Prats in the ranks.(The Education of a Young Liberal)(Book review)

The Education of a Young Liberal, by John Hyde Page; Melbourne University Publishing, 2006, $32.95.

POSH KID is playing shoot-em-up game at posh school. Posh Kid runs into group of other drunk, smoking, cross-dressing, slightly older posh kid members of the Young Liberals. Posh Kid signs up to the Young Liberal Party, rises through ranks of the NSW party, aiming eventually to be president. Several rorts, stacks, lies, frauds, preselections and elections later, Posh Kid is powerful and feared member of NSW, Young Liberals, working for a respected member of federal parliament--but not much closer to Young Liberal presidency. When new Liberal Party candidate challenges old Liberal Party candidate for preselection votes, Posh Kid briefly contemplates defecting to challenger's camp--but when he realises it won't help get him the Young Liberal presidency, decides against it. Disappointed, demoralised, and a little bit disgusted with himself, Posh Kid leaves the Liberal Party. Then Posh Kid writes a book, detailing some of the rorts, setting out a few of the stacks, and naming more than a few names.

The "Posh Kid" is John Hyde Page, and the book he has written is The Education of a Young Liberal. Like the preceding MUP publication The Latham Diaries, Page's book is the sort that is apt to attract different sorts of adjectives by different parties. "Alarming" and "valuable" is how the publisher describes it; the blurb writers for the Melbourne Writers' Festival had this to say: "John Hyde Page was in private school when he fell in with a bad crowd." The adjectives applied to the book by those individuals involved and implicated would probably be of the monosyllabic kind. In short, what you or I might call an "interesting" book.

It is generally entertaining; in any one chapter, several memorable episodes are detailed with vigour and the sort of crude humour you might expect of political hacks, amongst whose ranks Page was numbered. It's a memoir from personal experience, though not exactly a memoir of personal development. Page displays some moments of contrition while not exactly accepting responsibility for his actions. He is disarmingly evil, gleefully telling the stories of enemies vanquished and stacks achieved. He recounts with an obvious tone of pride that he developed many weapons in "the modern hack's arsenal" and goes on to describe them.

Occasionally, he will take a break to acknowledge the fallout from the attacks, or explaining his emotions and personal motivations, but these usually appear as afterthoughts. This allows for a swift, vigorous and often exciting narrative, but the results are also somewhat narrow. A little more surprisingly, in a book about politics and politicians, policy is never really discussed--it's not even entirely clear what sort of policy Page stands for. Policy, it seems, is inferior to strategy and tactics; you get the general idea when, in the earlier chapters, Page encounters a senior figure in the Young Liberals who is confronted with a paper on the Liberal Party youth suicide policy:

 
   When her turn came, Elaine confessed to 
   shortcomings in her branch work but pluckily 
   announced that she'd been working on other 
   projects. Good news! The movement's policy paper 
   on youth suicide was almost finished. 
 
      Chewbacca's anger almost shook the poultry 
   photographs from the walls. 
 
      "POLICY!" he roared. "Policy? What the fuck 
   do you mean by policy?" 
 
      This was exactly what was wrong with the 
   faction, he went on. Sloth. Misplaced priorities. 
   Idiocy. You idiot, Elaine! 

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