In the break-up of Australia’s anti-communist political alliance, in the early 1990s after the end of European communism, Robert Manne and I took different political paths. But I still followed his work, with on one occasion significant benefits for my own career. When his ‘political memoir’ was published it went immediately onto my must- read list.
Early life
For me, the first quarter of Manne’s book – on his early life and education – was the most interesting part. His parents were Jewish refugees from Nazism just prior to WW2; his grandparents were murdered in the Holocaust. Robert was born in Melbourne in 1947. As Manne says, his family history made him ‘naturally sympathetic’ to refugees.
Manne’s father, Henry, was born in the United States during a temporary family migration in the 1900s. This may explain his fluency in English. Like his son in later decades, during the 1940s Henry was a prolific writer, published in daily newspapers as well as niche-market publications from The Jewish Herald to Home Beautiful (Henry’s business was furniture manufacturing).
In one of several mentions of higher education that caught my attention, in 1943 Henry wrote an article for The Jewish Herald on suggested racial quotas for some University of Melbourne faculties. I can find no reference to such quotas in my U of M histories, presumably (hopefully) this idea never went beyond a proposal. Again the parallels between father and son are clear.
Sadly Henry died in 1958, and Manne’s mother Kate developed multiple sclerosis. Robert acted as her nurse fron 1959 until she died in 1965, soon after his matriculation exams.
University
Manne was a sought-after university student. He rejected a ‘generous scholarship’ from the then-new Monash University in ‘outer-suburban, semi-sewered Clayton’. Zelman Cowen, the U of M dean of law (later UQ VC and Governor-General) encourages Manne to enrol in Arts/Law rather than just Arts. Manne declines. He starts Arts at the U of M in 1966, studying history and English.
In the lively campus political scene of the 1960s, Manne initially joins the ‘Whitlamite-prone’ Democratic Socialist club, before switching to the Labour Club in 1968 (as opposed to the more anti-communist ALP Club). Later, under the influence of Frank Knopfelmacher and Vincent Buckley, he moved towards the anti-communism that would define the first phase of his academic career.
In the 1960s most U of M students, as now, wanted a degree and a job, not a university experience. But the university then was also ‘a genuine community of scholar-teachers and students’. Manne tells us that ‘tutors often ate with their students. Sometimes so did older academics.’ This kind of academic community is now rare.
After finishing his U of M degree, Manne applied successfully for a Shell scholarship, that financed two years of postgraduate study at Oxford or Cambridge. He chose Oxford. Its tutorial system was demanding – each week a three to four thousand word essay on a topic chosen by the tutor. Despite some big name tutors, including the historian AJP Taylor, Manne’s Oxford experience reads as disappointing compared to the lively debates of his undergraduate years. But ‘I did learn to write without procrastination’.
Back in Australia in 1974 Manne worked as a history tutor at the U of M. His future wife Anne was one of his students; he married her ‘some years’ later. He applied unsuccessfully for a lecturer position. Knopfelmacher was outraged, and recommended Manne for a job at La Trobe University. He had no doctorate and only one published academic article, but was appointed to a job he held for the rest of his career. Current academic life is very different.
The Cold War
I don’t remember exactly when I first read or heard of Robert Manne. The timing is vague, but I am near certain that something he wrote on communism, perhaps in Quadrant, lodged his name in my mind. As a teenage anti-communist, before I could afford to subscribe to magazines myself, I used to ride my bike to libraries to read Quadrant and its upmarket English equivalent, Encounter.
Australia has always had an anti-communist left, including importantly much of the ALP. In Australia’s political sociology, however, a strong stance against communism was coded ‘right’. A large group on the left were ‘anti- anticommunists’. By the time I became politically aware the anti- anticommunists rarely directly supported the oppression and mass murder of their own citizens of which multiple communist states were guilty. But they would dodge it, deny it, or blame it on the West for long after that position was tenable. They invariably opposed military efforts to contain or defeat communist regimes and insurgencies.
In 1977 Manne had a characteristic experience of what he calls the ‘smug and pious atmosphere of conventional anti-anticommunism’ of the era. A conference paper he gave on Cambodia’s murderous Khmer Rouge regime was met with ‘stony silence’. He was told, to audience applause, that he would not be welcome in Democratic Kampuchea.
For a while, the culture of the left made Manne more comfortable on the right. He calls a chapter ‘The 1980s – My Conservative Decade’. In 1989 he became co-editor of Quadrant and then editor in 1990. That year, my last as an undergraduate, I submitted a book review to Quadrant, which Manne published in the May 1990 edition. It was my first article published outside of student newspapers and magazines.
The Cold War alliance breaks up
By the early 1990s, however, the politics of anti-communism had changed. While communism was still a powerful and brutal force in Asia, as the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre had shown, central European communism had collapsed. The USSR itself ended in 1991.
I can remember from the time the realisation that this moment of victory for the ‘right’ was paradoxically also full of risks. Differences between right-of-centre political groups, with little in common other than their opposition to communism, could easily emerge. (Even though since the 1950s Australia had been much more directly affected by Asian than European communism, through wars and refugees, the political culture was Eurocentric. We cared more about Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany than other communist controlled countries. Today’s focus on an expansionist CCP was still in the future.)
The first and most important split on the right was over ‘economic rationalism’. From the 1970s Australia’s 20th century economic model – high tariffs, centralised wage fixing, government-owned industries, protection from domestic competition – came under sustained ‘economic rationalist’ critique.
Today what we then called ‘economic rationalism’ is dubbed ‘neoliberalism’, but that overstates its ideological content and coherence. It was more like one of the issue movements of the era, such as feminism or environmentalism. For a variety of reasons, several groups and forces in Australian politics and society felt that the old economic model no longer worked, and came up with a range of overlapping policy remedies. Generally, these reduced bureaucratic and political control of the economy and increased the role of market mechanisms. The most important defection from the old economic model was the federal Labor government, under the intellectual leadership of Treasurer Paul Keating.
In the right-of-centre division of labour Quadrant had never published much on economics. That was the space of the rebooted Institute of Public Affairs and the newish Centre for Independent Studies, later my employer. As editor of Quadrant, Manne thought it should be a place for people to ‘express their reasons for their disquiet and their dissidence’ from the economic rationalist orthodoxy. Manne also co-edited, with John Carroll, a book called Shutdown: The Failure of Economic Rationalism and How to Rescue Australia.
I was on the free market side of this debate. With a couple of university friends, Chrises James and Jones, I co-edited a book designed in part to respond to Shutdown, which we titled A Defence of Economic Rationalism. To my surprise, most of the people we contacted to write a chapter agreed to do so, and a commercial publisher, Allen & Unwin, agreed to produce and distribute it. Defence never troubled the bestseller lists, but it gave me contacts and a profile that proved valuable for the next, CIS, phase of career. Without the annoyance of Shutdown and anti-economic rationalist articles in Quadrant our opposing book may never have happened.
Assorted culture wars
Manne devotes much of the last 200 pages to the many ‘culture wars’ debates in which he was a participant. These include almost-forgotten controversies – on the historian Manning Clark and the writer Helen Demidenko/Darville – and still-going debates on Indigenous matters and refugees.
Manne’s positions on these last two issues are generally, in Australian political sociology, coded left. That’s why a book of his essays originally written between 1977 and 2005 was called Left, Right, Left – student democratic socialism, early career anti-communism, later career soft left causes. But in his introduction to the Political Memoir, Manne says that ‘I believe there is a moral and political consistency between my earlier and later selves’ on communism, refugees and Indigenous dispossession. I think that’s right. There is a common concern with politically-driven suffering.
In this part of the book, even more than in earlier chapters, there is much settling of sometimes old scores. Some targets are safely dead. Anyone alive who has clashed with Manne at some point since the 1960s should, however, look for their names in the index.
Conclusion
Manne writes well and his memoir always flows smoothly. Whether out of modesty or the commercial realities of book selling, not many Australian intellectuals publish memoirs, so this is one of the few providing a personal perspective on late 20th and early 21st century debates. For me interest faded as the narrative arrived at still-active debates, but never to zero.
Andrew Norton 