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BOOK REVIEW
| Ken Turner and Michael Hogan (eds), The Worldly Art of Politics, Federation Press, Sydney, 2006. pp. xv + 269. $29.95 paper.
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A disdain for politics is hardly unique to Australia but it does run deep in our culture. Turner and Hogan's edited book attempts to get readers to look at New South Wales politics – and, by extension, liberal democratic politics in general – in a more positive light. To this end, most of the contributors to The Wordly Art of Politics focus on political jobs well done, on ordinary and often unheralded successes from New South Wales political history. Turner and Hogan conclude the book with a plea for greater recognition of the good in New South Wales politics:
During 150 years in New South Wales [most politicians] have been as worthy or as unworthy as the general population. And some – see the examples in this book – have made very important contributions from the back benches and the sidelines. We believe that the system has worked better because of that, and that all the alternatives to the competitive and messy politics of liberal democracy are much, much worse. Criticism and vigilance are necessary. But give credit where it is due (pp. 267–68).
Thus the book aims to celebrate individual politicians, as well as the virtues of liberal democracy as a political system. |
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The book is most successful as a description of, and tribute to, the individuals engaged in the 'strong and slow boring of hard boards', as Max Weber described political work in his famous 1919 lecture 'Politics as a Vocation'. Thus, the book details the endless rounds of building site visits and reports for the Building Workers Industrial Union carried out by the future Labor Deputy Premier Jack Ferguson, the painstaking accumulation of material on police and political corruption in New South Wales by Independent MLA John Hatton, the years of work in women's organisations and party branches that led to Millicent Preston-Stanley becoming the state's first female MLA, the ceaseless attention to local party branch activity by John Carrick, the longstanding General Secretary of New South Wales Liberal Party, and the thousands of words produced by Labor polemicist, George Mure Black, to overcome opponents on detailed points of economic policy. |
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Apart from these politicians, the book includes essays on Labor backbench MLAs John Osborne, Michael Maher and Bill McCarthy, the Independent MLA Richard Torbay, the Australian Democrat MLC Elisabeth Kirkby, the Labor ministers Arthur Hill Griffith and Reg Downing, the President of the Legislative Council John Peden, the conservative minister and sometime Premier William Lyne and the Country Party Deputy Premier Charles Cutler. Graham Freudenberg contributes an essay on speechwriting and Peta Seaton takes readers into the inner circle of Nick Greiner's first government. There are essays on politicians working together on the once powerful Public Works Committee (1888–1930) and on the more recent Staysafe Committee, formed in 1982 to deal with drink driving and other road safety issues. |
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Even readers who are highly informed about New South Wales public life will find new and interesting material in at least some of the stories presented in The Worldly Art of Politics. What they will not find is any sustained examination of the structural features of the political system that helped and hindered the efforts of these individuals. To take one example, several authors laud their subjects for displaying independent thinking and action in politics. If independence of mind and action is a good thing for liberal democratic politics, what are we to make of the routine curbing of that independence by party discipline in New South Wales over the past century? |
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One of the starkest illustrations of the collision between individual independence and party discipline mentioned in the book was Labor's ruthless disendorsement of five sitting parliamentarians after they were suspected of voting against the Party's instructions in the 1949 parliamentary ballot for the election of Legislative Councillors. Was this good politics? Was it necessary politics? Why? Perhaps Hogan and Turner hope that readers will think through these sorts of questions for themselves. Perhaps after reading this book, some readers will agree with Hogan and Turner that the quality of individual politicians is not the problem it is sometimes thought to be. They may nevertheless resist Hogan and Turner's conclusion that liberal democracy as it is pursued in New South Wales represents the best of all possible political worlds. |
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| University of Sydney |
RODNEY SMITH | |
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