Memories of Robert Conquest

Section 57

SIR: James Allan’s polemic (“The US Constitution in Trouble: Lessons from Australia”, September 2015) commending section 57 of the Australian Constitution, notes that that section (a) provides a means for dealing with “unbridgeable disagreements between the lower and upper houses, a topic not untimely in the US today”, and (b) represents an improvement upon the US Constitution. I agree with Mr Allan’s views, but still feel that they are gilding the lily.

Stephen J in Victoria v Commonwealth (1975) explicated the teleology of section 57 or our Constitution thus:

Few, if any, of the provisions of the Constitution occasioned so much debate as did s. 57. It is clearly an extraordinary provision, a measure of last resort, introducing the unusual concepts of dissolution of an upper House and of temporary abandonment of the bicameral system, and this for the purpose of resolving disputes between the two plenipotent chambers … 

An examination of the operation of s. 57 discloses that it is in fact … a subtle solution to deadlocks between the Senate and the popular House. It relies, after the first occurrence of deadlock, upon providing opportunity for second, and perhaps wiser, thoughts and for negotiation and compromise between the chambers, likely to be stimulated, no doubt, by the prospect that should this be unavailing each chamber may untimely face the electorate following double dissolution. Should legislative harmony nevertheless elude the legislature, the majorities in each chamber proving irreconcilable, double dissolution may ensue and freshly elected chambers, reflecting the current feeling in the electorate, will then address themselves afresh to the task of legislation, having, as a last resort, recourse to the ultimate arbiter of a Joint Sitting should they, like their predecessors, again disagree.

In this light, section 57 embodies the ideals of “deliberative democracy” (that is, the philosophy of formally reviewing prospective laws through mechanisms that require, or at least prompt, debate and negotiation over those laws’ eventual forms). Further, section 57 also represents the sort of “checks and balances” jurisprudence that America’s founding fathers would have endorsed.

Be that as it may, where a bill is blocked in our Senate it takes at least six months for the “section 57 double dissolution mechanism” to pass the blocked bill via a joint sitting (which sitting is virtually a redefinition of “parliament”). And in our federal system money supply bills are supposed to be passed by parliament annually to ensure the proper administration of government. Accordingly, the six-month delay is a painfully slow means for resolving those deadlocks which arise when the Senate refuses to pass a supply bill.

Therefore, if the US were looking for model provisions of constitutions which it might adopt to resolve its own Congressional supply deadlocks, I submit that it could do better than Australia’s section 57. Moreover, given that the proportional voting system used for our Senate means that our governments usually do not control the Senate, I also submit that it is high time section 57 were amended to allow the more expeditious passage of blocked supply bills.

Mark Scully
Kingston, ACT

The public payroll

SIR: The country faces an obvious problem with the budget, so fame and the gratitude of thinking Australians will be guaranteed to the investigator with the abilities and courage of a Hal Colebatch. Briefly, the research would investigate the salaries and perks, including superannuation levels (17+ per cent), of senior people on the public payroll. Phase one of the study could be limited to a few key areas such as senior public servants, university administrators and ABC staff. Some of these people draw salaries greater, for example, than the combined salaries of the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition. At least the politicians must front the electorate every three years, whereas with the above group the appointments appear more-or-less permanent.

A possible result of this research could be a suggestion that nobody on the public payroll may be paid more than a minister of the Crown. This would introduce a note of fairness into the system and lighten the load on the budget.

Sidney I.L. Roveda
Townsville, Qld

Robert Conquest

Sir: In an obituary for Robert Conquest (September 2015), Peter Coleman claimed that I criticised Conquest some sixteen years ago, in the pages of Quadrant, on moral, as well as statistical grounds, for his work on the Soviet terror and Gulag. This is untrue and needs to be corrected. Certainly I pointed out that new data from the Soviet archives had shown that Conquest’s statistical estimates for the number of victims of Stalin’s rule had been too high. But I argued that he had been doing important work and that the whole subject needed to be a part of our common moral education in the twenty-first century.

Conquest’s own initial response to my essay was aggrieved and high-handed. He declared that I was part of a dubious school of historiography that was minimising Stalin’s crimes, called my essay misleading and muddle-headed, and urged that Quadrant’s readers cast it aside and “start again”.

I responded, in a letter to the editor: “… readers of Quadrant are completely welcome to start again and even to start by reading all of Robert Conquest’s books, especially The Great Terror, Harvest of Sorrow and Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps. The point is that one cannot finish there.”

I commented that “Conquest seems to feel that he is under personal attack by me and the ‘school’ to whom he obliquely refers. This is not so. I have always regarded him as being on the side of the angels and have never had any truck with Stalinism or communist apologetics, as readers of Quadrant will be aware …” I went on to point out that Conquest had not made a case for his original estimates, as against the data coming out of the archives. He had, rather curiously, admitted that the original estimates had been too high, but had not offered a revised estimate. He simply wanted to dismiss my own as misconceived and misleading. It is quite possible that there are still gaps in the record, I conceded and that I have made errors, in which case let’s identify those gaps and errors and get the numbers right, since the subject is very important and the whole idea in sound scholarship, in a Popperian sense, was to make the errors one is always prone to making in complex and conjectural matters as quickly as possible and then clear them up; thereby getting closer to the truth.

Conquest wrote a second letter to Quadrant, in which he stated both that the tone of my response to his attack had been “disarming” and that his original, published estimates, for example as regards the number of deaths in the Kolyma death camps, had turned out to have been “exaggerated at every step”—not, of course, wilfully. He then explained, correctly, that he had had to deal, at the time he wrote his books, with a grave paucity of data and to extrapolate from defector reports, rumours and propaganda what the numbers had been. This, of course, had been precisely the point I made in my essay. Estimates by various writers during the Cold War had put the death toll from Stalin’s rule at anything from 20 to 100 million. The emerging demographic and archival data suggested that the correct figure was between eight and ten million. The number of executions in the Great Terror, for example, seems to have been around 750,000, not the many millions claimed by a number of writers during the Cold War. This was still a staggering figure for a peacetime regime and was not a matter of “minimising” Stalin’s crimes, but of getting them in clear perspective.

Peter Coleman, for whom I have the highest regard (as I have always had for Robert Conquest) claims that I criticised Conquest on moral grounds. On the contrary, it was Conquest who levelled a moral charge against me, asserting that my essay was as misconceived morally as it was statistically.

I still think of Conquest’s books as classics in the exposure of Stalin’s abhorrent rule and as precursors to the great works of scholarship that have been written only in very recent years, drawing on great quantities of Soviet archive material that was never available to Conquest when he was writing his books. The work of Oleg Khlevniuk—The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror (2004), Master of the House: Stalin and His Inner Circle (2009) and Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator (2015)—and Anne Applebaum—Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps (2003), Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956—and Paul Hagenloh’s Stalin’s Police: Public Order and Mass Repression in the USSR 1926–1941 (2009) all do what Conquest could not. Stephen Kotkin has commenced a monumental new three-volume biography of Stalin, with the first volume (Stalin: Paradoxes of Power 1878-1928) taking us only up to the eve of forced collectivisation. The truth is emerging in detail. Robert Conquest can rest in peace.

Paul Monk
Melbourne, Vic

Evatt and Molotov

Sir: Rob Foot’s very informative article “Dr Burton at the Royal Commission on Espionage” (October 2015) calls for a little constructive criticism specifically directed to that part sub-headed “Postscript”.

The release of the final report of that Royal Commission to Parliament on September 14, 1955, did not contribute to the “Great Split” in the Labor Party. By that date that split had already been formalised. Dr Evatt’s inflammatory attack on the Labor Party in Victoria on October 5, 1954, set in motion a train of events. By the time Parliament reconvened on April 19, 1955, a new and separate Australian Labor Party (Anti-Communist) had been formally announced by its leader, Robert Joshua, and its seven members took their seats on the crossbenches. Their presence as a breakaway group certainly enlivened proceedings when the Royal Commission’s final report came to be debated.

The rest of Foot’s “Postscript” deals with Dr Evatt’s opening of the debate on that final report in the House of Representatives on October 19, 1955, when he disclosed details of his purported correspondence with Molotov only to be greeted with openly expressed scorn and disbelief. Foot has also attempted to place John Burton at the centre of this celebrated event.

Robert Manne’s account of this should be cited from his classic study The Petrov Affair. After giving details of Evatt’s letter to Molotov, which Manne rightly described as one which “must rank as one of the strangest ever sent by a responsible western politician to a Soviet leader”, he then discussed how it might have been received in the Soviet Foreign Ministry. It should be noted that the Soviet Union’s withdrawal of its embassy from Canberra on April 23, 1954, some days after Evdokia Petrov sought political asylum in Australia and the corresponding withdrawal of Australia’s diplomatic mission in Moscow, meant that any formal diplomatic dealings with Moscow had to be conducted through the Swedish legation in Canberra. According to one of Evatt’s staff, that was where he lodged his letter to Molotov for transmission to the Soviet Foreign Ministry. Manne continued his account as follows:

The Soviet Foreign Ministry may have been genuinely puzzled by Dr Evatt’s letter. Perhaps they read into it some complex trap. For six weeks there was no reply. When it finally came, despatched on April 9, 1955, it must have represented a severe disappointment to Evatt. The letter was signed not by Molotov but by a relatively junior official of the Soviet Foreign Ministry—[L] Ilyichev, Chief of the Press department—who claimed to write on the Foreign Minister’s “instructions”. Its contents were bland and non-committal. Ilyichev expressed the fullest agreement of his Government with Dr Evatt’s analysis of the Petrov Affair. It had, indeed, been staged by anti-democratic forces intent upon harming Australia-Soviet relations. The Petrov documents were, he agreed, fabrications. Unhappily, however, Ilyichev offered Dr Evatt neither new evidence on this matter nor even fresh argument. He politely but firmly declined Dr Evatt’s suggestion for the arbitration of the affair before an international panel of judges. Such an arbitration, he pointed out, would have no “subject matter”.

Despite being given the brush-off by Ilyichev on the matter of international arbitration, Evatt still urged the same in the course of his speech on October 19.

The evident bewilderment in the Soviet Foreign Ministry could have included disbelief that Evatt was the signatory to this letter even if the Swedish legation had confirmed that he had despatched it. Might it not have been the handiwork of a highly skilled practical joker or even a nutter? Although space does not permit me to enlarge on this, it was a fact that in the wash-up after Stalin’s death in March 1953 and especially after the forced resignation of his successor Georgiy Malenkov in February 1955, Molotov was something of a beleaguered figure as Foreign Minister. In the event he was deposed from that office in June 1956 and, like Malenkov, never held high office again. It is possible that Molotov wearily delegated replying to Evatt’s letter to someone as junior as Ilyichev. On the other hand it is possible that Ilyichev, after consulting with colleagues at his level, took it upon himself not to distract his minister with the letter’s contents but to reply to them as if acting on his minister’s “instructions”. It would have been a hilarious situation indeed if the first inkling Molotov received of that correspondence was when reports reached Moscow of Evatt’s disclosure of it on October 19.

Foot’s quotation from Calwell’s memoirs (1972) in my judgment is unconvincing when measured against the testimony of others. It is clear enough from the account Russel Ward gave in his memoirs A Radical Life (1988) that he and John Burton, who had assisted Evatt in the preparation of his speech to the early hours of October 19, were stunned to hear Evatt giving details of his letter to Molotov. This bolt from the blue struck them as they listened to the direct broadcast of the Doc’s speech at a party Burton gave at his Canberra house attended by a large number of Evatt’s supporters. I also find it impossible to believe, as Foot surmises, that Burton planted details of the letter to Molotov and the reply in Evatt’s speech on October 19 on Moscow’s instructions.

J.B. Paul
Bellevue Hill, NSW

Turnbull and Abbott

Sir: The lament over Tony Abbott’s demise, within certain sections of the right of the Liberal Party, and among some conservatives in Australia, seems misguided to me. Abbott should be judged principally on his competence as a prime minister, not on his political principles and his social values.

Abbott was, like his predecessor Julia Gillard, quite simply not up to the job. While Kevin Rudd presents a more complex case, Australia has suffered the misfortune of three poor prime ministers in a row. The political system has demonstrated wisdom in ensuring that the reign of all three was mercifully brief.

David Marr caught the mood, in commenting that most of the country breathed a collective sigh of relief when Abbott was deposed. I haven’t talked to anyone since, from anywhere on the political spectrum, who didn’t share this sentiment.

It is early into the new prime ministership, but I have to say that it is refreshing to have a national leader with the eloquence and judgment befitting the office.

John Carroll
Fitzroy, Vic

Sir: When you refer to “Liberal rank and file who support a political party from tribal loyalty or ideological sympathy” (Chronicle, October 2015), I feel you are talking about people like my wife and me. You assert that we are all very upset at the moment, that our “discontent will have to be soothed” and our “support will have to be won back” by the new Prime Minister.

Yes, we have been in “ideological sympathy” with, and supported, the Liberals continuously since the Whitlam era. But one learns a lot in that time, and though we are fully occupied with everyday family and work matters, we are capable of forming an idea of the way things are going, and we trust our own judgment. An example of this is the ninety-nine-year-old relative of mine, who, when asked, a few years back, how she viewed another unsuccessful politician, said, “They do not have what it takes.” Sometimes you do not need a degree in economics or political science to see things clearly and form an accurate opinion.

In our case, seeing the way things were going under Mr Abbott, we decided, for the very first time, to visit our local member and tell him we no longer supported the Liberal Party. We told him we felt that, apart from a few very obvious things the current leader was doing, and should do, he was not focused on the broader national interest. Furthermore, we felt that, in the light of the way he broke a promise he made (on 18C), he was taking our vote for granted.

You also say that “Turnbull won, but did against 45 per cent of his parliamentary colleagues and a much larger percentage of Liberal Party voters in the country”. To support your opinion of the voters in the country, you adduce telephone and internet messages into Canberra at the time of the “coup”. I would offer anecdotal evidence to the contrary in the comments, before the “coup”, of a wide variety of acquaintances of ours in the country.

In the light of events, our “discontent” will not have to be “soothed” and nor will our “support have to be won back by the Prime Minister”.

Richard Forrest
Pacific Pines, Qld