Thursday, December 11, 2014

Abbott misuses PM literary awards to attack unions

The panel of the Prime Minister's Literary Awards has been accused of political bias after presenting the top history prize to a book trade unionists and left-wing commentators say is a "union-bashing" rant.

The joint winner of Monday night's prize for history was Hal Colebatch for Australia's Secret War: How unions sabotaged our troops in World War II, published by the conservative Quadrant magazine.

Journalist and naval historian Mike Carlton exposes the political bias

"The infamous culture wars sank to a sorry new low last night," he wrote on Crikey.
"The prize for history went to a right-wing rant against Australian trade unions, an ideological tract that includes errors, hearsay, exaggeration and in some cases sheer fiction and fantasy.
"History it is not."

Carlton, who is also a naval historian, challenges several key claims in the book and takes particular aim at one of its opening accounts, which says a strike by dock workers in Sydney prevented prisoners-of-war from being reunited with their families. It states the soldiers were forced to remain on board a ship for 36 hours due to industrial action on the wharves.

"This is untrue. It simply did not happen," Carlton said. "Newspaper accounts of their return report the men were greeted by cheering crowds on the day they arrived.

"Colebatch gives his only source for this nonsense as a letter from one W.S. Monks, dated 1995, 50 years after the event."

Carlton said the prize was no doubt due to the political persuasions of two of the judges - right-wing commentator and Sydney Institute director Gerard Henderson and former Quadrant editor and Liberal MP Peter Coleman.

Carlton posted on Twitter: "No doubt I'll be accused of sour grapes, but I intend to expose the Colebatch book for the drivel it is".

Read more:

No comments: