In this issue.

The current issue of National Observer is headed by a powerful, scholarly article on the limited nature of Australia's form of democracy, which is not, strictly speaking, democracy at all, but something more accurately described here as a ballotocracy. The ancient popular assemblies in Greece and Rome were direct democracies in which the ordinary people participated in the making and ratifying of laws. We, like most modern democracies, have taken these popular assemblies and reduced them to elected lower houses of parliament with the people given a say only once in every three or four years. We have also taken the (never democratic) idea of the Roman senate, which was to a large extent an aristocratic preserve, and created our upper houses. The only Western country that has a real democracy is Switzerland. And yet, early in Australia's history as a political federation, there were serious attempts made to ensure that it would be a real democracy, with citizen-initiated referenda, the right of recall of elected representatives, and other truly democratic features. And the party in which most of these attempts were made was the Australian Labor Party, which only abandoned the ideal of a more genuine democracy in the early 1960s under the guidance of elitist social-engineering types like Don Dunstan. Joseph Poprzeczny has explored, for the first time in this kind of detail, the history of these attempts, and related them to similar, far more successful attempts in the United States which had a major influence upon thinking here, particularly in the Labor Party. This is a ground-breaking article that fills a major gap in previous treatments of Australia's political history.

In "Dr H.V. Evatt--Part II: The question of loyalty", Dr Andrew Campbell completes his major pioneering study of the subtle and not-so-subtle connections between Herbert Vere Evatt (one of the icons of the Labor Left, and frequently the subject of hagiographies) and Moscow-line communists here and overseas. Among the numerous intelligence sources used by Dr Campbell are the just-recently declassified documents from the Hope Royal Commission (1974-77), which are employed in this article to raise new questions about Evatt and his departmental head, Dr John W. Burton, suspected by some as a Moscow-aligned fellow-traveller. In fact, Dr Campbell uses numerous other previously closed intelligence sources as well, many of them revealed here for the first time. With all this primary material in hand, Dr Campbell has been able to examine Evatt's political career from a fresh perspective, particularly his tenure of the External Affairs portfolio under postwar Labor governments, and as a consequence he raises serious questions about Evatt's loyalty.

A lighter note, in some ways, is struck by John Stone in "'Reshaping Australia': 2020 and all that", which examines the Rudd Labor Government's recent, much-publicised exercise in drawing on the thousand "best and brightest" Australians for ideas on how to shape Australia's social and political future over the next decade or so. "20/20" suggests that the invited participants had perfect foresight, and certainly many of them knew themselves so gifted. Much inspired talking was done, many bright ideas floated in the specialised sections into which the grand assembly disposed itself, total agreement reached on such urgent issues as the crying need to make Australia a republic, and in sum the Rudd Government was presented with a host of brilliant ideas on how to improve Australia and its people. John Stone analyses this important gathering with great insight and panache.

In "Suharto's Legacy", Patrick Morgan considers the achievements of Indonesia's President Suharto across the four decades from the time he came to effective power in the 1960s to his political demise and subsequent death. Suharto saved Indonesia from the attempted coup led by D.N. Aidit's Communist Party of Indonesia (CPI). It was the Indonesian military, under Suharto but often acting locally in semi-autonomous fashion, which ensured that the CPI would never again be a potent force in that country. Not only the CPI leadership but the cadres right down to their families were liquidated (to use a term invented by Leninists, who taught the world how to do this sort of thing) in those areas of Indonesia where they were particularly strong, and as a consequence Suharto's regime was hated by the international Left, which spread the obfuscation that the coup had in fact been led by him. Under Suharto, Indonesia boomed in ways it never had under his predecessor, the charismatic President Sukarno whose policies had plunged his country into massive international debt. Sukarno's promises in the years before the attempted communist coup were nothing if not grand: this editor recalls the headline in the Adelaide News one day in 1965: "Suk: We will have N-bomb in a year". Well, not quite. Patrick Morgan's article offers a balanced assessment of the admittedly corrupt President Suharto's achievements, which were major, and important for the wider region and particularly Australia.

The final article in this issue is Charles Francis QC's "The CSIRO's political partisanship". This organisation has a proud record of scientific achievement, and it is disturbing to find that it has now, through its publications and policies, developed ideologically-skewed agendas on socially important issues like abortion. This article demonstrates that a particular point of view on abortion is considered privileged at CSIRO, and that censorship is exercised there to exclude the counter-view. This article, like others in this issue, deserves to be publicised well beyond our own readership, and it will be interesting to see whether any of the media pick it up.