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.