Only ten lines into his review, Professor Wesley gets personal, and continues in that vein. Critics of the Howard government’s performance, like me, he calls hysterical, bilious, outraged and polemical, accusing us of being contemptuous of most Australians as ‘morons’ – a word that is used nowhere in my book. On the contrary, I deplore the prime minister’s dismissal of public opinion, his deception of the electorate and his distortion of the national interest. Clearly, there is much Professor Wesley doesn’t get about my book. Nor, apparently, does he get much about the current debate, even though it is perhaps the most important in our history.

Professor Wesley says I have accused John Howard of allowing American policy to dictate Australian policy, and in targeting the Howard government and the Australia-United States relationship, I have targeted America itself. Well, yes, because the difference between Howard and George W. Bush is so slight, and because the policies I discuss are so bad for both countries. Am I supposed to recant? Some seventy per cent of Americans oppose the Bush administration, and a similar percentage of Australians polled by the Lowy Institute – who are not morons – share my concerns about it.

I have indeed written what Professor Wesley admits is a long list of ‘similar American and Australian policies’. I stand by the ones he mentions in his review, and more that he doesn’t, and even more that have emerged since I submitted my manuscript. The list is long, growing and not original, precisely because the evidence for it has been building for years, and never more than throughout this decade. But we need reminding of it. So I do not, as Professor Wesley does, strive for originality: it is Australia’s habitual resistance to change and fear of independence that are of greater concern to me.

When I shared a public platform with Professor Wesley last week – well after he had submitted his review to ABR – he said not a word of his distaste for my book to my face. Nor did he support a questioner in the audience whose views might represent what he claims are those of ‘most Australians’. So much for what he calls the steady impoverishment of public discussion and debate in Australia. Who is contributing to it, I leave your readers to decide, after they have read Allied and Addicted.

Alison Broinowski, Paddington, NSW

Name-calling

Dear Editor,

Perhaps there are good ethical reasons why large numbers of Australian academics and commentators, not to mention former soldiers and diplomats, were goaded in recent years into denouncing Howard government foreign policies and actions (Michael Wesley’s review of Alison Broinowski’s Allied and Addicted). Whether these criticisms were ‘unbalanced’, ‘increasingly hysterical’ or ‘bilious’ are questions worthy of reasoned debate, rather than name-calling against a distinguished Australian writer and former senior diplomat who happens to be a woman. Wesley’s review was unworthy of a serious academic.

As Wesley notes, many people (some reputedly ‘moderate’ on alliance issues, such as Malcolm Fraser, Paul Keating, Owen Harries, Richard Woolcott and Robert Manne) have expressed views not so different from Broinowski’s on the current state of Australia’s alliance with the United States. From across a broad political spectrum, many of us who have thought about these matters are not happy at the way in which the Australian-United States alliance has come to be exercised as the personal fiefdom of two dangerously narrow-minded and reckless men, George W. Bush and John Howard. Many responsible British writers have formed similar views on how Bush and Tony Blair have misused and perverted the equally solid United Kingdom-United States alliance.

Broinowski’s ‘schoolyard bully’ metaphor for the Australia-United States alliance under Bush and Howard, singled out for especial scorn in this review, is familiar to me: I first used it in my essay on Australian foreign policy in Manne’s The Howard Years (2004). Of course, Australia’s role in the alliance could and should be much more self-reliant and dignified than this. Neither Bush nor Howard, nor their obedient camp followers, will grant this.

I wonder why 1 found much of Wesley’s review redolent of the language of people such as Andrew Bolt, Janet Albrechtsen or Piers Akerman? It is a sad fact that eleven years of Howard’s political ascendancy have polarised Australian intellectual life into what often seem like two bitterly opposed ideological camps. The moderate centre has all but disappeared. Now, as the Howard era draws to its inevitable close, something different is starting to happen. Adept careerists, manoeuvring for positions of trust as advisers to a forthcoming middle-of-the-road and firmly pro-American Rudd Labor government, are labelling others as ‘extremists’ as part of positioning themselves as the ‘balanced’ centre – folk, that is, who can be trusted by our friend across the Pacific.

The trouble with this paradigm is that it just does not fit the facts. In the United States, United Kingdom and Australia, we have in these past six years lived through tragic misgovernance and dysfunctionality – years that Wesley, oddly, seems to regard as a time of normality, competent accountancy and positive achievements. Tell that to the dead and displaced of Iraq, or to the thousands of American soldiers who have died there in a vain and unjust war.

While people like Wesley have remained prudently on the fence in terms of their body of published work – effectively affirming the normality of the Howard years – others have laid themselves on the line, risking their own public reputations in calling for integrity in Australian governance, and in denouncing the gross abuses of power in these years.

Leaders bear personal moral responsibility for what they do, or allow to be done, in their name. Thankfully, the era of Bush, Blair and Howard is drawing to a close. These men, exercising their prerogatives of leadership, took our democratic nations into a cruel, immoral and internationally illegal invasion and occupation of a country and people that had not threatened us in any way. This occupation routinely committed war crimes in Iraq, most notoriously in deliberately wasting the city of Fallujah and in the sanctioned torture régime at Abu Ghraib prison.

Of course some of us are angry and ashamed. We have every right to be. It is not anti-American to be so. Many honourable Americans feel the same way. At last – after all the devastation and death in Iraq – our voices are being heard in politics.

Alison Broinowski’s survey is a worthy contribution to the literature of Australian-United States relations.

Tony Kevin, Forrest, ACT

Michael Wesley replies:

Alison Broinowski’s and Tony Kevin’s letters in response to my review of the former’s Allied and Addicted are a good example of what the British sociologist Frank Furedi describes as a ‘personalisation of politics’ in Western societies. Both Broinowski and Kevin have accused me of launching a personal attack on Broinowski, motivated by misogyny, careerism and political conservatism. This despite the fact that nowhere in my review do I discuss anything about Broinowski other than her writing. Furedi argues that it is increasingly pervasive in modern societies for people to define themselves and others primarily according to the political views they hold, and to use a person’s views to judge their character. Along the way, political label and judgments become more and more formulaic and predictable, and the discussion of political issue more and more impoverished.

As David Marr argues in his recent Quarterly Es ay on the impoverishment of public debate during the Howard years, ‘Finding dark motive is the stock-in-trade of public debate under Howard. It’s easy work. Slamming your opponent’s motives means you don’t have to grapple with facts; you don’t have to answer arguments; you don’t have to do any homework; and you can’t be disproved.’ Where Marr is off the mark is to argue that this is a product only of the Howard government; rather, Howard’s culture warriors have been so effective because the personalisation of politics driven by evidence-free polemics, was already broadly pervasive in Australian society when Howard came to office.

By imputing that my review was motivated by personal dislike and ideology, Broinowski and Kevin avoid responding to the criticism I raised about Allied and Addicted. The criteria against which I judged the book are those that any academic uses to appraise non-fiction: does the evidence presented support the arguments made?; are original and defensible arguments and evidence presented that move analysis of the problem in new directions?; has the author been scrupulous with evidence and sourcing, and in checking what others might have written on the topic? My review repeatedly points out where Allied and Addicted can be found wanting against these basic criteria.

In her letter, Broinowski agrees with me that her arguments are not original, and testifies that her intent is to remind Australians of these familiar arguments. By her own admission, then, Allied and Addicted is not scholarship or even good polemic; it is propaganda. Such writing doesn’t stimulate thought, it anaesthetises it by offering an audience that already identifies with its author predigested moral simplicities that can be effortlessly imbibed and repeated among the like-minded. The monotonous repetition of slogans (Kevin proudly claims to be the originator of Broinowski’s major argument that Australia has become a bully) comes from listening to no one but those with whom one already agrees. (Oh, and by the way, ‘screeching to the converted’ was not intended as a slur against Broinowski’s gender, but as a perhaps unsuccessful allusion to the parrot-like repetitiveness of the arguments in the book.)

I was motivated to write such a critical review because I think the dominance of popular non-fiction by such biased polemics is bad for Australian society. Surely such polarisation (one can’t have a debate when each side won’t listen to the other or take their arguments seriously because they are imputed to be personal attacks) and lack of balance is not good for either our democracy or for good policy. Vibrant democracy and good policy emerge from thesis, antithesis and synthesis, from the honest appraisal of, and response to, the views of those with whom one doesn’t agree. Critique that strives for objectivity, and is scrupulous about standards of evidence and argument, can contribute to better and more responsive government. But polemics that simply reiterate old charge make it easier for government to dismiss all criticism as motivated by personal or ideological bias.

The finished article

Dear Editor,

Chad Habel’s review of Jean-François Vernay’s book Water from the Moon: Illusion and Reality in the Works of Australian Novelist Christopher Koch notes that the book is an important and valuable contribution (July-August 2007). Cambria Press would like to clarify that ABR sent the reviewer a pre-press, advance copy, not the final work. In addition to making a significant contribution to scholarship, the book in question is a highly polished and carefully edited volume. There are no editorial deficiencies in the final published work. For book information or review requests of the published work, please visit: http://www.cambriaprcss.com/books/978 I 934943356

Toni Tan, Cambria Press, New York, USA