I approached this book with ambivalence: do I really need yet another book about John Howard's dire effect on public discourse, I wondered, and what if Tom Switzer, editor of the Australian's opinion page, was right to deride it as 'the latest we-are-silenced screed'? Well, several pages in, I was convinced that Mr Switzer was either deliberately obfuscating or hadn't actually read what he was deriding. Neither this book, nor Silencing Dissent is claiming that the leftwing commentariat has been silenced, as Mr Switzer either believes or pretends to believe; they argue that public debate has been corrupted (Marr) or silenced (Hamilton & Maddison) by withholding information that reflects poorly on government's initiatives, by ad hominem attacks in parliament on academics, by threatening to withdraw funding from NGOs, by using the federal police force to pursue public servants who leak information damaging to the government (but not those who leak information serving the government's interests). 'At the heart of democracy,' Marr says, 'is a contest of conversations. The tone of a democracy is set by the dialogue between a nation and its leaders.' When he started writing the essay, he set out to keep a diary of governmental bullying so as to have some current examples to enliven the argument. He turned out to have an embarrassing over-supply. It's not a matter of Howard winning the public debate, or as Switzer argues, of his having 'provoked thinking and talking about cultural issues': not, that is, unless you consider slander, police raids, lying, legislating, jailing and on occasion censoring as legitimate debating strategies.

The only place where I take issue with David Marr is in his pessimism. He's probably right that 'Australians are an orderly people who love authority' ('We grumble instead of challenging it'), and as a result strikingly vulnerable to the corruption he documents; but I take heart from our history. We were after all the first nation state where women got the vote (none of Pitcairn Island, South Australia or New Zealand was a nation state when women there voted); we are one of the few democracies whose constitution was adopted by plebiscite; referenda have refused conscription and the banning of the Communist Party, and have endorsed citizenship for Aboriginal people. We're corruptible, but surely also redeemable. ( )