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  In the encyclical, the analysis of the condition of contemporary culture in turn provides the explanation for the most troubling puzzle of the modern era, our abject failure thus far to rise to the challenge of global warming, a failure that explains why the encyclical argues that our generation is likely to be seen as the most irresponsible in history. Climate change denialism is the obvious self-interest of the economically powerful forces of society who, in the words of the encyclical, “mask the problems … and conceal the symptoms”. “Is it realistic to hope,” the encyclical inquires, “that those who are obsessed with maximising profits will stop to reflect on the environmental damage which they leave behind for future generations?” But there also exists something more common than outright climate change denialism, a climate change inertia which is fostered, according to the encyclical, by “a false or superficial ecology which bolsters complacency and cheerful recklessness”. The encyclical’s account of the psychological mechanism supporting climate change inertia is unusually shrewd and thus worth quoting at some length.

  As often occurs in periods of deep crisis which require bold decisions, we are tempted to think that what is happening is not entirely clear … Such evasiveness serves as a licence to carrying on with our present life-styles and models of production and consumption. This is the way human beings contrive to feed their self-destructive vices: trying not to see them, trying not to acknowledge them, delaying the important decisions and pretending that nothing will happen.

  Pope Francis is also shrewd about the climate change denialism and the climate change inertia found in the ranks of his fellow Catholics. “It must be said that some committed and prayerful Christians, with the excuse of realism and pragmatism, tend to ridicule expressions of concern for the environment. Others are passive; they choose not to change their habits and become inconsistent.” This passage might have been written with Cardinal Pell in mind. Come to think of it, perhaps it was.

  Despite everything, however, it would involve a profound misreading of the encyclical to imagine that it was written without a belief that there are real and not merely confected grounds for hope. The encyclical is entirely unambiguous in the praise it offers the international environmental movement for its intelligence of judgement and its achievements. “Worldwide, the ecological movement has made significant advances … Thanks to their efforts, environmental questions have increasingly found a place on public agendas.” Even though the encyclical recognises how difficult it is for the younger generation who “have grown up in a milieu of extreme consumerism and affluence” to develop different habits, it knows that many are aware of what is happening to the common home of the human family and of the terrible betrayal by their parents’ generation. It argues that they possess “a new ecological sensitivity and generous spirit”. Yet the grounds for hope in the encyclical rest ultimately on a faith in certain enduring and unexpungable qualities of what can only be called the human spirit. We have been endowed with free will which means that human history reveals both “decadence and mutual destruction” but also “freedom, growth, salvation and love”. Humans can transcend “their mental and social conditioning”. They are “born for love”. “No system can completely suppress our openness to what is good, true and beautiful.” “All is not lost.” This thought weaves its way throughout the encyclical, lightening the darkness. On occasions it is expressed quite wonderfully. “An authentic humanity … seems to dwell in the midst of the technological culture, almost unnoticed, like a mist seeping gently beneath a closed door.” Pope Francis reminds us of the story from Genesis of the innocent and just man, Noah, who lived at a time when “the wickedness of man was great in the earth”. Through him, however, God “gave humanity the chance of a new beginning. All it takes is one good person to restore hope!”

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  As I am incapable of locating Laudato Si’ within the frame of Catholic thought, what I have tried to provide here is a political reading. So have others. Some right-wing critics have claimed that the encyclical reveals that the Pope is a secret Marxist. This seems to me preposterous. Marxism is a materialist philosophy if it is anything. The encyclical is an expression of religious thought throughout and, philosophically speaking, of idealism. If a concern for the poor, or the rejection of radical inequality, or suspicion about the self-interested behaviour of the mega-wealthy is to be regarded as Marxist, there exists a global army of Marxists far mightier than I have ever imagined it to be. Another critique links the encyclical with the kind of anti-modernism or “cultural pessimism” that was found on the far right of Europe especially during the interwar period. This is a more plausible critique but also I believe quite mistaken. At the heart of interwar cultural pessimism was an elitist contempt for “the masses” and a hatred of democracy. What is unusual in the encyclical is the marriage of a critique of contemporary post-industrial culture with the most profound and sincere democratic beliefs and instincts. In its rejection of the spirit of our technological-industrial-consumer society there are undoubtedly similarities between the encyclical and the sociological critique of modernity expressed most profoundly in the work of Zygmunt Bauman. Yet there is a religious and transcendental element found in the encyclical, which is entirely absent in Bauman. Of all major contemporary political thinkers of whom I am aware, the one who most closely resembles Francis is Vaclav Havel, in whose great work The Power of the Powerless several major tendencies of the encyclical can be found – hostility to the technological-industrial-consumer society, profound democratic faith, and a notion of transcendence grounded in the idea of the human spirit. Havel’s masterwork was however written before the problem of climate change became apparent.

  With mainstream climate change writers and activists, like Al Gore or Nicholas Stern, who believe that political will and technological ingenuity will provide democratic capitalist society with a benign exit from the climate crisis, Francis shares only acceptance of the conclusions of the climate scientists and an anxiety about the inertia of the international community’s response thus far. He shares more with the radical anti-capitalist green Left, of whom presently the most important activist-writer is Naomi Klein, and in particular an understanding that only a transformative revolution can provide us with an exit from the impending climate tragedy. However while the revolution Klein looks for is political and economic, the end of what I call “really existing capitalism”, the revolution that Francis’s vision requires is cultural and spiritual. If I am not mistaken, the word capitalism is not to be found in the papal encyclical. There is however one major climate activist-writer, Bill McKibben, whose anti-technological and anti-industrial writings, as seen in The End of Nature or more recently in Oil and Honey, rather closely resemble Laudato Si’, in sensibility at least if not in formal argument. Immediately after reading the encyclical, McKibben wrote in the New York Review of Books:

  My own sense, after spending the day reading this remarkable document, was of great relief … This marks the first time that a person of great authority in our global culture has fully recognised the scale and depth of our crisis, and the consequent necessary rethinking of what it means to be fully human.

  This was my sentiment as well.

  Sentiment is however not enough, as McKibben himself concedes. It will take considerable time for the meaning of the encyclical to be absorbed and assessed. When I think back on the impact on my political thought of Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism, I can recognise now that, while I learned an enormous amount from it, on certain issues I was seriously misled. In his furious attack on the encyclical in the Australian, Paul Kelly wondered whether the environmental movement across the globe and in Australia would have “the nous” to seize the political opportunity occasioned by the publication of the encyclical. I hope that it does. The first step ought however not to involve propaganda, as Kelly fears, but engagement in a vital but also a difficult debate. Although it will not be easy to find a balance between the world views of Al Gore and Pope F
rancis, that is what, in my opinion, those concerned about the wellbeing of the Earth are now called upon to do.

  The Monthly blog, 1 July 2015

  THE MURDOCH EMPIRE

  BAD NEWS

  I took the decision to write this essay in September 2010. I had long been concerned with the role the Australian had played over the question of action on climate change. By then I was also convinced that this newspaper, which had played an important part in the unravelling of the Rudd government, would not rest until it saw the end of the Gillard government and the destruction of the Labor–Greens alliance. However, there was more to the decision than this.

  The Australian is in my view the country’s most important newspaper. Under Chris Mitchell it has evolved into a kind of broadsheet perhaps never before seen here. It is an unusually ideological paper, committed to advancing the causes of neo-liberalism in economics and neo-conservatism in the sphere of foreign policy. Its style and tone are also unlike that of any other newspaper in the nation’s history. The Australian is ruthless in pursuit of those who oppose its world view – market fundamentalism, minimal action on climate change, the federal intervention in Indigenous affairs, uncritical support for the American alliance and for Israel, opposition to what it calls political correctness and moral relativism. It exhibits distaste, even hatred, for what it terms “the Left”, and in particular for the Greens. It is driven by contempt for its two natural rivals, the Fairfax press and the ABC, one of which it seems to wish to destroy altogether, the other of which it seeks to discredit for its supposed left-wing bias and to reshape. Both the Fairfax newspapers and the ABC are constantly attacked and belittled by the Australian. Yet at least until the Murdoch empire was weakened in early July 2011, for the most part they turned the other cheek.

  The Australian is a remorseless campaigning paper; during the years of the Rudd government against the Building the Education Revolution program and the National Broadband Network. In these campaigns its assigned journalists appear to begin with their editorially determined conclusion and then to seek out evidence to support it. The paper is also unusually self-referential and boastful, heaping extravagant praise upon itself for its acumen and prescience almost on a daily basis, never failing to inform its readers that it was the first to report something or the only paper to provide real scrutiny or intelligent interpretation. Related to its boastfulness is the Australian’s notorious sensitivity to criticism. It regularly explodes with indignation and rage when criticised. It also bears many grudges. The Australian never forgave former Victorian police commissioner Simon Overland, who once had the temerity to complain about its behaviour on the eve of an anti-terrorist raid in Melbourne. It did not rest until his career was ruined. Not even then. It also has an intensely aggressive culture, described to me by close observers as bullying or swaggering or macho. Chris Mitchell is determined that his paper will be talked about, a style that his editor, Clive Mathieson, described vividly in an interview with me as “elbows out”. In no other newspaper is the spirit of the editor-in-chief so omnipresent, either directly through the editorials – the daily morning missives to the nation which he inspires – or indirectly throughout its pages. Mitchell is frequently interviewed by his own journalists. He uses those he most trusts to fight his battles with his many enemies. In a profile of him written by Sally Neighbour for the Monthly, David Marr described his uncanny ability to personalise everything he deals with as his peculiar “genius”. Because of the charismatic authority over his journalists exercised by Mitchell, and because of the costs that are paid by anyone in his paper who defies him, one very senior journalist likened the atmosphere inside the Australian to that of a cult.

  The Australian is this country’s only genuinely national general newspaper, with a readership in every state and territory and in the capital cities, the regional towns and rural areas. Although its weekday sales are small – somewhere between 100,000 and 130,000 – it is extremely well resourced by its proprietor, able to employ many of Australia’s best journalists. As a consequence, as I learned in interviews with Senator Bob Brown and with senior members of the Gillard government, the Australian now dominates the Canberra press gallery not only in the number of journalists employed – at some press conferences half of those attending are from the Australian – but also in the aggression its reporters display and their capacity for teamwork in pursuit of their prey. Because of the dominant position it has assumed in its Canberra coverage, the Australian influences the way the much more widely read News Limited tabloids, like the Daily Telegraph and the Herald Sun, report national politics and frequently sets the agenda of commercial radio and television and the ABC, even the upmarket breakfast program on Radio National. The Australian is in addition the only newspaper that is read by virtually all members of the political class, a group that includes politicians, leading public servants, business people and the most politically engaged citizens. Even those members of the political class who loathe the paper understand that they cannot afford to ignore it. Most importantly of all, the Australian has now transcended the traditional newspaper role of reporter or analyst to become an active player in both federal and state politics. As such it exercises what Stanley Baldwin once called, in describing the influence of the great press barons of his era, “power without responsibility”.

  Under Chris Mitchell the Australian has become one of the most important political forces in the country. No realistic account of power in contemporary Australia can afford to ignore it.

  THE MAKING OF KEITH WINDSCHUTTLE

  Australia was founded on the basis of the destruction of Aboriginal society. As a result, no question has so haunted the national imagination. During the course of the long dispossession, historians described the process of destruction with emotions ranging from racist denigration and callous indifference to genuine pity. Following the dispossession, as the anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner was the first to observe, the story of the destruction of Aboriginal society was excised from the history books in a psychologically complex process he described as “the great Australian silence”. Australia became “the quiet continent”. In the creation of the nation “no blood had been spilt”. It was only in the late 1960s and beyond – through the seminal Boyer Lectures delivered by Stanner, through the groundbreaking trilogy on the dispossession and its aftermath by the great scholar C.D. Rowley, and through the many books of Henry Reynolds – that the destruction of Aboriginal society returned from the period of repression to become a central question of Australian history.

  In late 2002 Keith Windschuttle published the first volume of The Fabrication of Aboriginal History. The book represented the first substantial challenge from the Right to the understanding of the meaning of the dispossession that had transformed national consciousness from the 1960s. Windschuttle chose to begin his history with Tasmania, where between 1803 and 1834 the entire “full-blood” Indigenous population, thought by scholars to have numbered about 4000 or 5000 people, had either died or been exiled to Flinders Island. Tasmania was an interesting choice for the first volume. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the fate of the Indigenous Tasmanians had stirred the European moral imagination more profoundly than that of any other Indigenous Australian group. In 1943 Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish jurist, coined a legal term for the idea of the total destruction of a people: genocide. Lemkin himself wrote extensively on the question of the destruction of the Tasmanian Aborigines. Before Windschuttle published the first volume of his Fabrication, not only in the scholarly textbooks but also in common understanding in Australia and beyond, the idea that the Tasmanian Aborigines had suffered genocide was an almost uncontested common wisdom. Oddly enough, the conventional idea that the Tasmanian Aborigines had been the victims of a successful genocide was resisted by two of the scholars Windschuttle had most firmly in his sights. In The Aboriginal Tasmanians, Lyndall Ryan claimed that the “conscious policy of genocide” had failed. Quite differently, in An Indelible Stain?
, Henry Reynolds argued that in Tasmania there had been no British government policy of genocide.

  In Fabrication Windschuttle argued that in the British settlement of Tasmania a mere 118 Aborigines had been killed. Far from it being a case of genocide, as the left-wing fabricators of Aboriginal history supposedly claimed, Windschuttle argued that the establishment of the colony was one of the most gentle in the history of the British Empire. There had been no Black War. The Aborigines had no concept of land or property. Their misguided attacks on the British settlers were nothing more than criminal acts motivated exclusively by the desire for consumer goods. Windschuttle could not deny that thirty years after the arrival of the British almost all the original Indigenous people had died, with a tiny remnant exiled to Flinders Island. He attributed their sudden demise to their susceptibility to introduced disease and to the willingness of the menfolk to prostitute their women by handing them over to the British arrivals. Unhappily, the Tasmanians were so backward a people that they were unable to generate a leadership wise enough to renounce their ancient way of life following the arrival of the British settlers and seize the bounty of British civilisation so generously offered them. This summary might appear a parody of Windschuttle’s argument. It is not.