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In conversation with Robert Manne

Professor Robert Manne

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Matt Smith: Hello, and welcome to a La Trobe University podcast. I'm your host, Matt Smith, and my guest today is Robert Manne. He's a Professor of Politics at La Trobe University and widely recognised as one of Australia's greatest thinkers.; He has now formally retired from La Trobe University, and at the end of February 2013 there'll be a conference in his honour, where some of Australia's most respected thinkers, writers and speakers will come to La Trobe University. You can find out more at www.latrobe.edu.au/news/ideas-society and the recordings of these will also be on La Trobe University on iTunes U.; He'll be sharing some of his thoughts today on the big issues in Australia, he'll reflect on his career, but we'll start firstly with how he became interested in politics.
Robert Manne: For as long as I can remember, I was interested in politics and social issues. Not really so much Australian politics, but it was really politics in Europe that had such a devastating effect on my family, both my mother and father separately had to flee from Europe because of the threat of Nazism. There was never a time in which I didn’t think politics could be absolutely central and determine what would happen, even in high school I was incredibly interested in political events, in particular, historical events that had great political importance.
Matt Smith
Robert Manne: Not really, no. It was if anything, the opposite. It was such a shocking event, my grandparents died one way or another during the holocaust. I think they wanted to shelter me from it. To my memory, they didn’t talk about it much. In a way, that made me more curious, because when I learned just enough to know what had happened, I then thought I really wanted to understand this, and then I wanted to understand the political world, I think.
Matt Smith: You studied a lot in Europe, didn’t you? You studied in England, at university. Was that a good environment to shape a global view of social issues?
Robert Manne: No, I mean, it was a good environment to study. I was at Oxford and I did a post-graduate degree called the Bachelor of Philosophy which people don’t understand. And I had wonderful teachers, and Oxford had this system, I imagine it still does, where you had to write an essay every week on something substantial. It wasn’t really being in Europe that had an effect on me then, it was having to work so hard. So I was writing 4,000 words a week for two years, and writing a 50,000 word thesis. I really got a lot under my belt during that time. It was a great experience from that point of view.
Matt Smith: You’d learn a lot about your own views I’d say, writing that much as well.
Robert Manne: Oh yeah. I studied under someone who was then a very famous historian, A J P Taylor, and I developed a slight A J P Taylor style of writing. My views had really been formed earlier than that and in a way Melbourne University was more important in the formation of my political, sort of, beginning, than Oxford was. At Oxford it was filling in a lot of historical detail, rather than shaping my world view.
Matt Smith: When you came back to Australia, and when you began working here, how long did it take you to become an academic proper?
Robert Manne: I came back for family reasons. My uncle was very ill and I became an academic almost immediately. I worked for a few months at Melbourne University as a tutor, then got appointed to La Trobe, when I was a very young man, 27 or 28, to a tenured lectureship. At that point in my life, it was the only thing I really thought I wanted to do, and I’ve stuck to it.
Matt Smith: Why did you stay at La Trobe?
Robert Manne: Partly, I’ve always been very happy here. The question suggests, you know, that everyone in this game should move on to one university or another.
Matt Smith: It happens in academia these days, I find.
Robert Manne: It didn’t so much then. A lot of people at La Trobe were here for a long time. To be honest, there’s a reasonable reason, which is that I live in the country, in the north east of Melbourne and I love where I’ve lived with my family, my wife and children, at a place called Cottles Bridge. It would have taken a lot for me to move from there. La Trobe is the only university in vague proximity. There were personal reasons. But in fact, I suppose a lot of academics move because they are very ambitious to move from place to place. My ambitions were I think in a way more to have an impact in the public world, at the same time as enjoying, greatly, teaching, so I had no reason to want to move, and had great reason to want to stay.
Matt Smith: Your political leanings have changed over time. Is that a reflection of your changing opinion, or is that a reflection of politics itself changing?
Robert Manne: I think in a way I have always been what I’d call a social democrat, a non-radical member of the left, in that I’ve always taken equality to be an absolutely fundamental value that I think should be pursued in one way or another. But I was peculiar at Melbourne University as a student, because most people on the left at that time were ambivalent about the question of communism, whereas I came to see because of teachers I had and because of books I read, and because of use of imagination, that the communist experiment in China or in the Soviet Union under Stalin, a bit later Pol Pot in Cambodia, was a total disaster, so being strongly anti-Communist while on the left, meant that my political identity was unusual. In a way, what changed for me, was as a historical system in Europe, communism collapsed in the late eighties and early nineties and so my political identity then was shaped much more by other sorts of issues, no longer by communism. And the reason I think that I understood communism was that there was a theory called the theory of totalitarianism, that said there is a great deal in common between the radical right, Nazism, fascism, and the radical left, communism. It was really that that made me politically unusual, I suppose, during the seventies and eighties.
Matt Smith: Would you still call yourself politically unusual?
Robert Manne: Oh yeah.
Matt Smith: Maybe not in the same way.
Robert Manne: Not in the same way, and it’s very important for me that all issues have to be thought through by oneself, and that you don’t become part of any team and you don’t pick up your views because your peer group, the group mentality, or the orthodoxy I don’t like, so I’ve moved from one issue to another, on the basis of what I hope to be independent judgment. So in that, maybe a bit unusual.
Matt Smith: You’re known to many as a social and political commenter. No matter what your opinion is of this, you’re also known as a great thinker. Why do you feel the need to voice your views on social issues?
Robert Manne: The first political writer that got to me in a big way was George Orwell. For him, it was absolutely fundamental that, in times of political difficulty, crisis, which the twentieth century was, and the twenty-first century remains, in one way or another, people had to commit and to be engaged, and that it was the job of writers to try and influence the way in which their society, the way in which people thought about and interpreted the world. So I don’t know why, in a funny way. It’s something I’ve never questioned although I’ve often been puzzled why it’s so fundamental to me. But ever since my period at Melbourne University, I’ve thought that it is a fundamental, almost responsibility, for someone who’s interested in politics and who thinks and reads and writes, to try and influence their society, and to stake out what they detect to be important values.
Matt Smith: One issue that I think you’ve had a big impact on is that of the Stolen Generation. Do you think that that should have been as much of a big issue and a debate as it is, because from this side of it, it seems to be a clean cut argument, less muddied than it turned out to be.
Robert Manne: Yes. Well, what happened with that was that I got interested in history of the indigenous people in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and began reading quite a lot after the Cold War. I hadn’t read much before then. I was quite shocked when I learnt in detail about child removal in the twentieth century, partly because it didn’t happen that long ago, and I did some reading and that enforced my sense of shock about racist in the 1930s and even ‘40s, Australia was. I had been editing an anti-communist conservative magazine called Quadrant and when I left that, I fell out with the powers that be at Quadrant and fell out with the Board over a complicated matter. In general, I was drifting politically away from Quadrant world view. I discovered that Quadrant ran a campaign, under the editor, Paddy McGuinness, to try and say that there was no great injustice done to the Aboriginal children that were taken from their parents. It became a politically fraught issue and it was obviously connected to the magazine that I’d been associated with, and it interested me anyhow, very greatly, mainly I think because, well, it was the policy at the time of breeding out the colour, the idea that somehow the best thing that could happen to the indigenous people was that they would forget who they were and merge biologically, into the European society, and that shocked me, that I hadn’t been aware that those attitudes had been so powerful in Australia, particularly in the inter-war period. It became one of those issues that for a while, before Rudd’s Apology, for a while the right, as I call it, made a great deal of, and I got involved in that argument, in quite a significant way.
Matt Smith: It’s been five years since Rudd’s Apology. Do you think it’s a closed chapter?
Robert Manne: Almost closed. I mean, there are two people, and they have followers, Andrew Bolt and Keith Windschuttle, who would like to keep it alive and to contend that there was nothing much wrong in the children having been taken from their families and communities, but I think in a more general, cultural way, Rudd’s Apology did sort of settle the issue. It’s not what historians think should settle issues, but in fact there was I think almost unanimous support for what Rudd did, and I think that did, from a cultural historical point of view, sort of settle the issue.
Matt Smith: How did that feel then, when something that much a part of your work, had a happy ending of sorts, because that is something that mustn’t come along all that often in your line of work?
Robert Manne: No, that’s true actually. I felt great. I felt slightly ambivalent about it in that Rudd’s speech didn’t settle the historical debate. There are all sorts of complexities in the historical debate that still remain open, and I think I’ll write some more about it, but in a cooler atmosphere. And look, to be honest, it felt great to see the indigenous people who turned up at the parliament building, that words were spoken that meant so much to them. I felt it was one of the greatest moments of contemporary history, for that reason.
Matt Smith: I do want to pick on something that you just said then. You might write about it again in, did you say, a cooler climate?
Robert Manne: Yes.
Matt Smith: Do you think that anything that you write is possible to write in a cooler climate. You seem to be a magnet for certain debates, certain attacks on your opinion will always come up.
Robert Manne: Yeah, well, I began really writing quite cool historical pieces for academic journals, on diplomacy in the 1930s. I wrote a book on the Petrov affair, in the eighties, which I think in general, there wasn’t much controversy. Most people accepted that it was a more or less accurate account of what happened. There’s part of me that would like to again be able to write, even in the area of the Stolen Generations, in a way that isn’t engaging polemical disputes. If I wrote a book now, I’ve done a heck of a lot of work which I haven’t yet found a way of using properly, I’d like to write a book that would be mainly of interest to scholars, because I think with Rudd’s speech, the political heat was taken out of that issue. There is a part of me that would like to do such things.
Matt Smith: Where do you think the political heat is now mostly?
Robert Manne: Well, for me, I’ve tended to follow ...
Matt Smith: The public debate ...
Robert Manne: The public debate, or the things which have struck me as being actually fundamental, and I was very interested in the Global Financial Crisis. For me now, and I think this will last unhappily, until I die, it’s climate change, which in some ways is the most serious issue that I’ve ever had to think about, and the one that seems to me most fundamental to the future of humankind, not to the planet, the planet’s fine. Human beings and other species are going to suffer enormously if things go on as they are. I’ve always tended to gravitate towards those topics that seem to me most important in the political realm, and for me, probably in the last five or six years, climate change has been my overwhelming preoccupation, and it’s what I read about every day really now.
Matt Smith: What do you think it says about Australia, that there is an actual debate surrounding the truth of climate change?
Robert Manne: Well, I think it’s one of the most astonishing things that’s happened, and partly Australia is following the United States, so it’s not an Australian phenomenon so much as an English-speaking world phenomenon. You have much less debate in Europe or Japan or China. I think it’s the most astonishing thing that’s happened, because, in general, almost to a fault, science has extraordinary legitimacy within our cultural world, and yet, even though there is a huge amount of fantastic work in science done on this, and a consensual conclusion that the scientists who know what they’re talking about, have come to, they disagree on all sorts of detail, but the fundamental question, which is that the earth is warming because of essentially the burning of fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution, that is a consensual conclusion, and it seems to me really, incredibly interesting and important that, because of economic and ideological reasons, in this area, science is now under threat and being challenged. That requires a lot of thinking.
Matt Smith: Are you hopeful that this kind of issue will be resolved?
Robert Manne: Well, it may be. I think it’s so irrational that it’s unlikely that denialism can continue, although it’s, at the moment, there’s a lot of denialism in the United States and Australia, and even now in the United Kingdom. My bigger worry is that the burning of fossil fuels will continue. I think to some extent the denialism has provided a sort of alibi for economic interests and for governments who don’t want to do the really hard things, which is to absolutely transform the source of energy with their societies, and so the idea that there’s some doubt about the science has helped governments and corporations in taking the most astonishing risk with the future of the earth, and my real worry is now that emergency action won’t be taken, and that if you read the science, you know that in twenty or thirty years it’s going to be too late and that a kind of momentum will build up in the climate system which will then be incapable of controlling. So, I'm ... and that worries me and interests me a way more than whether denialism will last. And the next bit of writing I want to be doing is to think about that issue, in particular to think about Australia’s moral relationship to coal.
Matt Smith: You’ve now highlighted two things that you want to focus on for your next bit of writing. Is there any others?
Robert Manne: Actually I’ve just written and am about to publish a piece on asylum seekers for The Monthly. You know, I'm interested in the failure of public policy in Australia on that issue. I may get to the Stolen Generations at some point. I’ve got an agreement with a publisher to do it when I want. I'm writing a thing at the moment on Australia and coal. I want to ask the question about whether or not the market should determine what Australia does about its huge coal deposits, or whether in fact governments should begin to say that we oughtn’t to dig it all out of the ground and use it ourselves, and sell vast amounts, mainly to Japan, China, India.
Matt Smith: A lot of the ethical debates and social issues that you get involved in are large, long-term problems that seem on the surface too big for any one event or one person to resolve. Do you think that making a contribution to these debates is worthwhile in the long run?
Robert Manne: I don’t feel any alternative. With climate change I don’t think that my voice matters that much, but I don’t think anyone’s voice matters that much, even the most important voices, like the scientist James Hansen, or someone who’s coming to Australia soon and I hope to be involved with, Bill McKibben. These are really important voices. I'm not sure that those voices can have much effect when you look at the kind of trajectory of economies, particularly now the Chinese and Indian economies, as they’re growing, but anyhow, I don’t feel any alternative but to do what I can, say what I can, without in any way thinking that it’s all that important.
Matt Smith: It’s not that unique only to Australia, but what do you think it says about this country, that there is denialism, that there is opposition to things like aiding refugees, that there is an opposition to the fact of what happened to the Stolen Generation, what do you think it says about Australia, that these kind of things can have a debate around them?
Robert Manne: Well, they’re all different. I'm a bit loathe to say there’s an overall umbrella kind of idea.
Matt Smith: But there is a mentality ...
Robert Manne: There is a mentality. I think in most societies at most times people look after themselves and altruism or concern for the other is always a fragile virtue and not one that I don’ t think there are other places that are necessarily much better. Maybe there are in Europe. One of the things I’d like to write about in the long term is the model of the Nordic democracies which I think they’re often less likely to take inhumane attitudes now in general, than in Australia. But, I think maybe also we live in the age of materialism and consumerism as we all know, and that the character type of contemporary societies finds it very difficult to think about sharing or sacrificing. I don’t want to push that too hard, it’s a complicated case. But I do think the attitudes of Australians to refugees, asylum seekers, is partly to do with the unwillingness to share with groups that haven’t been invited here by the government. I think the Stolen Generations was a different question. It really was from an earlier period in which the racism was so deep in Australia at that time, and all through the western world really. I think with climate change, people have a sense that if they took it seriously, there might be real economic sacrifices that need to be made. In Australia, but all through the western world there’s never been a period of greater material comfort for the overwhelming majority of people in those societies as there is now, and I do think that’s one of the reasons why climate change isn’t taken seriously. Even those who believe that something is happening, it’s usually for them a fifteenth order issue, not an issue that should dominate contemporary politics, which is where I think it should rank, and that may be to do with the instinct that people have that the material consumer comfort that they now have, may be threatened a bit if you took it seriously.
Matt Smith: I hesitate to use the word legacy, but what do you look fondly back on when you think of your career up until this point?
Robert Manne: Well, I suppose two things. One is that, and this is not kind of known really, I’ve enjoyed teaching a lot. One of the legacies I hope I leave is for hundreds of students, perhaps more than that, that I’ve taught, had seminars, who I’ve done the best I can to sort of interest them and engage them in the things that I think are important.
Matt Smith: You have only just retired from teaching, haven’t you.
Robert Manne: Yes.
Matt Smith: So you’ll have fond memories of it?
Robert Manne: Absolutely. And it’s been a very important part of my life, always. I'm really sad in a way that I think it’s less valued, or at least the system of universities rewards research far more than it rewards teaching, or at least gives priority in younger academics lives to how well they’re doing in research publications than to their engagement with teaching. I think that’s a great pity. That’s one legacy. I think the other legacy, honestly, there’ve been four or five public issues in which I think my voice has kind of mattered, in Australia only, and so I suppose for better or worse, that’s a kind of legacy
Matt Smith: That was Robert Manne, Professor of Politics at La Trobe University, and don't forget the conference coming up at the end of February. That's all the time we have today for the La Trobe University podcast. If you have any questions, comments or feedback about this podcast or any other, then send us an e-mail at podcast@latrobe.edu.au.

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