Robert Manne
Robert Manne is a professor of politics at La Trobe University and has twice been voted Australia's leading public intellectual. He is the author of Left, Right, Left: Political Essays, 1977-2005 and Making Trouble. Visit his blog. See also The Stolen Generations - a documentary collection
Politicians
The Long Goodbye: Explaining Gillard’s Collapse
Robert Manne
Blog | 29 March 2012 | Add a Comment
Almost every political observer recognises that unless something altogether unexpected happens, by late 2013 Australia will have an Abbott government. The more contentious question is what has gone wrong for Labor. This piece is offered as a contribution to a necessary debate.
The following chart, which is based upon the fortnightly Newspoll, is used to demonstrate the presently parlous state of the federal Labor government. I have calculated both the average annual first preferences and, where they were estimated by Newspoll, the average annual two-party-preferred vote of the federal Labor Party since 2000. The year in this survey begins on April 1 and ends on March 31.
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More ...MEDIA
Payback: The Bullying Tactics of the Murdoch Press
Robert Manne
Blog | 6 March 2012 | Add a Comment
The Australian is not a subtle newspaper. But it certainly has a genius for timing. Within hours of the publication of the Finkelstein report, which documents the widespread public disillusionment with the ethical standards and the political bias of the commercial media in Australia, one of its senior reporters, Ean Higgins, phoned me at work. He informed me that the Australian had gained information from a successful Freedom of Information request with regard to two Australian Research Council Grants I had supposedly received for two Quarterly Essays written very many years ago – one for approximately $60,000, one for approximately $180,000.
Even Higgins’ questions to me suggested that he did not understand the ARC Grant...
More ...Think Tanks
Lord Monckton and the Future of Australian Media
Robert Manne
Blog | 8 February 2012 | Add a Comment
In July 2011, one of the most extreme climate change denialists, Lord Monckton, accepted an invitation to take a trip to Australia – a country that matters greatly in the struggle against global warming because of its vast deposits of coal. According to several reports, his trip was funded by Gina Rinehart, the coal and iron ore billionaire, now one of the wealthiest people on the globe and the devoted daughter of the Western Australian mining magnate, the late Lang Hancock, one of the most right-wing Australians of the postwar era. As reported recently by Jane Cadzow in the Good Weekend, Hancock once suggested enticing unemployed Aborigines,...
More ...Prime Ministers
The Second Rudd Government?
Robert Manne
Blog | 22 January 2012 | Add a Comment
For better or for worse, unlike most commentators, my judgments about Australian politics are generally formed not by conversations with Canberra insiders but almost solely by reading history books, listening to radio, watching current affairs television and following the newspapers. As it happens, opinion polls are among my most valuable sources of information. They provide, for example, the only reliable evidence about the question I want to discuss in this blog: the relative popularity of our two most recent Prime Ministers – Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard.
Kevin Rudd governed Australia for two and a half years. Here, according to Newspoll, is the remarkable story of how his government fared, as measured in “two-party preferred” terms: 63% to 37% (once); 62...
More ...SOCIETY
The Search for the Least Bad Asylum Seeker Policy
Robert Manne
Blog | 21 December 2011 | Add a Comment
“When the facts change I change my mind. What do you do, Sir?”
– John Maynard Keynes
On the weekend perhaps two hundred asylum seekers bound for Australia perished off the coast of Java. One key question about Australia’s asylum seeker problem was finally resolved. No one can any longer pretend that a regime of spontaneous asylum seeker boat arrivals and onshore processing does not carry with it grave and arguably unacceptable risks. In such circumstances, a conscientious national search for a solution to the asylum seeker problem can no longer be postponed. Unfortunately such a search is made almost impossible by two different kinds of stalemate – one political, the other ideological.
The political stalemate is the more familiar. It can be...
More ...ENVIRONMENT
How can climate change denialism be explained?
Robert Manne
Blog | 8 December 2011 | Add a Comment
For several decades I have engaged in ideological disputes. The first dispute involved a disagreement with the Left over the nature of communism. I found it difficult to understand how people of good heart were unable to see what was in front of everyone’s nose: the disaster that communism had brought to the peoples of the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and China. The most recent involves a disagreement with the Right over global warming. I now find it difficult to understand how a person of reasonable intelligence is unable to accept the reality and the urgency of the looming climate crisis. With the Left and communism, the problem was indifference to a mountain of readily available evidence. With the Right and climate change, the problem is the unwillingness or...
More ...Political Parties
Does the Australian Parliamentary Left have a Future?
Robert Manne
Blog | 22 November 2011 | Add a Comment
The opinion poll results over the past eight months are as bad for an Australian government as any I can recall. As measured by Newspoll, Labor’s primary vote has been hovering around 30%. Between early July and late October it was consistently in the mid-to-high 20s. The two party-preferred vote is hardly better. Since July, Labor’s best two party-preferred poll result was 46%; its worst 41%. Julia Gillard would now die for poll numbers as good as those achieved by Kevin Rudd on the eve of his execution – a primary vote of 35% and a two party-preferred vote of 52%. If things go on as at present, the Gillard government will not be defeated but annihilated at the next federal election.
Almost certainly, however, things will not go on like this until the next...
More ...MEDIA
Notes on Evidence Given to the Media Inquiry
Robert Manne
Blog | 8 November 2011 | Add a Comment
Somewhat to the surprise of the head of the media inquiry, Ray Finkelstein, I had drawn only two main conclusions in my recently published study of the Australian, “Bad News”.
Firstly, the paper would only change as a consequence of courageous and persistent criticism both from outsiders – individuals and other media – and from those insiders who disapproved either of the way the ideological agenda of the newspaper distorted the way it presented news and opinion or of its penchant for character assassination.
Secondly, and far more importantly, I had suggested that the control of 70% of the state-wide and national newspaper market by a single...
More ...Category Error or Cardinal Mistake?
Robert Manne
Blog | 31 October 2011 | Add a Comment
Three telling opinion pieces on climate change have been published in the mainstream media in Australia in the past few days. One was alarming. One was fascinating. And one was unusually foolish.
On the Drum of 26 October, Stefan Rahmstorf, Professor of Physics at Potsdam University, pointed out that for the second time in four years the ice cover at the Arctic in September had been reduced to 4.4 million square kilometres, 40% less than it had been three or four decades earlier. In 2007 the reduction had been explained by odd wind patterns. There had been no odd winds this summer. The ice was also rapidly becoming thinner. There was now a prospect of an ice-free Arctic in...
More ...POLITICS
“Name Ten”: The journalism of Andrew Bolt
Robert Manne
Blog | 17 October 2011 | Add a Comment
On 28 September 2011, Andrew Bolt was found to have committed an offence under section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act. He had written two articles in the Herald Sun which had the capacity to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate members of the group about which he had written – a group Justice Bromberg called “light skinned Aborigines”. Bolt had not breached the Act because he had written critically about the question of racial identification. He had breached the Act because his articles were filled with “errors of fact, distortions of the truth and inflammatory and provocative language”. The full judgment is a brilliant forensic analysis of the Bolt technique. Of this technique I can boast some personal experience.
In 2000 and early...
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