AUSTRALIAN PRIME MINISTERS
Edited by Michelle Grattan
New Holland Press
Rec. price: $44.95
Great and small:You might think this topic's bibliography would be huge, but no: one-volume surveys of our Prime Ministers are all too rare. Australian history's academic practitioners used to disdain almost all biographical research, as reflecting the dreaded "Great Man View of History", which would in turn lead to Fascism, Sexism, Elitism and other nasties - hence a population so clueless that the Federal Government must buy advertising space on buses to tell us who Sir Edmund Barton was.
Fortunately most contributors to this volume retain some slight zeal for fact, often demolishing the hostile myths - particularly concerning pre-Menzies politics - which Manning Clark popularised. Those whose sole knowledge of Sir George Reid, Sir Joseph Cook and Joseph Lyons derives from Clark's malicious fictions have some intensive re-evaluating to do.
This being a Federation centenary tie-in, niceness about our leaders is preferred to nastiness. Still, even the kindest depictions remain - two chapters excepted - recognisable as portraits rather than icons. The exceptions are David Day's slavering homage to Paul Keating and Neal Blewett's rapt contemplation of Bob Hawke, whose Health Minister Blewett just happened to have been.
Otherwise the book has surprisingly little truly bad writing. Worst among the symposiasts is unreconstructed neo-Freudian Judith Brett, whose chapter on Lord Bruce presses into service every imaginable shabby-genteel cliché. Brett berates Bruce for assuming that government's true function is to operate like a business, whereas of course government's true function is really to operate like a lifelong pension-fund for unreconstructed neo-Freudians.
Brett notwithstanding, the overall impression this volume leaves of its subject is, on the whole, agreeable. Considering the number of State parliamentarians who have gone to gaol (one NSW Justice Minister escaped the gallows only through insanity), PMs' comparative moral stature is conspicuous. By American standards it positively shines: the sex mania of a Clinton, a Kennedy or an LBJ has no counterpart at the Lodge. Even the closest Federal elections - such as 1940's, 1954's, 1961's and 1990's - have borne some vague relationship to actual votes cast. Despite Queensland's best efforts, Australian vote fraud has yet to reach the exalted level of JFK, who owed his 1960 "win" to an Illinois electoral college six feet underground.
Of individual Australian leaders whom the present work treats, Lyons is perhaps the most striking beneficiary. The Lyons chapter helps explain why he possessed almost Menzies- or Hawke-like electoral success: whereas survivors of Clark's cement-mix prose will wonder how Lyons ever attracted any voter not permanently on drugs.
Nothing else in the book is as good as the Lyons section, except Geoffrey Bolton's fair-minded investigation of Billy Hughes. Understandably, the pre-1945 leaders fare best, because their chroniclers are less likely to be consumed by partisan passions than are those dealing with more modern events.
Only A. W. Martin's typically learned disquisition on Menzies manages a consistent blend of sharpness and sympathy. Martin's chapter confirms that, despite tabloid sloganeering about the 1950s' "blandness", Menzies' struggle against Evatt was a serious ideological conflict over basics: rather than - like representative post-Menzies Coalition behaviour - mere tactical squabbling over the correct scale of bribes to educrats, Yartz apparatchiks, trade-union mobsters, and other deserving causes.
Coverage of Labor emphasises the depressing truth that from the 1890s, Labor faithful were already making their Party a god; perhaps (despite their unctuous avowals of Christian belief) they had simply never heard of the First Commandment. From this blasphemous over-estimation of the Party's moral value, both of Labor's greatest vices derive: its childish deification of mateship - which syndrome covers even Lionel Murphy's multitude of sins - and its equally childish demonisation of internal critics as "rats". Well before Federation, Labor had forced out the aforementioned Cook (then its NSW parliamentary leader), simply because Cook refused to vow blind obedience to head office's wheeler-dealers.
Michelle Grattan - who provides the description of Howard - eschews, as do her colleagues, sustained prophesying about the Lodge's likely future. It is worth remembering that Barton, Deakin, Menzies and Whitlam all possessed some purely intellectual significance, which now makes them resemble blasts from a Jurassic past. All four became parliamentarians through a shortage of other career options. Today, a clever youth from a modest background will almost never dream of a parliamentary livelihood; he is far more likely to end up in the IT sector, to produce his own samizdat-style magazine, or to help run a think-tank.
Since membership of all major parties has fallen to a post-1945 low - illustrating these parties' continued failure to command adult minds' loyalty - the dearth of future Prime Ministerial talent will presumably remain unless the party organisations themselves are, in effect, updated out of existence. Much depends here on those who, like Mark Latham, have acquired reputations as original thinkers. Does their intellectual courage extend to combatting the nihilistic drongos in their own - rather than merely others' - ranks? Or will they, if given serious power, fall back on the Gorbachev delusion that you can cure a corrupt system simply by tinkering with it?
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