Provocateur by Clive Hamilton review - The public intellectual who not only thinks but feels

Clive Hamilton is a great asset to public life in Australia. Dissatisfied with what he could achieve as a Commonwealth public servant, he was central to the launch of the Australia Institute in 1994. A steam of submissions, discussion papers and books - some co-authored - has followed and will continue. Economic policy, morality (sexuality in advertising), consumerism, the environment, climate change and the Chinese Communist Party's influence on Australia have all been subjects of Hamilton's pen. What Provocateur adds to such impressive public service is a glimpse of the emotional cost of what he calls "advocacy scholarship". The price of immersing himself in climate science, for example, was that "I daily had to fight off feelings of despondency, panic and rage."

"If pure learning is pleasurable," Hamilton reflects at the end of his book, "as soon as it gives rise to a desire to change the world it becomes painful, riddled with anxiety, outrage and conflict." To know the world is to be distressingly at odds with it. Surging within Hamilton's intellectual critique of his times, compassion and moral severity contend for ascendancy, and Provocateur reveals how often severity has been the costly victor. He has fallen out with people with whom he feels affinity, such as Richard Denniss and Robert Manne. Not judging them, he is unsparing of others. Provocateur reveals that anathema comes readily to Hamilton.

For example, I was startled to read that Julian Assange "backed Donald Trump" in 2016. AAP Factcheck (available online) says that Assange admitted he did not have anything damning of Trump to disclose (in contrast with Wikileaks' release of emails embarrassing Hillary Clinton), but this is not "backing" Trump; Hamilton's characterisation of Assange is wrong. Similarly unconvincing is his continuing to label Hugh White a "capitulationist". White is warning Australians not to overestimate their own military strength and the military strength and regional commitment of the United States. Hamilton does not address questions of defence spending and alliance diplomacy posed by White. He is content to expose (in work that I welcome with reservations) the ways that Australia has become open to the bullying and covert influence of the Chinese government.

"Outrage" is evident in Hamilton's frequent reference to "corruption". In Provocateur, his examples are: Indonesian bureaucracy corrupted by forestry companies, Tasmanian politics corrupted by "dark money" and by the Communist Party of China; Victoria's Crown Casino; the influence of "homegrown corporates and lobbyists" on Australian politics; the Rudd government's subsidies to fossil fuel industries; and the relationship between the Howard government and the fossil fuel lobby. Perhaps a forensic national commission against corruption would confirm some of these as instances of "corruption" as legally defined, but what is clear is that "corrupt" is Hamilton's default word when he denounces political economies that damage the common good. It is allied with a moral psychology that characterises "friends of China" politicians (in his 2018 book Silent Invasion) as "driven by money or ego".

Of "conflict" there's no shortage, and Hamilton's fights are interesting in their variety. As my academic milieu includes cultural studies, I was fascinated to read that when the Australia Institute published a paper by Emma Rush and Andrea La Nauze that criticised advertising that sexualised children, the response of David Jones (named as an example) included gathering testimony from "cultural studies enthusiasts" as a weapon to use in bringing suit against the Australia Institute. According to Hamilton, DJ's Cultural Studies expert argued that the images in question were not intrinsically sexual but were made so by an eroticising gaze. The implication was that the Australia Institute authors (including Hamilton) were constructing what, ostensibly, they were condemning.

Before a judge could consider this, David Jones withdrew their suit, as the publicity was hurting them. Contacting the Australia Institute, the parents of a girl in the advertisements denied that the ads sexualised their daughter, accusing the researcher who found their little girl's photo erotic of being "sick". Hamilton could have paused his story to consider whether the parents' point illustrated the cultural studies expert's thesis. He recalls telling the parents' solicitor "although the parents may not see it this way, we are on the same side". "Anxiety"? Yes, Hamilton felt bad about the parents' "tears and rage" and about the threats levelled at one of the paper's authors.

Nonetheless he remains steadfast in condemnation of "libertarians". That word does a lot of work in Provocateur because Hamilton sees affinity between neo-liberal political economy and 'libertarian' culture. Each exaggerates the worth of individual choice and downplays the necessity of communal responsibilities based on a shared morality; their affinity thrives in "a de facto alliance of marketers, postmodern intellectuals and cultural elites".

Running through Hamilton's earliest criticisms of neo-liberal political economy, to his critique of climate change complacency, to his warnings against the strengthening Chinese government influence over Australia there is a continuing, important thesis. It is captured by this explanation (in Silent Invasion) of Australia's vulnerability to the Communist Party of China: "the enormous influence of free-market thinking whose unspoken assumption is that the economy must come before everything else, including our freedom." By "freedom", in this sentence, he means our democratic institutions and norms that, in his view, China has been eroding. Hamilton is one product of this freedom, and our opportunity to debate this admirable, prolific moralist is another.

This public intellectual not only thinks but feels.