Limits to power
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 3: Webs of Power
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Gerard Henderson
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Gerard Henderson's biography and other articles by this writer
The Catholic catechism of old commenced with the question "Who made the world?" The answer was unambiguous: "God made the world."
If The Australian Financial Review Magazine's annual "Power" survey took the pedagogical form of a catechism it would begin with the following question: "Who controls Australia?" And the answer: "John Howard controls Australia". Journalist Andrew Clark said as much when he started his article on "politics" in the October 2003 "Issues of Power" survey: "Prime Minister John Howard commands all he surveys ... This is the consensus of The AFR Magazine's Power Panel's review of the political scene seven-and-a-half years into John Howard's prime ministership."
In 2003, the Power Panel consisted of Rod Cameron, Allan Fels, Bob Hogg, Neer Korn, Sandra Levy, Robert Manne, Max Moore-Wilton, Grahame Morris, Helen Nugent, Heather Ridout, Philippa Smith, Mike Tilley and Catherine Walter. Each was described by AFR Magazine editor Brook Turner as a "prominent" Australian who is "a connoisseur of the exercise of power". Together they drew up a "Power List" that "gives an unparalled picture of who is wielding power in 2003, and how". Top of the (Power) Pops in 2003 were – in order – John Howard, Rupert Murdoch, Peter Costello, Ian Macfarlane, Bob Carr, Alan Jones, Kerry Packer, Peter Cosgrove, Simon Crean and Alexander Downer. All were said to exercise "overt power". But do they really?
Take the Prime Minister, for example. In private conversation he is more likely to focus on the restraints of office rather than discuss options for the exercise of overt power. John Howard is one of the most successful and significant leaders in Australian political history. Yet the Liberal Party/National Party Coalition does not have a majority in the Senate. The Coalition's policy platform has been constrained across a range of issues, including the full privatisation of Telstra, border protection, media laws, health in general and the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme in particular, eligibility for disability pensions, higher education reform – along with a host of industrial relations matters from strengthening the bans on secondary boycotts to winding back the unfair dismissal laws.
Clark and the AFR Power Panel may well believe that "John Howard commands all he surveys". However, it is most unlikely that any such self-assessment would be heard in Sydney's Kirribilli House or at the Lodge in Canberra. The same can be said for all the other members of the "overt power" list. Treasurer Peter Costello and Foreign Minister Alexander Downer share John Howard's policy frustrations. Media proprietors Rupert Murdoch and Kerry Packer have not been able to achieve their wishes with respect to Australia's media laws. Premier Bob Carr's government does not have a majority in the New South Wales Legislative Council. General Cosgrove, properly, implements the policy of Australia's democratically elected leaders. Alan Jones can be heard on the electronic media berating governments – federal and state alike – for not doing what he believes they should be doing. When opposition leader, Simon Crean's policy importance turned on deciding whether or not to support the Coalition's legislation in the Senate. This leaves Ian Macfarlane. Certainly there are few limits on the Reserve Bank governor's autonomy to set interest rates. Yet control over monetary policy is but part of overall economic policy.
Then there are the AFR panel's views about "covert power" and "cultural power". Winners in the former category include businessman Frank Lowy and journalist Maxine McKew. In the latter category are ABC chairman Donald McDonald and businessman Richard Pratt. In October 2003, Lowy let it be known that he did not believe that Dr Hanan Ashrawi should have been awarded the 2003 Sydney Peace Prize. She was, and it was handed to her by Bob Carr. Pratt, so far at least, has not been able to persuade the Howard Government to implement his policy agenda on water and immigration. McDonald has failed to win additional funding for the ABC, despite his personal friendship with the Prime Minister. And McKew's potential for what Rod Cameron described as causing "turmoil" turns on her ability to take influential Australians to lunch (on the record) with her.
THE PROBLEM WITH THE POWER LIST IS THAT THE CONCEPT of power is incompatible with democracy. Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler were unelected dictators who ruled by power. Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt were elected leaders who governed with authority. John Howard does not "command all he surveys" in Australia. Rather, he exercises the authority of the prime ministerial office. This makes Howard the most influential Australian, in a policy sense. But it also means that, on occasions, he has to make concessions and to enter into coalitions in order to achieve outcomes. Moreover, the Prime Minister does not control the state governments – although he can influence the amount of Commonwealth payments to the states. It is the premiers and chief ministers – currently all Labor – who administer education, hospitals and policing. And, of course, Howard does not control the High Court or the Federal Court – even though he makes appointments to both bodies.
It is much the same with the Power Panel's findings about covert and cultural power. Both are misnomers. What is being examined here is really influence, not power. To different degrees and in different areas, the likes of Frank Lowy, Richard Pratt, Donald McDonald and Maxine McKew – and more besides – exercise influence. Because they cannot implement their agendas, they do not wield power.
Modern democratic politics is all about authority, influence, compromise and coalitions. It is not at all about power. Invariably it has been ideological thinkers who have argued to the contrary – initially leftists, more recently conservatives.
THE POWER ELITE (OXFORD PRESS), WRITTEN BY THE AMERICAN LEFTIST RADICAL C. Wright Mills (1916-1962), was published in 1959. Mills identified the composition of what he termed a "power elite": "They are in command of the major hierarchies and organisations of modern society. They rule the big corporations. They run the machinery of the state and claim its prerogatives. They direct the military establishment. They occupy the strategic command posts of the social structure in which are now centred the effective means of the power and the wealth and the celebrity which they enjoy ... By the power elite, we refer to those political, economic and military circles which as an intricate set of overlapping cliques share decisions having at least national consequences. In so far as national events are decided, the power elite are those who decide them."
The power-elite theory soon became popular in Australia with both social democrats and Marxists and two years later resulted in the publication of Sol Encel's pamphlet Is There an Australian Power Elite? (Chifley Memorial Lecture, 1961). The question in the title was answered in the second paragraph. The social-democratic pamphleteer declared: "Of course there is a power elite in Australia ... in any organised society there is bound to be a power elite, in the sense of a more or less stable body of people who effectively exercise authority, influence and power."
Yet the attempt to transplant Wright Mills's thesis to Australia was not without its problems. In his essay "The Ideology Makers" (Dissent, Winter 1964), Hugo Wolfsohn argued: "... We must emancipate ourselves from the power-elite syndrome. Otherwise we get into Encel's difficulties when he asserts the existence of a power elite emphatically on page 3 of his Chifley Memorial Lecture, denies its existence on page 21 and discovers its gradual emergence on page 23."
The summer 1965 issue of Arena magazine published "A Symposium on Power in Australia" featuring Encel and Wolfsohn. Halfway through his paper, Encel commented: "It has taken me a long time to get around to the question whether there is a power elite in Australia. Let me make my position quite clear by saying that, in my opinion, the answer is no."
Encel acknowledged that Wolfsohn had "introduced the very useful notion of a continuum of influence". In his essay, Wolfsohn looked at Australian society in the early 1960s and saw not one identifiable power elite but rather "a plethora of elites among whom business executives, highly placed public servants and politicians exist side by side without showing signs of ideological or social coalescence". He accepted the existence of "an Australian establishment", the members of which "enjoy, or at least believe they enjoy, a particular type of influence". But not untrammelled power.
As Encel acknowledged in his Arena article, the left in Australia had long argued that the rich ran the nation. This was the theme in such pamphlets as Frank Anstey's Money Power (1921) and J.T. Lang's Why I Fight (1934). Anstey was a socialist activist who became a federal MP before quitting the ALP. Lang was a socialist, of anti-communist disposition, who also split with Labor. Both men, on occasions, exhibited certain anti-semitism. There were also such socialist tracts as Brian Fitzpatrick's Monopoly Business: Financial Facts (1941) and E.L. Wheelwright's Ownership and Control of Australian Companies (1957). The Communist Party ran a similar line: initially, J.N. Rawling's Who Owns Australia? (1937) and E.W. Campbell's pamphlet The 60 Families Which Own Australia published in 1963 in the wake of the power-elite debate sparked by Mills. Both Rawlings and Campbell presented a Marxist analysis where the base determined the superstructure. Rawlings was one of the few communists who quit the party in 1939 in protest at the Hitler-Stalin pact.
Campbell advocated the implementation of the Communist Party of Australia's program in order "to take away from the 60 rich families the great power they wield over the life of the nation and its people". In a sense, the author was afflicted by the psychological phenomenon of projection. He was projecting onto Australia the situation that actively existed in his ideal society, the totalitarian Soviet Union – where a small elite exercised real power without qualification. In Australia in the 1960s, on the other hand, elites competed to exercise influence – and no one person or family or institution exercised absolute power.