Looking on the bright side: the risks - and rewards - of political optimism

Wyndham City Barry Jones Oration 2024, Werribee, 18 September 2024

We can all, I would guess, remember that scene from Monty Python’s Life of Brian from which I have drawn my title. Looking on the bright side did not end at all well for that particular choir.

There are certainly plenty of reasons right now for finding the present state of the world – and to some extent Australia – anything but bright. Internationally, they include global warming; deadly conflict and atrocity crimes in Ukraine, the Middle East, Myanmar and too much of Africa; the continuing worldwide misery of more than 120 million refugees and displaced persons; the continuing grinding poverty, huge gains in China and India notwithstanding, of the world’s bottom billion; the still endemic scale of modern slavery; the irrational intensity and sheer riskiness of the strategic competition between the US and China; the prevalence of authoritarian populist nationalism, including in Western democracies we had thought long grown out of it; the associated retreat from commitment to free and open global trade, and re-emergence of mindless beggar-thy-neighbour economic policy.

And among the reasons for gloom domestically: the growing sense in our own country and many others of intergenerational inequity, that the next cohorts can no longer expect to do better than their parents; the defeat here of the Voice and our continuing failure to close the gap for Indigenous Australians; the continued reality of bamboo ceilings for racial minorities aspiring to leadership positions in both the public and private sectors; the unhappy reality that there still seems to be, in this most multicultural society, a political market for racist dog-whistling; and the dearth of willingness by political leaders even of genuine decency to tackle national interest issues which might involve even the most transient unpopularity.

So there is plenty for the Eeyores and Hanrahans all around us to be pessimistic about. But my argument will be that while some things are as bad as they seem, not all of them are, and believing them to be so tends to make things worse. There are plenty of risks in being what I rather bravely described myself as being in the title of my political memoir a few years ago, an ‘Incorrigible Optimist’. But there are also, I will suggest, some real rewards.

I’ve always been intrigued by the extent to which decision-makers, policymakers and those who influence them – both domestically and internationally – do tend to be divided those who instinctively look on the bright side and those who don’t. Of course, given life’s complexity and variability, any classification of human instincts or behaviour in starkly bipolar terms does run the risk of sliding into parody. (I can’t help remembering in this respect the solemn declaration by an Oxford philosophy tutor of mine long ago, absolutely incontestable as a matter of fact, that “there are two kinds of people in the world: those who wear nightcaps to bed, and those who don’t.”)

But I do think Manning Clark, out of fashion though he may be these days, was on to something, in those grand, sweeping rhetorical contrasts he loved to draw between the “life affirmers” and the “life deniers”, between the “mourners” and the “mockers”, between Henry Lawson’s “old dead tree” and “young green tree”, and maybe most memorable of all, between the “enlargers” and the “straiteners”. There just does seem to a mindset which is basically optimistic - open, embracing inquisitive, adventurous and positive; and another which is basically pessimistic – narrow, confined, cautious, and negative. Most people do seem to line up, instinctively or intuitively, on one side of this line or the other. And when they are influential in policymaking, it really does matter which way they do line up (not least for their own careers: enlargers do tend to get into much more trouble than straiteners!).

I don’t think you’ll be in any doubt as to which side of this divide describes the man whom we honour in this annual oration. Barry Jones is an irrepressible, irreplaceable living national treasure. The polymath’s polymath, and gadfly’s gadfly, he has had over the last fifty years or more an extraordinary amount to say of interest, relevance and real influence, over an extraordinarily wide spectrum of issues ranging from capital punishment, to science and technology, to history and higher education, to the arts to the quality of Australian politics and governance.

Just one of the legacies he will leave us, less well-known than it should be, is his Dictionary of World Biography, the product of a lifetime of learning, and a passion on which he has been working since the 1950s. Available free online from the ANU Press, as well as for hard copy purchase, it’s currently in its ninth edition, nearly 1,000 pages long with some 9,000 entries covering the world from the earliest times to the present and all major civilisations. Not just a reference book, but a marvellously readable smorgasbord of information, comment and entertainment. And Barry being Barry, his 92 years showing no great sign of wearying him, he is now putting the tenth edition to bed with another 100 plus pages of amendments and updates.

Barry Jones’s contributions to public policy debate, and the intellectual life and cultural life of this country. have been legion, and legendary. He has had his share of defeats and disappointments – certainly in politics, a bloody and dangerous trade which, as I can certainly testify, very few of its practitioners survive unscathed. But he has always been driven by a vision of a better society – a better, safer and saner world – and a belief that this is achievable if enough men and women of goodwill and competence believe in its possibility and strive relentlessly to make it so. Barry is one of a kind, and a role model for us all.

Being an optimist means believing that things can be better. It does not, and should not, mean believing that things are bound to be better. That way lies the risk of complacency. And there are too many troubling issues in the Australia and world of today about which policymakers and publics just cannot afford to be complacent, but in fact are looking on the bright side a little more than they should be. I think that is true, in fact, of the biggest threats of all that the world faces, the existential threats to life on this planet posed by climate change, pandemics and nuclear war.

As to climate change, the catastrophic long-run impact of unrestrained global warming is much better and more widely understood than it used to be, and outright sceptics are a diminishing force. But a sense of urgency about taking the necessary remedial action is still by no means universal. Too many still seem to believe that the problem will eventually solve itself, that technology will ultimately save us from the worst. But meanwhile, as the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) recently reported, the world is currently on track for 2.5-2.9℃ temperature rise above pre-industrial levels, far beyond the 1.5 ℃ we need to avoid the worst impact. And none of the G20 countries are currently reducing emissions at a pace consistent with their net zero by 2050 targets.

As to pandemics, complacency would be equally misplaced. Having conquered so many scourges over the last century, it was hard to believe that anything could be as bad again as the Bubonic Plague of the 14th century or the Flu Epidemic of the early 20th century. But Covid was a wake-up call as to state of the cooperative international mechanisms and instincts we will need if that comfortable confidence is to be justified: they both remain very fragile.

I find even more disconcerting the even greater complacency evident among policymakers and publics about nuclear war – that fears of such war are misplaced, that the bombs are for deterrence not warfighting, that no nuclear exchange has happened despite nearly 80 years of alarmist doomsaying and it won’t. It may be that no state, Russian chest-beating notwithstanding, will ever be crazy enough to make a deliberately aggressive first strike. But the prospects of a nuclear holocaust being unleashed by system error, or human error or misjudgement, are incredibly real. Given what we now know about the number of near misses during the Cold War, the limitations of command and control systems in a number of current nuclear-armed states, the number of weapons currently deployed and on hair trigger alert, and now the new risks posed by AI, it is nothing more than sheer dumb luck that such a catastrophe has so far been averted, and nothing more than wishful thinking that such luck will continue in perpetuity.

Let me add just one more example, closer to home, of the risks of complacency. I think too many Australians are excessively optimistic about the utility for us of the US alliance. The biggest security risk that we face in the next decade or two is not likely to be a major terrorist attack, or invasion by some northern regional neighbour thirsting for access to our land or mineral resources. It’s being drawn into a major war not of our own making out of a misplaced sense of optimism that by doing so we will be buying lifetime insurance protection from our great and powerful ally. If the US plunges into war over Taiwan, we have far more to lose than gain by joining in, but the AUKUS submarine deal seems clearly premised on the assumption – though no-one will admit it – that we will. And the ANZUS treaty, for all that we rely on it, actually offers zero guarantee that the US will come to our territorial defence, should we need it, if it does not see its own national interests being threatened.

All that said there are reasons for genuine optimism – not just ill-informed or mindless complacency – about many of the issues which many of us still find troubling. It is important to acknowledge, in way the straiteners and pessimists fail to do, just how much progress has been made on multiple fronts – things are not always as bad as they seem, particularly when looked at through an historical lens.

While war and violence sometimes seem to us to be ineradicably endemic in human nature, it’s worth stopping to think, as Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker reminds us in his brilliant 2011 historical overview, The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and its Causes: “customs such as slavery, serfdom, breaking on the wheel, disembowelling, bear-baiting, cat-burning, heretic-burning, witch-drowning, thief-hanging, public executions, the display of rotting corpses on gibbets, duelling, debtors prisons, flogging, keelhauling and other practices [have] passed from unexceptionable to controversial to immoral to unthinkable”.

Closer to home, it’s worthwhile stopping to think for a moment about – for all our continuing problems – just how much more civilised and decent our own country has become over the lifetime of most of us here. Let’s remember just how much was wrong about the Australia in which Barry Jones and I came to maturity sixty-plus years ago.

The White Australia policy was still in full force, and casual racism was omnipresent and unrestrained. There was rampant Protestant versus Catholic sectarianism. Indigenous land rights were undreamed of, and stolen-generation children were still being stolen. University education was something to which only a tiny minority could aspire.

There were rigid social expectations about the respective roles of men and women in the home and in relation to child-caring. Married women could not work in the public service. There was nothing remotely resembling equal pay for women. Women could not obtain bank loans without a male guarantor. There was no law against rape in marriage. Divorce required proof of adultery or other fault. There was no pill, and no legal right to abortion. Single mothers were socially stigmatised.

Homosexual acts were harshly criminalised, and gay marriage simply inconceivable. There was little recognition, respect or financial support for a great many of those with disabilities. There was still capital punishment. Censorship was universal. Civilised liquor laws were non-existent. The concept of animal rights was a joke in bad taste, and ethical vegetarianism a mark of extreme eccentricity.

There have been stunning shifts of community sentiment on all these fronts. For me, whose first-ever published article, over half a century ago, was an attack on the White Australia policy, perhaps the most moving of all has been the acceptance now of ethnic and cultural diversity in our community to an extent inconceivable when I was growing up. The 2024 Lowy Poll records 90 per cent of Australians as feeling mostly or entirely positive about the “country being open to people from all over the world”, with just 1 per cent as entirely negative.

Perhaps most miraculously of all to those of us (unlike Barry), who spent our early Saturday afternoons standing in the muddy outers of suburban football grounds, the kind of cringe-making racial abuse (not to mention poofter insults) that one used to hear all the time from the crowds around us now earns its perpetrators lifetime bans from attending matches.

None of these changes happened by themselves. They were campaigned for, endlessly and indefatigably, by legions of community agitators, occasionally supported by political leaders with visions equal to their own – all of them not only passionate about the need for change, but undeterred by setbacks and relentlessly optimistic about the possibility of its achievement. Barry Jones’s leadership of the campaign to abolish capital punishment is an iconic example; but so too was the role of WEL on women’s rights; and a legion of others fighting against racial discrimination, censorship, gay persecution and for a host of other civilizing causes.

Of course it is the case that a great many battles still remain to be fought if we are to achieve a safer, saner and more decent Australia, and wider world. I listed some of the most obvious of those challenges at the outset of this talk – from continuing conflict and atrocity crimes internationally to closing the gap on Indigenous advantage domestically. The degree of difficulty in achieving change for the better obviously varies enormously as between all these challenges. But I continue to believe that with the right kind of mindset, and leadership, a great deal more is achievable than we all too often pessimistically assume.

Internationally, as gloomy as the present outlook seems to be, the world of conflict prevention and resolution, human rights protection, economic fortune and misfortune, and political and diplomatic competition, never stands still. If things are no longer what they used to be, they never really were. Both new thinking, and the adaptation of old thinking to new circumstances, is constantly necessary. It’s happened in the past, and can happen again.

Let me give two examples of the power of new, and optimistic, thinking from my own experience in international policymaking.

One was the peace settlement in Cambodia in the early 1990s, which at the time seemed almost as intractable a problem as Israel-Palestine is now. Internal factions, the country’s ASEAN and Vietnam neighbours, and China, Russia and the United States were all tearing at each others’ throats, directly or through their proxies, and all diplomatic efforts to halt the civil war that had followed the Khmer Rouge genocide had failed. But we in Australia came up with the solution that broke the deadlock and did bring lasting peace (if not, sadly, as things turned out, human rights and democracy) to that tragic country. In short it was to give China a face-saving way of stopping its support for the Khmer Rouge by identifying an unprecedentedly hands on role for the United Nations in the government of the country during an agreed transitional period.

A second example was the creation in the early 2000s of a global consensus, which had never previously existed despite the Genocide Convention and other post WW2 human rights treaties, about how to respond to the horror of mass atrocity crimes of the kind which seared the worlds conscience when they erupted again in the Balkans and Rwanda in the mid-1990s. The global North had talked the talk (while not always walking the walk) of a “right of humanitarian intervention”, but the global South regarded this as anathema, just old imperialist sovereignty-denying militarism in a new guise.

A Canada-sponsored international commission which I co-chaired was able to cut through the deadlock by identifying a new norm, the “responsibility to protect” (R2P), which won unanimous support at the UN World Summit in 2005. The key to success was changing the language of the debate (from ‘right’ to ‘responsibility’, and from ‘intervention’ to ‘protection’); making clear that responsibility was shared by every state, not just the military big guys; broadening the focus from reaction to include prevention; and making clear that were many more reactive tools available than just military force, which should be used only with the endorsement of the UN Security Council as an extreme last resort.

R2P has had a mixed record over the last 20 years, with more successes than generally recognised but losing traction as intractable divisions resurfaced in the Security Council. But the horrors unfolding in Gaza, in particular, will hopefully serve as a wake-up call as to the absolute necessity of the world uniting again to ensure that genocide and other mass atrocity crimes, wherever they occur, are treated as indefensible assaults on our common humanity.

My observation from long international experience is that very few problems totally defy rational solution. If the will and capacity, and leadership, to address them is there the solutions are there. That has always been true of Israel-Palestine; it was demonstrably true of the Iran nuclear program until Donald Trump tore up the painfully negotiated JCPOA; it may well be true in Ukraine if both sides, with a bit more stalemated military exhaustion behind them, could accept the historical reality of Russian Crimea, and likely support through a plebiscite for a Russian Donbas; and it is certainly true of the potential for US-China détente, if both sides are genuinely prepared to focus on the benefits of cooperation rather than posturing confrontation. And it’s even true of the most obvious potential flashpoint in our own region, China-Taiwan. Although developments in Hong Kong have obviously not been helpful, it has always seemed to me at least conceivable that, if cooler heads can maintain the status quo long enough, common ground might ultimately found in the concept of a loosely federal “Greater Chinese Union".

As discouraging as the international environment may now be in so many ways, it is important to keep things in perspective. Pendulums do swing, wheels do turn, Presidents and Prime Ministers do change. Some recent elections in Europe, notably in Poland, have reversed the apparently inexorable tide of authoritarian populist nationalism. And in the US the alarming prospect of a second Trump presidency now seems rather less certain.

In Australia, we are blessed with a political and electoral system that not only makes the ascension to power of extremists much harder to achieve than in presidential systems, parliamentary systems based on first-past-the-post voting, and systems without compulsory voting. It also means that – frustrations of very short terms notwithstanding, and notwithstanding also periodic difficulties with a Senate whose minority party and independent members I once described as reminding me of the bar scene in Star Wars – we have a system which is not condemned to gridlock, one that does make change possible if governing parties want it badly enough.

There are always practical constraints – more often than not driven by economic winds and budgetary pressures – on how much any government can realistically achieve in any given period. But particularly when it comes to social policy – what I like to call decency – issues, and tackling the kind of big institutional governance reforms that would improve the quality of our democracy, how much can be achieved depends more than anything else on how much our political leaders want to achieve. It depends on their willingness and ability to articulate a vision of why we would be a better society with these reforms, to communicate and argue effectively for them, and demonstrate a capacity to deliver them effectively.

Nervous, defensive crouching, cautious plodding, seeing survival in office as being above all about making yourself a small target -- won’t cut it. Focusing overwhelmingly on the risks of offending some sections of the community rather than the rewards of exciting many more of them won’t cut it.

The Albanese Labor Government has enough obviously first-rate talent in its ministerial ranks to be a great reforming government in the Hawke-Keating tradition, one that sees political capital as something to be spent in office, not hoarded indefinitely while its value gradually erodes. But its instinct, on an increasing number of issues has been to move into cautious, defensive, wedge-avoiding mode – on gambling advertising, on electoral funding, on census questions, on the Makarrata, on any further commitment to constitutional reform of any kind, including the republic, and – perhaps most disconcertingly of all given the security and sovereignty stakes involved, AUKUS.

The Government’s reward for all this has not been an increase but a decline in its popularity. Other factors have of course contributed – not least cost of living and housing availability concerns, difficult now for even the most competent government to address – but one can’t avoid the impression that more and more people are asking what exactly is this Labor government for. It’s time for the party leadership to recover its mojo and tell them: a prosperous, secure and above all more decent society, of the kind that only a Labor government can deliver.

It has long been my belief that Australian politicians have underestimated the inherent decency, and over-estimated the cynicism and preoccupation with self-interest, of the Australian people. To take just one example among those I documented in my recent little book on Good International Citizenship: The Case for Decency, successive governments have allowed our overseas development assistance contributions to fall to lamentably, internationally-embarrassingly low levels, essentially because of an entrenched belief that these are among the easiest budgetary cuts to make: that Australians believe that charity begins at home, and many surveys have shown significant majorities saying we spend too much on foreign aid. But when one digs deeper a quite different story emerges. A Lowy Institute survey a few years ago revealed that community perceptions about the actual size of our aid spending were wildly inflated: people thought we spent 17 ½ times the amount we actually did – and when pressed to identify an acceptable amount, were happy for us to be 12½ times more generous than we actually were!

Of course having a decent vision has to be accompanied by real competence in explaining and selling it, something that was arguably not at the level it should have been in the management of the Voice referendum, the failure of which has been a major contributor to the loss of heart the Government has shown about pursuing major institutional and social reforms.

But above all what matters, to return one last time to the theme of this lecture, is maintaining a spirit of optimism about the art of the possible. If we want change for the better it is crucial that all of us who care maintain hope. Whether we be in governments or parliaments or intergovernmental organisations, in academia or think-tanks, or in the media, or in NGOs, or with influential social responsibility roles in the private sector, or just plain ordinary citizens with a passion for decency, we have to go on believing that what we do can and will make a difference.

The crucial point is that in public policy, as in life itself, outlooks can be self-reinforcing. Pessimists see conflict, horror, prejudice and crude self-interest as more or less inevitable, and adopt a highly wary approach to the conduct of just about everything else they do. But for optimists of all stripes and colours, what matters rather is believing in and nurturing the instinct of cooperation in the hope, and expectation, that decent human values will ultimately prevail.

If we want to change the world for the better, we must start by believing in the possibility of change. Like the man whose lifetime achievement we honour today, Barry Jones, I believe very much that such change is possible. I hope very much that you share that belief, and will act upon it.