Race Mathews: A Life in Politics, by Iola Matthews, Monash University Press
In a season when the weather of domestic and international politics might seem irremediably foul, any hint of sunshine is disproportionately welcome. Particularly in this week when we see the mismatch between the childishness of electoral politics and the urgent need to address climate change, gross inequality and mass killing of civilians around the world. The former is characterised by the exchange of slogans and personal attack, in which ideas do not serve the search for truth but are used as crude weapons. The result is that the pusillanimity or authoritarianism of each successive government leaves the nation more unequal and divided, political processes are marked by myopia, not by clarity, and the future of the world is more compromised.
Against this background, a recent biography of Race Mathews offers welcome hope. In it, his wife Iola Mathews honours a decent man who has given his whole life to politics at different levels in order to make the world a better place. Iola Mathews herself shared in Race’s political campaigns and brings to the book the insights gained from her own involvement in movements for women’s equality. She quotes liberally from Race’s own account of significant episodes in his life in a book whose structure is chronological but also thematic. This involves some repetition which underlines the themes running through Race’s life. Among these are the huge contribution that she and his first wife Jill, before her early death, made to support the family in a way that enabled him to be a real, though by the nature of his work, often physically absent, husband and father.
The features of Mathews’ life that speak to the present state of politics are his clear vision of a democratic society in which people are responsible to one another; his respect for ideas that allow this vision to inform effective policies; his insistence that political institutions and processes, including those of his own Labor Party, should reflect these ideals; and his breadth of interest and sympathy that inform a richly human politics.
Almost from the beginning Mathews was inspired by the vision of society embodied in the slogan of the French Revolution: Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. It was also captured in the phrase Democratic Socialism and Social Democracy. This is essentially a vision from the bottom up, where agency is exercised by individual persons, and groups