03/18/2002 "Neutral tone reveals mind of Howard "

Neutral tone reveals mind of Howard
By Robert Manne (Sydney Morning Herald)

Last week one of the noblest and most liberal-spirited public figures in contemporary Australia, Justice Michael Kirby, was savagely attacked in the Senate by Bill Heffernan, a junior minister in the Howard Government.

Those with an interest in Australian politics need to try to understand why an attack of such a kind was mounted and what, if anything, the Heffernan attack might signify. The most common and least disturbing explanation of last week's incident is the one which focuses exclusively on the peculiar sexual obsessions of the man who launched the attack.

No-one who has read Heffernan's rather disordered Senate speech could doubt that his anti-homosexual passions run deep. He appears, for example, genuinely to believe that there are large numbers of gay men in prominent positions who "see sex with children as a perk of office". He is either incapable or unwilling to distinguish between homosexuality and pedophilia. He argues that those who engaged in homosexual acts in NSW, before such practices were legalised in 1984, are presently in such danger of blackmail or even prosecution that retrospective legislation protecting them is urgently required. All this is seriously weird.

Far more disturbing than Senator Heffernan's personal nightmares, however, is the role played by John Howard in last week's affair. We know that Heffernan is one of Howard's closest personal and political friends. We also know that Heffernan informed Howard last year of his intention to launch an attack on Justice Kirby. Howard has told us he "counselled" Heffernan against the misuse of parliamentary privilege. Obviously, however, he failed to make it clear to his minister that he was not a free agent in this matter but a member of a government; that if he indulged in a vendetta against a High Court judge, serious political and constitutional issues involving the Government would arise; and that, therefore, if he launched an attack on Kirby without government approval he would, of course, have to be dismissed from the ministry at once.

Before Heffernan's attack, Howard appears to have played a curious waiting game. Following it, he adopted an even more curious position of neutrality, neither condoning nor condemning Heffernan had done. Heffernan was not sacked from the ministry but allowed to step down, pending the final outcome of the case. Howard expressed his confidence in the character of Bill Heffernan whom he called a "decent and likeable" man. Howard forbade Coalition members from supporting a Senate motion of apology to Justice Kirby for what Heffernan had done. While he acknowledged that on some occasions privilege might be abused, he also reminded us, rather inscrutably, that on other occasions the use of privilege played a most salutary public role.

Concerning the general question of the place of homosexuality in public life, Howard informed us that he took a "tolerant" but nevertheless a "conservative" view, leaving it to the citizenry to try to fathom what precisely he might mean. Concerning the Heffernan-Kirby question in particular, he adopted his characteristic pose as the man of commonsense who had found the middle way between the zealots of the Right, who thought that after Heffernan's parliamentary assault Kirby ought to step down from the bench, and the zealots of the Left, who thought the Heffernan attack an unmitigated disgrace.

Just as, by his eloquent silence following Pauline Hanson's maiden speech, Howard encouraged a hostile populist wind to blow up over questions of Asian immigration, multiculturalism and Aboriginal reconciliation, so now has his post-Heffernan search for the reasonable middle ground bestowed a kind of political and moral legitimacy upon the most virulent expression of homophobia Australian public life has witnessed for very many years.

Howard has described himself as the most conservative prime minister in Australian history. From one point of view this seems to me quite wrong. Conservatives normally defend established institutions. Under Howard, supposedly autonomous institutions which have displeased the Government - like the Federal Court over refugee law, the High Court over native title, the ABC over everything - have been subjected to open attack. But from another point of view, the claim of the Howard Government to a deep conservatism is true.

Since the 1960s all Western societies have been engaged in a process of searching self-criticism with regard to the radically unequal manner in which women or racial outsiders or indigenous peoples or homosexuals have been regarded and treated, according both to tradition and to law. All have been transformed by a profound revolution in sensibility concerning questions of race and ethnicity, gender and sex. All have, too, been wracked by cultural conflicts between those who have embraced this revolution with enthusiasm and those who are uncomfortable about the emergence of a society where women or blacks or Asians or Aborigines or gays are treated and regarded according to an evolving ethic and practice of genuine equality.

Of all the Australian governments of the past 30 years, Howard's is by far the most ill-at-ease with the moral temper of the post-1960s. Howard and his natural allies - Abbott, Ruddock, Minchin, Tuckey, Lightfoot, Heffernan and so on - feel a deep ambivalence about the revolution which has turned upside-down the assumptions about gender, race, ethnicity and sexuality of the world into which they were born.

Because of its lack of sympathy for the post-1960 attitudes to race and ethnicity, Howard and the Coalition's cultural Right are generally indifferent to the cause of Aboriginal reconciliation, hostile to any genuine exploration of multiculturalism and have proven themselves capable of treating Muslim asylum seekers with a depth of cruelty that would be inconceivable if the refugees were European.

Similarly, because of a profound ambivalence over the complete emancipation of homosexuals from the marginalisation, contempt and persecution they experienced in the not-so-distant past, the fact that a grotesque attack should emanate from a member of the Howard inner circle on an openly gay High Court judge and that, even more significantly, such an attack should be treated with sympathetic toleration by the Government as a whole, comes, for me at least, as no surprise at all.

Robert Manne is associate professor of politics at La Trobe University.