The NSW Senate race has produced a sideline of media commentary attacking Lee Rhiannon, the lead Greens candidate and until recently a NSW Upper House MP. Most of it has been along the lines of the socialist menace lurking beneath the apparently acceptable green exterior of the party.

Paul Howes, the  right-wing leader of the Australian Workers Union, used his weekly space in the Murdoch press to attack Rhiannon as part of a “watermelon faction”, “infiltrating” the party to turn it into a socialist organisation. Quoting Howes at length was the dour Fairfax columnist and one-time Howard staffer, Gerard Henderson. He went further, using material from Mark Aarons’ new book on what ASIO files reveal about some key Communist Party families which alleges that she refused to condemn the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Rhiannon replied to Henderson’s overheated accusations as politely as possible.

The more important point is that there is nothing in her record over the last 20 years that could be considered as supportive of Stalinism, whatever her past views may have been. She has been an inspiring and committed fighter for ordinary people against the capturing of the political class by corporate interests, a counterpoint to the capitulation of the ALP. Indeed, it is ironic that Howes pursues this line as I remember him as an articulate defender of the Cuban dictatorship when he was a teenage member of its Resistance youth organisation. One could hardly accuse him of being a supporter of Cuba today. And when it comes to taking sides with violent regimes, he seems to have little problem defending Israel’s extrajudicial killings of a Hamas activist in Dubai.

There are three main things to draw from this blatant red-baiting. The first is that some right-wingers want to isolate the significant Left inside the Greens, especially as they have noted political tension within the party, personified by an alleged feud between Rhiannon and Bob Brown. There is no question that there are political differences inside the Greens and that if there is a more socialist or Left social democratic current dominant anywhere it would be in NSW. But the things that unite the party nationally—an in-practice commitment to parliament as the only serious arena for social change, a growing distance from social movements, and the lack of a coherent ideology beyond a vision of a new, post-class Green ethics—are currently more important that what divides it. Nevertheless, the MSM does like making trouble!

Second is the attempt to link Left politics to totalitarianism through the medium of Stalinism. This is problematic because entire generations of Left activists up to the late 1980s looked to the Eastern Bloc as some kind of alternative to the injustices of capitalism. Especially in the “midnight of the century” in the 1930s and 40s, for anti-capitalists the Soviet Union could seem the only hope as capitalism descended into the Great Depression, the horror of fascism and the rush towards WWII. In Australia the Cold War years were marked by Menzies’ antidemocratic moves against the union movement and left-wing political organisations while the Communist Party was, despite its deformations and uncritical view of the Eastern Bloc, a serious organisation that took up struggles for Aboriginal rights, migrant workers and equal pay along with its commitment to bettering the lives of its working class base.

This doesn’t excuse the fact that well-meaning activists were uncritical of the crimes of Stalinism, but it does place them in a context that Howes and Henderson, arch defenders of free market capitalism, are unwilling to entertain. Any new radical Left will need to stake out not just opposition to Stalinism, but a serious critique of what went wrong with Russia.

As Marcel van der Linden points out in his excellent Western Marxism and the Soviet Union, those who were able to develop substantive critiques of “really existing socialism” in the years prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall were having to deal with an entirely new phenomenon—a socialist revolution in Russia in 1917 soon followed by the imposition of bureaucratic dictatorship and rapid industrial (and military) expansion at the cost of millions of lives and livelihoods. My own view is that the most coherent critiques were the ones that saw Stalinist Russia as an extreme case of trends towards statification and military inter-state competition already coming to prominence within global capitalism at the time.

Finally, and most importantly, is Henderson and Howes’ implicit delegitimation of any discourse outside the accepted neoliberal ideology of our age. They don’t even deign to raise substantive arguments against a different, Left politics, instead writing it off as part of a past era or simply dangerous. This is in the context of the worst economic crisis since those dark years in the 1930s, a crisis which is still working its way through the world system. The crisis has provoked a collapse in the legitimacy of the neoliberal project, but after a fleeting (and illusory) “return to Keynes” there seems little to replace this once hegemonic force. Instead corporate leaders and politicians are turning to ad hoc and pragmatic attempts to shift the burden of the crisis onto working people—using the issue of increased government debt (caused by recession and bailouts) to implement swingeing austerity measures.

Such overwhelming attempts to redistribute wealth upwards are bound to meet with resistance at some stage. For the right-wing commentariat, the fear is that a radical new critique of capitalism emerges to contest the attacks. The spectre of a Greens party winning substantial voter support and containing within it the seeds of a radical Left is something they want to head off at the pass.

Wallace, in her review, describes the Kent book, The Making of Julia Gillard, as a “political quickie”. I’ve read it, and that’s fair comment, though Kent does cast a fair bit of light on aspects of Gillard’s rise through Labor ranks which are not well known, such as the effects of her long term rivalry with Lindsay Tanner and Kim Carr.

In his defence, Naparstek points to a similar review by Michelle Grattan.

However, Michelle Grattan has not written a book which is in direct commercial competition with one she is reviewing.

Naparstek also claims Wallace is best qualified to review Kent’s book – by virtue of being the author of a rival biography of Gillard. Bizarre.

There’s a fair bit of obfuscation in Naparstek’s defence of his editorial decision. Whether or not Dr Sally Warhaft, a former editor of The Monthly, is a friend of Kent’s (and in the public realm, the fact that she was somehow involved in launching Kent’s book can’t be taken as evidence of that) seems to me to be entirely irrelevant, and to only serve to revive the pointless and inward looking arguments about the ramifications of her relationship with Robert Manne as chair of the magazine’s editorial board. It’s unwise, I’d have thought, to even give this sort of thing the remotest airing in public. And particularly unwise for Manne himself to appear to be the one conjuring this spectre. It’s only going to reinforce the (reasonable) perception that the affairs of The Monthly are still driven by impenetrable circle jerk arguments of no interest or relevance to its readers.

The last thing anyone wants to read is another 3000 word treatise on who said what to whom in some Melbourne restaurant. It’s about as interesting as an email exchange between Gerard Henderson and Robert Manne.

Leaving that looming potential pr disaster aside, how difficult is it actually to understand that Wallace doesn’t get a free pass for trashing a book in direct competition with her own by disclosing that she’s writing one?

To frame this as a “biography war” surely only draws attention to the ethical vacuity behind the decision to commission Wallace’s review in the first place. It’s pretty much an admission that what is really going on is trolling for a controversy, and that – as with all the other “wars” – the putative subject of the interchange will be lost in the fog at the moment of its declaration. This silliness should not be allowed to obscure the basic fact of the elicitation of a blatant conflict of interest by The Monthly. It’s as simple as that.

Elsewhere: Andrew Crook in Crikey.

Update: Andrew Norton writes:

While editors do need to exercise judgment about what impact apparent conflicts of interest will have on a review, avoiding them entirely is very difficult.

Perhaps, but that’s not an argument in my view, for not leaning over backwards to avoid conflicts. Norton appears to give some solace to Naparstek in his claim that Wallace was somehow uniquely qualified to review Kent’s work by virtue of being in the process of writing her own (rival) book. That seems to me to be an entirely spurious claim, because any purported expertise Wallace might bring to the scrutiny of Kent’s work could not – in the eyes of any reasonable reader – avoid the trap of being vitiated by their opposing commercial interests.

Since it was announced in April, barely a peep has been heard from the Grattan Institute, Kevin Rudd’s $50 million super think tank named after a street abutting Melbourne University. Headed by ex-McKinsyite John Daley, it’s supposed to mimic the Washington-based Brookings Institution, the think-tank of choice for Clinton-era centrists. But if the list of backers is any guide, the local version’s shaping up as the intellectual playground for a new-Ruddism, backed by a truckload of taxpayer cash.

The Institute says it will be “apolitical”, dealing with “fact-based” conundrums, as if facts are ideologically neutral and government the preserve of disinterested policy wonks. But it really represents the dawning of a new era as the right-wing think tanks of decades past are subsumed by the ALP-connected. Add Grattan to outfits like OzProspect and PerCapita — whose bright sparks attempt to solve society’s problems through their own enlightened managerialism — and you’ve got an intellectual revolution afoot.

Grattan (nothing to do with Michelle, apparently) is the brainchild of ex-Victorian public service scion Terry Moran. Moran was picked to head the Prime Minister’s department in February and the Institute got the green light shortly afterwards. Its chief spruiker and chairman is the illustrious Allan Myers QC and the board reads like a who’s who of plugged-in elites including Melbourne University Vice Chancellor Glyn Davis and Moran’s VPS successor Helen Silver. Victorian Treasurer John Lenders is also involved — his government matched Canberra’s initial $15 million cash injection.

A horrified John Roskam of the right-leaning Institute for Public Affairs said last month that he’d be “absolutely amazed if it [Grattan] could accommodate an opinion critical of a Labor government.” He has every reason to be concerned — the IPA, and its ideological bedfellows at the Centre for Independent Studies and Gerard Henderson’s Sydney Institute have been effectively frozen out of the national debate. The idea of Rudd launching a major policy initiative alongside someone like Henderson, as John Howard did with the Intervention, is all but unthinkable.

At the other end of the ideological spectrum, the union-funded Catalyst, with a shoestring budget of $220,000 per year and 1.4 full-time staff, hopes Rudd’s ideas factory won’t monopolise debate and discussion at the expense of actual progressive thought:

“I would hope that the Grattan Institute would reach out from the policy insiders and build community links with other independent think tanks,” Catalyst Executive Officer Jo-anne Schofield told Crikey.

“I think it would be a real shame if it marginalised progressive thinking. It should support a freer model of thinking.”

But the Grattan Institute is on different plane — it’s shaping up as a quasi arm of government that replaces frank and fearless advice with something eminently more pliable. The irony is that the Rudd Government’s obsession with experts (detailed in Crikey earlier this year) reflects less a return to a disinterested public service and more a proliferation of pick-and-mix advice witnessed at 2020. Grattan is looking like a permanent 2020, staffed by wonks rather than celebrities.

Even if Grattan was to evolve as a crucible for a vibrant ‘new-Ruddism’, it ignores the complete lack of content at the centre-left’s ideological core. Third Way trailblazers like Demos (remember their 14-dimensional plan to save child care?) are now so out of favour among governments as to appear a sad anachronism. Of course, think tanks have been historically the preserve of the political right — they provide a haven for pro-business ideas likely to founder in the face of mass democracy or social movements. Their left and centre-left derivations represent for the most part a backlash.

Crikey understands the PM was hunkered down at Grattan Street’s Prince Alfred Hotel last weekend celebrating the birthday of one of Glyn Davis’ offspring. It’s safe to assume the duo was also toasting the endless possibilities for a $50 million ideas quango to call their very own.

History classes should start with the history of the Jews, then move on to the Greeks and Romans, then the history of Britain, Mr Abbott said.

None of this seems to me to be particularly informed comment, or worthy of the importance the history warriors themselves supposedly place on the issue. It’s clearly absurd to teach Australian history as if it doesn’t have a global context.

Stuart Macintyre’s views are outlined in this interview.

What surprises me, though, is that no one has picked up on the fact that Macintyre’s justification draws heavily on Anna Clark’s work in her book History’s Children: History Wars in the Classroom. Clark interviewed a large number of both Australian and Canadian school students on what they liked and disliked and would like to see in the teaching of national history. A world history context was a theme brought up by the students again and again. Some of Clark’s research is highlighted in this article in Overland.

These guys have too much time on their hands? Or the most pressing public issues of the day are related to positions adopted in the late 1960s on Suharto’s crimes in Indonesia?