• William Bowe

27 October 2009In the Australian Review of Public Affairs William Bowe reviews a new book from the Democratic Audit of Australia

THE QUALITIES or otherwise of democracy have been provoking controversy since ancient Greece. According to Plato’s Republic, Socrates believed democracy to be motivated by ‘an excessive desire for liberty at the expense of everything else’, which led in turn to ‘the demand for tyranny’. Somewhat more recently, American founding father James Madison argued that democracies in their pure form were ‘incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths’. Now that democracy has lost its pejorative connotations, contemporary argument turns upon the particular formulation of good things which can be said to constitute it.

In Australia, the meaning of the term has been one more battleground in the culture wars, over which the Howard Government continues to cast a long shadow. Depending which side one is on, the former Prime Minister can be said to have launched a full-scale assault on democracy, having ‘cowed his critics, muffled the press, intimidated the ABC, gagged scientists, silenced non-government organisations, neutered Canberra’s mandarins, curtailed parliamentary scrutiny, censored the arts, banned books, criminalised protest and prosecuted whistleblowers’; or, on the other side of the fence, to have ‘juggled the various imperatives that now face any democratic leader’—not the least being to ‘prevent ‘bad things’ happening to Australians’...

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