Somehow, We Vote for Them

I chanced recently to consult again Graham Freudenberg’s large and insightful volume Churchill and Australia. Freudenberg achieves a scrupulous fair-mindedness in his two assessments: first, the great man’s towering stature as a lionhearted democratic leader in the Second World War; second, his longstanding petty meanness and spite towards Australia which, Freudenberg tells us, extended all the way back to 1907.

I confess to having myself nurtured a near-personal grudge against Winston for his churlish refusal to pay this country even so much as the compliment of a visit, despite Australia’s extraordinary services to the Allies in the anti-Fascist war of 1939–45. In proportion to population, we had even more men in our armed forces than Soviet Russia: our Navy served with gallant effect in the Mediterranean; our soldiers played their parts in the great Middle East victories of Tobruk, El Alamein and Syria, and bore heavy losses in Churchill’s faintly dodgy Greek campaign. We made appalling sacrifices at Singapore. Australian airmen (serving in the RAF or the RAAF) fought in the Battle for Britain and in the skies over Europe. On the civilian front, Australian families were severely rationed in many ordinary commodities—butter, sugar, meat—so that more could be exported to an embattled Britain.

Yes, beyond doubt, Winston’s attitude to us was sour, and also odd. Somewhere in his writings he said that Australians came of “bad stock”. Well, conceding that we can’t all claim descent from the great Duke of Marlborough, did he think of us as still a penal colony?

And yet, asks Freudenberg (no British bum-licker, he) what would have been the fate of world democratic freedom without Winston Churchill? What if Britain had continued to be led by its Neville Chamberlains and its Lord Halifaxes? Freudenberg frankly regards Churchill as the greatest single figure in twentieth-century history; and so do I.

Churchill’s power to move was projected through his steely command of the English language. This sharp knife he could ply with equal skill on the grand rhetorical thrust: “an Iron Curtain …”: or upon the lapidary lethal: murmured to a friend near the Commons one day, as they brushed past the notoriously up-himself Stafford Cripps: “There, but for the grace of God, goes God.” Might this gift for the succinct and salty have descended through the genes of his seventeenth-century ancestress, Sarah Jennings, first Duchess of Marlborough (“When my Lord returned from the wars, he pleasured me thrice before removing his top boots”)?

But chiefly in my mind remains the great man’s paradoxical pronouncement that democracy is the worst form of government, except all the others. This reflects the dire truth that every sort of human polity whatever can rise only from the fact that “the heart of man is desperately wicked, and madness is in their hearts”. The sea cook in Moby Dick had it right when he preached his famous sermon to the sharks; if only we would all just become angels, there would be no further problems. Such a happy prospect does not seem likely to come about this year (or next). And attempts to pursue it here on earth produce regimes like Stalin’s Russia, or Pol Pot’s Cambodia. That cool witness of the ages, Edward Gibbon, remarked that, the more freedom, the more likely that it would be attended by corruption. Churchill seemed to be in tune with the title of E.M. Forster’s famous book of 1951: Two Cheers for Democracy.

The state of authentic democracy always varies from country to country and from time to time; if there were league tables, I should be frightened to ask on what rung of the ladder Australia stands at present. Not one department of the present Labor federal government escapes the charge of farcical failure. The Gillard government has no remnant of moral right to be there. Its leadership is discredited as treacherous within its own ranks, and untruthful to the electors; it does not command a majority in the parliament (hang on—isn’t that what democracy is?) It dives as obediently as a trained seal to the command of a minority party of more-or-less mad people with sinister intentions towards the lives and interests of Australia and ordinary Australians.

We may have to wait more than two years for the election required to demolish this present house of shame—though great will be the fall thereof. The recent virtual vanishing of the Labor Party in New South Wales shows us that, though the mills of democracy grind slowly, they grind exceeding small. I had come almost to accept that New South Wales Labor had installed for ever the three poisonous capital Cs of democracy gone rancid: Corruption, Careerism, Cynicism. (Readers of inventive mind may add further capital Cs to taste.)

But we were right to stick patiently to the rules. The alternative to parliamentary democracy is revolution, the rule of force, violence in the streets and bombs in public places.

If we must endure that long two years, perhaps we could spend part of the interval thinking how (assuming there is some way) to improve the quality of those senators and representatives who sit in the big house and govern us. (After all, they only get there because we vote for them.) But—be honest—what do you feel when the camera obligingly lines up both sides for you on the box? (“Look at ’em all! Heads on ’em like mice!” growled the drinker beside me at my local.)

How many of them have for very long held down a real workaday job? How many would you lend a fiver, introduce to your sister, nominate for a club where you valued your own membership, or write a reference for?

I am lucky enough to know several Members—some on Mr Speaker’s right and some on his left—who might justly be called an ornament to public life, but even the combined weight of all of them would hardly be enough to swing any issue of national gravity. How can we, over time, raise the level of all this self-seeking mediocrity?

In a recent Spectator (May 21) one of my favourite columnists, Matthew Parris, clearly shows similar concerns. He heads his piece “The Pathology of the Politician”, and concludes that his own representatives at Westminster tend to be “driven men and women: dreamers, attention-seekers and risk-takers with a dollop of narcissism in their natures”. True, undoubtedly. But so are many prima donnas, barristers, tennis stars and goal-kickers (and writers).

It is hard for a serious voter to establish, behind all the flim-flam, what are the true qualities of aspiring parliamentarians who supplicate his vote; and from some current study I am doing, I am coming to the conclusion that, even after their retirement or death, the fog and static around them only become thicker and louder. 

Take ex-prime minister Malcolm Fraser’s lately-published memoirs, and you find it to be simply one of the most awful and misleading Australian books ever produced. It even misstates the number of times he was prime minister—he claims four—one more than the truth.

Fraser deeply disappointed me in 1980, when MUP published Elsie Webster’s Whirlwinds in the Plain, a biography of the explorer Ludwig Leichhardt. Among other achievements, she made a crisp bonfire of all the garbage then being generated by Manning Clark, Patrick White and Russel Ward, and the shining distinction of her book’s scholarship and writing had drawn high honours around the learned world. Not only that, it sold brisk quantities among ordinary readers. Miss Webster had worked on it, all by herself, for fifteen years, without the least academic support, and without one cent of taxpayer-funded grant. To launch such a book was worthy of any prime minister and, Fraser having agreed, the coming occasion in Canberra was widely publicised. He did not turn up for the launching, having delegated the task to a junior minister. He himself had slipped away to visit the curious friends he was cultivating among the leaders of the disastrous new African states. It was an act of simple meanness to a great Australian. I do not think he has published any view on the recent news that the bloodstained eighty-six-year-old monster Robert Mugabe has nominated for yet another presidential term. And have a guess how many pages in Fraser’s memoirs are devoted to the exploit which probably earned him his most extensive media coverage of all—his presence on the night streets of Memphis, Tennessee, wearing a bath towel.

The only constructive advice this book could offer an earnest prospective elector is: “Don’t vote”.

James Ford Cairns was Australia’s Deputy Prime Minister and Treasurer under Whitlam, whose government of gruesome memory is presently slogging it out with Julia Gillard’s for the “worst ever” award. Cairns died a few years ago, a pathetic figure in a raincoat, hawking pamphlets of his own authorship in the Prahran Market. I knew him well, and our personal relations were always friendly. (In moments of sardonic fantasy, I imagine now a debate between him and his successor Wayne Swan, on some topic of economic profundity. It would be a fair match.)

Jim Cairns in the early 1940s had been a Victorian policeman. In 1945 he reappeared in khaki as a soldier in the army’s education service. There followed wide and intense mystification; wartime manpower regulations powerfully forbade any Australian police officer to abandon his civilian job, though many a fit young constable must have yearned to join the military. Why the exception for Cairns? (For that matter, what secured his later appointment as a senior tutor by Melbourne University, when he was still not within a bull’s roar of any academic qualification?)

Cairns’s heart—albeit in a rather wavering fashion—lay always with communism. One night at a student party he told me directly that, just an hour earlier, he had “fronted” the central committee of the Communist Party to press his application for membership.

“How’d you go, Jim?”

“They knocked me back. They said ‘Once a copper, always a copper’ [long pause]. But I told them that, anyway, I could probably be more help to them from outside, as a member of the Labor Party.”

Cairns made a snug fit with Matthew Parris’s English model, in his passion for fame. He loved leading the street marches of adolescents protesting against the Vietnam War; he lapped up every media line and photograph of his schoolboyish infatuation with Juni Morosi, Canberra’s beautiful “secretary at large”.

Here we have another leading politician who left behind him, not clarification, but obfuscation. Over many a wearisome page of the interviews he dictated for the National Library’s Oral History Project, he creates the impression that his quite singular translation from the Victoria Police to the Australian Army Education Service happened because the Commander-in-Chief (General Blamey) and the Police Chief Commissioner (“Wee Alec” Duncan) were both so overwhelmed by the talents latent in this cop that he must be given a wider field in which to exercise them for his country’s benefit. I knew Blamey well enough to realise that such a claim was preposterous, but not until several years later did one of the most senior members of the Victoria Police hierarchy tell me that Cairns was removed from the police because of involvement with a group at the St Kilda police station who were dealing in bogus petrol-rationing coupons. He was removed quietly; civilian wartime morale could only be harmed if citizens believed that their sacrifices were being exploited by bent coppers. My informant assured me that he was perfectly clear on all the facts—he had himself been the senior officer over the St Kilda investigation.

I see no ready way to guarantee the absolute purity of our parliamentary candidates; or, at least, no way that would not infringe intolerably upon civil liberties. We can only, as individual voters within our own electorates, make deeper inquiries and deploy more suspicious minds.

To return to Winston Churchill: At dark and desperate stages of the war, he would say grimly to his staff: “All we can do is KBO, KBO—keep buggering on.”