The Best Australian Essays 2014 (16 page)

My Fellow Australians

Don Watson

At this time of the year, my sleep is a cavalcade of dreams. Too much family stirs the mental pot. One thing leads to another and the next minute Tony Abbott appears, sitting backwards on a bicycle and wearing an Australia Day T-shirt, a proxy for some oppressive childhood memory no doubt. He goes at a good clip along an avenue of gums and shadows, pedalling round corners without so much as a rearward glance, and still managing to talk. ‘I have a resting heart rate of thirty beats per minute. To put that in perspective, a resting crocodile's is twenty-eight. Malcolm Turnbull's is seventy-six on a good day. Even John Howard never clocked less than seventy.'

He is winding up a steep hill now, through a forest, standing on the pedals – don't ask me how.

‘The more regularly one drives up the pulse, the more it falls at rest. With brutal exercise I have recorded rates that are the human equivalent of an Etruscan shrew.

‘To rip through the rind of comfortable existence and enter the lowest deep of pain is my pleasure. I am an endorphin addict. It is how I know myself. Without exercise – at a dinner, for instance, or reading a briefing paper – I struggle to remain convinced that I am not hibernating like a python in a cave.

‘Only when I exercise do I feel truly alive; yet the more I exercise, the less alive I feel when I am not. It is the paradox of my existence.'

At that point he shoots down a fire track, and I wake and dictate all this into my smartphone. Once asleep again, I find him in a forest clearing, standing bow-legged on an old-growth tree stump and spouting to a gathering of lyrebirds. With his blue swimmers visible beneath a tattered toga, he might be the prophet Isaiah, but for some reason Thomas the Tank Engine also comes to mind.

‘My fellow Australians,' he says. ‘Today we celebrate Australia's remarkable progress from convict settlement to the great nation in which we live today. Surely no people on the planet have more reason to be joyous.

‘How magnificent we are! What a future lies before us! What a past behind! We must remain true to our Judaeo-Christian values, and steadfast and fearless as the Anzacs. Great challenges lie ahead – the Budget challenge, the education challenge, the national broadband challenge, the arrival of their Royal Highnesses the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and Prince George in April.

‘Let us now resolve to pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, to make sure we can't think of anything else while they are here.

‘By all accounts Prince William is a keen adventurer like myself, and I have already invited him to join me in an ironman contest and to go a few rounds in the ring. I urge you to flock and fawn and hang your flags up and down the land. Buy the souvenirs and mags. Leave them in no doubt that the sun will never set on your affection; that you would rather die than live without them.

‘The future king and queen will have scarcely left our shores when we begin the centenary of the outbreak of World War I. And, as if that were not enough excitement for one year, nine months later we have the centenary of the landing at Gallipoli. What else can one say but “Yippee”?'

The lyrebirds oblige. The forest resounds with their mimicry. And he goes on.

‘Of course it goes without saying that these last two are solemn events. We should not commemorate historical episodes that saw the deaths of millions with the unbridled gaiety we bring to Australia Day, which – putting aside the destruction of an ancient civilisation and a legacy of rank injustice, suffering and despair – commemorates an event that caused the deaths of comparatively few. A couple of hundred thousand perhaps, if you count the disease and alcohol and so on, over several generations. Maybe half a million – tops.

‘That is a good many more than the 60,000 Australians killed in World War I. I know. I can count. But what are we supposed to do – get out the black armbands again, and bow our heads and fill our hearts with awe and sorrow every 26 January? Not on your Nellie. That's what we do on Anzac Day.

‘Yes, there is a downside to our history. In much of life there is a downside. It comes with the upside. You can see that in the example of my heart rate. Difficult things happen sometimes. Besides, many of the deaths were not deliberately inflicted: the worst we could say of most of them is that they were careless; incidental, as it were, to the colonial and national projects on which the furtherance of our Judaeo-Christian values depend. Most of them were no one's fault, really. And frankly, some of them were their own fault, partly, frankly. And unlike the Anzacs, they were defending no one's freedom or values, or the Australian way of life – unless you count their own. It's chalk and cheese – well, chalk anyway.'

*

At this point, silence descends on the gully. All birdsong stops. The leaves of the trees cease to rustle in the high breezes.

‘It's all relative, you see. It's all a matter of context. It ain't necessarily so, and all that. What's important is not truth so much as …'

And here he hesitates, and a preternatural and nightmarish grin takes possession of his face. His eyes roll back and beads of sweat bubble on his brow. When at last the grin has gone, he exhales and mutters, ‘Sorry, just stretching my glutes.' And he continues:

‘There is no need to go into the micro details of history. The important thing is not to politicise these commemorations. Under my government, Christopher Pyne – a bravura example of Western civilisation and Judaeo-Christian Anzac values if ever there was one – will put a stop to the rewriting of history by postmodern, multicultural, left-wing relativists. We will decide what we know of history, and the circumstances in which we know it. We will make an end of it.'

And then I'm wakened by a possum chattering on the roof. Or so I think, but it might be one of the lyrebirds.

Good Weekend

Men of a Certain Age

Rachel Nolan

At an International Women's Day event in March this year, Prime Minister Tony Abbott, in describing the progress women have made, noted, ‘It wasn't so long ago as a Sydneysider that there was a female lord mayor, a female premier, a female prime minister, [and] a female head of state in our governor-general …'

It should hardly have been surprising that his remarks were ridiculed. No one had done more, after all, to see that three of the four had by that time been replaced by more traditional appointments – older, private school–educated, conservative white men.

The Abbott government is the first in Australian history not just to stifle but also to reverse the progress of Australian women.

It began within days of Abbott becoming prime minister at September 2013's federal election, when he announced a nineteen-member cabinet with just one woman, the lowest level of female representation since 2001. It continued in January 2014, when a former chief of the Australian Defence Force, Peter Cosgrove, was chosen to replace Quentin Bryce, whose term as governor-general was about to expire.

In between times the tone was amplified with a slew of significant appointments weighted overwhelmingly towards older, business-oriented, climate change–denying, Sydney-based, conservative men.

Having mocked the then new prime minister Kevin Rudd for ‘hitting the ground reviewing' in 2007, Abbott has commenced his tenure in much the same way. ‘Independent reviews' have been commissioned across portfolios, and the choice of reviewers speaks volumes about the new government, its bedfellows and the advice it wants to hear.

Sydney businessman Tony Shepherd, sixty-nine, is chairing the National Commission of Audit. He is the immediate past president of the conservative Business Council of Australia. Sydney businessman Maurice Newman, seventy-six, chairs the Business Advisory Council. A friend of John Howard's, he is the former chair of the Australian Stock Exchange. Sydney businessman David Murray, sixty-five, chairs the financial system inquiry. He is a former CEO of the Commonwealth Bank. Sydney businessman Dick Warburton, seventy-two, chairs the review of the Renewable Energy Target. Like Murray and Newman, Warburton is an outspoken climate change sceptic, so his appointment to review one of the key planks of the government effort to combat climate change was unsurprisingly met with outrage and incredulity by environmentalists, climate scientists and renewable-energy advocates.

In social policy, Abbott's big appointment is Sydney-based charity executive Patrick McClure, sixty-three. The former head of Mission Australia, who rose to public prominence as the face of welfare corporatisation in the Howard years, now runs the welfare review. Kevin Donnelly and Ken Wiltshire are carrying out the national curriculum review. Both are long-term fixtures on the political scene who have supported not just conservative education causes but also the cause of the Liberal Party itself. Donnelly was a staffer to Kevin Andrews, now the minister for social services, some years ago.

Over in the courts, the government has again turned to trusted sources as it introduces the American practice of seeking to criminalise its political opponents. The top two contenders to become Australia's Kenneth Starr are: Ian Hanger QC, sixty-seven, who was a former colleague of Attorney-General George Brandis at the Queensland Bar and is now inquiring into the home insulation scheme, and Dyson Heydon, seventy-one, the Howard government High Court appointee now leading the royal commission into unions.

Another striking aspect of the Abbott appointments is that so many are retreads from the Howard years. Cosgrove, McClure and Heydon in particular had strong public association with Howard decisions. The Warburton connection from that time is accidental but telling nonetheless. In 2002, Warburton and Abbott both received Ernie Awards for sexist remarks. Warburton's Ernie was for the comment, made as the chair of David Jones, that ‘he was unable to find a woman of sufficient talent to join the Board'. Abbott's gong, ironically, was for saying that paid maternity leave would happen ‘over this government's dead body'. (The 2002 Gold Ernie went to Abbott associate George Pell, who said abortion was a bigger moral scandal than sexual abuse of young people by priests.)

The appointment of Howard-era people by the new government provides a telling insight into Abbott the PM. Notably, for a man who's been in public life since university days, Abbott hasn't enunciated a unique political philosophy or surrounded himself with a clique of fellow travellers stretching beyond the party room. Unlike Bob Hawke, Paul Keating, Howard or even Julia Gillard before him – but like Kevin Rudd – Abbott is an individual to whom the party turned, not the leader of a push.

Analyses of Abbott's political philosophy often reflect on his influences – notably B.A. Santamaria and Howard – rather than assessing any vision he has presented for the country. The immaturity of Abbott's political philosophy has been revealed when he has confronted issues beyond the narrow platform he laid out pre-election: when hard choices – the questions on which populism offers no guide – have needed to be made. The prolonged indecision around the sale of GrainCorp was the clearest example of this vagueness; the flat-footed response to manufacturing job losses is much the same. In the absence of a clear personal political philosophy, Abbott's choice of advisers becomes critical to the direction of the government.

A key difference between the Abbott government and its critics involves the question of diversity. The PM has argued loudly and repeatedly that all the appointments have been merit-based – and that their limited gene pool has been coincidence, happenstance or of secondary importance anyway. Meanwhile, the critics argue that diversity matters, not only in terms of who sits around the table but also in the perspectives they bring and the kind of advice they provide as a result.

A recent Fairfax article by Waleed Aly, commenting on the government's proposed changes to the
Racial Discrimination Act,
made a critical point about society's need to understand diversity. He argued that the issue with the
RDA
is not whether or not it's legal to racially vilify someone (the focus of the debate so far) but who determines the standard by which racism is judged. As the proposed amendment stands, the test of whether something is reasonably likely to intimidate or vilify is to be determined ‘by the standards of an ordinary reasonable member of the Australian community'. Fair enough, says Aly. ‘But then it adds in the most pointed way: ‘not by the standards of any particular group within the Australian community.'

‘Of course, only white people have the chance to be neutral because in our society only white is deemed normal; only whiteness is invisible … This is just the level of privilege we're dealing with.'

The ‘reasonable person' envisaged by the Abbott government is not just white but also, it would seem, old, conservative and male.

*

‘I think it would be folly,' Tony Abbott said back in his university days, ‘to expect that women will ever dominate or even approach equal representation in a large number of areas, simply because their aptitudes, abilities and interests are different for physiological reasons.' Far from growing out of such a view, he took a similar stand twenty years later in a radio interview, rhetorically asking, ‘If it's true … that men have more power, generally speaking, than women, is that a bad thing?'

In 2010 he suggested that the ‘housewives of Australia' would reflect on the carbon price ‘as they do the ironing'. And in March this year, again at the International Women's Day event, he reflected, ‘the deal that [Australia] gives to women … is obviously pretty good', as if equality, living standards or personal freedom were not human rights but somehow the gift of society – and, by implication, the men who are running it.

The feminist response to Abbott's appointments paints the exclusion of women as an injustice. ‘When women make up more than half the population,' said sex discrimination commissioner Elizabeth Broderick, ‘it's disappointing that there's only one woman in cabinet.' Liberal senator Sue Boyce and former Liberal senator Judith Troeth have also expressed their displeasure. ‘Why aren't women equally as good [at running the country] as men are?' Troeth asked.

The justice argument ignores the differences between men and women. When women were first fighting for equal opportunity, consideration of these differences was considered either a distraction from the basic goal of better representation for women or an excuse to justify their ongoing exclusion. The field on gender difference has been left almost entirely to conservatives, who have used it – relentlessly – to justify inequality.

Alongside the justice argument sits a body of suggested action. From the former Victorian premier Joan Kirner with
The Women's Power Handbook
(1999) to the Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg with the bestseller
Lean In
(2013), women have written guides to success that encourage women to be tough, act more assertively and overcome what for many is a reluctance to self-promote. The subtext is that with a bit of ‘you go, girl', women can make it in a man's world.

What is rarely said about this thinking, though, is that while many women (this author included) find it quite possible to learn to play such a role, the very act of doing so, day after day and year after year, can be a dehumanising or, more truthfully, de-feminising experience. Female political candidates are told to dress differently, to wear less jewellery and colour and more sober suits; they're told to lower their voices in fear of the great turn-off, that they'll come across on the radio sounding like a girl. They're constantly told to toughen up, to not act ‘emotionally'. It's well understood that tears in the office would spell disaster. Angry responses are fine, however. There's no shortage of anger in politics.

My own experience of this process, as a transport minister and later as a finance minister in Anna Bligh's Queensland state government, is that while women can do it (and indeed it's satisfying to develop a sense of authority), there can be something soul-destroying about it, too. The constant act of self-promotion sits uneasily with many women, as does the need to defend against the ego-driven players (almost always men) who are constantly point-scoring and looking to knock you off your guard.

The distinctive character traits of many women at the top serve to reinforce, not dismiss, that sense of dissonance. That the Margaret Thatchers, Angela Merkels, Julie Bishops and Peta Credlins of the world often stand out for being tougher than tough suggests not that women are on the verge of forever breaking the glass ceiling, as is often assumed, but that only those who have a level of confidence or force of opinion that is highly unusual among women can make it in what remains a man's world.

There are a million explanations – from science to self-help – for the origin of men's and women's difference. Neuroscientists interpret MRI scans to argue that men's and women's brains are wired differently – with men having connections within brain hemispheres, aiding coordination and linear thinking, while women are connected across hemispheres, aiding intuition and empathy. While this work has been seen on the one hand as confirming gender differences commonly observed throughout society, other scientists argue that, as the brain changes with behaviour, these wiring differences only reflect the sheer inescapability of social norms.

The popular spiritual author and ‘guru' Eckhart Tolle describes the differences in understandably different terms: politics, he says, is driven by ego – the part of us that needs constant affirmation that we're right – but that ego tends to be a men's field, while women are driven by a deeper, more humble and more spiritual sense of self.

Whatever the origins of difference, it is fair to say that the public responds differently to women and men in leadership.

In Australia, the fact remains that the women who made it to the very top have been flung from political office, not just in defeats but in landslides (or in Julia Gillard's case a projected landslide) driven by a sense of public rage.

The former NSW premier Kristina Keneally (who took her party from fifty seats to twenty, after a sixteen per cent swing against it) and the former Tasmanian premier Lara Giddings (from ten seats to seven in a ten per cent swing) were both judged weak leaders. Giddings found it impossible to get through a profile interview that didn't canvass her desire to ‘meet the right man'; Keneally fought aspersions that she was someone else's ‘girl'. Both Anna Bligh (from fifty-one seats to seven, sixteen per cent swing) and Julia Gillard faced public loathing for ‘betrayals' (on asset sales and carbon tax respectively).

Compare this to Bligh's and Gillard's respective successors, Campbell Newman and Tony Abbott, who performed their own post-election backflips – on public service sackings and telecommunications and education spending respectively – but were instead perceived as simply politicians predictably breaking promises.

As I touched on in a piece for the
Monthly's
blog last year (‘What It's Like To Be a Woman in Politics'), the extreme public emotional responses to Bligh and Gillard seemed unfathomable to those who knew what clear-headed, decent, reasonable people they were in a working environment.

In Sheryl Sandberg's
Lean In,
the Facebook chief operating officer cites empirical evidence that shows women are viewed as less likeable the more powerful they become. This trend, in controlled studies, does not apply to men.

In 2014, the proportion of women in Australian parliaments is actually trending down. Following this year's state elections, twenty-one per cent of Coalition MPs across state and federal parliaments are women, while Labor has more than twice that level of female representation at forty-three per cent. The fall in overall numbers of women in Australian parliaments is entirely the result of the conservative ascendancy.