Book reviews: Australia and the birth of the international bill of human rights (original) (raw)

This book is an exercise in revisionism. Frank Cain has an axe to grind with those who depict Jack Lang as a 'dodgy character', a political manipulator who got what he deserved: summary dismissal by New South Wales Governor Game, political marginalisation, and consistent condemnation by historians ever since. Cain has conducted an extraordinarily well-researched study that should demonstrate once and for all that everyone got it wrong: Jack Lang was a noble and wise statesman who did what he could to shelter the many NSW workers and unemployed against the burdens of poverty imposed on them by the combination of massive war debts and the Great Depression, and he was destroyed politically by a series of irresponsible, shortsighted federal governments acting in collusion with the British government, the British banks, big business, a bigoted governor and other reactionary forces. Yes, this is a study that analyses politics according to a classic good guys-bad guys scheme. Lang, whose own motives and actions are treated remarkably briefly and superficially in an otherwise well-documented study that bears his name in its title, is the tragic hero of the story, who ultimately is forced to a heroic defeat by forces too big for even him to handle. Cain's painstaking research has enabled him to reconstruct not only the public rhetoric and personal correspondence of the chief players in this seven-year drama but also the actual movement of money in the very complex web of loans, repayments, deferments, seizures and evasive manoeuvres that took place during this creeping politico-financial crisis in Australia's most important economy. He is quite convincing in showing how actions of the federal government in the wake of the Great War constrained the ability of the States to raise their own money and arrange their own debt repayments so as to develop arrangements that fit their needs and priorities. In fact, his entire book can be read as an impassioned plea for States' rights and against centralisation of the Australian federation. At the same time, it bears an uncanny resemblance to the debt relief controversies that rage in contemporary Africa and Latin America, in particular. Cain's good guys-bad guys scheme can easily be supplanted: the IMF, the G7 and the big banks are the bad guys, and Hugo Chavez and various other Left-leaning, neo-nationalist, anti-globalist Latin American presidents are the good guys. Whether they will end up as Lang-like Don Quixotes or successful odds-defying heroes remains to be seen. If the case of New South Wales in the 1920s and 1930s is any guide, the former is more likely than the latter. Cain's minute reconstruction of the saga is entertaining and gripping at times, although very densely spiced with intricate economic data. More importantly, the relentless hammering home of the good guys-bad guys scheme that overlays the entire project begins to irritate even the most neutral reader. Being a recent migrant to Australia and completely unprejudiced about the Lang-era battles, I found it impossible to escape the impression that the author's sheer drive to prove the mainstream opinion about Lang wrong got in the way of dispassionate, balanced analysis. Put simply: Lang is depicted consistently as a benevolent leader who is 'unsuspecting' of the vile plots being hatched against him by a federal government and its foreign co-conspirators bent on conducting a 'war' against him (military metaphors are employed consistently to describe the behaviour of anti-Lang actors). This is just too good to be true, particularly in view of the rather weighty evidence-almost completely ignored by Cain-unearthed over the years that Jack Lang was not exactly an angel. The sheer ferocity of the 'attack' of both Labor-and non-Labor-led federal governments against the Lang government remains incomprehensible, because the various actors' motives are assumed from rather simplistic ideological or positional schemes and subsequently framed negatively by liberal use of disqualifying and condemnatory adjectives rather than investigated empirically. Moreover, the wider political context of the times and the political style and position of Lang himself are left largely