Ergas is a heavy-hitting neo-liberal economist who has provided a lot of the intellectual and consulting grunt in the international and domestic ‘structural reform’ (i.e. privatisation) movement of the last twenty years. Ergas contributes regular columns to Business Review Weekly, with pieces such as ‘Two Cheers for Privatisation’ (BRW, 11 July 2002). A former OECD economist, he worked on structural adjustment policy in the 1980s and 1990s. He was also a professor in the Graduate School of Management at Monash University in the 1980s. As the Australian Financial Review noted, among his many students was one Richard Alston. It is a matter of record that Ergas was appointed by Minister Alston after 1996 to a series of government reviews looking at standard telephone services, intellectual property rights and broadband services.

Ergas has been managing director of Network Economics Consulting Group Pty Ltd (NECG), founded in 1987, with a special interest in telecommunications, utilities and privatisation. His clients have included Telstra, Visa, CSL and Singapore Airlines. NECG employs, according to the NECG website, more than fifty consultants and researchers with considerable academic expertise and deep industry and government links.

I do not know precisely what links Ergas has with CIS, nor how much support he offers CIS, but I do know that among his close colleagues at NECG is Jason Soon, a self-declared ‘classical liberal’ who was assistant editor of the CIS journal Policy and remains an Adjunct Scholar at CIS. Soon is also co-editor with Andrew Norton (also of CIS) of Catallaxy a neo-liberal blog. Ergas might have declared such links, especially given that CIS co-published (with Duffy & Snellgrove) Saunders’s Australia’s Welfare Habit. Saunders also works for CIS.

Of my review of Saunders’s book (one of three books I wrote about). I should say that I have always taken his work seriously. I took it seriously enough to invite him to an RMIT seminar late in 2003. In his presence, I presented a paper outlining my critique of his policy advocacy and specifying some significant concerns with the erstwhile liberal ethical basis of that advocacy. Saunders said that he thought I had raised a series of important issues. Recently, in a co-authored paper with Greg Marston (Just Policy, No. 33. October 2004), we argue that Saunders’s empirical and statistical ‘evidence’ matters for less than the underlying ethical/ evaluative framework he relies on. For example, an erstwhile empirical category such as ‘welfare dependence’ actually relics on a prior evaluative judgment. Ergas will know Amartya Sen’s On Ethics and Economics (1988) and, therefore, why we say this. Using Isaiah Berlin’s famous essay on two conceptions of freedoms, we show why Saunders’s claims to be taken seriously as a liberal are mistaken and misleading. We say that no serious liberal could possibly support the current regime of ‘mutual obligation’ income support that is so injurious to so many low-income Australians.

I don’t think this constitutes a ‘rant’. I also invite Ergas to debate the ethical principles at stake in Australia’s social policy and to do so from his declared position as a leading neo-liberal advocate for small government and privatisation.

Rob Watts, Melbourne, Vic

Fainlight it is

Dear Editor

I enjoyed Sophie Cunningham’s piece about writing fiction in the November issue of ABR. One small inaccuracy should be clarified, though, in case your readers go off searching for the poet ‘Ruth Fairlight’, whose poem ‘Sugar-Paper Blue’ is quoted as an epigraph to the essay, and fail to find her.

Ms Cunningham says: ‘I reread an article in the Times Literary Supplement by Fairlight on her relationship with Jane Bowles and Sylvia Plath. Then, becoming curious about Fairlight, whom I knew nothing about, I found the poem “Sugar-Paper Blue”. The poem is based on experiences Fairlight had in Leningrad in 1965, when she visited two survivors of the Siege of Leningrad, who happened to live below the poet Anna Akhmatova.’

The poet she means is New York-born British writer Ruth Fainlight, who has published eleven collections of poems as well as short stories, translations and libretti. Her recent books are published by Bloodaxe Books in the UK.

John Tranter, Sydney, NSW

All in the family

Dear Editor,

Melbourne is a characteristically familial city despite its millions, a view pleasingly confirmed by the November 2004 issue of ABR. There on the cover is my (much older) cousin Jean Campbell, now deceased, and there inside is my abandoned daughter Sophie Cunningham, musing intelligently about the difficulties of locating – and then altering into art – the real, and, among other things, about being haunted by meaningful coincidence. Yet she was presumably unaware that she shares an issue of ABR with a relative whom – it is a new insight for me – she has been practically channelling for a decade or more.

Sophie and Jean: risk-taking writers both, simultaneously natives and anthropologists of Bohemia, intensely sociable, fiercely ethical, political, sophisticated, innocent and loyal, and, significantly, no strangers to self-parody. It is alarming for me to realise how readily Sophie can be imagined as morphing into Jean: the warm, kind woman whose extremely loud and caustic observations terrified us in childhood, as we timidly lurked on the fringes of the many lively literary parties she gave in East Melbourne.

Jean, the subject of Lina Bryans’s portrait The Babe Is Wise, was wise to the quirks of the 1930s and 1940s; Sophie, my babe, is wise to the 1990s and 2000s. I hope she finds some latter-day Bryans to memorialise her. ABR quite randomly brings them together, but unless Sophie reads this letter, she may remain ignorant of the link between her and a relative of whom, for all I know, she has never heard.

Peter Nicholls, Surrey Hills, Vic.

The lonely reaches

Dear Editor,

Michelle Griffin reviewed Arnold Zable’s novel Scraps of Heaven in the November 2004 edition of ABR. It was not an unkind review but Griffin cannot be accused of enthusiasm. I beg to disagree with her assessment: I think it is a splendid book.

Arnold Zable has an astonishing ability to capture time and place. Scraps of Heaven is set in one place, Carlton; in one year 1958. The intersecting stories reach back to the past, with fear mostly, or nostalgia; and hint at possible futures, with hope mostly, or resignation.

I remember the time and recognise the place. Early in the book, it is summer, 1958. Romek Swerdlow is leafing through the Sun News Pictorial. One of the headlines talks of the fires tearing through East Gippsland. I was in East Gippsland that summer. Our family had gone to Bemm River, on the coast near Orbost. When the fires came through, the women and children were ferried across the lake to the line of sand dunes that separate the lake from the ocean. There we camped for a week while the men fought the fires. Each morning we saw tracks on the sand around our little camp: koalas, dingoes, goannas, kangaroos, all fleeing the fires they could see and hear and smell as thousands of acres of tall timber burned. For an eight-year-old, it was all very exciting. I did not understand until much later how dangerous it was. I hadn’t thought about that charred and gilded summer for a long time, until Romek read about it in the newspaper, in Zable’s book.

Perhaps it is a trick of the mind, but a single focusing image casts light around it. The rest of 1958 comes to life vividly in these pages. Back then, Italian, Greek and Jewish immigrants were a novelty in Melbourne. They were still jostling for a place, bracing themselves against the insults and taunts of white Anglo-Saxon Australia. They brought their strange brand of football and foreign habits; they baked bread that looked different; they drank red wine and white spirits. They ate exotic things such as spaghetti that did not come from a tin, and (horror of horrors) they ate squid.

But an earlier Australia is also here. The mostly Catholic workers in Carlton were moving upwards socially, but some remained. Zable’s book recalls Carlton when ‘reffos’ and ‘dagos’ lived there; when Lygon Street was a genuine reflection of other places – a tenuous link to the different histories they had left behind. We did not see then the rich gifts they offered so lightly. And we did not see the burden of terror and grief that many of them carried.

All the damaged victims and desperate survivors are in this book, recalled two generation later. And the same stories are being played out again today, not in Carlton but in Dandenong and Broadmeadows: the Afghan and Iraqi survivors of untold horrors, all bringing their gifts lightly; but ignored or hated for it. And so it goes. But Arnold Zable records it and recalls it faithfully. Perhaps by remembering, he may help us avoid the mistakes of the past, when we let a damaged generation find their own bleak peace and threadbare salvation.

Julian Burnside QC, Hawthorn, Vic.

Bad PR

Dear Editor

I felt that I had to write and express my disappointment with Cameron Woodhead’s dismissal of Robert Gott’s Good Murder (ABR, November 2004). Coincidentally, I had just finished reading the book when my ABR arrived in the mail. The novel I read was a breath of fresh air in what is becoming an increasingly stuffy and overly serious genre. Gott’s book is beautifully crafted and devastatingly funny. Woodhead obviously does not agree with me on this, and there is nothing wrong with that – part of the reason I subscribe to ABR is to encounter views that do not accord with my own on books. However, this review frustrated me for its casual and, at times, careless critique of a book that has plenty to offer crime fiction enthusiasts.

Woodhead begins by getting the main character’s name wrong and finishes by complaining that this main character is not likeable. Clearly, Gott does not mean the character to be likeable. Since when do protagonists in crime novels have to be likeable? The suggestion that Gott’s final chapters do not ‘conform to the dictates of the genre’ is pompous and ridiculous. A genre that demanded such adherence would not last. Surely, a crime critic of Woodhead’s experience must recognise that it is innovation that has kept this genre so popular over the years.

To finish, I will mention the point that really annoyed me: Woodhead scolds Gott for using the term ‘public relations’ in a novel set in 1942. He says that it is ‘utterly anachronistic’. It isn’t – I checked. This phrase has been in use since before World War I. The book is obviously well researched. Woodhead’s comment is peevish and lazy. Good Murder is an entertaining novel that deserves better than to be labelled with a tired cliché like ‘two-bit pantomime’ and trashed in such a haphazard way.

Tony Thompson, Elwood, Vic.

The Charlton brothers

Dear Editor,

Michael, not Tony, Charlton, co-founded ‘Four Corners’ (‘Media’, ABR, November 2004). By the time I realised my mistake – appropriately, on the steps of ScreenSound Australia – ABR had already gone to press. My sincere apologies to both the Charltons.

Bridget Griffen-Foley, St Ives, NSW