SELLING STUDENTS SHORT Richard Hil

SELLING STUDENTS SHORT: Why You Won’t Get the University Education You Deserve
RICHARD HIL
Allen&Unwin, 2015, 227 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

‘When I leave, it will be like it never really happened’, bemoans a dejected student to Griffith University Associate Professor, Richard Hil, in Selling Students Short, his investigation into the “hollowing out” of the modern university education experience in Australia.  Many of his student interviewees report a similar alienation, a lack of connection with other students, the atrophy of teacher-student interaction and an uninspiring, narrow pursuit of a vocational qualification that together make for the social and intellectual “blandscape” of today’s campuses.

Personal enlightenment and the public good have both evaporated from “University Inc.” which has been re-purposed for the needs of free enterprise rather than free enquiry.  Market values, corporate culture and a “tighter tertiary-industry fit” are ascendant in what are now “job-training centres and feeders for the industrial economy”, pumping out credentialed ‘products’ (graduates) fit for purpose (industry needs).

Starved of significant government funding, Australia’s universities have taken on the trappings, and soul, of the corporate world.  Courses which lack immediate economic utility are culled whilst multi-million dollar marketing budgets entice “tertiary shoppers” in a “mad scramble” for undergraduate market share.  Brand promotion, free iPads and other loss-leader enticements are used to attract enrolments to secure the revenue stream from hefty tuition fees.  The removal of government caps on student numbers has invited universities to take in anyone, including the sub-literate and semi-numerate.  Student quantity is valued over quality.

Crammed into overcrowded classes, the student hordes are taught by an army of 67,000 low-wage casual teachers, stressed by oppressive administrative and bureaucratic demands.  This academic proletariat is heavily populated by a glut of PhD post-graduates, trained in their redundant droves for prestigious university research jobs they will never get by university administrations because they attract rare government funds of $100,000 each.

Amongst the most aggrieved of Australia’s university students are the 223,000 international students (one quarter of the total student population).  This particular income river is highly prized by university accountants because of international student fees which are  up to three times those for domestic students.  Fraudulent entry processes which falsify academic records and English language skills let in the unsuitable, wastefully divert resources into intensive remediation, and encourage plagiarism and “soft assessment”.

Compounding the decline in the quality of education, campus culture withers due to the time pressures of employment (80% of students work to support the costs of their study), resulting in missed classes and rising drop-out rates, especially for the bargain-basement education offered by on-line tuition.  To cap it all off, unemployment, or lack of employment in their chosen field, awaits many graduates, whilst all are mugged by a long-term debt of up to $100,000.

The corporatisation of higher education results in the depoliticisation of university life, churning out graduates with the professional skills needed to administer, but not critically challenge, the hegemony of “global capitalism”.  Universities now manufacture the politically passive brain-worker whereas they once produced critically aware citizen-graduates.

Hil laments the bygone age of the liberal university when the rigorous exploration of ideas in a “joyous, passionate and engaged passage through higher education” was assumed.  Hil’s book could have benefited from an historical analysis of the tension between, on the one hand, the university’s role in preparing the workforce essential to capitalism and, on the other, its antagonism to that system’s political-economic values.  This tension has been present from at least the time when universities were essentially elite finishing schools for the sons and, more rarely, daughters of the ruling class to the contemporary era of the university grinding out capitalism’s technical-managerial class.  Neo-liberalism has been very bad news for what was once a “community of scholars”.

A hopeful Hil notes that pockets of academic resistance remain, that student protest has not been extinguished and that the (market-agnostic) humanities still account for the majority of undergraduates who remain the least unhappy students because they are doing what they really love, irrespective of what the market deems directly utilitarian.  Hil’s fervent and deeply-felt book maps out the ground still to be fought over for the purpose of the modern university.

MANNIX by Brenda Neill

MANNIX
BRENDA NIALL
Text Publishing, 2015, 439 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

Daniel Mannix, Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne for half a century, could be a bit of a rebel.  As Monash University’s Brenda Niall recounts in her biography, the Irish nationalist and opponent of conscription in Australia during the first world war would show his disdain for the British monarchy by sticking postage stamps, bearing the King’s image, on sideways.

The one-time Labor Party-supporting champion of the working class, however, spent his last decades splitting the party and keeping it out of government, whilst white-anting the trade unions, by unleashing his literally secret weapon, the Italian grocer’s son from Brunswick, Bartholomew Augustine Santamaria, in a clandestine, anti-communist offensive.

Born to a tenant farmer in Ireland in 1864, Mannix was always conscious of the grim and violent past of British rule in that colony.  This survived his seminary training and he retained his Irish republican sympathies when he was sent to head the Church in 1913 in Melbourne, the then seat of federal government.

Mannix condemned Britain’s murderous reprisals for the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin which declared an ill-fated independent republic.  Alone amongst Australia’s Catholic Archbishops, Mannix “took the side of the rebels” and declared himself for Sinn Fein, Ireland’s radical nationalist republicans.  Unwilling to see colonial lives sacrificed for British empire, Mannix opposed, and helped defeat, the two conscription referenda during the Great War, adding that ‘the working class would pay the highest price in the war and then be forgotten’.

Mannix openly supported Labor and his working class parishioners in north Melbourne, and, during the seamen’s strike of 1919, said ‘the worker must get a fair share of the wealth he produces’ and that people are ‘more sacred than property’.

The worm in the apple of this putative Red priest, however, was anti-communism, an ideology shared by all the Catholic hierarchy.  Mannix sought to promote Catholic leaders in the secular world, beginning in the politically turbulent 1930s, to ensure that if people ‘are to move along safe lines, the public mind should be leavened by Catholic principles’.  ‘Safe lines’ meant stopping the Red Menace.

It was fine to give coins to the poor, as Mannix did on his daily walk to his Cathedral, or to organise welfare relief, but just don’t let the workers do anything about their lot that might actually challenge capitalism, or the Church.

Santamaria’s publicly nameless and secretive anti-communist strike force was Mannix’s insurance against any such outcome.  Mannix “ensured funding for The Movement” as it organised ‘Industrial Groups’ to overthrow Communist Party leadership of key Australian trade unions and it penetrated the ALP to campaign against its left, splitting the party in 1954-55 and keeping it out of office until 1972 courtesy of the anti-Labor preferences of his splinter Democratic Labor Party.

Santamaria was Mannix’s lever for directly influencing public political and industrial policy in the way an Archbishop could not openly do.  In a 1961 interview on ABC TV, two years before his death, Mannix called Santamaria ‘the saviour of Australia’.

Niall, for her part, is in fairly comfortable proximity to the Mannix-Santamaria ideological cosmos.  Communism, she agrees, “was a cruel failure”.  She puts down all Communist Party union leadership to “ballot-rigging, intimidation, physical force and mass apathy”.  Her first job was research assistant to Santamaria and, although she claims not to have been aware of The Movement at the time, Niall would probably have been right at home with its politics as demonstrated by her going on to work for Santamaria’s anti-communist News Weekly as book reviewer.

Niall’s wooden anti-communism is complemented by a largely unreflective Catholicism.  The Mannix hobby-horse of state aid for private religious schools is assumed to be a good and just thing.  The ethics of Church wealth is unchallenged (as is the hypocrisy of the worker-friendly Archbishop living in wealthy Kew, in the conservative electorate of Liberal Prime Minister, Robert Menzies).  “Atheistic communism” (simplistically reduced to Stalinist horrors) is assumed to be undesirable.

Niall’s academic career was in English literature, not history, and her personal background that of Catholicism not Marxism.  Unsurprisingly, therefore, her portrait of Mannix is closely intimate rather than politically substantive.  Arcane points of Catholic doctrine and institutions tend to crowd out a fully rounded analysis of Archbishop Mannix who, like the majority of working class Irish Catholics at the time, was mocking of the Union Jack, cold on conscription and who could be numbered with the unionists and the left but who wound up undoing all this as a remote control leader of the anti-democratic, anti-communist Catholic right in Australia.

ELEANOR MARX by Rachel Holmes

ELEANOR MARX
By RACHEL HOLMES
Bloomsbury, 2015, 508 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

“Is it not wonderful when you come to look at things squarely in the face, how rarely we seem to practise all the fine things we preach to others?”, lamented Eleanor Marx in 1892.  Karl’s youngest daughter was to be the tragic victim of this truism, as Rachel Holmes explores in her biography which extricates this pioneering revolutionary socialist-feminist from the giant shadow of her father.

In a Britain where women had no political or economic rights, Eleanor willingly took after her rebellious dad.  The young Eleanor was questioning and combative, absorbed in the free-thinking, theatre-loving, fun-filled and intellectually-rich but financially-stunted Marx household.

If Eleanor inherited Marx’s political genes, she chose to nurture them with frenetic activism and inexhaustible political stamina.  Her support for the 1879 Paris Commune (‘the first attempt of the proletariat to govern itself’, as Karl put it) gave her her first public profile but it was her leadership in the trade union movement that defined Eleanor’s political impact.

She was “the epicentre of strategy and organisation” for the newly-stirring ranks of unskilled, often female, workers who had been long-ignored by the craft unions.  She opposed divisions between skilled and unskilled unionists, and between men and women workers, arguing that women must refuse to undercut men’s wages and that men must insist on equal pay for women for the same work.

Eleanor’s many successes in the labour movement, however, were not replicated in Britain’s revolutionary circles.  ‘Socialism’, she said despairingly, ‘is at present in this country little more than a literary movement’ and it was a time of “faction, schism and split” with nationalists against internationalists, revisionists against revolutionaries, and the anarchists against everyone.  Eleanor, nevertheless, stiffened the Marxist cause by bringing to it her strengths of organisation, strategy and economics (she was one of the few who had actually read, and understood, Marx’s Das Kapital).

Her most original, and most enduring, contribution, however, was the development of socialist feminism.  She detested domestic drudgery, was appalled by the grim lives of women factory workers, and resented the cultural constraints of the period which saw both of her (socialist) sisters’ lives wasted by the demands of housework, motherhood and their (socialist) husbands’ careers.

Eleanor followed Engels and other Marxist men who deplored women’s oppression and saw socialism as its solution but she went further, making women’s liberation necessary to, as well as dependent on, socialism.  Her pamphlet, ‘The Woman Question: From a Socialist Point of View’, refocused feminism from its limited rights for middle class women to full equality at work and at home for the great mass of poor, working class, women.

Despite her feminist principles, however, Eleanor’s own ‘free-love union’ with the playwright and socialist, Edward Aveling, spectacularly failed to achieve socialist-feminism in one household.  Economic independence or domestic equality was doomed for her because, although “Eleanor loved Edward”, “Edward loved himself”.

Aveling’s main interest was in sponging off Eleanor’s earnings and exploiting her famous name as his passport to fame.  He treated lecture tour expenses as his own little pork barrel, did no share of the housework, and was decidedly lacking in courage compared to Eleanor who put herself in the front line of free speech and free assembly fights and wore the scars of police violence for her pains.

To top it all off, he killed her.  Or she suicided.  Soon after she had shatteringly discovered that the latest in Aveling’s series of sexual infidelities had resulted in a clandestine marriage to a 22-year-old actress, Eleanor was found dead in 1898 from chloroform and prussic acid (cyanide).

Her timely death also opened Aveling’s way to the money the recently-deceased Engels had bequeathed to Eleanor (Aveling had been the chief beneficiary of Eleanor’s will and remained so after he destroyed the codicil by which Eleanor had disinherited him after her discovery of his secret marriage).  Literally or morally, either way, Aveling was responsible for Eleanor’s death.

Holmes’ book is more a page-turner of a period historical novel, narratively propelled by the collision course between the villainous Aveling and the deaf-to-all-warnings Eleanor, than a politically-rounded biography.  Eleanor, for example, agitated for an electorally-focused labour party but lacked any premonition of the pitfalls of parliamentarism, which Holmes, despite the benefit of over a century of disillusioning hindsight, also does not critically explore.

Nevertheless, Eleanor Marx’s forty-three years of socialist-feminist activism are dynamic enough to make even a romantic pot-boiler a tribute to her and her cause.

THE UGLY GAME: The Qatari Plot to Buy the World Cup, BLAKE & CALVERT

THE UGLY GAME: The Qatari Plot to Buy the World Cup
HEIDI BLAKE and JONATHAN CALVERT
Simon & Schuster, 2015, 472 pages

Review by Phil Shannon 

The only surprising thing about the currently unfolding FIFA corruption scandal is that anyone should be surprised, given the long history of credible allegations of bribery in world football’s governing body.  As Blake and Calvert, investigative journalists at Britain’s The Sunday Times, reveal in their exposé of Qatar’s corrupt winning in 2010 of the hosting rights for the 2022 World Cup, the technical merits of the competing bids “were not worth the glossy paper they were printed on”.  What mattered was money.

The winner was the world’s richest (GDP per capita) country, the sweltering desert monarchy of the football minnow, Qatar, as it bought the most votes amongst the 24-member FIFA Executive Committee, the “elite cabal” who run world football.

Courtesy of a FIFA whistle-blower who leaked a mountain of confidential Qatari documents, Blake and Calvert copiously document the corrupt backroom deals and vote-rigging by the architect of Qatar’s Cup victory - Mohamed bin Hammam, the construction industry billionaire, Royal Family insider, Asian Football Confederation (AFC) President and FIFA Executive member.

Despite being privately described as ‘our greatest asset’ by the Qatari bid team, Hammam was publicly kept at arm’s length as he successfully bribed scores of FIFA officials through his AFC, construction company and other slush funds.

Hammam paid more than $5 million  to the presidents of thirty national football associations in Africa, venal men who had risen from Africa’s endemic poverty and who fully intended to stay that way.  $1.7 million of Hammam money found its way to greedy soccer chiefs in Asia.  The recipients’ emails to Hammam contain effusive outpourings of brotherly devotion and, by the way, yes, US dollars would be fine and here are my personal bank account details.

These national football bosses would influence their regional Cup-voting FIFA Executive representatives, whose vote was also ripe for cultivation by Hammam through cash backhanders and lavish hospitality for international, all-expenses-paid junkets.  It was corrupt business-as-usual for these top decision-makers, whether voting on Cup sponsorship by major corporations, Cup broadcasting rights, Cup venues or FIFA presidents.  Hammam also dished out vote-inducing football ‘development’ grants to poor countries through FIFA’s ‘Goal Program’, a vote-currying creation of FIFA president, Sepp Blatter.

Hammam was as adept at gas-for-votes as cash-for-votes, facilitating massive and highly favourable trade deals for football nations on Qatari gas (for Thailand) and Siberian gas extraction (for Russia).  His flurry of commercial matchmaking also procured the support of other countries through billion dollar corporate deals on property (for Thailand), land (for Cyprus), football clubs (for France’s financially-plagued Paris Saint-Germaine), football television rights (for the French government  from Al Jazeera to televise French football) and Cup infrastructure building contracts (for Belgium).

The official Qatar Cup bid was not content to outsource all the vote-buying to Hammam.  They secretly offered $1.5 million to key African members of the Executive and to African national football presidents, whilst also funnelling $1.8 million to Africa for a well-catered regional football shindig whose real business took place in side-meetings between Hammam and African football chiefs.

The other string to Hammam’s bow was vote-trading collusion, which is technically forbidden under FIFA rules but undetectable because Cup voting is secret.  Amongst other pacts, Hammam arranged for his Asian confederation votes to go to the joint Spain-Portugal bid for the 2018 Cup in return for the Iberian votes supporting Qatar for 2022.

All this activity delivered the prize when the FIFA Executive, barely pausing to acknowledge, let alone read, the FIFA technical assessors’ report which rated Qatar’s as the worst of the bids, voted for Qatar to host the 2022 Cup.  The incredulity at this decision sparked renewed allegations of corruption but over at Sleepy Hollow, FIFA’s Ethics Committee, serenity reigned - and why would it not when the committee’s members included the corrupt (Hammam, for example, was an initial member) and ancient judges whose well-remunerated sinecures depended on not upsetting the FIFA family business.

The vehemence of public outrage, however, eventually compelled FIFA to refurbish its ethics window-dressing by beefing up the Ethics Committee with a criminal investigator (a former Melbourne, and Interpol, police detective).  Qatari money again proved its power, however, as FIFA’s internal cop, and his entire investigations team, was bought off with well-upholstered positions at a new International Centre for Sports Security in Doha.  FIFA’s internal investigation was duly closed delivering no adverse corruption findings.

At the end of this Great Cup Robbery, Hammam took the time to attend to his own nest, challenging Blatter for the top job in FIFA’s 2011 presidential election.  Hammam deployed his usual junkets, bank transfers and envelopes stuffed with cash.  Blatter, however, out-Machiavellied Hammam, using the public backlash against Qatar’s corrupt purchase of the 2022 Cup vote to threaten Qatar with being stripped of its hosting rights unless they pressured Hammam to withdraw from the presidential race, which Hammam duly did.

As a heavily censored new internal ethics investigation report put Qatar (and Russia) in the clear for their Cup wins, all ended well for FIFA’s privileged parasites.  Qatar’s 2022 Cup was safe.  Blatter’s job, and its massive, but secret, salary, was safe.  FIFA’s culture of corruption remained safe.

The FBI, whose recent raids narrowly post-date the publication of this angry but pessimistic book, may be the ‘super-sub’ which sinks the FIFA rust-bucket but FIFA’s structural corruption needs a radically more democratic game-changer, a revolution in who control the people’s game – those who profit from it (whether by fair means or foul), or the people who play and love the game.

17 CARNATIONS: The Windsors, the Nazis and the Cover-up by ANDREW MORTON

17 CARNATIONS: The Windsors, the Nazis and the Cover-up
ANDREW MORTON
Michael O’Mara Books, 2015, 327 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

The 1936 abdication had it all for Royal soap opera addicts.  The King of England, Edward VIII, gave up the crown so he could marry Wallis Simpson, who, as an American, a divorcée and not being “PLU - People Like Us”, had three strikes against her being allowed to become Queen, as Andrew Morton explores in 17 Carnations.  The real story, however, lay elsewhere, well-concealed, in Edward’s untimely ardour for Hitler when Nazism shifted from being a valued defence against the Red Menace to posing a threat to the British empire.

Edward was a “miserable prince”, depressed by, as the party-boy complained, having to ‘hit up with a lot of old-fashioned and boring people and conventions’.  Sure, the privileges of royalty were nice - Edward would rise “not much before eleven”, before an afternoon of golf or fox-hunting or polo followed by cocktails in the evening and then the nightlife until the early hours - but the dull ‘Princing’ duties and the limited pool of royal mating partners were too much to bear.

When the untitled Simpson hove in to view from Baltimore, Edward was infatuated.  Also excited was Adolf Hitler who took a political interest in the pro-Nazi love-birds.  Hitler had earlier attempted to broker a marriage between German royalty and the Prince, and now set Joachim von Ribbentrop, his foreign affairs point-man, to the cynical ploy of engaging in a carnation-strewn, clandestine affair with Simpson to gain access to the new king.

Edward was receptive to the Nazi cultivation.  He was a man of staggering wealth who thought, like most of the pukka aristocracy, that Britain’s very own Blackshirts were ‘a good thing’ for sorting out trade unions and communists.  His anti-Semitism, his hatred of Indian and Irish nationalists, his dislike of ‘those bloody suffragettes’ and his “lifetime loathing of the Bolsheviks” because of the execution of Czar Nicholas (Edward’s god-father) also made this right-wing extremist into a potential Nazi recruit.

Hitler’s hopes were rewarded when the newly-crowned King leant on the British government to not respond to the Nazis’ early expansionism in Europe.  Hitler was aghast then, when Edward abdicated, but Plan B was to get the now demoted Duke to be a celebrity voice for ‘peace’ (on Nazi terms) and ultimately to be installed as the Nazis’ puppet King of England.

To keep Edward away from Nazi temptation, the government ordered him from semi-banishment in Nazi-threatened France to the Bahamas as governor in 1940, where he continued to entertain Hitler’s plans, telling an interviewer (and undercover FBI agent) that ‘it would be a tragic thing for the world if Hitler were to be overthrown’ by revolution in Germany.

Crisis, however, loomed for the monarchy when Edward’s Nazi-friendly past threatened to publicly emerge after the war.  The Allies had agreed to a joint US, UK and French history of Nazi foreign policy as a re-education tool for the German population, based on seized German Foreign Office archives.

These documents, however, contained Edward’s compromising comments on Nazism, causing Buckingham Palace and Whitehall to attempt to suppress ‘the Windsor file’ in order to cover up the existence of a treacherous rat-in-waiting, and his like-minded circle, at the heart of the monarchy, the “beating heart of the nation” as they liked to see it.

The US and French (but not the British) editors, as professional historians, bridled at the political interference and threated resignation.  Their would-be censors eventually agreed this would be a bad look for academic freedom in the victorious capitalist democracies and, after re-jigging the publication schedule to keep the offending file away from public eyes until 1957, opted for public relations massaging on its release.  Edward, soothed the Foreign Office via a compliant establishment media, was an “innocent party caught in a web of Nazi intrigue, a royal dupe rather than a traitor king”.

Morton, alas, joins this rehabilitation chorus – Edward “made mistakes, said things he shouldn’t and met people he should have shunned” but “he was a nuisance not a traitor”.  Morton ends up soft-soaping Edward, including, for example, ignoring the Prince’s fascist propensity for street violence when he volunteered as a strike-breaking ‘special constable’ in the 1926 General Strike.  Despite declaring an antipathy to Royal history-writing “on bended knee”, Morton’s book is intrinsically deferential to (and fascinated by) the cult of monarchy, including its very English King who was knee-deep in fascist mud of his own making.

ANZAC: The Unauthorised Biography CARLYN HOLBROOK

ANZAC: The Unauthorised Biography
CAROLYN HOLBROOK
NewSouth, 2014, 266 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

The “bungled invasion of an isolated Turkish peninsula” one hundred years ago, writes Melbourne University’s Dr. Carolyn Holbrook in Anzac, looks set to super-heat the “commemorative frenzy” of Anzac Day when what is needed is a cooler examination of the historical fate of (white) Australia’s first serious taste of modern warfare.

The Boer War a few years earlier had been too insufficiently crimson to provide the requisite sacrificial genesis for Australian nationhood, but the sixty thousand dead Anzac soldiers from the ‘Great War’ was a better fit for Australia’s ‘baptism of fire’, centering on the Allied landing at Gallipoli (eight thousand Australians killed) on 25 April, 1915, as part of an ill-fated plan to take Turkey out of the war.

Thus did Anzac Day begin its career as a sacred day for khaki patriotism but it has not gone unchallenged.  Dissent from the approved Anzac values of nationalism and militarism began from the time of the war itself.  Whilst the official war chronicler, Charles Bean, dutifully penned the narrative of the Australian people coming together in search for national identity through war, Holbrook writes that, “lost in the clamour of Anzac idolatry”, is the fact that, helped by two defeated national referenda on conscription, six out of ten eligible Australian men failed to follow the blood and nation script by not enlisting for the war.

Post-war, many veterans themselves preferred to forget rather than remember, let alone celebrate, the whole ghastly experience, whilst internationalist, socialist and anti-war movements kept the Anzac fever dampened during the inter-war years and almost drove it to extinction during the 1960s and 1970s.

In response, Anzac’s more sophisticated guardians have rehabilitated its history, acknowledging the misery and hardship of war but redeeming it through an ennobling mateship.  The poignancy of the personal tragedy has replaced the geo-political causes of war as the Anzacs are movingly portrayed as victims but without any perpetrators.  This is a far cry from, for example, Erich Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front whose “profound subversiveness” was to see the real enemy, on both sides, as “a political system that led millions to awful, senseless deaths”, writes Holbrook.

Holbrook’s critique of the Anzac religion is, however, compromised by subscribing to Anzac’s subtly refurbished conservative politics.  She is loathe to be numbered amongst the card-carrying “Vietnam generation of baby boomer historians” who see Anzac Day as glorifying and justifying war.  She is warmly sympathetic to those Anzac family descendants whose state-supported personal histories try to separate the war from the men who fought it but this approach risks tripping up on the old patriotic banana skin of  ‘support our troops’ which amounts in practice to acquiescing in whatever war they are engaged in, no matter how illegitimate or ugly.

Holbrook claims that “it is difficult to be offended about the benign form of the contemporary Anzac legend” yet this surrender to the ideological modernisation of Anzac leaves unchallenged the omnipresent cultural symbols and rituals of Anzac Day remembrance with their reverberations with all things military.

Anzac is too valuable a conservative political franchise to be allowed to lapse by its custodians - the military, the corporations, the Prime Ministers and the establishment media who took us to Gallipoli a century ago, who keep taking us to other exotic butchering fields and who are so keen to partner with “Australia’s most powerful brand” today.

Holbrook is no crass militarist or Anzac cult member but she does keep her dissenting noise down to a reverential whisper and her book will not alarm Anzac nurturers such as Kim ‘Bomber’ Beazley, Labor’s former Defence minister, who wrote the book’s foreword.  Anzac Day has never been an anti-war day.  Those who wish to see a world free of sordid resource wars should not be marching in its ranks.

THE RISE AND FALL OF GUNNS Quentin Beresford

THE RISE AND FALL OF GUNNS LTD
QUENTIN BERESFORD
NewSouth, 2015, 442 pages, $32.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

It was a sweet day when the placards – No Pulp Mill! – won an epic seven year battle against elite corporate and political power in Tasmania after Gunns Ltd., the largest timber corporation in Australia, went bust in 2013 with debts of $3 billion.  Public outrage over its proposed woodchip pulp mill had sunk the state’s largest, and most powerful, corporation.

Quentin Beresford, politics professor at Edith Cowan University, situates Gunns’ spectacular implosion in ‘crony capitalism’ – the close and profoundly undemocratic bond between business and state - that had ruled Tasmania’s economy and politics for decades and had arrogantly ignored or bullied its people.

Hydro-industrialisation had led the way with cheap hydro-electricity for industry, the tab picked up by the taxpayer for the government’s loan financing debt.  The logging industry next joined the corporate profit party with “eye-glazing” government subsidies, bargain-basement government royalty revenue and environmental regulation exemptions.  The trading of financial favours worked both ways with forestry industry political donations to Liberal and Labor parties returning the state’s economic favours.

Gunns not unreasonably thought that its ideologically-compliant and donation-tamed ministers would surely see to it that nothing would get in the way of government approval for Gunns’ next big project, a proposed pulp mill in the Tamar Valley, near Launceston.

Not the toxic pollution from the dioxin-contaminated effluent, not the rotten-egg gases and other air pollutants, not the mill’s enormous thirst for water, not the massive clear-felling of old-growth native forests to supply the woodchips for the mill, not, for good measure, the quantum leap in greenhouse gas emissions.

Every single politician of note, Labor or Liberal, state or federal, got on board the Gunns-forestry-pulp mill bus.  They may have been part of the minority (less than a third) of Tasmanians supporting the mill but the politicians had all the power.  Their armoury against the popular will included personal aggression when under public challenge, a lack of tolerance for dissenting views, quarantining government policy and deal-making from public scrutiny, fast-tracking parliamentary approval, criminalising protest and dogmatically refusing to consider an economically diversified and cleaner future as an alternative to capital-intensive, low-employment, anti-environment ‘development’ projects.

Gunns, for its part, tried to sue its critics into silence whilst mobilising its timber workers, made susceptible to corporate propaganda over their jobs, as shock troops against mill opponents in an “organised campaign of intimidation”.

There emerged, however, a counter-power.  A “multi-dimensional strategy” incorporating local community opposition, mass public rallies and ‘corporate activism’ targeting Gunns’ business customers and investors sustained a campaign that was remarkable for its size, breadth, intensity and longevity.

Beresford devotes much favourable attention to ‘corporate activism’.  Certainly, its successes were real.  The ANZ (Gunns’ principal lender) withdrew its backing for the pulp mill after tens of thousands of the bank’s customers threatened to close their accounts.  Other large financial investors ran off, fearing similar “reputational risk”.  Japanese buyers of Gunns’ woodchips (Gunns’ most profitable market) dumped Gunns’ native forest woodchips in favour of the surviving market of sustainably sourced woodchips during the global financial crisis.

These were all hard-headed commercial decisions based on Gunns’ soaring investment risk, rising debt, falling profits and tumbling share price.  All these failing financial indicators, however, had been fatally aggravated by a vibrant and determined popular campaign against the pulp mill.  ‘Corporate activism’ is dependent for its effectiveness on the old-fashioned protest stuff, and even has the potential for being counter-productive, as demonstrated by The Wilderness Society, a multi-million dollar organisation reorienting from protest to boardroom business deals, which offered its green imprimatur to a pulp mill in return for Gunns sparing more native forests.

In the end, Gunns’ refusal to move with the greening times burst its government-backed financial bubble as “their plans unravelled in the face of people power”.  The fatal mistake of Gunns and its hired governments was to underestimate the power of the placard.