Alison Broinowski is a regular contributor to the oeuvre of the outraged. She has regularly denounced the Howard government’s ‘neglect’ of Asia and its participation in the invasion of Iraq; and she has suggested that the Bali bombings were a type of ‘blowback’ against Australia for its slavish advocacy of American foreign policy. In Allied and Addicted, she returns to the subject of the Australian– American relationship. This time, her target is not only the Howard government but the entirety of Australia’s relationship with America, and indeed America itself:

Australia has often been likened to the kid in the schoolyard, who for little reward sucks up to the bully and at his bidding kicks the smaller and weaker boys around, always hoping for the bully’s protection … Having taken the drug of dependence from birth, Australia seems allied and addicted to it. But as with sex, the cost of the drug is damnable, the subservient position required to get it is ridiculous, and the reassurance it provides is fleeting.

‘What or who is running Australia under John Howard?’ she asks. In compiling a long list of similar American and Australian policies, the answer she presents is clear: the United States runs Australia, through Howard’s mimicry and admiration. Broinowski’s narrative of Howard’s copying of the United States is unencumbered by references (she repeatedly alludes to others’ views without attribution) or too much concern for chronological accuracy. She observes that ‘after one month in office, Bush rejected the Kyoto protocol’, and that ‘when America’s mind changed, Howard’s mind changed too’. Bush took office in 2001; the Howard government had been consistently talking down the Kyoto protocol since 1997.

Broinowski sees nothing less than covert Americanisation at work: ‘The more Howard imitated the United States, the harder it became to find any remnant … that greatly distinguished Australian culture.’ Here she cites restricted gun ownership as ‘facing extinction because of American imports’. Surely even Howard’s most bitter critics must concede he has, more than any other Australian prime minister, instituted much tighter gun controls which take Australia further from the American model. In the same passage, Broinowski suggests Australia is becoming Americanised in terms of ‘religious practice’, a claim that flies in the face of extensive sociological research concluding that Australian religiosity is much closer to secular Europe than to the United States.

Even beyond Howard, the alliance and the United States, Broinowski’s contempt is ultimately for the Australian people, who have continued to support Howard and the alliance. She argues that Australians’ ‘self-image of courageousness is a self-deceiving myth’, that they are ultimately morons manipulated by a government ‘to vote for things that [they] didn’t believe in’. Australians aren’t even discerning enough to borrow those aspects of the United States that the author admires, such as models of higher education, and enlightened policies towards refugees, indigeneity and refugees.   Broinowski identifies ‘three national characteristics [that] have locked Australia into a self-inflicted dependency: a deceitful culture, an exploitative attitude to the environment, and a subservient foreign policy’. In devoting a chapter to each aspect of our ‘national characteristics’, Broinowski fails to make a case that these are clearly character-based traits: the evidence she provides is of government action and public acquiescence – or even complicity: ‘Past generations were entertained by far-fetched yarns that took their name from Furphy’s watercart, around which those yarns were told uproariously and at length. Now, to judge by the quotidian chat around the water cooler, in magazines, and in op-ed pages, lying enjoys a new vogue … To lie these days is funny, financial and fashionable.’

There is little new in Allied and Addicted that can’t be found in a long history of critiques of the Australian–American alliance or the record of critical writings on the Howard government. Old charges are repeated – such as that the alliance endangers more than protects Australia – and the litany of the Howard government’s trickiness recounted, from the Australian Wheat Board scandal to ‘children overboard’ to Iraq’s putative weapons of mass destruction. In striving for originality, Broinowski makes unsustainable claims. I cannot find any evidence, and she produces none, that Australia tried to join the six-party talks on North Korea. Her claims that Australia’s participation in the Echelon intelligence sharing arrangements with the United States makes it impossible for it to have secure diplomatic communications lapse towards outlandish conspiracy theory. Her conclusion is that ‘the way to be taken seriously by the United States … is to demonstrate some independence’ – hardly an original contribution, or one seldom heard in critiques of the Howard government.

Ultimately, argues Broinowski, the alliance with the United States isolates and imperils Australia. For all this subservience, the United States refuses to provide a watertight guarantee to protect Australia when it is not Washington’s interests to do so. The United States has also ‘refused to reveal whether depleted uranium is in weapons used at the [American] bases [in Australia]’. Broinowski also argues that Howard, by playing Bush’s lickspittle, has failed to gain any diplomatic advantages from his close relationship with the president. This includes being unable to join the G8 (surely the entry of the thirteenth-largest economy in the world would pass unremarked in a meeting of the world’s eighth largest economies?) or the Security Council.

The Australian leaders (presumably every prime minister since John Curtin) who believe that the alliance brings greater security benefits than costs ‘must be ignorant, incompetent, irrational, deluded, or deceitful’. The balance of her discussion of Howard suggests that she thinks he scores highly on each of these measures. A reader ignorant of the last decade of Australian foreign policy would conclude that Australia had been hypnotised and led by an evil savant, hell-bent on driving the country to ruination at every turn. Few of the Howard government’s positive achievements are mentioned, and those that are are characterised as near disasters or insignificant instances of Australian independence or initiative.

The irony is that the regular appearance of books such as Allied and Addicted makes it all the more easy for Howard, and his allies in the ‘culture wars’ whom Broinowski denounces, to caricature and dismiss all commentary and analysis critical of the Howard government and its policies. Beyond this, the absence of any attempt at analytical balance, original scholarship or deeper evaluation makes such polemics almost exclusively the fare of those who already agree with them and who take comfort in the confirmation of their views. The result is a steady impoverishment of public discussion and debate in Australia, a situation that surely will increase our dependence on ideas imported from countries that have rigorous and genuine debate – such as the United States of America.