There it is again, p.18
There It Is Again, page 18
The difference between what is called populism and what is orthodox or mainstream is generally held to be the difference between the rational and the irrational. One confronts a complex reality with reasoned arguments and solutions; the other escapes it in a make-believe world of conspiracies, supernatural forces and flat taxes. In one, metaphors help to explain reality; in the other there is no distinction. A pipeline built by capital, labour, machinery and graft is a pipeline willed by God. A government that bailed out Wall Street is a government of socialists. A health system that affords insurance to the majority of citizens is a system of ‘death panels’.
The striking thing about populist arguments is how they seem to gain force in proportion to their unreason. Enlightened self-interest, the country’s watchword, becomes its opposite. Self-interested plantation owners persuaded the South’s poor white trash that slavery was also in their interest and, as Ulysses S. Grant observed, on this fallacy the Rebel army safely depended for cannon fodder. The Tea Party – and the Republican Party – attracts hordes of poor citizens by vowing to abolish the government welfare on which they depend. The Tea Party states receive anything from twice to three times the government assistance received by New York or California.
To attend a Tea Party rally, or to listen to them talk, is truly to enter a parallel universe; one every bit as mad as, say, a gathering of university Maoists in Melbourne in 1970. But the Maoists were not in charge of one of the mainstream parties; they were not setting the terms of the national debate; they were not backed by the Koch brothers and given a free run on Fox News. And they were not feeding off the despair, poverty and ignorance to which great swathes of American society have been steadily reduced. The Tea Partiers are, and they have been for most of the last two years. If one of their heroes does become President, it will not be by putsch or civil war, but by popular election through orthodox political processes. A President Palin, Bachmann or Perry will be elected because her or his predecessors in office made it possible.
Let’s imagine a President Palin. She maintains – or reinstates – the Bush tax cuts, slashes government welfare, cuts health care coverage, boosts defence spending, finds a foreign battlefield or two, leaves 30 million poor to fend for themselves, sacks the environment and drills baby drills, in the name of unfettered markets and rugged individualism faithfully serves the corporate interest and intensifies the concentration of wealth in even fewer hands. And all this before she gets to abortion, creationism, the war on drugs and ever more manic flag-waving activities. Has she no original ideas?
Mad as she and her fellow demagogues might seem, big as her lies might be, Palin steps directly from the last chapter of United States history, the one that begins with Ronald Reagan. So she is irrational: explain to us again, that one about how the wealth trickles down. Peggy Noonan reckons she’s a nincompoop: but was it Palin or Reagan, Noonan’s employer and hero, who made the world safe for trickledown economics and the neo-conservatives? Palin’s a terrible liar of course, and a fantasist: then again she isn’t the one who said it was morning again in America.
The Monthly, November 2011
* * *
focus
(v) To concentrate on. Not to be distracted. Purposefully attend to in the appropriate way: e.g. focus on the soufflé: cooking it; focus on the garden: weeding, fertilising, cultivating; focus on the children: feeding, comforting, educating, clothing, reading to, etc.
In business the focus is on goals, core issues, key objectives, main game, etc.
(n) That on which one focuses (‘maintaining a strong focus on core business is the key to success’ … etc.).
(adj) Focused – single-minded, resisting all distraction, switched-on, fired-up, pumped, come to play, etc. (‘I was really focused today’ – swimming, netball, high jumping, etc.)
‘An output management focus by departments.’
Victorian Department of Treasury and Finance
‘Clear direction allows organisational alignment, and a focus on the achievement of goals.’
Gracedale Private Nursing Home
‘We must focus on our garden.’
Voltaire
‘Focus on the lilies, how they grow.’
From Weasel Words
* * *
Phoney Education
With our Android phone at the drop of a hat we can see whether it rained in Auckland yesterday; what won the third at Bendigo and the winner’s five-generation pedigree; the names of all those who served in the Dardenelles; a map of Nunawading or Cairo, and the time in each of those places; the words to ‘Embraceable You’; Faye Dunaway’s birthday; the right way to slaughter a pig; one’s own five-generation pedigree. Some of these phones have spirit levels. Some warn the user if he or she is about to walk into a fire hydrant or under a tram. The modern phone combines all the qualities of a library, a university, and a Swiss army knife. It is nothing short of a miracle and a friend to humankind.
The best measure of the boon these phones have been is to recall the woe of life before them. Just 15 years ago on trams and trains people buried their heads in books, newspapers and periodicals, searching for the precious little information they contained, or stared out the windows at a world going past that without Wikipedia they could not begin to understand. People knew very little then. They were lonely in ways known only to those who knew the world before Facebook and texting; and who, to escape their loneliness, made eye contact with perfect strangers and even spoke to them.
Those who are too young to remember might get some idea of what this world was like by downloading Halldor Laxness’s 1946 novel, Independent People. There are surely no characters in literature, those of Dickens included, whose lives are as bleak and impoverished as the Icelandic family of the novel’s hero, Bjartur of Summerhouses. It is the decade before World War I. For six months of every year this crofter and his illiterate children are attended by ice and snow and darkness. Poverty, hunger and filth beset them for all 12. Should the world brighten for a day or two in spring, it is only as an overture to a fresh calamity. Salted fish and the rhymes of the old sagas are all they have to keep them going, along with Bjartur’s obstinate will to remain ‘independent’ on his impossibly unproductive holding.
Then, deep in the cruellest winter, when Bjartur is away and the desolation and suffering of the children are becoming more than they or any reader can bear, a man staggers in from a snowstorm, and says that he has come to teach them.
At once the ‘light of learning began to shine’. The teacher warms and animates them as nothing has before. For the first time their lives rise above those of their wretched sheep. He teaches them that ‘the distinctive features of the world’s civilisation are not simply and solely the giraffe and the city of Rome, as the children may perhaps have been led to imagine on the first evening, but also the elephant and the country of Denmark, besides many other things’. Every day he teaches them new animals, new countries, new kings and gods; how to add and subtract ‘those tough little figures … with a life and value of their own’; and poetry ‘which is greater than any country’. For each of the three children the light of learning shines on something different; for one it is animals, for another countries, and the other is ‘swept on the wings of poetry into those spheres which she had sensed…’
True, the world of Independent People being what it is, the teacher who brings the light turns out to be a reprobate and cad, and he takes the 15-year-old he has spellbound with poetry, gets her pregnant and breaks her heart. Now, no Android is going to do that. But then no Android can teach in the way that he does. This is a shortcoming we have to acknowledge: the best mobile phone in the world cannot do what a teacher can. It is dumb, like a mule, and no more the master of the information we download from it than a mule is master of the piano it carries on its back.
The children on the croft in Iceland wonder not only at the things they are taught, but also at a person who knows such things, who has been to such places and seen with his own eyes, who has ‘the words which fit the locked compartments of the soul, like keys, and open them’. It is this ‘personal contact with those who teach’, Albert Einstein once said, ‘that primarily constitutes and preserves culture’.
This theme of the teacher and child is as old as literature itself (as is the theme of the cad and child, of course). But we don’t have to go to literature. Ask anyone from what they learned the most: an item of equipment, a school hall, or a teacher? With few exceptions it will be a teacher. It might not be the best teacher; just a teacher who for any number of reasons, including hormonal ones, for a term or two holds a student, if not actually in her spell, then at least in a realm of shy excitement wherein he learns something.
One might expect, then, that whenever education is talked about in the public sphere the words ‘teacher’ and ‘teach’ would practically be synonyms for it. But they seem to consciously avoid the words; any words in fact that predate ‘enablers of quality learning and wellbeing outcomes for children’. And no regression tempts them. We hear we are in the midst of an ‘education revolution’ and the talk will be about more gymnasiums, halls and computers, and ‘learnings’ and better ‘student outcomes’. The principal at a Victorian primary school last month told a meeting of ‘Aspirant Principal Leaders’ of his delight that ‘staff’ had made ‘commendable efforts to improve student outcomes and learnings, setting high expectations for all. Leadership and School Climate are critical in driving the quality of student well-being hence student engagement,’ he said. Let Einstein wrap his head around that.
Of course everywhere now education is ‘outcomes-based’. Twenty or 30 years ago it was based on nothing, unless it was on teachers; which would explain why people who were educated at that time exhibit all the rank stupidity of Icelandic crofters from a century ago. No one cared about outcomes then. They only cared about teaching. Teacher-based education. So crazy.
Today in the Northern Territory there are remote communities where mobile phones are out of range and the people are determined to stay on their land, though it means they struggle to feed themselves sometimes and must endure in the wet season the kind of isolation the crofters of Iceland suffered in their winters. Territory education is as outcomes-based as the best of them, and they have an ‘Impact Framework’ to ‘implement their strategy’ and ‘monitor the progress of the activity, the impact of that activity on the desired outcomes and continuous evaluation to determine whether effort is directed to the areas that will have the greatest impact’. With that sort of framework impacting on everything there is no getting round the need to send their teachers to Professional Development Days. Student outcomes depend on it – or are we going round in circles here?
This October, on the wall of a room in a sad hub-town where a Professional Development Day was in progress, the following three posters were pinned.
1. INTERSUBJECTIVITY
Sharing perceptions, conceptions, feelings and intentions IS a state of achievement. Scaffolding is one of the major processes whereby it is achieved.
2. SITUATION REDEFINITION
In the context of the established AL class where students have studied a number of texts then intersubjectivity happens when the teachers and students have shared control and explicit understandings of their INTENTIONALITY.
3. ZONE OF PROXIMAL DEVELOPMENT
… Development occurs through the interaction as the child is assisted to complete a task that they would not be able to achieve on their own.
If an Android could talk it might sound like this. Someone has mistaken the machine for the goods it carries, the library for the knowledge to be found in it. Maybe the scaffolding had a flaw, but after five years of outcomes-based professionally-developed teaching in one community school the children remain functionally illiterate and the teenagers cannot read
Where the Wild Things Are without referring to the pictures. Of course the school reports almost reverberate with ‘achieved outcomes’. But the truth is there to see when you sit down with the children for ten minutes and pretend you are a teacher.
The Monthly, December 2011
From Recollections of a Bleeding Heart, Afterword, 10th Anniversary Edition
Paul Keating let me know what he thought about this book a few days before the launch: on the night itself in the Sydney Town Hall he let the audience know – not everything (some bits were reserved for me alone), but enough to leave them in no doubt about his loathing. The book was launched by Noel Pearson, who when he had read it told me he thought it was a ‘love story’. I confess to wondering sometimes if therein lay a piece of the problem. A few years later Pearson wrote about the ‘darkest and barely restrained dudgeon’ of Keating’s mood that night, and the ‘variously erudite, humorous, vicious and thoroughly mesmerising black performance’ with which I was ‘surgically pinned to the wall’. I would take issue with ‘surgically’: it struck me as more a shillelagh than a knife.
After saying nothing more in public for the best part of a decade, last year Keating wrote an article in which, coopting to his case a remark alleged of Graham Freudenberg, he charged me with breaking ‘the contract’. I knew what he meant by this ‘contract’ – it is the common understanding that political leaders own their speeches regardless of who writes them – but I could not see how I had broken it. I agree with the ‘contract’ and have affirmed it a hundred times on public platforms, including a couple shared with Freudenberg, the great Labor speechwriter and historian who also believes in it. Prime Ministers decide what they will say and what they won’t, they bring their own judgement to whatever words we put before them; they fire the bullets or throw the streamers and bear the consequences. I don’t recall Paul Keating ever uttering a word that he did not want to utter. Under the ‘contract’ all of them are his and he is welcome to them.
The occasion for his sudden assault last year was an article in The Sydney Morning Herald which reported comments I had made about the speech Keating delivered in Redfern Park in 1993. When the Herald reporter phoned, as usual I had told him that he should speak to Keating. But you wrote it, said the reporter. I was his speechwriter, I said, but it is Keating’s speech. I explained the ‘contract’. I have no recording of the conversation, but I am confident that I went on to say, as I say in this book, no other senior politician in the Labor Party would have delivered it – not as he did, without changing a word. No one else had the personal conviction and political courage in the same measure. My saying this, Keating said, was ‘condescending’. To a certain kind of ego in certain circumstances it might be: to another kind, I’d venture it is no more than a statement of two discrete facts: that we thought the same way, and he had the mettle to say what he thought.
I spoke to Graham Freudenberg and he too was surprised that Paul Keating thought I had ‘broken the contract’. Perhaps it was something in the way my remarks were reported, but from his article it seems he has come to believe that, because the speech was his under the ‘contract’, he had actually written it. Either that, or the matter of the speech was a surrogate for deeper grievances. Whatever the case, I cannot alter the fact that one dark night I wrote it. That was not to put words in his mouth, but to put them on a page: for him to use as he saw fit, as he would any other form of advice. In a political office a speech is advice formally composed. An offering. Whether he used all or some or none of it was entirely Keating’s pigeon.
History devours millions, raises and lays on acolytes to so few. Why would any man who has enjoyed all the privilege and exhilaration of the highest office be so tormented by the thought it might go down in history that his words – no less than Kennedy’s and Reagan’s, Whitlam’s and Hawke’s – did not in every case scuttle from his own hand, or that from time to time he misread the signs or needed help to read them? Why not might be more the question. And if that is troubling, why not be agitated by a listing and imperfect monument like this one?
Paul Keating called Recollections the ‘black box recorder’ of his Prime Ministership. Though he meant to illustrate my failure, this remains the nicest thing he said about it and I have been tempted to infer that at least I did a fair job of getting down the last words of the government before it crashed in flames. The ‘black box’ was a good metaphor and useful for his caustic purposes, but it came from an outraged misreading of the book. A black box recorder records as God might: everything, with an omnipresent and objective ear. This I lack. The book was no black box for the only slightly less obvious reason that anyone writing history (or a speech) has to sift and select evidence, find a structure, a voice, a tone – the key in which the story’s told. Anyone telling a story has first to decide what the story is going to be, and then how to tell it. All story-tellers worth their salt know that if you try to tell everything you will wind up telling nothing. They all know that the story you tell is determined by the angle from which you look at the events. The angle determines where the light falls. Change the angle and you change the story. Paul Keating will know this: he has a strong claim to being the greatest story-teller Australian politics has seen.
I prefer a different metaphorical machine: not a black box, but a hand-held camera. In this book the camera is focused on Keating in the main, but not to the exclusion of the people who worked for him; or to the contest of ideologies, the germination and defence of ideas, the moods, the psychology and the clamour of daily life of the PMO in which they were all engaged. It sees not only what was done, but what, for better or worse, was not done. What was started and not finished. What opportunities we grasped and what we missed. Who won the battles and who lamented. What was willed and what pure chance. The camera could not be everywhere, only where I took it; in and out of offices, cars, planes, hotels, and only when I remembered to switch it on; only when the words and images were clear enough. And then I added a voiceover, to create the context. I wasn’t thinking of a camera at the time, but that’s how I think of it now.
