The judgement of Adele Horin (no fan) was that Abbott was ”easy to hate” but also ”easy to like”. Mia Freedman – whose reaction to Abbott’s accession to the leadership was: ”PS Libs, are you on crack?” – said after actually talking to him: ”I did like the guy. In person, it’s hard not to.”

It’s instructive that Mitchell never sought to interview Abbott or anyone close to him in preparing this vicious polemic. She did interview him for TV 17 years ago when he was a new MP but, that aside, has assembled this ”biography” by homing in on almost every published criticism or known error and exaggerating it.

Each mistake that Abbott has made is presented in the worst possible light. Every accusation that’s been peddled is treated as self-evident truth. Every misjudgment or over-the-top statement by an associate proves Abbott’s guilt by association. Hence, this book reads like a succession of parliamentary censure speeches – but all from the one side.

During his time in Federal Parliament and before that as a journalist and student politician, there has been much that Abbott could have done differently and better. It is the fate of senior politicians to be damned for faults they don’t have and, less frequently, praised for virtues they don’t possess.

At least by the standards of public figures, Abbott is more than usually thoughtful and self-aware. He’s also a tough and unrelenting political advocate but this is hardly a vice in the leader of a political party.

His politics are not mine. Any sneaking sympathy I currently might feel for the federal Opposition is much more a function of dismay at the state of the contemporary Labor Party.

Yet Abbott is arguably the most substantial conservative politician of his generation: a senior and effective minister in the Howard government, in which he was often cast not just as parliamentary enforcer but as philosopher in chief; the author of three books and innumerable magazine and newspaper articles; and the principal reason the Coalition did not descend into chaos after Kevin Rudd became the prime minister.

Throughout, Mitchell not only talks up the leader Abbott deposed, Malcolm Turnbull, she also becomes a defender of Pauline Hanson. To Mitchell, Abbott’s campaign against Hanson’s One Nation party was not a defence of principle over populist conservatism, it ”was always the powerful woman he had in his sights”.

It is hard to imagine a sillier charge against someone who has many women advisers and whose worst moment as Opposition Leader came from attempts to win party support for a generous paid parental leave scheme.

Mitchell’s ”biography” is riddled with factual errors, just one of which should puncture its ambition to be taken seriously.

Mitchell claims Abbott was against ”RU486, the morning-after pill” but she has confused two different drugs: the morning-after pill, which has long been available from pharmacies and – in Abbott’s time as health minister – became available without a prescription, and a very different drug that, under legislation passed long before Abbott became minister, could only be imported with ministerial permission. Abbott never had cause to block any such application because none was ever made to him.

As a supposed work of non-fiction, Tony Abbott: A Man’s Man is neither fair nor accurate. It’s hard to know how much the Labor Party will try to make of it. My feeling is that any attempt to do so would make them look increasingly shrill and desperate.

Spectrum, Sydney Morning Herald, October 15, 2011

While he’s offering voters a mix of rural socialism, nationalism and protectionist economic policy, he’s also wrong-footed not just the National Party but also the Liberal Party by calling for more personal freedom and civil liberties. Bob Menzies and John Gorton promoted such freedom but sadly it’s something eschewed by most Coalition leaders since.

It remains to be seen how far Katter will take his personal-freedom message, but already he has it circumscribing areas of life once quintessentially Australian (fishing and boiling the billy, to mention a couple), now disappearing in a volcanic cloud of political correctness. He’s cleverly tugging at the heartstrings of economically conservative but socially relaxed voters who have had enough of the nanny state. A few Greens voters who enjoy the bush lifestyle but are fed up with interventionist nonsense in the name of environmentalism might also hear his message. Laws that stop people from fishing in their local estuaries do little to save the rapid decline of the world’s oceans. What Australia needs is some tough action on pollution run-off and on commercial fishing on the high seas. Laws that ban people from lighting small fires in the bush to boil a billy or burn a few gum leaves are just as ridiculous and do little to stop rising CO2 levels. Neither do they do much to prevent bushfires, which are mainly the work of deranged arsonists, faulty power lines and sometimes even passing trains.

There is no doubt that in the past two decades the amount of legislation created to control people’s personal lives has expanded, with hardly any deletion of ancient laws. For example, while we have laws governing speed cameras and motorways in every state, lawyer friends tell me Western Australia and Queensland still have laws on the statute books prescribing that the owners of a horse and cart should proceed with a red lantern after dark. As well, a whole raft of anti-sexist, anti-racist and anti-ageist discrimination legislation, while no doubt well intentioned, eats away at the rights of free speech and the sort of satire that ought to thrive in a democratic society.

Opposite Katter at the other end of the political spectrum is the Australian Sex Party, which also has civil liberties and personal freedoms high on its agenda. It wants to decriminalise drugs for personal possession, abolish outdated government censorship laws on entertainment and legalise abortion, euthanasia and gay marriage. While it may not support all of Katter’s personal freedoms, especially on firearms, it would probably support many of them. At this point, Katter would appear not to support gay marriage, given his promise to walk backwards to Bourke if anyone could find a gay voter in his electorate. Clearly he is playing to the media, and he needs to do a bit of navel-gazing about his attitudes to sexual censorship and drug law reform if he is not to alienate younger voters in his target audience. These days, many of them may well enjoy a joint after the round-up as much as they like a beer.

At 65, Katter is eligible for an old-age pension and he needs a pop-culture makeover to stay relevant. He should draw on his father’s legacy. Bob Katter Sr was actually a Labor supporter in Queensland before the great Labor split in the 1950s when he joined the Country Party. He owned a gentleman’s outfitter’s business and a drapery and was by all accounts a man of style. He even had leather business cards. Around the vast federal seat of Kennedy he was no reactionary. As the owner of a local picture theatre he famously tore down the segregationist railings and seating that kept European Australians separate from Aboriginal Australians. It was an act of integration and respect that no doubt infuriated rednecks, but it was typical of what made Katter Sr so successful.

Similarly, and before entering federal politics, Katter Jr was Johannes Bjelke-Petersen’s extremely popular minister for Aboriginal Affairs and commanded great respect and affection from indigenous Australians. These days, Katter Jr needs to tear down the barriers in North Queensland around gays and lesbians, even if it upsets a few of his old mates. Leather business cards might even help with the present cattle crisis. It’s all about members of his new political party being elected, and integrationist policies are in the ascendancy.

Drug-law reform is especially ripe for any self-respecting civil libertarian party. The Greens used to have a solid law-reform platform in this area but as partners in government with federal Labor, they have gone cold on it as they chase “respectability”. The present round of “tough on drugs” rhetoric by the states over synthetic cannabis is a case in point. The Greens didn’t utter a word of protest as Western Australia recently passed laws to ban these substances, with penalties of up to 25 years in jail for supply and fines of up to $100,000 for mere possession. They fine people only $100 for possessing real cannabis! This week NSW introduced similar legislation, following South Australia. Most citizens see through this shallow posturing on an issue that demands scientific evidence and facts rather than moralistic populism.

Synthetic cannabis has been around for a few years but has only recently started to become popular with Australians. After lengthy health investigations in New Zealand, the Kiwis gave it the “legal but restricted to adults” classification. They even gave it a D rating, whereas alcohol is listed as a more serious level B drug. Their expert committee said synthetic cannabis was less harmful than alcohol, and indeed anecdotal evidence everywhere seems to indicate a lot of people prefer it to alcohol and to full-strength hydroponic marijuana, because the effects are mostly milder. There is also evidence that elderly and ill people are buying synthetic cannabis for pain relief.

Self-medication with these substances rather than with the addictive drug alcohol would seem to be a better option for society, but it is the personal-freedom issues around them that could win voters over. If people have the freedom to drink alcohol with all its attendant problems, why shouldn’t they have the same freedoms with cannabis, natural or synthetic?

Australia’s leading expert on drug control and prevention, Alex Wodak, once told delegates at a conference at Macquarie University that drug-law reform hardly ever occurred under left-wing parties and was most likely to be enacted by slightly right-of-centre parties and politicians. It’s an interesting thought. Gorton, Don Chipp and the former Liberal leader in the ACT, Kate Carnell, all fit this model. Katter could do well to think about these issues as well. Conservatives who are sick of being told where they can drive in the bush and where and how they can cast a line are probably not going to be scared off by a party that backs their freedom to self-medicate as they want.

Katter’s popularity in Queensland is legendary. If he can persuade some high-profile candidates to stand for the Australian Party, then Katter and his ilk could make the cross benches interesting, to say the least.

The Weekend Australian, July 2-3, 2011

By April 27, 1904, the party’s progress was confirmed by the installation of the world’s first national Labor government. Led by Chilean-born J. C. (Chris) Watson, it lasted longer, slightly less than four months.

The Watson government included future prime ministers Andrew Fisher, who had been a member of the Dawson government, and W. M. (Billy) Hughes, who later came to be reviled as a Labor rat for deserting the ranks and forming his own Nationalist federal government in 1916 over the issue of conscription. Watson’s minister for defence was none other than Dawson, by then a Labor senator for Queensland, who a few years later died in Brisbane from rampant alcoholism, isolated and alone.

Some of the above is covered in the plainly expressed and well-illustrated A Little History of the Australian Labor Party by Nick Dyrenfurth and one of his PhD thesis examiners, Frank Bongiorno. Much of the material in the first book also appears, but much less successfully, in the rather laborious and strangely titled Heroes and Villains, which deals with the ALP from its beginnings until 1919. Unlike the engaging little history, it reads like a slightly rejigged doctoral thesis, which indeed it is.

And, annoyingly, although there is no bibliography in this second book, there are hundreds and hundreds of endnotes, which occupy 38 pages of the total of 281. Comparing the one with the other, less is certainly more.

From its genesis, as Dyrenfurth and Bongiorno write, there was considerable dispute about whether Labor’s prime aim was to “civilise capitalism”, to improve the lot of Australian workers and their families, to end or ameliorate the rule of a “cruel and relentless capitalist class” or, more extremely in the case of those influenced by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s The Communist Manifesto, to nationalise key industries and even install something like a dictatorship of the proletariat. Since its formation in 1920, the latter was one of the aims of the Communist Party of Australia.

However unpalatable it may seem, it is also important to acknowledge that one matter on which, in common with all other political parties at the time, most Laborites and members of the Labor Party agreed, at least up to the mid-1960s, was the promotion and protection of a distinctly White Australia.

The most illuminating chapter in Dyrenfurth and Bongiorno’s fascinating book deals with the period from 1972 to 1995. Headed Old Labor or New?, it canvasses the rise to power of the charismatic Edward Gough Whitlam, who was first elected to federal parliament in 1952, aged 36. Whitlam’s memorable 1972 It’s Time campaign, “with its singing celebrities, hip T-shirts and dazzling leader’s increasingly fluffy mane”, embodied new Labor.

The reality, the authors point out, is that between Whitlam’s election in 1972 and Paul Keating’s electoral demise almost a quarter of a century later, Labor “ruled federally for 16 years — roughly equal to its meagre performance over the previous 70 years”.

It seems indisputable that Whitlam and flamboyant South Australian Labor premier Don Dunstan, who had risen to power in 1970, had much in common. The authors put it particularly well: “Elegant and well spoken, and paying attention to the environment, urban planning, consumer protection, education, the arts, equal opportunity and Aboriginal affairs, Dunstan, as much as Whitlam, epitomised the party’s changing image and policy orientation.”

Prime minister Whitlam and his senior ministers were supposedly progressive but in 1972 not a single woman sat in caucus, let alone in the federal cabinet. As opposition leader, Whitlam had described his leadership style as “crash through or crash”. It is hard not to agree that this phrase applied equally well to Whitlam’s style of governing.

Moreover, like an earlier, short-term, Labor prime minister, Jim Scullin, Whitlam significantly raised expectations about what he could deliver, while confronting a “global economic crisis, an obstructionist Senate and powerful vested interests that were hostile to his agenda”.
Much of this heady material is traversed in Brian Carroll’s Whitlam. But do we need another book about the great man, especially as Carroll’s biography does not seem to contribute anything new?

Nevertheless, there are interesting bits in Whitlam. Carroll writes well about the two-man government of Whitlam and his deputy leader of the parliamentary party, Lance Barnard, which was sworn in on December 5, 1972. Remarkably, they were in charge of 27 portfolios: 13 for Whitlam, 14 for Barnard. This duumvirate abolished conscription, freed all jailed draft resisters, recalled troops still left in Vietnam and applied to the commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Commission to reopen the equal pay for women case. It also appointed Edward Woodward to begin an inquiry into Aboriginal land rights and “began moves to set up diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China”.

Carroll usefully puts the spotlight on Whitlam’s trouble-prone attorney-general Lionel Murphy, who in March 1973 led “raids” on ASIO offices in Canberra and Melbourne. In his book The Whitlam Venture influential Canberra-based political journalist Alan Reid rightly called Murphy “a political bungler of considerable eminence”.

Although Graham Freudenberg’s magisterial exegesis of Whitlam’s role in Australian politics, A Certain Grandeur, is mentioned in a section on suggested reading at the end of Carroll’s book, it seems strange that there is not one mention of Freudenberg in the footnotes.

Yet as Whitlam’s brilliant speechwriter, close adviser and confidant, the chain-smoking Freudenberg helped Labor to power in that heady year of 1972.

He also was instrumental in keeping in the public eye what he regarded as the main contributions that the short-lived Whitlam government had made to Australian life.

A Little History of the Labor Party, By Nick Dyrenfurth and Frank Bongiorno, New South, 217pp, $24.95
Heroes and Villains: The Rise and Fall of the Early Australian Labor Party, By Nick Dyrenfurth, Australian Scholarly Publishing, 281pp, $44
Whitlam By Brian Carroll, Rosenberg Publishing, 256pp, $29.95

Ross Fitzgerald is emeritus professor of history and politics at Griffith University. His most recent book (with Rick Murphy) is Austen Tayshus: Merchant of Menace.

If she cannot turn public opinion, it can only be a matter of time before her caucus colleagues remove her from the top job.

Gillard’s ability to recover from her slide in the polls will depend on how well entrenched public opinion is of her and her leadership style.

If the public decides it has seen enough of this Prime Minister to pass judgment, it will be very difficult, although not impossible, for her to redeem herself.

Given the circumstances in which she attained the leadership and her relatively short time in the role, it is open to question whether the public has fully grasped the fundamental essence of Gillard’s character and what she stands for or what she hopes to achieve.

Gillard’s convictions and her policy agenda lack the clarity and coherence Australians have come to expect of their leaders. As has often been said of past leaders, love them or hate them, at least we know where they stand.

The reality is that what the Prime Minister has revealed of her personal beliefs paints a deeply confusing picture. For example, when and why did the outspoken feminist activist and founding member of Emily’s List Australia, who was committed to its socially progressive agenda, transform into a traditionalist social conservative who rejects gay marriage?

To add to the uncertainty, Gillard has not developed her own signature policy or reform agenda. Recent prime ministers were able to establish their political character through an embrace of reform, backed by clever political skills, which garnered respect. One of the challenges for Gillard to overcome is that she came to the job of Prime Minister without a positive reform agenda.

Her claim on the job initially rested on an ambition to fix the three issues on which she declared the Rudd government had “lost its way”: the asylum-seekers policy, the resource super profits tax and the carbon pollution reduction scheme.

She faces a credibility gap on all three issues.

First, when in opposition she was primarily responsible for drafting the framework on asylum-seekers, which was subsequently adopted by Rudd in government.

Second, Gillard was one of the Gang of Four responsible for the implementation of the mining super profits tax.

Third, along with Wayne Swan, she convinced Rudd to dump his emissions trading scheme.

However, the greatest challenge confronting Gillard is the perception that she cannot be trusted. For the voting public, the critical tests of her honesty are her successful toppling of Rudd for the leadership and her election promise that she would not introduce a carbon tax. Despite declaring repeatedly that she was a loyal deputy, likelier to fly to Mars or play full forward for the Bulldogs AFL team than mount a challenge for the leadership, challenge she did.

Rudd’s continuing popularity in the polls suggests the public is still smarting from the fact Gillard denied it the opportunity to pass judgment on him.

More disturbingly, Gillard has not yet adequately explained the contradictions between her claimed long-term support for a price on carbon, her urging of Rudd to drop his scheme to price carbon and her statement six days before the election last year that: “There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead.”

This is the prism through which her actions and pronouncements are judged.

In July last year Gillard announced that East Timor would host a regional processing centre for asylum-seekers. When it attracted criticism, she attempted to retreat from the announcement, but when confronted with her own words she promptly re-embraced the policy. It made her look, as the Nine Network’s political editor Laurie Oakes said at the time, “silly and slippery and slimy and shifty”.

During the last sitting week, as Labor attempted to claim the moral high ground on sexist remarks in parliamentary debate, Gillard denied that she had ever referred to Christopher Pyne as a “mincing poodle”, lecturing journalists to read the Hansard record of her comments.

While it is true that she did not use the phrase “mincing poodle”, she did refer to Pyne as “mincing” and a “poodle”, and did not deny that was what she meant to call him when asked about it at the time. A small issue, perhaps, but it was disingenuous at best and fed into the perception that she is often too clever by half with the truth.

Another challenge for Gillard is to explain how Labor, and she in particular as opposition spokeswoman at the time, railed against the Howard government’s Pacific Solution to process asylum-seeker applications on Nauru. Gillard argued that as Nauru was not a signatory to the UN Convention on Refugees it could not be trusted to treat asylum-seekers with appropriate respect and that their human rights were not guaranteed, ignoring the fact Australia provided resources and staffing to the island nation to oversee the process.

It beggars belief that Gillard now argues it is preferable to trade asylum-seekers, including children, with Malaysia, a nation that is not a signatory to the UN Convention and that is notoriously harsh in its treatment of asylum-seekers.

There has been no credible justification for this hypocrisy and it provides further damning evidence that Gillard will shred any conviction, or walk away from any principle, to cling to the job of Prime Minister.

Further insights into the Gillard psyche were provided mid-way through last year’s election campaign, when she announced a change to her re-election strategy. No longer would the public be presented with a scripted, managed persona presumably based on what her minders believed would appeal to the public. She promised we were to see the “real Julia”, explaining: “I’m the Prime Minister. I’m the leader of the party and I obviously take responsibility. It’s about me.”

A senior Labor source said: “What she’s saying is that they will now see the Julia that people wanted to be PM.”

Back in 2005, a magazine feature quoted Gillard as saying she would “cheerfully kill several hundred people” for the opportunity of being prime minister. Taken metaphorically, it was a clue that she would not flinch at political kills on her way to the top. She certainly did not flinch in removing Rudd in a cunning coup d’etat. But it takes more than naked ambition to be a successful leader.

Gillard’s policy shambles gives the impression of someone who wakes up every day asking: “What do I have to do today to stay in power?” After all, as she declared during the election campaign last year: “It’s about me.”

Meanwhile, Rudd – and possibly Simon Crean – are waiting in the wings to see if an already wounded PM takes even more hits.

The Weekend Australian – 18-19 June 2011

As for aspiring political minnows, well, it’s getting tougher to register as official political parties in the populous state.

In last year’s federal election, 21 political parties nominated candidates in NSW for the Senate. In this year’s state election, only 14 political parties nominated candidates for the Legislative Council, its state equivalent.

Based on the potential for success, these numbers should have been reversed. The first 20 candidates elected to the NSW Legislative Council required 185,000 votes, while the 21st required about 100,000. By contrast, election to the Senate required almost 600,000 votes in NSW for the first five positions, while the sixth needed 440,000 votes. Even with a double dissolution, when the whole Senate is up for election and these numbers are halved, winning a seat in the Senate is more difficult than winning a seat in the Legislative Council.

There are fewer political parties in NSW state elections because registering them ranges from difficult to nigh on impossible. Therefore state politics is fast becoming a closed shop, designed to benefit the major incumbents. The consequences for democracy are significant. For example, in the 2010 federal election comedian Austen Tayshus (Sandy Gutman) stood for the Australian Sex Party, gaining a credible 2075 votes against Tony Abbott in the lower house seat of Warringah. Yet, because of much stricter registration requirements in NSW, in the 2011 state election he had to stand against now Premier Barry O’Farrell for the Outdoor Recreation Party, which, unlike the Sex Party, was already registered in NSW.

Prior to 2000 a political party in NSW needed just 200 members and a constitution to be registered. In the 1999 state election there were 80 political parties, leading to the famous tablecloth ballot paper. Under the preference system then applying, this even allowed one candidate to get elected to the Legislative Council with only 7264 primary votes.

Determined to prevent a repeat, NSW state parliament changed the law to require political parties to have at least 750 members on the electoral roll, pay a $2000 registration fee and be registered one year ahead of an election. Preferences were made optional and left to voters rather than the parties.

The process of gaining registration was further complicated by a requirement for party members to complete a NSW-specific membership form, and for the NSW Electoral Commission to then write to each member asking that they write back confirming their membership — 750 clear and unambiguous responses had to be received for registration to be granted: a bureaucratic nightmare. Although those who join political parties are less apathetic about politics than most, many find it absurd to confirm what is obvious and do not respond. So, in practical terms, political parties in NSW require considerably more than 750 members to achieve registration.

Consequently, many parties that participate in federal elections are unable to participate in NSW elections. Among them are the Australian Sex Party, registered federally and in Victoria, and the Liberal Democratic Party, registered federally and in South Australia and the ACT.

The impact of this is substantial. In the federal election the Sex Party gained 73,500 Senate votes in NSW while the Liberal Democrats got 95,700. If repeated in the NSW state election the Sex Party could have taken enough votes from other parties to have affected the outcome, while the Liberal Democrats’ vote was almost enough to win a seat in the Legislative Council in its own right. Given a small flow of preferences it might well have won the final seat ahead of the third Greens candidate.

Those who voted for these parties in the federal election but could not vote for them in the state election are likely to have contributed to the 230,000 informal votes cast in the recent NSW state election. With no party representing their views, deliberately voting informal could seem a logical response.

Incumbent parties in NSW also benefit from new rules governing campaign expenditure, public funding and donations to political parties, which came into effect on January 1 this year. Electoral expenditure has been capped under a formula that limits the three parties (counting the Liberal/National coalition as one) that nominate candidates for all 93 seats plus the Legislative Council to a total expenditure of $9.3 million. A minor party that nominates solely for the Legislative Council, or for the Legislative Council plus up to 10 Legislative Assembly seats, may spend up to $1.05m on the campaign. A party or candidate that attracts 4 per cent of the vote will have their nomination deposit refunded, but public funding of campaigns (based on reimbursement of actual expenditure) is not available unless a party’s candidates achieve at least 4 per cent across all the electorates contested and at least one candidate is elected.

In other words, the money only goes to the victors — who benefit handsomely. A party that spends its allowable $9.3m on a campaign would receive almost $7m in public funding. Even without fundraising during the four years until the next election, that is more than enough to run another effective campaign.

Although fundraising remains important, the new limits have reduced its overall significance. A registered party, including its members and candidates, is not permitted to accept more than $5000 from a single donor. Transfers between federal and other state divisions of a party to the NSW division are subject to the same limit. This will have an impact on the major parties, but only by affecting their fundraising to top up public expenditure.

For a small party seeking to participate in the electoral process, it is a matter of life and death. Even if a party has negotiated the registration process, it must bankroll its election campaign not only without public funding but also without accepting donations exceeding $5000 from party members or supporters.

As a result, it is highly likely that at the next NSW election in 2015 there will be fewer parties than there were this year. The major players will be pleased. Like major corporations squeezing out their rivals to reduce competition, existing political parties are always looking for new ways to get rid of their political competitors. And Australian democracy is all the poorer for it.

Published in The Australian, June 11 2011. Ross Fitzgerald is the author of 34 books, most recently the co-authored Austen Tayshus: Merchant of Menace, published by Hale & Iremonger.

In its own way, Sideshow is as revealing as Tony Abbott’s important 2009 book Battlelines, which was also part memoir, part analysis and part impassioned critique. Tanner argues that the degradation of civic culture and the dumbing down of democracy is increasingly depoliticising society and narrowing active engagement in politics to an “unrepresentative elite”. Rather than meaningfully participating in public debate, citizens, he claims, are often reduced to the role of apathetic spectators. Informed media coverage and genuine debate are arguably in a state of serious decline, while the electoral process itself is devalued. In this analysis, Tanner is supported by Hugh Mackay, who last year pointed to three key problems: “leaders as brands; endless repetition of slogans; craven dependence on the dreaded focus groups.”

In Sideshow, Tanner argues that the democratic process is “undermined by the dominance of cynical apparatchiks who are skilled at manipulating the levers of political power but believe in little other than their own career advancement”. Highlighting the decline of the centrality of politics to public life, he explains that “the sideshow syndrome … punishes idealists and activists, and elevates cynical machine-politics to paramount importance”. As he explains, it fosters politics without values and beliefs. To give one salient example, many Australians aren’t sure what the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, believes or stands for – or indeed if she stands for anything.

These days, political debate is increasingly “composed of empty posturing about trivial matters”. Similarly, with the media and politicians often symbiotically blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction, “the ability of ordinary citizens to distinguish substance from noise and distortion” is shrinking fast. Halfway through the lacklustre 2010 federal election campaign, with voters swamped by slogans, The Australian’s editorialist damned the “triumph of the political class over the national interest”, claiming that the campaign reflected “the realm of virtual politics, where the message becomes an end in itself”. Not everyone was fooled, however: the informal vote rose by almost two percentage points – to 5.65 per cent.

Tanner is surely correct in describing Gillard’s main slogan of “Moving forward” as “a cliche from corporate-speak that would have irritated anyone who had spent much time with second-tier business executives, who tend to use it to great excess”. Hence for most of us, “spin” has come to mean some form of evasion and calculated deceit. As the balance, especially on TV, between information and entertainment has shifted in favour of the latter, the way that politics is covered by the media has altered significantly. In this sense, the overabundance of spin is a mere symptom of this deleterious change

Tanner is honest enough to reveal that, in his 18-year parliamentary career, he was sometimes guilty of aiding the spin doctors and trivialising the relations between politics and the media. Towards the end of Sideshow, a pessimistic Tanner lets his guard slip further, wondering whether the time has come, or may soon come, for thinkers, including himself, to advocate the abolition of compulsory voting.

Review by Ross Fitzgerald Politics SIDESHOW by Lindsay Tanner. Scribe, 232pp, $32.95
The Sydney Morning Herald 14 May, 2011. Spectrum – Books. page 35.

That afternoon after school I’d had a few beers but I wasn’t drunk. The organiser was Rex Mortimer, himself an ex-student at Melbourne High, who later gained a PhD at Monash University, where I studied as an undergraduate. Mortimer ignored Alan entirely and concentrated on me. After I’d babbled on for a few minutes, he put up his hand and said: “I think you can do better elsewhere son.”

I wasn’t turned down on ideological grounds. The message was, as I came to realise afterwards, that however desperate the CPA might have been for members in the late 50s, it didn’t need an erratic young pisspot gumming up the works.

After I’d left school and finished my PhD at the University of NSW in 1976, my brilliant but idiosyncratic biology teacher Norton Hobson confided that he was an ex-member of the Communist Party who worked as a part-time operative for the Victorian State Special Branch and for ASIO, supplying information about staff and students alike.

As it happens, in my Grafton Everest novels, Hobson is the prototype for Lee Horton, the head of Australia’s newly privatised Australian Security Corporation.

When I flew to Melbourne in late 1970, Hobson said that he had always regarded Manning Clark as a “crypto”, that is, someone who kept his membership of the Communist Party and-or his strong support for the party a secret because he could be more useful that way than as an openly CPA member.

So what of the proposition that Manning Clark was a crypto-communist?

On one level, because in those days the CPA was such a highly disciplined organisation, it seems unlikely the party would have wanted to recruit as a member someone such as Clark who was extremely erratic and who for most of his life had a severe drinking problem.

Yet because the historian was such a leading member of the Australian intelligentsia, it may have been the case that the CPA would have welcomed Clark’s support.

This certainly applied to Clark’s 1960 book Meeting Soviet Man, which detailed a trip, paid for by the Soviet Union, that he took in 1958 accompanied by the hardline Australian communist writer Judah Waten and the poet Jim Devaney.

This short book was effectively a pro-Soviet tract. At this time, Clark had already started to learn Russian. That Clark should have written such a paean for the communist state so soon after Nikita Khrushchev’s so-called secret speech of March 1953 denouncing Joseph Stalin, and the brutal Soviet invasion of Hungary in November 1956, would suggest Clark was, at least, an ardent fellow traveller. Also it’s important to remember that, in this dreadful book, Clark described Vladimir Lenin as “Christ-like in his compassion”.

Significantly, in an interview with Gerard Henderson at his home in Canberra in November 1988, Clark conceded Meeting Soviet Man was “not an aberration so much as an error of judgment in not making clear what I really had in mind”. This interview is dealt with in depth in Henderson’s chapter on Clark in his book Australian Answers, published in 1990. But what Clark actually had in mind in his 1960 book he never divulged. Certainly, the historian wrote unequivocally of his 1958 experiences of communist Russia that “whoever lives unmoved in Moscow must have a heart of stone”. Certainly at that time, at least as expressed in the book, he had a very positive opinion about what life was like for the average person in communist Russia.

In June 1970 Clark again visited Russia at the Soviet Union’s expense. Although this was a time when many dissident Russian intellectuals were still imprisoned or kept in psychiatric institutions, Clark gave a laudatory speech praising the Soviet Union and in particular Lenin, who he described as a great “teacher of humanity”.

Even though he definitely did not get the Order of Lenin, Clark certainly received, on June 22, 1970, at the presidium of the Supreme Soviet, a Lenin Jubilee Medal to celebrate the centenary of Lenin’s birth in 1870. Other of the many overseas recipients of the Lenin Jubilee Medal included delegates from North Korea and East Germany. That in 1970, after the brutal Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and with Leonid Brezhnev’s ongoing repression of Soviet writers and intellectuals still in full sway, Clark should praise the Soviet Union without even mentioning the many victims of communist totalitarianism, is puzzling. Indeed it seems inexcusable.

And it’s certainly true that back in Australia Clark was a strong supporter of the Australian-Soviet Friendship Society and a regular visitor to the Soviet embassy in Canberra.

Then there is the fact of his close and continuing friendship with his ex-academic colleague from the University of Melbourne, the well-known New Zealand-born, Oxford-educated communist Ian Milner, who undoubtedly was a spy for the Soviet Union and who defected to communist Czechoslovakia in 1950. Milner later worked for the Czech secret service spying on foreign visitors and also on students and his colleagues at Charles University in Prague.

Clark must have known that Milner was a committed communist yet he saw fit to visit Milner twice in Prague, once in 1958 straight after his trip to Russia and, again, in 1984.

Indeed five months before his death, Clark wrote to Milner: “I see us all as people who have lost their ‘Great Expectations’, either in any world to come, or in the here and now. [J]ust because 1917 fell into the hands of spiritual bullies, that does not mean we should give up the hope of stealing fire from heaven – or that we should bow down to 5th Avenue.”

Even if Clark was not an active Communist Party operative, it seems indisputable that he was a strong supporter of the Soviets. To deny this seems as ridiculous as Gerry Adams, or his supporters, denying that Adams had once been a leading member of the IRA.

Many people, including Clark’s most recent biographer Mark McKenna, argue that Manning Clark was a person who never made up his mind about the Soviet Union.

But even if this were so, what would the attitude be to an intellectual and historian who never made up his mind about fascist Italy or Nazi Germany? Such a position would, rightly, be denounced. And would such a person be excused for sitting on the fence? Not on your nelly. It saddens me to say this, because Manning Clark was supportive of me personally and as an historian.

Emeritus professor of history and politics at Griffith University, Ross Fitzgerald is the author of 33 books most recently the co-authored Alan “The Red Fox” Reid, which is shortlised for this year’s National Biography Award.

The Australian, May 02, 2011

Indeed, Clark sometimes admitted there wasn’t very much difference between literary fiction and “his kind of history”.

As academic Mark McKenna tellingly puts it, in the romantic tradition of Carlyle, who spoke from his “inspired soul” to become “the light of the world”, Clark “attempted to minister to [our] nation as a kind of spiritual soothsayer, uttering gnomic words of guidance in the form of historical parables”.

He was forever fascinated by these words of Carlyle etched into the sandstone walls of the foyer of Sydney’s Mitchell Library: “In books lies the soul of the whole past time, the articulate audible voice of the past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.”

Novelist David Malouf perceptively sensed in his friend Clark an enduring spiritual yearning, which manifested itself in “a desperate need for certainty”, and a “huge desire for absolute truth”. Yet, for all of his adult life, the historian’s deep longing was as much sexual and emotional as it was spiritual and intellectual.

Hence a significant portion of McKenna’s An Eye for Eternity deals with Clark’s many infidelities with women other than his long-suffering wife, Dymphna, and the role of a succession of other women as his muses, some of them not sexually consummated, such as his relationship with his research assistant and later controversial historian, Lyndall Ryan.

McKenna’s life of Clark also canvasses his homoeroticism, his earlier attraction to adolescent boys and his emotional closeness to some younger male historians including, perhaps most prominently, Humphrey McQueen.

Clark could certainly be generous to younger historians and writers. As McKenna points out, to me he was most encouraging. Indeed in the early 1980s he wrote for The Courier-Mail a very positive review of volume one of my history of Queensland, which helped draw to the book favourable attention. Also as a person who was himself embarrassed by his behaviour when drunk, who suffered from amnesia (“blackouts”) after drinking binges, yet who was incapable of giving up alcohol completely, he strongly supported my staying off the booze via Alcoholics Anonymous — a fellowship he never joined himself.

McKenna makes it clear that “throughout the 1970s (and possibly beyond), Clark was disgusted by his own drinking habits”. It seems no accident therefore that, of all our writers, with the conspicuous exception of Patrick White, with whom he had a very ambivalent relationship, Clark was especially drawn to Henry Lawson (1867-1922), whose life and work were marred and scarred by the booze.

Significantly, Lawson’s writing deteriorated as he continued to drink and the great Australian nationalist died tragically, precisely because of his alcoholism. Yet, in one of his poems, he prefigured the notion of the effectiveness of one alcoholic being able to help another. So strong was his identification with the writer that, when in Sydney, Clark “became a frequent pilgrim to Lawson’s grave at Waverley Cemetery”.

In 1978 Clark wrote a highly personal and idiosyncratic assessment, In Search of Henry Lawson, which was reprinted in paperback with amendments in 1985 as Henry Lawson: The Man and the Legend. As with A History of Australia, this provoked much scholarly complaint on the grounds of its many inaccuracies, especially from the quarrelsome Colin Roderick, who described Clark’s biography as “a tangled thicket of factual error, speculation and ideological interpretation”.

Although McKenna does not mention it, Clark also wrote a fine essay about attending an Australian rules grand final for my co-edited 1988 collection The Greatest Game. Typical of Clark, his piece was titled An Entire Nation Stricken with a Strange Infirmity. It is still a relatively little known fact that, like his fellow student at the University of Melbourne in the mid-30s, B.A. (“Bob”) Santamaria, the historian was an ardent and one-eyed barracker for Carlton.

In the main, An Eye for Eternity is a fine book. It is so much stronger in terms of sheer research and lucid writing style than Brian Matthews’s overrated (in my opinion) 2008 biography, and perhaps is even better, and more convincing, than Stephen Holt’s less ambitious, but important, 1999 effort, A Short History of Manning Clark.

McKenna does not shy away from the fact Clark’s “historical method” in writing A History of Australia embodied that of a novelist. In writing, he “pushed beyond the particulars in order to write history that revealed universal truth — not historical fiction but fictional history”. This attitude was true of Clark from an early age. Thus aged 23, while at Balliol College, Oxford, he wrote: I am most certainly not a scholar — that is why the research here leaves me cold and angry — but I do feel genuine enthusiasm for teaching, and if possible at a university standard. This must be combined with something else, and I feel certain that I can write something one day on Australian history. I feel quite convinced that Australian history has been betrayed by [historians]. I believe quite passionately that Australia is a “weird” country and that its weirdness has never been portrayed except in landscape painting.

Here, in embryo, is Clark the polemicist and storyteller with a grand and epic vision.

Inevitably McKenna’s approach raises some questions. The fact is he has acted as a gatekeeper to all Clark’s papers and has made particular decisions about what to allow open to public gaze.

The section on Meeting Soviet Man, arguably Clark’s worst book and certainly his most compromised, is much too brief, as is McKenna’s exploration about where Clark stood vis a vis the Soviet Union. Detailing a three-week sojourn in Moscow and Leningrad in November 1958 with fellow writers Jim Devaney and hardline Communist Party member Judah Waten, the book, published in early 1960, is truly awful in its acceptance of Soviet propaganda and its avoidance of acknowledging many unpalatable truths.

However, McKenna does maintain that not even Clark’s close friends really knew “where he stood on communism”. And in what seems at best a partial explanation, McKenna points out Clark never aspired to “consistency”. To explain his genesis as a historian, Clark repeatedly recounted how, aged 23, he arrived in Bonn on November 10, 1938 — the morning after Kristallnacht, “the night of broken glass”. He allegedly made his way amid the debris caused by the Nazi stormtroopers who had destroyed Jewish shops, businesses and synagogues. He saw, he said, “the fruits of human evil before me there on the streets of Bonn”; the shards of glass were “still on the streets”.

But McKenna’s careful reading of Clark’s diaries, and of correspondence between Clark and Dymphna, demonstrate that it was impossible for Clark to have been in Bonn on the morning of November 10, 1938.

In fact, it was Dymphna who witnessed the immediate aftermath of Kristallnacht, and it was in Dymphna’s letters to Clark, who was not in continental Europe at all but in Oxford, that described the carnage that she had seen. In one of her letters to her wayward husband, Dymphna included an article about the event by Joseph Goebbels to which, years later, Clark referred in his claim to be present in Bonn on November 10, 1938. As Clark’s own diary confirms, he did not arrive in Bonn until November 26 — more than two weeks after Kristallnacht.

To answer his rhetorical question of why could not Clark have simply told the terrible story through Dymphna, McKenna answers that, “most likely Clark, the great historian, needed to be there to make the parable of Kristallnacht more powerful, to draw from the events the great lessons he had undoubtedly drawn”. Then McKenna concludes: “In this sense, there was no fabrication.”

The impact of Kristallnacht on Clark was, he argues, “genuine and profound, somehow pushing aside the fact that he was not physically present”.  After pointing out that, just as Clark maintained he could not write about past events unless he visited the places where they physically occurred, so too “he felt he could not speak of the significance of Kristallnacht for his intellectual and spiritual development without having been present”.

Then McKenna adds that, in “a lifelong partnership, a couple’s separate memories can sometimes become one, and through Dymphna, Clark no doubt felt he was there in Bonn on the morning after Kristallnacht”.

This seems to me to be a rather feeble obfuscation. To put it bluntly, Clark must have known he wasn’t there in Bonn on the morning after Kristallnacht! All of this leads one to question: whether Clark was present at other key events.

In his 1990 memoir The Quest for Grace, Clark claimed he attended the famous debate about the Spanish Civil War, held at Melbourne University on the evening of Monday March 22, 1937.

This involved a grand verbal battle between a team, jousting for “Christ the King”, which comprised three members of the board of the Catholic Worker — Santamaria, Stan Ingwersen and Kevin Kelly — against a team advocating the republican cause led by radical writer Nettie Palmer supported by two members of the Communist Party of Australia, Gerry O’Day and Jack Legge. McKenna states unambiguously that Clark “watched it all `bewildered’, unable to decide where to stand, his heart and mind wavering from one side to the other: achieve human perfectibility on earth or wait until the gates of heaven opened?”

In contrast to this claim of Clark “being there”, Gerard Henderson argued on Radio National Breakfast on March 9, 2007, that after the revelations about his untruths on Kristallnacht, one now has to doubt the veracity of many, if not most, of the assertions of Clark where he claimed to be present at key events. This includes, Henderson argued, Clark’s report of the 1937 Spanish Civil War debate.

As with Kristallnacht, some may say it doesn’t matter if Clark weren’t actually there; it is enough he was there “in spirit”.

So does it matter if what Clark wrote was fact or fiction? Call me old-fashioned, but for those of us purporting to write history, there surely has to be a difference.

For the funeral of that extremely complex personality, Clark, on May 27, 1991, more than 600 mourners gathered in St Christopher’s Catholic Cathedral in Canberra. Some were surprised that, at the end of his life, Clark might have embraced Catholicism. Yet for all Clark’s vague hopes of an afterlife, McKenna reports that he died “racked by doubt, pleading for his life not to end”. It’s unclear how well versed McKenna is with Catholicism. Thus, when he writes of the Eucharist, he confuses what he terms “transfiguration” with transubstantiation, which is the Catholic belief that the bread and wine is transformed into the body and blood of Christ.

Despite McKenna’s careful research and his seven years of fine labour, key questions about Clark remain unanswered. Where he stood in relation to communism is one of many. McKenna argues that Clark’s “admiration for Lenin and the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 was driven by his conviction that the revolution contained `the promise of better things for mankind”’. It was for this reason, McKenna says, “that he often attended ceremonies held at the Soviet embassy in Canberra to commemorate the anniversary of the Russian Revolution — not because he was a communist but because he was an idealist”.

Towards the end of this vast book, McKenna quotes a letter that, five months before his death, Clark wrote to his friend and ex-academic colleague, the Oxford-educated communist, Ian Milner, in Prague: I wonder whether any crude secular position is conducive to poetry, music or painting . . . I see us all as people who have lost their “Great Expectations”, either in any world to come, or in the here and now . . . just because 1917 fell into the hands of spiritual bullies, that does not mean we should give up the hope of stealing fire from heaven — or that we should bow down to 5th Avenue.

An Eye for Eternity: The Life of Manning Clark, By Mark McKenna, MUP, 793pp, $54.95 (HB)

Ross Fitzgerald is emeritus professor of history and politics at Griffith University. His new book, Austen Tayshus: Merchant of Menace, is published this month.

Perhaps some clues can be found in Luker’s acknowledgements to this controversial book. There he states that the veteran columnist for The Weekend Australian Magazine and long-running broadcaster for ABC’s Radio National “seemed to believe that I had agreed not to delve into his private life. He never asked me to agree and I did not do so, either verbally or in writing.” Luker continues: “Did [Adams] believe that, after working as a journalist for 50 years, I would not try to find out about his private life, just because he didn’t want me to?”

Despite its problems at birth, this sometimes prosaic but often fascinating biography has finally found a home with the energetic Melbourne publishing house JoJo. Most information about Adams’s private life allegedly “came from his own mouth”. This took the form of a National Library of Australia oral history to which Luker claims Adams gave him written access.

Born on July 12, 1939, Adams was brought up by his grandparents. During his sad and uncertain childhood, he spent little time with his distant English-born father Charles – a Congregational minister – whom his equally absent mother Sylvia left because of his drink problem.

An early Adams romance was with Rosemary, a bohemian from the posh Melbourne suburb of Brighton. When Adams was a 21-year-old communist atheist and a successful adman, he married Rosemary, who was then 19 in a church. Since their marriage ended, Adams has had no dealings with her.

Apart from Sylvia and Rosemary, five other women seem to have been crucial in his life: he and Rosemary’s daughters, Rebecca, Meaghan and Saskia; his current long-term partner, Patrice Newell, and their teenage daughter Aurora. Adams is close to all his children except Saskia, a book editor and novelist, with whom, Adams says, he has “a negligible relationship”.

An insomniac and prodigious worker who drinks little, Adams has been a highly successful broadcaster for decades. His broadcasting career began in the late 1980s on Sydney commercial radio. After a brief stint in the mornings, Adams presented a late-night program on 2UE. Although Luker does not mention it, it was at 2UE that Adams worked with the inimitable Robbie Swan, who in recent years has been running the Eros Foundation in Canberra. Typical of Adams’s loyalty to his relatively few friends, the broadcaster and the lobbyist for the merchants of erotica have been in close contact for years.

Speaking of relationships, it is fascinating to learn that Adams has written a biography of his seemingly improbable friend Kerry Packer that to this day has not been published.

In chapter seven, “The Angry Old Left-winger”, Luker claims that, apart from John Howard, the person Adams dislikes most, and his “favourite adversary”, is Gerard Henderson, the executive director of the Sydney Institute and Herald columnist. Yet, intriguingly, although Adams does not seem to have a good word to say about him, Henderson freely admits that Adams’s program Late Night Live, which has been on the air four nights a week for 20 years, “has a lot of talent” and that, despite Adams’s predictable take on most matters, is “a good program”.

Indeed, Henderson says he thinks Adams is “an able broadcaster” to whom he listens to regularly. As Luker points out, unlike most of Adams’s critics, at least Henderson listens. Moreover, although they often snap at each other in print, Adams’s attacks “seem more heartfelt than Henderson’s”.

Adams’s success is all the more remarkable because, like his friend Paul Keating, he left school at 15. Keating is one of the eight prime ministers Adams has known, but it is Keating, along with Kevin Rudd, whom he admires enormously. This admiration is reciprocated in spades by Rudd and Keating.

Adams was the key figure with Bruce Beresford and Barry Humphries in getting off the ground the much underrated film The Adventures of Barry McKenzie and among his many awards Adams has received a Walkley for broadcast journalism.

All this is more or less predictable. But page 326 of Luker’s book pulls me up with a start. Under the heading “Speechwriting”, Luker writes: “Phillip Adams has written speeches for the Queen, Pope John Paul 11, Mikhail Gorbachev, President Reagan, President Mitterrand, Helmut Kohl, Deng Xiaoping and the prime minister of Japan, Australian prime ministers and premiers. He has worked on Labor Party state and federal election campaigns.”

Was Luker taking the piss, having a laugh? Or was it the 71-year-old Adams, or both? Only when I re-read the book did I notice that for a four-hour Nine Network TV program on January 1, 1988, the director, Peter Faiman, allegedly got Adams to write speeches for about 20 world leaders. Which prompts another question: even if this were true, did the Ronald Reagans and Deng Xiaopings of this world actually say the words that Adams penned?

The Sydney Morning Herald April 30- May 1, 2011
Phillip Adams: The Ideas man – A Life Revealed, Philip Luker, JoJo Publishing, 337pp, $34.99

Australia is the driest inhabited continent in the world, with most of our landmass regarded as desert, arid or semi-arid. However, the far north receives huge amounts of mostly summer rain, with vast volumes of water wastefully flowing out to sea.

Many thinkers have been fascinated by the potential for diverting some of this water to the rivers flowing inland and south, where it could be used to substantially increase agricultural production and support larger population centres.

The most famous of the plans is the Bradfield scheme, named after John Bradfield, the chief engineer for the Sydney Harbour Bridge. In 1938 Bradfield finalised his initial plan for diverting water from north Queensland, principally involving the Herbert, Burdekin and Clarke rivers. Unfortunately, long-serving, authoritarian, Queensland Labor premier William Forgan Smith rejected the scheme because of its estimated cost.

Bradfield died in 1943, but his visionary scheme has been studied and debated ever since.

One of the scheme’s highest profile and staunchest supporters is the feisty independent MP for the vast north Queensland seat of Kennedy, Bob Katter, who has been arguing since the late 1960s for its implementation.

Indeed, Katter came close to implementing the Bradfield scheme in 1981 while serving as state minister for northern development in the Joh Bjelke-Petersen government. Katter commissioned a study that found it was feasible in engineering terms, although questions remained about its cost and the volumes of water it would provide to inland areas.

Part of the interest in the Bradfield scheme comes from the fact he was a highly credentialled engineer who had a long history of interest in all things hydrological. Bradfield worked on an unsuccessful plan to build a series of locks and weirs on the Barwon and Darling rivers in the 1890s, which sparked his lifelong interest in better ways of managing this scarcest of Australia’s resources.

Bradfield also worked on the Burrinjuck Dam on the Murrumbidgee River, which underpinned the establishment of the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area in 1912. Agricultural production in the region contributes more than $2.5 billion directly to the Australian economy, from a diverse base of fruit, livestock, chickens, wineries, rice and horticulture.

It is not hard to see why proponents of the Bradfield scheme are inspired by the potential of providing more water reliably to greater areas of inland Australia. It also can be argued that the benefits go far beyond increasing agricultural production and that it would encourage further development, in terms of bigger cities and towns. This would potentially take pressure off Melbourne, Sydney and southeast Queensland.

Further complicating elements in the debate about water management include the fact Australia’s largest population centres are located in the southern parts of the country, which regularly face water shortages.

There has been controversy over the construction of a 70km pipeline to bring water from the then parched Murray-Darling system to supplement Melbourne’s water supply. Critics demanded the Victorian government build a new dam, pointing to appropriate sites in the Gippsland where a dam could also mitigate floods. The debate was inflamed by the decision to build a desalination plant at exorbitant cost, particularly in comparison with dam construction.

Sydney also faces water supply constraints. One of the wettest summers in Australia’s history has lifted Sydney’s dams to only an average of 75 per cent of capacity. After severe drought in the early 1900s depleted Sydney’s supplies, two royal commissions were subsequently held to determine the best way to prevent a repeat of the situation.

More recently, Brisbane was facing severe shortages of water before the drought broke in such spectacular, and catastrophic, fashion.

As part of its efforts to deal with water shortage problems, state Labor in Queensland decided in 2006 to build the Traveston Crossing Dam on the Mary River. It was a controversial decision from the outset and there was vocal opposition from various interest groups, including farmers and environmentalists. The proposal was abandoned in November 2009 when federal environment minister Peter Garrett refused approval.

Heavy rain on the east coast has taken the pressure off governments for the short term, but population growth and the inevitable next series of droughts will undoubtedly bring the issue rushing back to the forefront.

Western Australia has experienced a particularly hot and dry summer and Perth’s water supply storages are at 23.5 per cent, with water restrictions in place. Premier Colin Barnett recently restated his long-held belief that water from the Kimberley region should be channelled to Perth.

In 2005, as opposition leader, Barnett committed to building a 2500km canal from the north to the south of the state as the centrepiece of his campaign. He failed to win that election but clearly has not given up on the idea of bringing water from the north.

Barnett may well be inspired by engineer Charles O’Connor, who designed and oversaw construction of the Goldfields Water Scheme in the late 1890s and early 1900s that was designed to support development more than 500km east of Perth in the region around Kalgoorlie. That pipeline continues to reliably supply water to more than 100,000 people and to significant numbers of livestock.

Part of the reason many of our cities are under pressure with regard to water supplies is that for many years there has been a virtual moratorium on building new dams in Australia.

Earlier this year, Opposition Leader Tony Abbott announced that the Coalition would develop plans for new dams across the nation and has begun a detailed review of water policy. Abbott’s announcement reflected the instinctive reaction of many people who, after years of drought, felt that more should have been done to store some of the floodwater inundating large sections of the country at that time.

Australia’s highest profile anti-dams crusader is Greens leader Bob Brown, who rose to national prominence during the campaign to prevent the Franklin River dam, which would have been used to produce low-emissions hydroelectricity. Brown and the Greens presumably would still campaign against new dams, regardless of their location, utility or contribution to climate change.

Population growth and droughts will force difficult decisions on us as a nation. The time to start planning for new dams in Australia is years before we face another huge problem about the lack of water.

Abbott’s welcome review should include the Bradfield scheme as one of many options that should be given serious consideration with a full cost-benefit analysis, before the next, and more severe, water crisis hits our sunburnt country.

The Weekend Australian, April 23 -24, 2011