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Outrage is a key performance indicator for Peter Dutton, the ‘bad cop’ of politics. But what does he value?

Emeritus Professor of Politics, La Trobe University

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Judith Brett does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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Lech Blaine and Peter Dutton are both from Queensland, where the political culture is tough and masculine and politics south of the border always good for a spot of confected outrage.

So Blaine, author of Quarterly Essay 83: Top Blokes: The Larrikin Myth, Class and Power , is a good choice to try to make some sense of the federal Liberal Party’s current leader.

Who is Peter Dutton? What drives him? Why did he choose politics? What does power mean to him? And what does he hope to achieve if he wins government?

Bad Cop: Peter Dutton’s Strongman Politics: Quarterly Essay – Lech Blaine (Black Inc.)

Bad Cop , Blaine’s second Quarterly Essay, mixes straightforward narration of events in Dutton’s life with perceptive interpretation and one-liners like: “Politics would enable Dutton to be the bad cop without fear of physical injury.”

Dutton’s first job was as a policeman, which exposed him to the worst of human behaviour. He took from this experience a suspicion of the legal system’s presumption of innocence and its strict rules of evidence, disdain for those who try to understand human criminality and transgression, and no compassion at all for the criminal and depraved.

When on Kitchen Cabinet , Annabel Crabb put to him his wife Kirrilly’s description of him as black and white, without shades of grey, he agreed.

But, as Blaine shows, we know much more about the black in Dutton’s world than the white: African gangs , illegal immigrants , Islamic terrorists , Lebanese criminals , paedophiles , Indigenous sexual abusers , welfare cheats .

It is a richly peopled world, compared with the bland suburbia and regional Australia he wants to protect, with much more energy expended on blaming and punishing than on praising. Compared with John Howard, with whom he shares aspects of political style, we know little about Dutton’s heroes and what he values about Australia.

In his interests to stoke fear

Dutton is a boundary rider. As a politician whose main offering is the promise of safety, it is in his interests to stoke fear.

He thrives on conflict and when he is not fighting the criminals and depraved, he is fighting those who are not as alert as he is to danger: human rights advocates, inner-city elites, bleeding hearts, the welfare lobby, the Greens, and of course his arch enemy in our two-party Westminster system, the Labor Party.

Mostly, it seems what he wants is a reaction. For Dutton, says Blaine, outrage from Labor, the Greens and on Twitter is a key performance indicator. Hence his political strategy of abandoning the inner city to Labor, the Greens and the Teals – and winning government from the outer suburbs and the regions.

The big question facing Dutton’s political future and his electoral strategy is whether Australia is quite as fearful and homogeneous as he imagines, or whether, as Blaine argues, he is forever riding a time machine to 2001.

Dutton resigned from the police after he crashed his car during a chase. He shifted into property developing with his father, and then into politics. In 2001, John Howard’s Tampa election, Dutton won the seat of Dickson, which he still holds.

It was, says Blaine, a fateful moment for an ex-policeman with authoritarian tendencies to embark on a political career. But compared with Howard, we have little sense of what else, besides safety and not being Labor, Dutton is offering.

Read more: How the Liberals lost the 'moral middle class' - and now the teal independents may well cash in

Style over substance

Howard had enduring policy interests – in economic policy and industrial relations. Does Dutton have any policy interests, besides law and order? He was not even especially competent in his supersized ministry of Home Affairs , where his obsession with keeping out asylum seekers at any cost distracted him from the border incursions of organised crime and the systemic rorting of the immigration system, together with problems with the award of contracts.

As Minister for Home Affairs, concludes Blaine, “His bad cop act was a triumph of style over substance.” His championing of nuclear power to reduce Australia’s emissions, despite all the expert evidence it is much more expensive than renewables and will take too long, shows that opposing Labor rather than solving problems is his primary motivation.

Read more: Dutton wants a 'mature debate' about nuclear power. By the time we've had one, new plants will be too late to replace coal

Blaine gives a compelling account of Dutton the strong man, but he also claims that if you watch him for a long time, you see a man who is small and scared. The pioneering political psychologist Harold Lasswell says politicians like Dutton, preoccupied with the management of aggression and with provoking reaction, are driven by low self-esteem and a compulsive need for deference.

This fits Blaine’s observation, but I needed more on this side of the man. What is he scared of and why? Of being ignored and irrelevant? Of inner demons that need to be kept under lock and key? Of a world that is changing? All of the above?

Writing about the moving target of a politician seeking power is a tough gig. Some learn as they go, some don’t. It’s too early yet to tell is Dutton is a learner or not – but Blaine has told us what to watch out for.

• Immigration
• John Howard
• Quarterly Essay
• Peter Dutton
• Kitchen Cabinet
• Annabel Crabb

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WRITING & PUBLISHING

Jess Hill and Sarah Krasnostein on writing Quarterly Essays

Jess Hill and Sarah Krasnostein are the two most recent authors of Quarterly Essays. Jess released The Reckoning: How #MeToo Is Changing Australia in late 2021, and Sarah released Not Waving, Drowning: Mental illness and Vulnerability in Australia in early 2022. Quarterly Essays are prestigious, but they are notoriously difficult and always come with intense time pressure. In this interview, Jess and Sarah discuss how they did it and why they signed up for it.

Jess  is an investigative journalist and the author of See What You Made Me Do . She has been a producer for ABC Radio and journalist for Background Briefing , and Middle East correspondent for  The Global Mail . Her reporting on domestic abuse has won two Walkley awards, an Amnesty International award and three Our Watch awards.  See What You Made Me Do  won the 2020 Stella Prize and the ABA Booksellers’ Choice Adult Non-Fiction Book of the Year.

Sarah  is the multi-award-winning author of  The Trauma Cleaner and  The Believer .  Her writing has appeared in magazines and journals in Australia, the United Kingdom and America. She holds a doctorate in criminal law.

ASTRID: Welcome Jess Hill and Sarah Krasnostein. I can't believe the two of you are appearing together on The Garret.

JESS: Here we are.

SARAH: Today.

JESS: Thank you both for joining us. And today I want to be really nerdy, which works for The Garrett and The Garret's audience. I want to talk about the Quarterly Essays now.

Jess Hill, you wrote your first Quarterly Essay last year, published at the end of 2021, about #MeToo. And Sarah, you have just released your first Quarterly Essay about mental illness and vulnerability. I'd like to ask both of you, what does a Quarterly Essay represent? And why have you both put yourself through the sheer horror and pain and suffering of writing one?

Jess, yours was published first, so we'll start with you.

JESS: Oh, I've already gone through part of the amnesia process, because it's been several months since I finished it. Look, I've always been a fan of the Quarterly Essay format, partly because it's substantial enough to be a thorough investigation of a topic, but it doesn't carry the pressure of a book because it's only around for a few months. Well, unless you write a classic.

And to be honest, Chris Feik from Schwartz had been asking me to write a Quarterly for a while and I sort of had been resisting because there's just a lot going on. And then, then he said, ‘Well. Like, okay, what about #MeToo? Write about #MeToo’. And I'm like, ‘Okay’.

So as usual, like my life just kind of carries me along this drift. Because people asked me to do things. It wasn't burning inside me to write a Quarterly Essay about the #MeToo movement. And much like when I wrote about domestic abuse for the first time, I actually was a bit like, ‘Oh, what am I going to spend 20 to 40,000 words writing about #MeToo? Hasn't it all been written? It's something that's been flogged to death, this subject’. And sure enough, within days, you realise, well actually, as usual, it has been written about a lot, but certain narratives have solidified that really need messing with and reinterrogating. Of course you could actually write that much just on the last 12 months in Australia, let alone the developing weather system that exploded into me too. So I wish I could say, ‘Oh, this has been formulating in my mind for months and finally I got the opportunity to put it on paper’. I wish I was like a more meaningful person sometimes like that, when really a lot of the time I'm just a hack who's been asked to write something.

SARAH: You have to refer to that as negative capability, Jess. You are a meaningful person, you're just waiting to use it.

JESS: That's right. I think my internalised self-critic stops me being a deeply meaningful person on that level of driving forward. It's just like, ‘Oh, they think I'm good enough to write about that. Okay. I guess I will’.

ASTRID: Look Jess, being thought of as good enough to write a Quarterly Essay is a compliment. But also Sarah, and I are both going to make you leave behind or put aside for now your self-deprecating way and really embrace the fact that you are one of the authors of a Quarterly Essay that has written a classic, right? No, one's going to forget the Quarterly Essay on #MeToo.

JESS: Oh, thanks Astrid.

ASTRID: And Sarah, you now have also written a Quarterly Essay. It just has hit the shelves. You went in knowing this was a tough gig. Why and how?

SARAH: I wrongly, as it would turn out, thought this would be refreshing sorbet between books. I thought, ‘Oh, like that's not book long. That's fine. You can't really go past 40,000 words. And it's an essay. I love an essay. So I'll do that between my last book and disappearing into the next one’. And I was a 100 per cent wrong about the refreshing palette cleansing character of what this is. But at the same time, everything about it is quirky.

So the style notes that you get from Chris are a word discursive document about... [Laughter] A very loose dos and don'ts. And I am such a nerd that when I read these notes, I teared up because it is the ideal form for me to take. It's noteworthy in its lack of prescription on the format. Apart from that there shouldn't be too strident a policy analysis, which is the reason why I left my legal work. And it should be the largest possible view of a current issue. You have the freedom to do that in a formally inventive way or not, or whatever, as long as you're coming at it originally in the substance, and the form is flexible enough to allow you to do that.

Wonderful, very touching, poignant, lovely. And then there's the horror of that degree of freedom when you're just trying to come up with something original. And it's a lot.

ASTRID: I've previously spoken to others who have written Quarterly Essays, including Ben Law. And everybody seems a little bit shell shocked afterwards because of the intense time period that all the research has to happen. A Quarterly Essay is of course published four times a year, and you can't push the deadline back in any significant manner.

You both are writing about nuanced and complicated areas of life. You are also writing about them two years into a global pandemic that has directly impacted the subject matter that you are writing about. How does that change your approach? So for example, rates of domestic abuse. Potentially terrifying when we think about lockdowns in Australia, Jess, and I don't know a single person whose mental health is as good as it once was, particularly in Melbourne that experienced the very long lockdowns. So when you are putting out such a document, how do you even place it in the context of a global pandemic?

JESS: It's been interesting the way that #MeToo had such a resurgence in Australia right in the middle of COVID. We were so stuck within our four walls, and even when we weren't in technical lockdown, everything was pretty much lockdown. There was so little interaction. And yet there was, in terms of the so-called women's movement or women's issues, this massive public reckoning. And very public. On the streets and are coming together and are dividing apart. And all these things was going on at a time when we weren't even really seeing each other in person, which flavours it in a way, because it's easier to objectify people, even from within your own movement or on your own side, for want of a better word, when you don't see them in person for a couple of years. So, you can start to get very heady about things and not drop into the humanity of it.

When it came to writing about it, I don't think I was really conscious of placing it within the conditions that we were in. Because I think with the Quarterly , even though it is transient in its format, I also think you're writing a historical record. So that was really, for me, the most important thing was to write a clear... And as Sarah's saying, like do it from the broadest possible view... Record how #MeToo came about, or my personal view on that, because there will be a million different interpretations of that, and then how it bounced through Australia to what it became in 2021 and how it exploded in Parliament. And so that for me was more important.

I have to say also is that as personally, just coming off the back of a lot of work. The SBS series had just finished earlier in the year, then I did a podcast series and there was no break in between at all. And I was pretty burnt out. And poor Chris and everybody at Black Inc, I feel like I owe just unrelenting gifts because from the time that I started writing, I had seven weeks until print. I submitted the last chapter the night before we went to print! So in a way, that rushed, very rushed, very quick period of writing and editing meant that I couldn't get too carried away with even placing it in any context. It had to roar out of me, and I had to not make any mistakes.

I'm sure Sarah had this too, that thing of being so responsible for people's not just individual stories, but the stories that unite so many stories. You have a lot of responsibility to get that right. You have a lot of responsibility for your sources. A lot of my focus was just on how can I make sure that I am doing the best by the people who are named in this essay, and that I am representing the people who are not, and who have not been platformed. And the rest was just like cross fingers and hope.

ASTRID: Your topic is slightly different, Sarah, and you do draw the linkage between mental health and Jess's essay. For example, instances of mental ill health turn up in the system, first and foremost, through instances of violence in the home. What do the two of you think – and I know you didn't pre-plan this, Jess, I don't think you would've known whose essay was coming after you – but what is the statement of two Quarterly Essays coming out that are about not traditional policy issues, not traditional men's business, if I can be so broad as to label it like that? We're talking about women, we're talking about #Metoo, we're talking about mental health, which affects everybody but is so often stigmatised and not admitted to. What is the cumulative impact of two Quarterly Essays ?

SARAH: Well, I've been thinking about not this exact question, but these issues for something else I'm working on, which is much more creative writing, but I think the point transposed as well onto that question.

One of my many bug bears is a focus on the discourse, national history, or the sections of a newspaper along entirely arbitrary, and now canonical lines, so there is such a thing as ‘economics’ or ‘economic history’ or ‘political history’ or ‘military history’, when it's all social history. And it is all inexorably co-created, relationally sourced issues manifesting in different parts of our institutional collective life. So I think it's not inevitable in the sense that nothing's really inevitable, but it makes sense to me that there would be two gal writers having a go at examining our collective life through the prisms that Jess and I have chosen to look at a very complex – I'm trying to phrase this without swearing –

ASTRID: You're allowed to swear.

SARAH: – clusterfuck of national policies through our chosen lenses… That I think the significance. Rather than writing more abstractly about politics as a separate entity or international patterns or relations separately, we are looking quite clearly at what we value and the gaps between our national rhetoric and our enduring collective behavioural patterns, whether they manifest as seemingly intractable patterns of interpersonal violence in the home or the workplace (where the overwhelming majority, but certainly not all victims are female), or whether it manifests also in the home, but in our public life and in our criminal justice system, in our educational system, in our healthcare system, as this kind of compulsively repeated pattern of caring about fixing these problems only so much and no further.

So that's a very long way of not answering the question, I apologise.

JESS: Oh, that's really made me think a lot just when you were talking there, Sarah, about Martha Gellhorn, who was one of my sort of original journalistic heroes. And for those who haven't heard of Martha, one of the first female war correspondence, very much of her own making, known for instead of reporting the ‘game of war’ and what's going through the minds of the strategists and the high profile commanders, she got like right down onto the street and with the people. And particularly the story about the invasion of Finland where she's like... It was really a different way of doing war reporting. And I think that through the prism of what people might see as the softer – not softer in terms of their impact, but the sort of like more touchy feeling of feminine issues like mental illness or domestic abuse, or #MeToo, is that actually, as you say, you are talking about very serious political and policy issues, but you're coming through the prism of human experience rather than keeping it in this sort of unreachable cerebral level. But there is still very much a contest of ideas, but making sure that it doesn't get separate from the grassroots, from the actual experience of the living people who are subject to the whims and fancies of all these great thinkers and strategic masterminds and politicians.

Sometimes I think the more feminine issues, what they do is actually just bring us back to Earth and give us a better chance at finding better solutions than just talking at the policy level.

SARAH: And I think it's also a way of short circuiting a lot of the debate about issues on which we have too much empirical data for this to be a debate. It goes straight to the human heart of the matter. It's the so what of these potentially rarefied debates about what it looks like to do institutional reform in late stage capitalism, blah, blah blah. So what? How does it impact us on a daily basis in the home, all of us together? That makes a something much more pressing.

JESS: When we continually relate it back to the grassroots, it also takes those academic ideas about reform or about smashing systems or about... I think when you are really reporting from that level of the personal, you have to take those ideas through to their end point. Like okay, if we were to do this really interesting reform, how would it affect X, Y, ?. Or if we were to just forget reforming the system, because the system is so entirely buggered, what is the actual effect of that? Because I think we can get stuck – I mean, everywhere in the world, but we can get really stuck in these academic sort of niches and new sort of normal niche comes along that academics and thinkers want to explore, but can so often be disconnected from. Well, how would that actually work in reality? Instead of just like, how does it make us feel or how interesting is it to explore?

SARAH: Yeah.

ASTRID: I don't think I would be able to find a reader of either of your Quarterly Essays who didn't feel and understand and empathise with what you're writing about. But the Quarterly Essay is a niche audience, Quarterly Essays aren't read by everyone. And so a question for both of you. Who is the audience of the Quarterly Essay ?

JESS: There is the subscriber base. So there's the rusted ons, about 9,000 or 10,000 people. And then it's really, I think, a matter of who do you reach with it? There are obviously people who are going to be more inclined to buy a journal of this kind, just exploring ideas. They're probably more likely to be the Radio National audience, for example. God bless the a Radio National audience. But what I found really interesting is – especially going to events in the last few weeks, and one in particular at the Adelaide Writers Festival, where I appeared with Grace Tame – is that when it came to the signing line, these were not just standard Quarterly Essay readers. And in fact, many said they'd never bought a Quarterly Essay and were now really interested in finding out more about it. I had high school girls buying the Quarterly Essay . Teachers. So sometimes, I think the Quarterly Essay audience is to an extent what you can make it and to an extent related to the topic. So when Alan Finkel writes about are getting to zero emissions, he's going to get a different audience to the audience that me and Sarah are going to get for our essays. And fortunately, writers festivals and other institutions are quite keen to promote Quarterly Essays , like they've got a reasonable amount of status. So yeah, sometimes it's just about what can you generate and what audience can you generate?

Sarah: The thing that's always struck me about it is how it punches above its weight, not just with the leadership, but with the potential influence, if it resonates in a certain way. It can set an agenda in more daily newspapers, for or against, whatever. It gets topics ventilated outside a rarefied circle. So, I mean, I like a rarefied circle very much, don't get me wrong. But if you want to do this professionally, you can't just live there. So it is the best of both worlds in that sense. It first has to pass through a very considered, particularly literary, I want to say, or engaged audience before it gets into the discourse more generally (if it's going to do so).

JESS: That's, that's a really good point. I think because there are some journals that do tend to remain much more within the readership, like sometimes the Griffith Review and other journals. It'll be very rare for them to go outside of their known audiences, but because the Quarterly Essay is topical, it becomes news just by being a quarterly. And yeah, like I mean, extracts go in the paper. And I think if we look at these things as a system, that even if people don't actually read the whole essay, that they'll probably engage with some of the ideas that were presented in it, through all of these other... Through your podcast, and through the ways in which it's promoted.

ASTRID: This is a podcast for writers, and I often speak to writers about how they represent the viewpoints and the voices of others. I want to ask you that, but before we get there, I want to just stay on the Quarterly Essay topic. Because the Quarterly Essay is a thing, sometimes rarefied, sometimes breaking out to a whole lot of a wider audience. What does it take to get selected to be the writer of a Quarterly Essay ? Because I feel like that's a rarefied list. And if I can insert myself with an opinion here, it is changing over time, the list of who gets to write a Quarterly Essay . So my question to you both is, who gets to write a Quarterly Essay, and why do you think you were picked?

Jess, you're laughing at me. I know there's thorny things in there.

JESS: No, no, nothing. Nothing particularly thorny. Who gets picked? There's a very large conversation about who gets chosen to represent the intellectual side of Australia. And this is not to cast shade on Schwartz, but more just how that landscape gets created in general. The list is still pretty overwhelmingly white. That needs work. You know, when I was a producer at the ABC, you needed to really consciously... I actually needed to consciously when I was putting panels together, make sure that they were 50 per cent women represented because 10 years ago that was actually the work that needed to be done. And now there is much more work to be done that is close to the surface.

I think that the Quarterly Essay , it strikes me that it is a pretty rare person that writes long form in Australia and long form journalism. You do have to have the experience, and I guess some runs on the board to be able to write something like this in such a short period of time. I couldn't have written this before I wrote my book, I think that was a really great sort of staging ground. I know other writers of Quarterly Essays who maybe haven't written a book before have been really shocked at how hardcore it is. And I guess to an extent, there needs to be some name recognition, I think, because the Quarterly Essay does, as Sarah saying, try to set a bit of an agenda. So some expertise in the area that you're writing about or some name recognition. But yeah, aside from that, I don't know.

SARAH: I would second all that. And I think that observation just about kind of the dearth of spaces to write at length factually and creatively is not something that we really have a lot of. And if it's the length that you are... My background was academic immediately before I wrote my first book, and I would get more scared by 1,200 words than 40,000 words, which is my length. And I enjoy having the space to do that. And even in the compressed kind of deadline, it's still time to let the issues aerate and marinate, and it's a really unique space. So, I think it does select people that have that experience and are sufficiently masochistic that they are enthusiastic about doing it.

But I agree also, Astrid, that it is changing over time. I mean, when I think back to my favourite ones before it even occurred to me that I too might throw my hat in the ring for it, it was Anna Krien – both of her’s, but particularly the live export market, Jess's now, and the observations from Rebecca Huntley. And I'm not looking for the gal writers specifically, I'm looking at these topics and also the way in which most of them were written. So I have other ones that I really enjoyed as well, but what I can tell you off the top of my head, these were the ones that made me think that I too would be good at doing that, or at least capable of asking, of pitching without having a laugh come back. They are the female ones. But yes, I agree. The diversity issue does need to be addressed.

JESS: I think also there's obviously a crossover with Black Inc authors and the Quarterly Essay , although after what I put the team through with See What You Made Me Do around deadline, they should have known it would be probably repeated.

It was interesting seeing Lech Blaine's essay that came before mine. That's not a diversity on a cultural level, but on a class level, it represents something very different for the Quarterly Essay . Having come from writing memoir –  memoir that obviously is doing a lot more heavy lifting than just telling a story with car crash, talking about masculinity and so many other things, and trauma – his style of writing the Quarterly Essay was very unlike almost any Quarterly Essay that came before it.

You know, he wrote quite consciously on and off in ‘Boganese’. It was very much writing... Almost like Gonzo writing on lyricism. The whole writing style is lyricism. And I was really inspired by what he did with the form, which was very different. Coming from a very working class background brought a totally different sensibility. I think that was really... I would love to see more chances taken on people who don't come out of the mould. I don't think myself or Sarah come out of a mould per se, but I think that Lech was the furthest outside what you would expect as an author of a Quarterly Essay .

SARAH: That is such a good point, Jess. I think that it also speaks to a new way of looking at Australian history that is the thread that the last... Well, I think like you can trace in the last two, two or three years worth of Quarterly Essays . It's a new way of looking at what in the world are the enduring persisting patterns that takes it out of where... To whom those traditional modes of history and historical debate have been assigned. As, you know, ‘This is the way of looking at credible academic or scholarly history’.

Lech is a perfect example of that, seeing these continuities, these patterns, these values, their expression, how it falls on the ear, how we are meant to understand things said and things meant. He brings all of his particular background characteristics to understanding that and illuminating that terrain. So I think that's another kind of subtle trend.

ASTRID: Another thing about the Quarterly Essay is the correspondence at the end and the right of reply. So Sarah, this hasn't happened to you yet, but it will in about three months.

JESS: You wait.

ASTRID: In your essay, Sarah, there are letters published in response to Jess's previous essay. And of course your right of reply, Jess. So, two questions. Firstly, how does that feel personally, because this is not something common in widely available non-fiction published in Australia, the fact that you reprint the supporting or opposing views? And what is the role of that correspondence in the Quarterly Essay ?

JESS:  You know, I was having a chat to Anthony Lowenstein about something kind of corollary to this yesterday. And it was about sort of the dearth of intellectual disagreement amongst Australian writers, particularly at writers festivals, which is both, I think, a symptom of how Australia has become quite anti-intellectual, and also of the fact that many on the Right who get platformed fall into a pretty narrow band of culture warriors. I think the so-called Right or conservative media has become pretty bad at platforming its intellectuals, because that wasn't what was getting bang for their buck.  So there's a paucity there. And of course, writers festivals, they're a bit of a circuit and getting writers to come across for $300 a session, coming interstate, I guess maybe some writers would be turned off if they were heading into a sparring match. But there is that sort of... As you say, there's not a lot of space for disagreement. And even in reviews it can be that you find that person writing the review of that other person's book, they're friends, they're mates. It's a very small writing community. So what's great about the Quarterly Essay correspondence. It's not that you have some sparring match at the back, but it's that it is encouraged. This is not going to risk your connection with that person, that we are supposed to be interrogating the ideas. It's not personal. It'd be great if there was more of it.

Now, when it came to the correspondence to mine, most of it was just lovely. I was really lucky. I was really wondering like, ‘Oh, what's this going to be like?’ And some of it was... Certainly some of it interrogated things I hadn't managed to interrogate, and added new things that I hadn't even thought of.

The only real challenge came from Janet Albrechtsen. And I really wanted that challenge to be nuanced and sophisticated. I wanted that even against my own better knowledge. And look, there were parts. But again, it was just in that culture warrior frame where it felt like to engage with it critically was being sucked into that vortex. And even points that she made that just, given a bit more thought, would've had more meat on their bones just came across quite shallow. Such as, ‘If I'd been a more curious writer, I would've looked at how certain people, read women, have taken advantage of the #MeToo movement for their own ends’. There's a point to be made there about how #MeToo can be used in all different ways, but the inference there is really clear that it would be women who are trying to corner men. I think we've seen from both sides various types of ways that me too has been weaponized. But not really so much in terms of false allegations – in fact, that was more heralded as a likelihood by people like Janet and her ilk, and didn't come to fruition, not in any high profile way that we've seen. So there was just things like that where I thought, ‘A bit more thinking in this response would make this a really interesting sort of debate’. But instead I feel like I didn't really even give what you are saying that much attention because you're coming at it from a warrior perspective and it's really boring.

So there's a bit... I think what the correspondence does, even when it's not disagreeing or trying to spar, is it does bring out your blind spots. And I thought it was a great response to Lech's essay before mine from Allison Pennington, really talking about his focus on male larrikin figures and where were the female larrikin? Where was the Julia Gillards, those sorts of figures? And that was a blind spot in Lech's approach, or perhaps just it wasn't a narrative he was exploring. It's great just to open up that whole concept to other eyes because you can't, in that short amount of time (even if you do use up all of your words as Lech and Sarah and I have), you're just not going to get everything. You've got your own path that you're treading.

SARAH: And we're not unfamiliar when you publish... The exception isn't hearing back from readers, the exception is having a right of reply. We mostly have to tolerate definite legitimate criticism which improves our endeavours, and equally many criticisms that are ideologically driven and factually lacking. We just have to suck that up 99 per cent of the time, because it doesn't behoove the position to get into a shit slinging match with readers that just don't like your work. That's part of the job. You develop a scab or a bruise or techniques of taking it on and forgetting or what have you. So to have that dialogue format is really rare and, I think, precious.

Because like Jess said, when you write about life, it is in ineluctably partial and selective. And we have our own focus areas for our own reasons and to be able to speak and disagree in a respectful environment – or, if it's not respectful, at least in an environment where people are equally heard. I mean, that is really a beautiful thing… So I'm telling myself this now and I'm going to play it back when the bile is rising, I'm sure, in three month’s time.

JESS: Oh, what you have to look forward to, Sarah.

ASTRID: Sarah and Jess, I would like to thank you both for speaking to me, but I would also like to say as an avid fan of the Quarterly Essay series, with all its ups and downs, I do think that you have both written classics. Jess, your work on me too, Sarah, your work on mental ill health are exceptional.

My favourite ever Quarterly Essay was Karen Hitchcock's from 2015, I believe, Dear Life: On Caring for the Elderly. And I cried the first time I read that, and she identified everything that went wrong with the aged care system through the pandemic, and we all found out the hard way, the brutal way. That's how important I think Quarterly Essays are – they give us the understanding of what we should have about what matters.

Thank you so very much and may everybody start to read the Quarterly Essays .

JESS: Thank you, Astrid. Thank you, Sarah.

SARAH: Thanks.

OTHER RECENT INTERVIEWS

Laurie Steed on writing the short story form

Kate Larsen on why the relationship is the project

James Bradley on the colonisation of the oceans

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Disabled people must be in charge of what happens next with the NDIS

Micheline Lee's elegant, honest and searing indictment of non-disabled people’s failures, and its acknowledgement of disabled people’s determination, must be heard.

Sep 11, 2023

The National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) was born from the need to meet the most private of disabled people’s needs, without which we don’t have any chance of being part of the community. But the NDIS wasn’t meant to be just about these deeply personal parts of our lives — it was also intended to liberate disabled people from being excluded. Has that happened?

The latest Quarterly Essay — Lifeboat: Disability, Humanity and the NDIS — is a timely and personal look at the NDIS from writer Micheline Lee. Using her own experiences and expertise as a disabled person, she examines the Australian government scheme and asks if it has delivered on the hopes invested in it.

Lee begins with an anecdote familiar to most disabled people: one about exclusion, about being treated as different, about the barriers in the world to our equality. As she notes, “What many people don’t see is the bigger issue: discriminatory attitudes and society’s unwillingness to meet the needs of disabled people”. Indeed.

Her experiences were detailed in an earlier essay for The Monthly in 2017, which explored the frustrations of trying to get the support that we disabled people need to live our lives. Lee ended that article with the hope that the NDIS could mean that “the structures and the attitudes that disadvantage people with disabilities can be transformed”.

In Lifeboat , the writer traces her life through mainstream education, sitting away from her classmates, watching them play in places she couldn’t reach. Her friendship with another disabled person weaves throughout the essay — different disabilities, different personal impacts, but the same exclusion. This power in solidarity with other disabled people is clear, as is the heartbreak.

Perhaps it is our similar age, but I, like Lee, struggled with seeing myself as disabled when I was younger. I also thought that “disability was something I had to overcome”, fearing that reliance on others as my body changed. That fear, for both of us, came from very good reasons. At the time, there were few examples of disability supports delivered with anything other than indignity, waiting lists and charity.

Lee traces her own experiences with disability supports before the NDIS, which weren’t even close to what she needed. She finally received two hours of support in the mornings before work, but more aid wasn’t available “until someone else vacated their place in the scheme”. This was a common experience — little to no assistance and inconsistent eligibility rules between different states, or even local government areas, and between different kinds of disability.

This lack of support wasn’t accidental; it’s the end result of centuries of seeing disabled people as unequal, as wrong, as not really human. Lee talks about how “from my Chinese-Malaysian background, I was seen as a result of a curse of a contamination to my lineage”. She includes the eugenics movement, active in Australia along with many other places, which saw “disability as a defect, which needed cure or elimination”.

The rise of the disability rights movement — including the development of the social model of disability that tried to build a framework for solidarity among disabled people with many different kinds of disabilities — established a new way of thinking about disabled people, led by disabled people. Here the problem with disability wasn’t as much about our own impaired bodies and minds but about the barriers and exclusions in the world around us. This means to include us, the barriers must be torn down, instead of focusing on changing us as disabled people.

Lee elegantly goes through the history of the NDIS and the original promises it made. Choice and control, reasonable and necessary — what these terms mean and why they are important. But she also asks, “Could the NDIS really create a more caring and inclusive society?”

It’s a good question. Part of the answer is about what went before — disabled people fighting to be in control of our lives, of our supports, of the systems and policies that are about us. Lee looks at the changes to the NDIS, the infiltration of non-disabled people from banking and the corporate sector, saying the “experiential knowledge of disabled people was devalued”.

Through interviews with other disabled people and their families, Lee asks questions about the market system of the NDIS and whether it has delivered the promised power to disabled consumers. She writes, “We did not sign up to a scheme where an individual is left to sink if they don’t fit the image of the ideal consumer”, and wonders why the kinds of individualised funding schemes in other countries that use public service delivery haven’t happened here.

Lee finds that “providers have raised their prices, taking advantage of situations where there is more demand than supply”, which echoes the findings of the current NDIS review .

The essay ends with a clarion call for disabled people to once more be in charge of what happens next with the NDIS, rather than those who scaremonger “about the cost of the scheme, although they themselves have amplified these by cutting short-term costs so the scheme can’t flourish, neglecting disability supports outside the NDIS and implementing a market model that’s not fit for purpose”.

The current NDIS review, with thousands of disabled people contributing ideas for change, must have its recommendations led by us, or this opportunity to deliver on the promise of the scheme will be squandered. Lee’s elegant, honest and searing indictment of non-disabled people’s failures, and its acknowledgement of disabled people’s determination, must be heard.

Have you dealt with the NDIS? Let us know what your experience has been, and what if anything you’d like to see change, by writing to [email protected]. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.

About the Author

Contributor @bluntshovels

El Gibbs is a writer and consultant who works across the NDIS and disability policy.

• Micheline Lee
• quarterly essay

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get rid of every third party middle man ; like the NDIS funding – indeed all social security payments are not there to provide so called business for profiteers in suits, shuffling their cut out of our finite pie ; note the pirates in childcare, body corporates born of public infrastructure payments ; agedcare , our once public parking and tunnel road links ; lazy or corrupt and inane politicians with their predominate focus on announcements and lies “Conversations” public enquiries giving lobbyland and pundits in tourism and marketing soap boxes on our ABC ( run like netflix increasingly dumbed diwn with cheap hollow appropriating ; achieving zip except abuse ; gaslighting older progressive voiceless people; seasoned women who are being indentured into lowly indentured free silo kabor for middlenen pretending they are supporting precarity – nup

It sounds like this is another group that needs a Voice…

Disabled people have always had a Voice, the problem is the lack of those who will listen!

My son had his review in past months. We learned information at his phone interview that we’d not had before. Useful information.

So he’s got he new plan and updated funding, since part of it was running short and he had to drop some sessions with one of his providers to eek it out for the last six months of the previous plan. That’s another difficulty with the NDIS. Funds are allocated to certain ‘budgets’ within the plan and in some cases unused funding available in other parts of the plan can’t be shifted to cover shortfalls elsewhere in the plan.

He’s been allocated funding towards a plan co-ordinator. However, none are local and if they arrange something, from their own resources, and have some one travel, that’s yet another cost that’s not always made clear and the plans don’t necessarily allow for travel costs by service providers especially given that we live rural, so travel costs can add up.

I’m also aware of plan co-ordinators, even after discussing what services a recipient would like, don’t necessarily find services that suit (they don’t necessarily Listen, they simply decide what they think will work) and the only option for recipients is to continue with a service they don’t like, or stop using the service and have the money sit there not being used.

So the real problem is, not that they don’t have a voice, they just need people to actually LISTEN, not just HEAR. There is a difference.

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