The next time someone decides to write a ''Whither the Liberal Party?'' book, I suggest they get the Special Minister of State, John Faulkner, to edit it. No doubt the idea of a senior Labor luminary and intellectual being the man for the job might seem perverse, but I can pretty much guarantee that by the time he is finished there will be no misunderstandings about plagiarism; the attribution of words or ideas; spelling, grammar and punctuation; or whether the supposed author means each word, sentence and paragraph of it.
I have never personally suffered the agony of being edited by Faulkner, but a number of my friends and acquaintances have, and they speak of his efforts in hushed tones. He is brilliant, infuriating, exhausting and pedantic, and some have suggested he devotes much of his time to agonising about whether a page should be sent back because a comma has been printed in Times Roman rather than in Times Roman italic.
A number of highly professional and respected journalists and authors, writing chapters for books he has edited, have had their copy returned as not good enough indignities they have never previously endured, even when they deserved it. A number have been grudgingly given a ''not a bad first draft'' mark and then been astonished to see the ''draft'' returned with scads of queries, suggestions, quibbles and corrections. One victim - now grateful for the ''assistance'', if with a still somewhat bruised ego - once commented that, compared with Faulkner, the legendary Harold Ross, founding editor of The New Yorker, was slapdash, careless and incurious. Ross, too, was famous for putting mega-marginalia alongside manuscript, including the ''who he?'' query against a pronoun.
I expect Faulkner does not employ fact-checkers, as Ross did and The New Yorker still does. They are a species unknown in Australian letters and journalism, given to looking for independent confirmation of the spelling of every name mentioned, and proof or record of every fact asserted.
Ross once reviewed the Buffalo telephone directory, drawing attention to a number of misspellings and wrong addresses. But, as the Thurber biography would suggest, a good deal of his constant questioning, checking and feel for falsity came not from his great learning but from his great ignorance. He was not in the least afraid of exposing it in his efforts to publish words that were perfect and facts which were right.
By contrast, I expect that Faulkner's pedantry about spelling, grammar or facts comes from his head, his own intellectualism and interest in ideas (including those of other people) and his command of facts and history. That, and a background as a primary school teacher, obviously from a day when teachers got the awed respect of their classes and when no one was in any doubt about who was the teacher and who the pupil. (I am not to be taken as implying that modern teachers do not deserve respect; my fear is they do not get it.)
The Faulkner sin, if it is a sin, is in thinking that words should be taken seriously, and that one should mean what one writes and express it as clearly as possible. He is not a subscriber to the ''It doesn't matter how you say it, as long as you get the meaning across, sort of'' school. He is, like the good sub-editor, a person who makes a scribe think about what he has written, and forces him in the process to concentrate his thoughts. But he is not, first, your friend; he is the reader's friend, searching for ambiguity, misstatement and inelegance, with kindly suggestions about improvement. He has no compulsion to substitute his words for yours so much as a determination that each of your words will pay its freight.
Alas for such good editors, writers often have powerful, and surprisingly tender, egos. Even when they have made mistakes - as I did in this column last week in referring to the subjunctive voice, rather than the subjunctive mood - they are prone to be crushed and blame others.
The problem with the book Liberals and Power is that the editor, Peter van Onselen, seems to have taken the task rather more seriously than some of the politicians he commissioned to contribute thoughtful pieces about the future of the party. A number, such as Brendan Nelson and Julie Bishop, agreed to do so, then consigned the task to employees in the office, who are in far shorter supply than when their bosses were ministers and routinely able to take credit for the work of others.
Each notional author will no doubt insist he or she gave broad guidelines to the amanuensis, and general approval to what was put forward. But anyone who remembers their performances as ministers would expect that supervision, beforehand or afterwards, was minimal. Julie Bishop's ''thoughts'' involved some plagiarism of another writer explained away, very unconvincingly, as the staffer having forgotten to forward footnotes. The man who wrote the Brendan Nelson ''contribution'' plagiarised not another but himself: whole tracts had appeared elsewhere under his byline.
Faulkner would probably have spotted this directly, because he reads very widely, even (or especially) about the ideas of his political opponents. He would also have noted, in any event, that both contributions were quite pedestrian not up to the task involved. Had he decided they had to be saved anyhow, a string of queries and suggestions would have gone, by telephone as much as mail, to the supposed author, not the ghostwriter. It would have produced an ultimate state of affairs by which the supposed author had considered, reconsidered and committed himself or herself to every word and syllable. And, thus, would have been unable, if problems had later emerged, to disclaim responsibility and blame a minion.