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Mark Davis

"Great White Noise"

Sydney Morning Herald, January 12, 2002

For my 14th birthday my parents gave me a small paperback by someone called Hugh Stretton. I'd never heard of Hugh Stretton and the book looked very enigmatic and not very exciting. It was called Ideas for Australian Cities. I opened it to find, amid the text, maps and alternative plans for parts of Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney and Adelaide.

Now this was more exciting. At 14 I was very interested in the ways towns were set out, and I spent my spare time drawing alternative plans for all the towns we had ever lived in on large sheets of paper my parents smuggled home from the art department at the school where they worked. When I stopped looking at the pictures and began to read, I became even more excited.

It hit me that Hugh Stretton wasn't just an isolated individual who happened to be interested in Australian cities, but that he was one of a group of people who thought and wrote about such things. I knew this because in the book he entered into debates and discussed other people's ideas as well as his. What's more, they seemed to do it for a living. As a lower-middle-class kid who grew up in country towns, I figured that there were people who planned towns and designed bridges and made laws and thought up ideas, but I'd never met any of them.

We knew no academics, lawyers, planners or engineers. As I read Ideas for Australian Cities I felt for the first time that I was in touch with that group of people whose job it is to think about the different aspects of how society works. The book gave me my first glimpse inside the workings of democratic process.

Stretton was, and is, an academic. At the moment he is emeritus professor of history and visiting research fellow in economics at the University of Adelaide. In a rise that would be an affront to today's academic system, he was a professor of history by the time he was 30.

That was in 1954. They tried to pick winners in those days. And win they did. Stretton was one of a large group of people who, in the three decades after World War II, reshaped and revitalised Australian culture and society. Some were well known, such as Nugget Coombs, Donald Horne, Nettie Palmer, A.A. Phillips or Judith Wright.

Most were not-so-famous bureaucrats and technocrats who built the health and education systems, planned towns and played key roles in the media and government departments. Many of these people were academics or had strong links to academia.

I picked up my copy of Ideas for Australian Cities the other day and, as I flicked through it, I wondered what would happen if Stretton and his gang of postwar reformers rode into town now? These days such a group would almost certainly be derided as a cultural elite. Such elites, we are increasingly told, are not only out of touch with the mainstream, they act against the interests of the mainstream by spending too much time talking about minorities.

They drink too much chardonnay and caffe latte, and are out of touch with ordinary people who live in the outer suburbs and the bush. Forget the fact that there are plenty of places outside capital cities where you can get caffe latte, though our anti-elite commentators don't seem to know that. And plenty of kids from battling families have worked hard to get university educations.

These "awkward" details carry a greater significance; they help explain the great cultural divide in Australia. The yawning gulf that everyone talks about isn't between so-called elites and the mainstream, or even between the city and the bush. The big gap in Australian politics is between perceptions and realities. And it is the untidy facts, the loose ends that don't fit into stereotypes and generalisations, that allow people to demonise certain groups in our society.

Elites, in other words, have been made subject to the same strategy of demonising the "other" that has been played out on asylum-seekers, Aboriginal land-rights campaigners, ethnic youth gangs, "welfare mothers", and so on.

The current demonisation of elites is as irrational as it is clever. It is irrational because it shows contempt for the views of the many Australians who wrote letters to newspapers, signed petitions and started community groups to show their outrage at the Government's policies on asylum seekers, on reconciliation, on the Wik 10-point plan, on saying sorry to the stolen generations, and so on. Were all those who came from far and wide to march for reconciliation and plant seas of hands in capital cities really just an elite?

The attack is clever because it helps mask the fact that those who attack elites are themselves part of an elite. How many "ordinary people" have a radio show, or a newspaper column? How many "ordinary people" have the opportunity to vet the appointment of a government minister, as radio talkback host Alan Jones did recently, before the instalment of a new NSW police minister?

Yet while media commentators love getting stuck into supposedly Left-leaning, university-educated, inner-city elites and liberal-minded writers, they overlook all those other elites who are undoubtedly more influential - from business and the Public Service, government advisers, the engineers, lawyers and, yes, town-planners, who keep the democratic show on the road. The present attack on elites is prejudiced in its blinkeredness.

But the narrowness of this attack hides a more important, fundamental issue: we need elites, especially those humanitarian elites that conservative commentators love to disparage. A healthy democracy needs a class of civic-minded people willing to master detail, willing to preside over broader ethical questions, prepared to offer their specialised knowledge and expertise for the greater good, and willing to put the greater good ahead of self-interest.

Government by the whims of a majority is no government at all. Such elites are guardians of the civil society that in the end everyone, irrespective of their political beliefs, wants to inhabit. In a healthy democracy, these humanitarian elites are never truly representative of the majority. Nor should they be, since they are protectors of those most likely to be disenfranchised, whose role is to guard the rights of the voiceless. When such elites stop being a voice out of season, something is wrong.

And if we need such elites, then we need universities to produce them. As I flicked through my copy of Ideas for Australian Cities the other day I also wondered what would have happened to a young Stretton in the present academic system? The role of universities is increasingly to produce knowledge for private-sector benefit. The debate about wider social purpose and the curriculum is more or less dead. Career paths have dried up with funding cuts.

Would Stretton as a young academic in his early 30s in today's world be a professor of history, or would he be a part-time casual tutor, or on a short-term or fractional contract, working casually or part-time outside the university as well, struggling to pay rent on a fairly dingy room in Surry Hills or Brunswick or Toowong? The increasing orientation of universities towards the markets tends to favour those forms of knowledge that are easily commodified at the expense of those that orientate to less tangible things, such as civic purpose.

If, as both history and recent attacks on higher-education funding suggest, universities are engine rooms of social change, then in an increasingly privatised, fee-paying university system how representative of the broader community are student and staff populations likely to be? What kind of problems are they likely to be interested in addressing? What kind of social agendas are they likely to set?

The attack on humanitarian elites is clever because it's a way of narrowing the target. This attack is part of a wider historical shift from valuing things that are public to valuing things that are private. Such elites came to the fore as intellectuals who maintained the apparatus of postwar bipartisan consensus, where major political parties shared a broad commitment to ideals such as the provision of universal education and health services, and the maintenance of a "welfare state", expedited via the principles of Keynesian economics.

Since the mid-1970s, conservatives inspired by New Right ideas - Thatcher in Britain, Reagan in the United States and, belatedly, Howard in Australia - have sought to sweep this consensus aside and to replace it with an economic consensus based in neoliberal free-market economics and a new social contract based in private interest and competitive individualism. Both they and sympathetic commentators have seen it as a point of honour to attack all the apparatus of postwar consensus, including the intelligentsia that administered it.

Attacks on affirmative action, multiculturalism, feminism, environmentalism, academics, public broadcasting, Keynesian economics, and all those causes deemed to be sponsored by the so-called "new class" of 1960s and '70s radicals and social democrats, are a staple for this new politics.

We all pay a price for this new consensus, even if the ticket is mostly hidden. Until they or a relative gets sick, most people don't realise what sort of shape the health-care system is in. Until they or a family member loses their job, most people don't realise how little access they have to welfare. Until they are involved with the law, most people don't realise just how much the law now costs, and that cuts to legal aid mean that access to legal representation and remedy - the very definition of democracy - is out of the reach of most people.

According to recent Bureau of Statistics figures, Australia is now one of the most economically unequal countries in the Western world. The richest 10 per cent of Australia's population now control over half the wealth. We all pay a price, too, because of the damage the new era of divisive wedge politics has done to less tangible things.

What is the cost to society as a whole when the creation of scapegoats - the name-calling and demonisation of Aborigines, of young people, of people going about the perfectly normal business of seeking asylum in a safe country - is intentionally used to create mistrust and paper over the cracks of growing economic and social division?

Looking at a book such as Ideas for Australian Cities, or other public-spirited books of that postwar era, such as Donald Horne's The Lucky Country, is to be struck by the boldness of their agendas. It's a boldness partly born out of courageous optimism, partly out of desperation. Desperate because the postwar elite grew out of a response to failure. Not only was it their business to rebuild and consolidate in the decades after the war and to rethink institutions so as to insure against another depression, they also had to shake off an increasingly stultifying and hidebound culture.

Sound familiar? This, too, is a time of economic uncertainty, and of a hidebound, increasingly stultifying climate of conservatism and social division.

What we need, in short, is a rejuvenation of Australia's ideas culture. But this isn't to say our present elites, Left or Right, should be let off the hook. There can be no going back to the certainties of the postwar era that many on the Left advocate. And increasingly our elites are not representative of any group but themselves - least of all of minorities and women.

We need to question our present elites, not least high-profile media figures. Not because we're saddled with a "cultural elite" comprising "politically correct" old lefties from the '70s, but because all the old lefties from the '70s have become so conservative, even if they often don't realise it. Too many have completely run out of ideas but still dominate the agenda-setting parts of the media.

And they've been joined by a whole bunch of neoconservatives who, Imre Salusinszky-style, seem to be able to do little but set up and knock down straw men, so that between these two groups, public life is mostly narrated by out-of-touch people, mostly fighting it out with each other, in a spectacle that is little more than diversion.

So that poor old ex-punk rocker turned New Right impresario, Michael Duffy, fights it out with New Right impresario turned liberal democrat, Robert Manne. That poor old washed-up ex-Push libertarian, Paddy McGuinness, fights it out with Robert Manne. That poor old duffer (he was never anything else), Frank Devine, fights it out with Robert Manne. And that poor old Bob Dylan fan, now try-hard new conservative commentator on the block, Salusinszky, fights it out with ... you know the rest.

Elsewhere, ex-Whitlamite Paul Kelly rabbits on about the free market and the evils of anti-globalisation protesters. Or ex-feminist Bettina Arndt tells us all about how hard things are for men because of the things women do to them. To compare this intelligentsia with the postwar intelligentsia is to be struck by how little substance the former has and how much space they take up. There is a catalogue of their failures in their utter inability to set an original agenda in a complex era of globalisation and social change, that doesn't rely on either the pieties of 1970s liberalism, the pieties of 1980s economic rationalism, or the destructive certainties of 1980s neo-conservatism.

Almost no new ideas have entered Australian public debate for more than a decade, and the need for them is more important than ever. New ideas about how to base a democracy in diversity, without race-based scapegoating. New ideas about how to manage economies that both generate and redistribute wealth. Economic models that can account for social costs. New ideas about the relationship between individuals and societies and the role of democratic institutions. New ideas about how to manage the relationship between public and private. Ways of distinguishing between different types of globalisation in debate, such as the difference between the present corporate model and other, more useful models. All these things are needed.

Rights and avenues for dissent are drifting away from "ordinary people" at the same time as, for many, economic power is drifting away. Meanwhile, that group of thinkers and planners that has historically been the safeguard of all these things has had its institutional power eroded and is losing its research base.

Looking at books such as Ideas for Australian Cities is to wonder where these new ideas will come from in an era of increasingly privatised knowledge. Who will sponsor them? Where is the public culture in which they will thrive?

Some of the best new ideas are being developed far from the power centres of Australian debate by a generation of thinkers who largely lack institutional backing or access to mainstream forums and who wonder if they will ever have influence. Yet these are debates that many of us, "ordinary people" and "elites", await with eagerness.

- Mark Davis is the author of Gangland: Cultural Elites and the New Generationalism and a member of the Advisory Board of OzProspect