 Renowned Israeli historian Ilan Pappe provides an instructive short history.
The decades-long Israel-Palestine conflict is complicated and often highly contested. Enter Israeli historian Ilan Pappe with this accessible short history. Zionism, we learn, began as a European Christian movement in the 16th Century. It was believed the return of the Jewish people to Zion would fulfil God’s promise in the Old Testament. Hence many religious groups were emotionally and spiritually invested in Palestine. Modern Zionism took off in earnest in the 19th Century, and once the Ottoman Empire collapsed during the First World War and Britain controlled Palestine, they promised the establishment of a Jewish homeland there. The Palestinians, also, had been promised their own state, just as had happened with neighbouring territories such as Jordan and Egypt. The main problem was how Britain juggled these two promises. As Jews bought more and more land, with income from around the world, they were allowed to displace Palestinians from their villages and farms. Fast forward to the wars of 1948 and 1967, and all of Historical Palestine came under Israeli rule. Two refugee camps were set up - the Gaza Strip and West Bank, still in existence today. The conflict as Ilan Pappe portrays it is basically one of power imbalance. Britain and the US sided with Israel, providing arms and money. Palestinians were disenfranchised and removed from their lands (Pappe constantly refers to this process as ethnic cleansing.) The solution (obviously what should have happened from the start) is to give full citizenship to all Palestinians. That is, a one state solution. With such entrenched division, this seems impossible. But so does the continuation of the current situation, with Palestinians as a disenfranchised, stateless people. Into this mix, Pappe adds that Israel is not stable itself, and at the time of the Hamas attacks the country was on the verge of civil war, with deep seated divisions between secular and religious Jews. An excellent primer that clarifies much, but leaves a despairing portrait. A Very Short History of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, by Ilan Pappe. Published by Oneworld. $24.99 Review by Chris Saliba  How an illegal government program slowly unravelled.
Robodebt was a harebrained scheme hatched by a group of public servants hoping to make happy their political masters. Welfare recipients have never been popular with the electorate, easily demonised, and so here was some low hanging fruit. The scheme, as imagined, would reap a whirlwind of budget savings by recouping badly guesstimated debts from those unlucky enough to receive a letter. The problem was it was illegal from the get-go, and blind Freddy could have told you so. Debts were worked out with a fundamentally incorrect model, by trying to squeeze the square of tax office data into the circle of the fortnightly centrelink payment system. Rick Morton tells the sorry story of senior public servants watering down or hiding legal advice and their political masters who didn’t want to ask too many questions, preferring to pursue a tough on welfare cheats rhetoric. Mean Streak provides a valuable document of how disastrous public policy is made, with a jaw dropping cast of bunglers, sycophants, careerists and cowards. It was only for the heroic acts of a few who took the Commonwealth to court that the system collapsed. A cautionary tale of government overreach. Mean Streak: A Moral Vacuum, a Dodgy Debt Generator and a Multi-billion Dollar Government Shake Down, by Rick Morton. Published by Fourth Estate. $35.99 Review by Chris Saliba  A short collection of President Volodymyr Zelensky’s speeches.
A Message From Ukraine is a selection of President Volodymyr Zelensky’s speeches, from 2019 to 2023. The speeches were chosen by Zelensky himself and he also wrote the introduction. The book first appeared in 2022 and this new edition features an additional speech, from 2023. Having watched on our television screens the horrible destruction and humanitarian disaster of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for the last two years, one might expect A Message From Ukraine to be full of grim stories from the front, unbearable tales of death and destruction. In fact, Zelensky’s speeches are warm and humane. While they may have been written to bolster morale and help Ukrainians endure the unendurable, their message has a universal appeal. Zelensky stresses that truth and dignity will be the victor in the end. There is a tone of deep empathy in Zelensky’s words - this is the voice of someone who has seen much suffering. A Message From Ukraine is more than a collection of political speeches of the day; it is a timeless book dealing with the deepest of existential themes. It shows that truth and honour can give untold strength, despite the confronting horror of war. A Message from Ukraine, by Volodymyr Zelensky. Published by Penguin. $19.99 Review by Chris Saliba  An academic explains how the housing market really works, and why government intervention is needed.
Cameron K. Murray is an economist and expert on housing markets. At various stages in his life he has been a renter, a home owner and landlord, and so comes at the problem of housing affordability not only from an academic perspective, but also lived experience. There is much received wisdom that Murray turns on its head in The Great Housing Hijack. For example, we learn that rents have stayed steady at 20 percent of income for the last several decades, and that historically they track at roughly that percentage. Or the fact that developers stagger the release of housing to capitalise on the best price. This is all part of what Murray describes as the “five housing market equilibria”: asset prices, rents, location, density and the absorption rate (the aforementioned release of housing). These equilibria have interacted historically to give us a property market that doesn't veer too much off a predictable path. (Remarkably, archaeological records from Mesopotamian stone tablets show property price similarities to today). In short, the market left to its own devices produces big inequalities. High prices and the concentration of wealth are the result. We now have a market where landlords are competing with each other for properties, pricing out owner-occupiers. Murray writes: “Historically, housing markets were always divided between the haves and have-nots. What we are seeing since the 1980s is a return to the normal operation of the housing market after the post-World War II decades of heavy government intervention.” Nor does the future of the market look hopeful. While many commentators may call for an increase in supply to reduce prices, the reality is that the two thirds of the population who own or have mortgages do not want to see the value of their assets diminish. Even a 10 percent decrease in the values of Australian homes would be a disaster, wiping billions of dollars off the housing market. What is the solution? A simple one, as it turns out. The reader may be surprised to learn it was a Liberal prime minister, Robert Menzies, who in the post war period championed public, affordable housing. It was a time when soldiers were returning from war, creating the conditions that made it politically palatable to offer cheap housing. War heroes couldn't be treated shabbily. The Menzies policy of building houses at a rate of knots worked, increasing home ownership to a high of 70 percent. Murray suggests we treat affordable housing as we do roads, schools and hospitals, as a right for all citizens. He suggests we follow the Singapore model of building housing and selling it at essentially cost price. The system would work as a parallel market to the private one. A book of hard truths we need to face, with a solution that is well within reach should we grasp it. The Great Housing Hijack: The Hoaxes and Myths That Keep Prices High for Renters and Buyers in Australia, by Cameron K. Murray. Published by Allen & Unwin. $34.99 Review by Chris Saliba  A tragic accident is told in harrowing, intimate detail.
In 2012, five-year-old Palestinian boy Milad Salama was scheduled to go on a school trip. His family lived in the impoverished town of Anata on the West Bank, where infrastructure such as roads and housing were of a poor quality. The bus traveled along the Jaba road - a road notorious for its safety issues. Conditions were bad on the day of travel, with an approaching storm making visibility difficult. An oncoming truck collided with the bus and seven children died. Help was late to arrive, which if it had come earlier could perhaps have saved lives. A Day in the Life of Abed Salama describes the events of that awful day. Through a brief biographical sketch of Abed Salama, Milad’s father, the reader also gets a short history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and how occupation directly affects the lives of Palestinians. The genius of Nathan Thrall’s book is how it shows personal lives caught up in larger historical forces. With its focus on people and their relationships to each other, the book reads very much like a novel. A humbling book that concentrates on the pain and suffering of many Palestinian lives. A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, by Nathan Thrall. Published by Allen Lane. $36.99 Review by Chris Saliba The Great Divide: Australia's Housing Mess and How to Fix It: Quarterly Essay 92, by Alan Kohler13/12/2023
 Finance journalist Alan Kohler looks at Australia's current housing crisis
According to Alan Kohler Australia's housing crisis is some twenty years in the making and is so baked in it will take at least a decade to unravel. And that unravelling will require not the current policy drift, but firm action and consensus from the electorate. As it currently stands, the majority of the electorate either own outright or have a mortgage, meaning any change to the status quo, that is, lower prices, is against their financial interests. Alan Kohler takes two historical views, the longer and the more recent. Australian property in early settler days was pretty much a land grab. Land was often gifted in large slabs by the British Crown. Some simply squatted on land and claimed it as their own, without a murmur from government. Australia was considered terra nullius – it was free for the taking. The shorter historical view, starting around the early 2000s, illustrates how the seeds of the current crisis were sown. A mixture of tax breaks and increased immigration under the Howard Government was rocket fuel to house prices. Everyone was happy – until they weren't. Prices were increasing at a rate of knots; it was money on a loop. Even if you hadn't entered the market, there was cheerful news that once you did, a pot of gold awaited. The results of those twenty years of rampant price increases are now in. What has turned housing into such a wicked problem is how entrenched it has become. It will take years to build our way back to housing affordability. It will also require national focus, of which Kohler says there is little, if any. A brilliantly lucid essay that explains how we arrived at such a mess. The Great Divide: Australia's Housing Mess and How to Fix it: Quarterly Essay 92, by Alan Kohler. Published by Black Inc. $27.99 Review by Chris Saliba  Naomi Klein explores how the internet has upended the way we think.
Canadian writer Naomi Klein has spent much of her career investigating capitalism and its effects on society and culture, with a focus on the inequities it creates. Klein felt her work was distinct; readers knew what she stood for. Imagine her surprise when she started noticing online that she was being mixed up with Naomi Wolf, a writer who shot to fame with her feminist treatise The Beauty Myth in 1990. Since then Wolf has had a stellar career, but in recent years has lurched to the far right as a conspiracy theorist. Doppelganger is Naomi Klein's attempt to come to grips with this new age of online extremism. The book explores through literature, history and politics how individuals and even societies have a dark side, an almost evil twin. (Australia often gets a mention, the doctrine of terra nullius seen as a way of denying the existence of First Nations.) If we are honest, according to Klein, we are all vulnerable to this doubling and need only look in the mirror. Doppelganger starts from a flimsy premise, but spins into a fascinating and absorbing book, full of superb analysis and surprising paradoxes. Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, by Naomi Klein. Published by Allen Lane. $36.99 Review by Chris Saliba  Megan Davis and George Williams take an historical perspective on the Voice in this instructive and useful guide.
Constitutional experts Megan Davis (a Cobble Cobble woman from south-west Queensland) and George Williams AO have put together a neat, easy-to-read history of the Indigenous struggle for recognition in Australia's founding document, with useful timelines and appendices. Starting with an explanation of how the constitution came to be, Everything You Need to Know About the Voice then moves onto the 1967 referendum, which proposed changes that would allow Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to be counted as part of the population and provide the Commonwealth with the power to make laws for them. This referendum was carried with an overwhelming majority and the authors spend much time dissecting the reasons for its success and the misunderstandings as to what was being proposed. The rest of the book describes the democratic process that led to the Uluru Statement from the Heart and some of its key goals, namely Voice, Treaty and Truth-Telling. Davis and Williams put the Voice referendum in historical perspective, highlighting its challenges and clearing away the fog of misinformation. A vital contribution to the upcoming referendum that will help citizens to make an informed decision. Everything You Need to Know About the Voice, by Megan Davis and George Williams. Published by New South Publishing. $27.99 Review by Chris Saliba  Two experts explain what the Voice to Parliament will and won't do. With cartoons by Cathy Wilcox.
Indigenous leader Thomas Mayo and former ABC journalist Kerry O'Brien have come together to write this short “handbook” to the Voice to Parliament. They have kept its length short, the idea being to make it easily posted or shared. What do you get inside? It's a mix of personal stories, some history of previous referendums, a calling out of the misrepresentations about the Voice (it won't be a third chamber of parliament) and a section devoted to FAQs. A closing essay from Marcia Langton and Fiona Stanley explains how the Voice will help close the gap on Indigenous disadvantage. The final section provides some good tips for spreading the Yes message. What do we learn? The Voice will be a representative body loosely similar to ATSIC (The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission) set up by the Labor Hawke government in 1990, and dismantled by the Liberal Howard government in 2005. The world “loosely” should be stressed. If the Yes vote is successful, then the model could take any form, and change over time, according to legislation. The vexed issue of the Voice's form is really more of a procedural one. The key point is that if the Yes vote is successful, the Voice will be enshrined in the constitution. No government will be able to dismantle the Voice, ensuring continued representation from First Nations people. An accessible explainer and impassioned call to vote Yes. The Voice to Parliament Handbook, by Thomas Mayo and Kerry O'Brien. Published by Hardie Grant. $16.99 Review by Chris Saliba  Stan Grant on the British monarchy, Australia and its legacy of whiteness.
Wiradjuri man and author Stan Grant says he wrote his new book, The Queen is Dead, in an explosive burst and in real time, as events unfolded. Despite the quick writing time, there is nothing rushed or rash in Grant's book. This is a deeply considered work with not a word wasted or out of place. When Queen Elizabeth died, Grant expected there would be some discussion of the effect of colonialism and conquest on the lives of First Nations people. While many may have wished to mourn the queen, there should also have been recognition of the terrible legacy of English invasion and occupation. As a Wiradjuri man, Grant felt this personally. When colleagues and friends confessed feeling a sadness, even shedding a tear, over the queen's passing, Grant felt betrayed. Why didn't his friends consider his perspective, or that of his people's? Didn't they know the queen represented hundreds of years of oppression, suffering and violence? The major theme, you could say, of The Queen is Dead is the notion of whiteness. Whiteness as an historical phenomenon and institutional power. A whiteness that is so pervasive, at every level of society, that white people themselves don't see it. They simply see life proceeding as normal. Yet for First Nations people, everyday they are running up against whiteness – at work, in politics, in popular culture. Most importantly, in everyday life, in the endless comments on race, skin colour and heritage. While Stan Grant discusses the large philosophical issues – the weight of history, white ignorance and blindness, how these power structures crush First Nations people – the book has a deep, almost confessional vein. Grant examines his personal emotions, how they swing from hate and resentment to love and forgiveness. These sections are vulnerable and brave in trying to get across the truth of the author's experience and feelings. They make for humbling reading. Stan Grant brings his formidable mix of intellect, passion and truth-telling to a subject many may want to turn away from. Uncomfortable reading, but essential. The Queen is Dead, by Stan Grant. Published by 4th Estate. $34.99 Review by Chris Saliba |
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