Book Review: Rogue Nation by Royce Kurmelovs
Australia breeds two opposing worldviews: the provincial and the cosmopolitan. The provincial’s world is as narrow as an island girt by sea or sometimes even narrower. It rests on the assumption that Australia is unique and exceptional and the world beyond is barely worth knowing. When the provincial does look outward it is with anxiety: he or she is relieved to tune in to familiar sounds regardless of the physical distance they have travelled from the States or Britain. The cosmopolitan nurtures a separate anxiety, that borne of an inferiority complex. The cosmopolitan sees Australian as a backwater within the world: it is never really sure where Australia stands, forever fearing that everyone else is secretly laughing at Australia behind its back.
When these worldviews collide or coalesce in Australian politics they produce the most marvellous paradoxes. Take the example of Pauline Hanson’s popping open a bottle of “Black Pig” sparkling white wine at the announcement of Trump riding to victory. Hanson, the archetypal provincial suddenly deciding she was part of a global movement to keep the world out.
In Rogue Nation, Royce Kurmelovs recounts this as he takes a survey around the Australian political fringe. A reader will be treated to political profiles of an increasingly large array of outsiders like Derryn Hinch, Jacquie Lambie, Clive Palmer, Nick Xenephon - and of course the mandatory Pauline Hanson (Cory Bernadi is strangely absent). In the process Kurmelovs is forced to wrestle with contradictions such as Hanson thinking globally. Each contradiction is a limitless source of irony that Kurmelovs energetically taps. Perhaps the finest is the detail he expertly uses to describe just how insulated the Australian federal political class are from the public they democratically serve - privileged yet with a pang of an emperor’s loneliness.
Kurmelovs worked as a media adviser for Xenophon and he clearly believes in the state senator’s message, (and perhaps the access his position afforded). Xenophon emerges as a warm, determined and media-savvy politician, able to carve out an authentic nook from the stone of the major political parties.
Access is everything when writing about politics. Yet with Australian right-wing populists increasingly taking their cue from Trump with wholesale bans or dubious “fake news” labels put on a hair-trigger. So access is increasingly difficult to come by and easily lost.
I have been given a tour by the author of his hometown, through Elizabeth on the edge of Adelaide, the place that supported the Holden plant. I got a whiff of his tenacity as a journalist. I shudder to think about his mobile bill. In Rogue Nation those he meets personally come out the best. Of those who evaded him, he is able to mine secondary sources for details, although these personalities don’t live and breathe within these pages as Xenophon does.
Yet if Rogue Nation consisted solely of the meat of political reporting: media gaffs, ruthless party machinations and the florescent lit corridors - it would get dull pretty quickly, even with Kurmelovs’ flourishes. The author soon does what he does best - moves out from the relentless symmetry of our capital and to Tasmania, to Western Australia, to Northern Queensland, to the Latrobe Valley. In other words to the places where the major parties get smug, complacent and aloof, to where populist uprisings really begin.
With Fairfax’s mastheads entering a dubious future, it’s difficult to overstate just how important this sort of journalism has become in Australia. Every media outlet has reporters stalking the halls of power but by then the story is in its final act. Fewer and fewer outlets have reporters in locations in decline - where deindustrialisation or drought or depopulation are decimating rural towns and stripping them of them of opportunity and breeding resentment.
In both Rogue Nation and in his previous book The Death of Holden, it’s precisely these locations where Kurmelovs really succeeds as a writer. I have come to call his style ‘yarn mode’ - a voice that borrows vernacular and easy turns of phrase from his subjects. It’s deceptively colloquial and renders place and person with nuance and humanity. It conveys struggles in the dust and the rust of modern Australian landscape and establishes that all too evasive link to the well-coiffured overmanaged political bulletins that run on the 7pm news. In others it could easily become patronising but Kurmelovs grew up amongst people like these. These people are his people.
In the end Kurmelovs relies on this link between blue collar and blue tie to answer if Australia is part of a global populist uprising or not. For Kurmelovs, this country is not immune to the same forces gave rise to Brexit and Trump. Populist uprisings don’t spontaneously arise from nowhere - they are the result of prolonged localised neglect and hubris by the major political parties. Populism is an expression of resentment which can be positive and hold power to account, as in the case of Xenophon, or it can be opportunistic and cynical as with Clive Palmer, or even somewhere in between. What Kurmelovs is certain of is that the current political winds will not fix the structural flaws. We arrive at a resolution of sorts between the cosmopolitan worldview and the provincial: Australia is not exceptional to the rest of the world, the same forces operating here will more often than not produce the same outcomes as elsewhere. Yet those of Australia’s issues that give rise to populism are unique. This is why Rogue Nation is so vital to our national discourse. To understand the underlying issues is the first step towards resolving them.
Rogue Nation: Dispatches from Australia’s populist uprising and outsider politics by Royce Kurmelovs is available from Hachette Australia