A critic untroubled by facts who seeks to silence dissent

Teh Australian February 14, 2008

IN daylong discussions at The Australian three months ago in preparation for his 115-page Quarterly Essay, "Bad News", Robert Manne made one of the many Holocaust allusions he has drawn on during his long academic career.

He said Australia faced a greater moral challenge dealing with climate change now than it had confronted when its troops joined battle against the Nazis in Germany.

Robert has drawn the Holocaust analogy many times on many issues as he made the long journey from conservative anti-communist historian, through the late 1990s Stolen Generations campaign and into his present deep-Green Authoritarian persona. He has seen potential Holocausts and past pogroms, real and metaphorical, in communist Russia, Hawke-era economic reforms (the 1992 book Shutdown), the actions of the Aboriginal protectors and now in climate change.

The manipulation of the idea of the Holocaust for political advantage, particularly in the Stolen Generations debate, is at the core of longstanding disputes between Manne and this paper. Of course, this Holocaust tactic, like the related use of the word "denier", is a simple trick to undermine an opponent's moral position when a polemicist has little intellectual case. Some history.

As a long-time reader of Rob's work, it was after a particularly egregious bout of this kind of moral posturing that I decided to offer him an all-expenses-paid trip in 2001 to Cape York with my then Courier-Mail chief reporter Tony Koch and my long-time Courier and now Australian columnist Noel Pearson. I wanted Robert, who had recently written "In Denial" for the Quarterly Essay, to see the real Aboriginal Australia in all its horrific disadvantage.

"In Denial" was a sly manipulation of David Irving's Holocaust denial smeared on Manne's critics in the Stolen Generations debate. I hoped the trip through the Cape would help Rob see the strange moral position into which he had drifted. That he would realise he was now campaigning on what the protectors did in the 1920s and 30s, but ignoring the present desperate plight of black Australians.

Robert reproached me, saying a concern for past injustice did not rule out concern for present maladies. True, but Robert's writings suggested he was blind to the present. As Sir Ronald Wilson's Bringing Them Home report makes clear, there are today probably 5000 people, at most, directly affected by past removal policies, out of an Aboriginal population of 400,000-plus. Robert, and many like him in southeastern Australia, had conflated a historical wrong into a modern call for redress and apology and, no doubt, compensation. That call focused on the past but ignored present-day conditions that for most regional Aborigines were far bleaker than those faced by their forebears before the 1967 referendum. In short, I thought there was a real potential Holocaust in black Australia and Manne was wilfully blind to it. This was important because Manne had an influential weekly column in The Age.

Anyway, the trip was a great success and for a while Rob showed a genuine sympathy for the plight of modern Aborigines. Any examination of his columns in the months after the trip makes this change of heart very clear. Koch this week recalled how shocked Rob was when the two of them joined then state education minister Anna Bligh at the Lockhart River community school to meet the Year 1 and 2 classes and Rob for the first time realised none of the kids was speaking English.

Robert's intellectual and moral malaise was familiar to me. I knew long before I went north as editor-in-chief of Queensland Newspapers in Brisbane in 1995 that polite metropolitan Australia did not want to see the real Aboriginal world. Indeed at The Australian in the early 1990s, when I was first a young editor, Rosemary Neill won a Walkley Award for an expose of violence by black men against black women and children.

At the awards ceremony in Melbourne, senior Fairfax journalists had branded me a racist for even daring to publish her piece. Later, at The Courier-Mail, I was lobbied many times by senior Aboriginal activists, often from ATSIC, to stop reporting on Aboriginal disadvantage and to give more focus to reconciliation.

Like many in the modern Left, Robert had departed from traditional left positions centring on the redistribution of wealth and a hand-up for the less privileged. He was more concerned with being on the right moral and legal side on issues such as apologies than with addressing genuine social, health and educational disadvantage.

The pressing issue of race in southeastern Australia by the end of the century had become the Sorry Walk. In northern Australia, my friend Noel Pearson, speaking about why he would not join the Sydney Harbour Bridge walk, said his people did not even know what reconciliation meant.

Fast forward to 2008 and The Australian splashed on the Rudd apology with the headline "WE ARE SORRY" in large capital letters. The paper did not dispute the need for that apology, but it was not interested in the politics of guilt. Nor, do I think, are most Australians. They are, however, certainly very interested in the politics of suffering. That is why so many supported, and still support, John Howard's intervention.

They do not want to be told they are responsible for the mistakes of another era with different values. But, paradoxically, many are happy to be responsible for the problems of today's Aboriginal Australians. They are not racists in the main. Nor are they dupes, ready to swallow the latest highly politicised rights campaign devised in academia. Ironically, in traditional left-right political parlance the common view is progressive. Rob and much of what he calls "the permanent oppositional moral political community" are more interested in rights and despise this paper's support for John Howard's NT intervention.

To be fair to Manne, he praises Koch for his work on the Courier and The Australian.

One Koch story he may have missed followed an interview Tony did with Steve Biko's sons, Hlumelo and Samora, in December 1998, after the Courier had hired a light plane to take them to a function at Doomadgee hosted by Murrandoo Yanner. Hlumelo expressed dismay at the disconnect between the highly moralising tone of the southern rights debate, focused on the crimes of the 1920s and 30s, and the living conditions of Aboriginal people across regional Australia today, which he said made Sowetan injustice pale into insignificance.

Into that heady brew pour Robert Manne's latest black sermon from his essay, about Keith Windschuttle, Larissa Behrendt, the Stolen Generations debate.

As Manne's readers cannot have failed to note, the essay is an intensely personal, even manic, attack on me, with 109 separate personal mentions in only 115 pages. Why?

While Manne claims to have often been bruised by me, he neglects to mention he arbitraged a high selling book, The Culture of Forgetting, off my 1995 Courier publication of the Helen Demidenko literary fraud story and later received a board appointment to the Brisbane Institute, a think tank set up by Ross Fitzgerald and me with help from the major Brisbane universities, businesses and mayor Jim Soorley.

Unfortunately with much of Manne's essay, his positions about this paper only really shore up his own moral superiority and attempt to settle old scores.

His most obvious personal grievance is a piece The Australian published by Deborah Cassrels in late 2002. It was an analysis by my former partner, reprinted from The Courier-Mail. A Jew who, like Robert, had lost relatives in the Holocaust, Cassrels dissected Manne's manipulation of the Holocaust for his own political purposes.

Manne's essay fails to mention this 7700-word piece, even though he has complained to me about it several times. It is mentioned only in a single sentence in the footnotes. This is Manne's long-time modus operandi: leaving out or downplaying significant facts and quoting selectively out of context.

An even more keenly felt motive for Manne's critique is my 2003 decision to open our pages to the Windschuttle debate. In his interview at the paper in June, Manne seemed incredulous when told I had met Windschuttle only once and had never spoken to him by phone. The essay hints at intellectual conspiracy rather than free exchange of ideas between consenting adults in the handling of Windschuttle's 2002 book, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, which caused controversy when it pointed out significant mistakes in the work of some of the leading historians in the field.

Like so many of the factual errors that have marred Manne's work over the decades, the very assumption that it was The Australian that brought Fabrication to the public's attention is simply wrong. The first large piece published in the mainstream media praising the book was by conservative Fairfax columnist Paul Sheehan, the influential writer of the bestselling Among the Barbarians. Sheehan's piece, and a response by Sir William Deane on the Mistake Creek massacre, were published in The Sydney Morning Herald in early December 2002.

Worse than that simple error, Manne's essay fails to admit that the original three-part paper on which Windschuttle's Fabrication is based was first published in Quadrant in October, November and December 2000 by Paddy McGuinness, the man appointed to edit Quadrant after its board sacked Manne over his coverage of Aboriginal affairs. This is no small matter. Manne was scarified by the sacking and has publicly admitted it was his understanding of the Stolen Generations issue during this period that moved him from the Right to the Left.

Manne always has a guru. Where in his anti-communist days it was Czech Jewish intellectual Frank Knopfelmacher, in the Quadrant days it became philosopher Rai Gaita (author of Romulus, My Father); and now it is former Marxist economist and climate pseudo-scientist Clive Hamilton (hence morphing Rob's Holocaust analogies from Aboriginal affairs to climate science). This move to the Left at Quadrant under Gaita's moral tutelage was instrumental in Manne, very late in academic life, finally being made a full professor in 2003, after decades languishing at La Trobe University as an associate professor.

That elevation, which would have been unthinkable had Manne remained on the Right at Quadrant and subsequently, came at the price of public humiliation in his 1998 sacking by the Quadrant board and his replacement by McGuinness, former daily columnist at this paper and former editor-in-chief of The Australian Financial Review.

Honest analysis of Fabrication, as will certainly come when the partisan nature of present academic hostilities has quietened and the influence of post-colonial studies has waned in the Western world, would surely acknowledge the influence of Windschuttle's book on the history in this area. It also would acknowledge the review of the book published in this newspaper by the leading historian in the field, Henry Reynolds, was less than favourable.

What angers Manne most about the Windschuttle debate, even more than the slights he has had to endure from this paper despite his self-conscious assumption of the role of national moral arbiter in Aboriginal affairs, is that in the Howard years our so-called "leading public intellectual" lost so much of his cultural cachet that Fabrication became a massive publishing talking point, despite his desperate attempts to shut down debate about it.

The section of Manne's essay that most clearly shows how out of touch Manne is on Aboriginal issues, and how out of his depth in media commentary, is the discussion of Larissa Behrendt's tweet about central Australian Aboriginal woman Bess Price.

During the ABC's Q&A program on Monday, April 11, the Warlpiri woman activist spoke passionately and bravely, given the audience, in favour of the Howard intervention.

Behrendt, a 42-year-old Sydney-born full professor and research director at the Jumbunna Centre at the University of Technology, Sydney, tweeted about Price's performance: "I watched a show where a guy had sex with a horse and I am sure it was less offensive than Bess Price."

We published the story of the tweet on the front page and followed in subsequent days in the news pages and on the opinion page. Manne's argument is essentially that this should not have been a story. Yet imagine had that tweet been written by a Howard government minister or by Windschuttle. Manne would have bayed for the author's blood.

Throughout his political writings Rob seldom has primary sources. He writes about morality and feelings as if they were a substitute for intellectual rigour. If he had primary sources in government in the way journalists do, he would have received the same feedback we did from ministers, who saw just how outrageous Professor Behrendt's words were.

As a nation we are lucky to have as Minister for Indigenous Affairs a senior left figure such as Jenny Macklin with courage enough to push on with important elements of the intervention, against the institutionalised shame politics embraced by Manne and his like. Indeed it is hard to think of a story that better highlights the wilderness into which the intelligentsia has drifted on Aboriginal affairs than the Behrendt tweet against a woman trying to help the most disadvantaged of her people. As argued earlier, Rob has form on this.

The foolishness of the Behrendt critique is magnified in journalistic terms. This was a classic "man bites dog" story, well pursued by political journalist Patricia Karvelas. But Manne deliberately conflates a simple news story and its news follows with subsequent opinion pieces by third parties, as if they are somehow connected to Karvelas's work. His outrageous defamation of a very well-respected young press gallery journalist explains why the political commentariat has let Rob's silly essay fall flat.

Manne wrongly accuses Karvelas of writing a story on Mick Dodson's house and says Behrendt did not trust her because of this. The Dodson story was, in fact, written by Jennifer Sexton, who left the paper several years ago. Manne also suggests Karvelas, a young journalist with over 10 years experience covering indigenous affairs who had her second child just before the publication of his essay, quoted Price at length but included only one quote from Behrendt. Except that Behrendt was offered as much space as she liked but provided only one sentence to quote.

My examples concern black Australia. Paul Kelly on Wednesday concentrated on Manne's lack of political and media acumen. These pages focus also on his misconceptions about economics, the environment, journalism and the nationalist project that is The Australian. We are sorry Rob is unhappy with elements of our news coverage over the past decade. The 300 journalists who produce this paper work very hard to lead the news agenda across the continent every day. If Manne, who admits The Australian is the best paper in the country and the only one he cares about, cannot forgive us our flaws, we humbly suggest he move his subscription to The Age, a local broadsheet in Rob's town that will surely please the good professor by unfailingly accepting every soft-left piety known.

The truth is Rob is wrong on Windschuttle and on Behrendt. Worse, his entire critique is an ad hominem attack by a man so unburdened by knowledge that as a professor of politics he has not even grasped his own federal government's political position. His critique of The Australian's coverage of the Greens seems to be not informed by polling that shows Labor in its first year has shed 2 per cent to the Greens and 10 per cent to Tony Abbott.

Manne on the evidence is unfamiliar with the Prime Minister's praise on national ABC radio for this paper's support of a carbon tax the day after the tax was released. His discussion of Iraq is untroubled by any understanding of the links between Saddam Hussein's overthrow and the democratic upwelling across the Arab world all this year. Manne, alone of all pundits and politicians we have spoken to this past year, thinks this newspaper brought down Kevin Rudd. Never mind Mr Rudd could not muster a single supporter for a spill and had to walk away from the prime ministership.

One is also left to wonder if there is any reason, other than his conversion to Green values, for the timing of this latest essay.

Why, for instance, did he have no complaints about our two-year campaign against the previous government on the AWB wheat for weapons scandal; our Gold Walkley-winning pursuit of the AFP over the harrassment of Dr Mohamed Haneef; our breaking of the children overboard and related Mike Scrafton stories immediately before the 2001 and 2004 elections; or our long campaigns via our relationship with the Melbourne Institute on "Too Much Tax" and "Making the Boom Pay" between 2004 and 2007? Just politics I guess.

Back to my introductory paragraph on Manne's climate change Holocaust analogy. The Australian in the past 10 years has published 29 pieces by climate change "deniers" -- that is, three a year. In that period it has published thousands of news stories, opinion pieces and editorials on the issue. This paper has accepted man-made climate change since the 1980s. But deep-Green Rob Manne is not interested in facts. He wants a media inquiry because, after all his protestations to the contrary during the Howard years, he really is a keen supporter of "silencing dissent", to quote his mentor Clive Hamilton's book.

To paraphrase another high-profile commentator on media, I say to editors at Fairfax and the ABC, don't publish crap just because it's written by Rob Manne. Can't be that hard.