They make a desolation and they call it Treasury

Dear Editor,

If Dr David Kemp’s ill-fated 1999 university reform package, on which I worked as a member of his staff, had become law, then Simon Marginson’s essay ‘They Make a Desolation and They Call It F.A. Hayek’ (ABR, April 2004), identifying the influences of the free-market economists Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, might have been persuasive. As it is, writing instead on the Nelson reforms, Marginson is wide of the mark. Just how far Dr Nelson had strayed from Hayek’s and Friedman’s liberalism was highlighted by an appearance I made, in October 2003, before the Senate Inquiry into his reforms. Senator Kim Carr, a member of the Socialist Left, and I agreed that the legislation gave the government (not the market) too much power, and should be voted down in the Senate. We have never agreed on anything before.

The final package, as amended in the Senate, is better than the original legislation. But it is still a long way from being a functioning market system. It’s true that by 2006 price signals will come from most undergraduates, but they will be too faint to have any dramatic effects. With a twenty-five per cent price cap, fees will vary little, and the revenue, while useful, won’t transform any university. This glimpse of fee-setting freedom is accompanied by an enormous increase in bureaucratic interference. The allocation of HECS places to universities and disciplines will be managed tightly from Canberra. Incentive schemes universities cannot afford to reject will control teaching and governance practices in ways they do not now.

The origins of a system like this are not in Hayek or Friedman, and not even in the Keynesian world nostalgically described by Marginson. What the new system most resembles is old-fashioned socialist central planning.

But we should not look for the genesis of these reforms in the writings of intellectuals. Their real origins are in a mix of Treasury’s cost-shifting and the Education Department’s micro-managing tendencies. The names of those to blame can be found in the Commonwealth’s departmental directory, not a history of economic thought.

Andrew Norton, Carlton, Vic.

Hybrid voices

Dear Editor,

Thank you for publishing Hsu-Ming Teo’s review of Australia’s Ambivalence towards Asia (ABR, February 2004). We are gratified that Teo recognises the importance of our book. Nevertheless, we feel that some of her readings significantly misrepresent us. She betrays a certain eagerness to promote her own values and positions to the detriment of reviewing ours.

We stand accused of having ‘dumped’ petty grievances in our book alongside serious and urgent problems. Specifically, Turtle Beach is said by Teo to be ‘a text already so problematic that the analysis of minor issues almost seems like overkill’. Leaving aside our puzzlement at the implication that problematic texts do not bear close analysis, the criterion by which certain issues are deemed ‘minor’ or ‘petty’ is not made clear, nor are such issues exemplified. We are left to suspect that the inextricable interlinking of the intimate, personal sphere of life with the political one is being overlooked, and that the significance of the former is thereby being derogated. We deemed it important to show the characteristic relations between Australia and its others on all levels; the imagined minutiae of Turtle Beach shed light on the public interactions of states, and vice versa.

However, we are more disconcerted to be accused of a ‘sneering attitude’ to Asians who promote a liberal human rights agenda in their own countries. ‘In denying the intellectual “compradors” a say in their society because they have imbibed the value system of the West, the authors are guilty of ethnic or cultural essentialism,’ thunders Teo. This charge is based on a number of false premises.

Firstly, we do not identify acceptance of Western values with ‘comprador’ status. Our observation about ‘Third World compradors who will mimic whatever political garb is in fashion’ is cited, but wrenched violently from its context, as consideration of the paragraph immediately following in our text makes clear: ‘Tempting though it may be for some, not everything from the West need be rejected outright in an Asian context. Nor should somewhat homologous indigenous traditions not be honoured. There are Asians somewhat “liberal” in training and conviction … who are hardly mimicking compradors.’

Furthermore, we do not deny anyone a say in their society, nor do we deny agency and authenticity to those individuals and groups who might prefer (certain) Western values. Such denials are not for us to make because, as we point out in our book, ‘the ultimate acceptance or non-acceptance of social reality, its pace and its terminologies, should remain in the control of indigenous people and be exercised through whatever social and psycho-cultural mechanisms they prefer to live by’. We do claim that Asian groups apparently promoting Western cultural and political agendas often have yet to ‘sell’ their acceptability and relevance in their own countries; and that those Asians lauded as champions of Western liberal democracy, such as Kim Dae-Jung, may well on closer inspection emerge as champions of something not so Western, liberal or democratic after all.

Our book recognises, illustrates and honours diverse and hybrid voices both in Asia and in Australia. We are, merely, cautious about the rush to Cyclopean and unreflective acceptance of the Western liberal human rights agenda and its Asian (and other) promoters. The demonstrated failures of this agenda seem sufficiently stark to warrant serious consideration of alternatives. Teo’s point of departure, however, seems to be that this agenda, however flawed, is self-evidently worth pursuing at home and abroad. She is entitled to her view, but it has informed her reading of our book to a regrettable extent.

J.V. D’Cruz and William Steele, Clayton, Vic.

It’s a puzzle

Dear Editor,

Australia’s Ambivalence towards Asia, by J.V. D’Cruz and William Steele, triggers different impulses in your reviewer, Hsu-Ming Teo (ABR, February 2004). To Teo, it is variously ‘thoughtful’, ‘enlightening’, ‘thought-provoking’ and ‘desperately needed’. I agree. What puzzles me is her concerns that the authors are guilty of ‘cultural essentialism’, and that they attack Western-educated middle classes of Asia. D’Cruz and Steele, in Chapter 4, discuss at length people and societies on the concrete–abstract oriented cultural continuum. They conclude: ‘There are no societies that are purely concrete or purely abstract, there being no pure types.’ D’Cruz and Steele deal specifically with ‘hybridity’ in Chapter 1. Citing Fiona Nicoll, Jacqueline Lo, Tseen Khoo and Ien Ang on Asian-Australians, they make the point: ‘One would have to walk around [hybridity] to avoid it, and each little journey acknowledges its existence even more firmly.’ The authors are pluralists; anything but essentialist.

On Teo’s second concern, D’Cruz and Steele, in Chapter 3, allude to the temptation of Western-educated middle classes of Asia ‘to pass off their legitimate but sectional class interests as if they were those of the whole society’. I do not read the authors denying the Western-educated élites their legitimate interests. It seems to me that they question only the right of these élites to speak for the whole society. The authors’ preferred position is clear in their commendation of Mohamed Jawhar Hassan, the director of the Malaysian Institute for International and Strategic Studies, who more inclusively calls for the twofold objective of ‘poverty eradication and civil society’.

Ambivalence, if nothing else, has provoked thinking, including one review diametrically opposed to Teo’s critique of cultural essentialism. Geoffrey Barker (Australian Financial Review, 29 December 2003) accuses Ambivalence of ‘dangerous relativism’! What to Barker is relativism is to Balthasar Kehi, of Melbourne University’s Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics (‘Letters to the Editor’, AFR, 7 January 2004), the denial of ‘public discourse among peoples with different value orientations’. Kehi’s sentiment echoes a central argument in Ambivalence: Western disempowerment of the Asian experience, ‘centring one [Western] brand of morality, then claiming it is everybody’s’.

Ambivalence is an ‘important polemic’ (‘Off the Shelf’, The Australian, 3 December 2003) that is ‘not for the faint-hearted’ (Dewi Anggraeni, Eureka Street, January–February 2004). Feel free to disagree with it: that is the essentialism of relativism. I’ll celebrate that freedom.

Boey Kok-Choy, Rowville, Vic.