deadweight in the wall that divides, and protects, the elite from the many.

OIL AND HONEY by BILL McKIBBEN

OIL AND HONEY: The Education of an Unlikely Activist
BILL McKIBBEN
Black Inc., 2013, 255 pages, $29.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

When the American environmental writer, Bill McKibben, became a climate change activist, he discovered the delights of Internet abuse (‘Asshole!  Shitstain!  Harvard Grad! … Harvard Nazi scumbag moron climatebecile!’ was one of the more baroque emails) and the public meeting crazies including followers of Lyndon LaRouche, the leader of a “marginal and bizarre but tenacious political cult”, as he entertainingly describes in Oil and Honey.

When his quarter-century deployment of scientific facts with literary flair proved inadequate against these foes, and the more deadly fossil-fuel-funded, climate-change-denying Republicans and the cowardly Democrats “afraid of Big Oil”, McKibben, in 2009, set up 350.org, “the first big green movement for the Internet age”, named after the atmospheric CO₂ level above which climate change starts to get really serious.

350.org revolutionised organising on global warming, including the following virtual-human protest extravaganzas.  An international Twitter campaign to end fossil fuel subsidies (whose hashtag “drew more tweets on any one day, falling just short of birthday greetings to Justin Beiber”, he wryly notes).  An Internet-based global day of action spreading to 181 countries.  A human siege and encirclement of the White House.  The “biggest climate rally [50,000] in US history”.

1,253 arrested at the White House in 2011 in a civil disobedience protest against President Obama’s hankering to approve the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada’s dirty-oil-rich tar sands to Texas refineries, a “fifteen hundred mile fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the continent”. A bus tour across America which seeded divestment campaigns by students at 252 campuses for university trustee boards to withdraw from their fossil fuel investments.

A vibrant ‘Do The Math’ campaign theatrically elucidating, with McKibben’s typical explanatory clarity, three crucial numbers: 2,795 gigatons of CO₂  in the coal, oil and gas reserves of the fossil fuel companies and petro-state countries which are planned to be burned for profit, a catastrophic five times higher than the 565 gigaton ‘carbon budget’ that can be burned if we are to keep global temperature rise below 2 degrees since the Industrial Revolution when coal and oil companies developed carbonated capitalism.

Campaigning in desperate times calls for leadership and McKibben, who gently mocks himself as an “accidental activist, making it up as I went along and kind of sorry to be having to bother anyone”, stepped up.  He has survived the tiredness, the endless emails, conference calls and travel, the ten speaking invitations a day, the challenge of saying afresh the same thing for the hundredth time, the ever-present question of ‘what next’ after the post-protest exhilaration.

McKibben’s book is not all about carbon, however.  There is honey, too, as he takes respite from the personal strain of activism through his love of beekeeping.  The global and the local are his twin focuses for societal change and, although he doesn’t always achieve a seamless integration of the two political philosophies, nor manage to quite gel the two strands of the book, McKibben succinctly notes how the climate-change-induced wild weather of 2012 wrecked the world’s honey crop - “no flowers, no nectar”, “too much oil, too little honey”.

ECO-BUSINESS: A Big-Brand Takeover of Sustainability by PETER DAUNERGNE & JANE LISTER

ECO-BUSINESS: A Big-Brand Takeover of Sustainability
PETER DAUVERGNE and JANE LISTER
MIT Press, 2013, 194 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

Every big retail brand name you can think of – McDonalds and Starbucks, Coca-Cola and Nestlé, Nike and Adidas, Disney and Google – are leading an apparent corporate charge towards ecological sustainability, or so they would have us believe, say Peter Dauvergne and Jane Lister in Eco-Business.

There is some substance to this business movement, they conscientiously note, because it is more than just ‘greenwashing’, that public relations sprucing up of a company’s environmental image to attract more consumers.  On offer with the ‘eco-business’ model is not just competitive branding advantage but lower input costs and thus increased corporate growth, sales and profits.

Most of the big brands’ business costs, and their environmental damage, is to be found in their supply chains (up-stream production, packaging, shipping and distribution) and if a big brand can avoid reputational damage, falling share prices and profit slumps (from toxic toys, rainforest timber, ‘blood minerals’, etc.), and if cost savings through energy, water and other efficiencies can be made, then the big brands will become apostles for sustainability.  Where there is money to be made from going green, they will go green.

If it boosts their bottom line, they will even sup with the devil.  Partnerships between big corporates and environmental organisations are now far from rare, with companies purchasing the rights to display green logos in return for green cred.  The World Wildlife Fund, for example, partners with Coca-Cola, the WWF logo worth billions in increased sales to Coke and $20 million from Coke to the world’s largest environmental NGO.

Whilst mainstream green groups describe their corporate involvement as getting out of ‘the green ghetto’, Dauvergne and Lister show that the green heavyweights are complicit in the corporate takeover of sustainability.  The growing corporatism of the global environmental movement, through its own organisational model and its co-option by corporate polluters, has moderated its earlier focus on “radical transformation – such as reducing consumption, slowing resource use and limiting economic growth – and opted to pursue incremental market-driven advances instead”.

The fatal ecological flaw of eco-business, argue the authors, is that sustainability is not possible within a world economy that relies on a perpetually growing consumerism based on rapid obsolescence and ever more turnover of retail goods.  Environmental efficiencies, which decrease per unit resource use, can never keep pace with total growth in consumption through selling more TVs, T-shirts and other stuff to more people, especially in the expanding consumer markets of emerging economies such as India, China and Brazil.

The authors make the best case they can for eco-business (their book sandwiches copious lists of eco-business ventures between clunky layers of business jargon) but in the end they conclude that eco-business is all about “sustaining business, not ecosystems”.  This valuable message remains relevant for a green movement wanting to remain untamed by the lure of the corporate dollar.

SILENCES AND SECRETS: The Weintraubs Syncopaters by KAY DREYFUS

SILENCES AND SECRETS: The Weintraubs Syncopaters
Kay Dreyfus
Monash University Press, 2013, $34.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

 

Stefan Weintraub and Horst Graff, German-Jewish jazz musicians, were alarmed when, having fled persecution in Nazi Germany, they were then interned in Australia in 1940 in a prison camp in Victoria which was under the de facto management of its German-Australian Nazi detainees, who were menacingly effective at ‘maintaining order’ in the grateful eyes of the Australian military.  This “cruel irony” is one of many noted by Monash University’s Kay Dreyfus in Silences and Secrets, her study of the German jazz band, the Weintraubs Syncopaters.

Exiled from Germany under Hitler in 1933 because they were, mostly, Jews, who played ‘Negro’ music, and who featured in Marlene Dietrich’s The Blue Angel (much to the annoyance of Goebbels who described the film as ‘offal’), the seven-piece band finished a world tour in Sydney in 1937 where their first obstacle was a hostile Musicians Union of Australia with its fiercely protectionist policy on jobs for Australian musicians.

Mass unemployment amongst Australia’s working musicians (estimated at 80% by the union) as a result of the 1930s Depression and the new sound movies, had accelerated the union’s predisposition towards an anti-immigrant jobs policy.  Governmental ‘White Australia’ policies under the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 gave the union a receptive lobbying ear in parliament and conferred practical influence through legislated industrial awards and the arbitration system.

It took patriotic war fever, however, to cause the demise of the band.  A lone, fanciful denunciation about  espionage by the band for the German government whilst on tour in Russia was made in 1939 to Sydney police by a businessman whose Britishness (Australia was ‘Britain beyond the seas’, editorialised the Melbourne Argus in 1940) and war veteran status outweighed, to Australian security agencies, his dubious credibility (he was to be arrested after the war for theft and black-marketeering of Red Cross packages intended for prisoners of war).  As a result, three of the four German nationals (all Jews) in the Weintraubs Syncopaters were interned as ‘enemy aliens’.

With hindsight, “it seems absurd that the Weintraubs Syncopaters, as Jews and refugees by circumstance, should have been suspected of spying for the German Government” but, on the lookout for potential ‘fifth columnists’, the guardians of ‘national security’ regarded all Germans as disloyal and therefore dangerous by definition.

Dreyfus avoids the tempting but facile equation of Nazi anti-Semitic persecution with the war-time treatment of Jewish refugees in Australia.  The Nazi state’s “ultimately murderous program of cultural purging” was not the same as the parallel civil rights abuses in Australia despite the similarity of “state-sponsored racist ideologies”.  She recognises the “legitimate military and national security concerns” that shaped Australia’s war-time internment policy, though its intelligence officers proved vulnerable to spy hysteria, less than capable of nuanced understanding of exotic political lives, and often blind to the personal motives behind some private denunciations to authorities such as the accusations against band members, the brothers Cyril and Ernest Schulvater, by, respectively, a vengeful jilted fiancée and a landlady who objected to noisy violin-playing.

Australia was a “reluctant refuge”, where there was no threat of Jewish extermination but where individuals were treated unfairly, though this, too, could be partially addressed through legal remedy.  Similarly, Dreyfus acknowledges, with much sympathy, the legitimacy of the Musician Union’s “desire to protect jobs and working conditions of its [Australian] members”, though she laments that it took until 1960 for the union to realise it was better to organise with refugee and migrant musicians rather than against them.

Dreyfus’ book, betraying its origins as a doctoral thesis, doesn’t always avoid the nose-bleeding academic heights of conceptual abstraction, nor the sluggish narrative meter of bureaucratic and legalistic detail, but the human story is engrossing, and, as briefly alluded to by Dreyfus, its contemporary relevance for refugee policy is clear.