Crikey reporter Sophie Black writes:

Does TheAustralian
have it in for Robert Manne? After reading the long and bitter 1500
word attack in the paper’s Inquirer section last Saturday –
written not by an established figure but by a fortysomething post-grad
student called Peter Hayes – you’d begin to wonder.

In the piece, Hayes accused Manne of a series of research blunders and
half-truths, described him as a “celebrity intellectual” who “doesn’t
measure up to his reputation,” and claimed Manne was guilty of “fudging
evidence” and handling facts and sources “very loosely for a
professor.”

Manne – a LaTrobe University politics professor and newspaper columnist
– says the critique was around the 20th time in the last three years
that the paper has published “personal attacks against me,” including
three editorial comments. He says every allegation in the story is
wrong – “apart from the misspelled names” – and believes that
ever since Chris Mitchell became editor-in-chief at The Oz he’s wanted to “do me harm for political reasons.”

Manne said he wouldn’t be surprised if the decision to publish the Hayes piece wasin parta reaction to an article called “Murdoch’s War” which he wrote for the July edition of The Monthly magazine, which attempted to document The Australian’s
endorsement of the Iraq war and claimed the paper trumpeted owner
Rupert Murdoch’s pro-war sentiments irrespective of the bad news coming
out of Iraq.

“I’ve only ever written the odd letter to The Oz,”
said Manne, “but I feel now that it’s gone too far. People read these
things quickly and…they assume where there’s smoke there’s fire.
These things do ruin people’s reputations and I think that’s their
purpose. I think this thing is entirely gratuitous and unjustified.”

Patrick Lawnham, editor of The Australian’s
Inquirer section, told Crikey the paper accepts that “everyone is open
to criticism, including the newspaper itself,” and actually published
an extract of Manne’s Monthly article in July. “It is rare for
a newspaper anywhere to open itself to such criticism extensively in
its own pages,” says Lawnham.

“I accepted the (Hayes) article
because it attempted credibly to hold a public intellectual to near the
same standards to which he holds others,” he says. “Professor Manne has
since asked us to run a rebuttal by him of this article, of similar
length. His request was immediately accepted.”

So who is Peter Hayes? The Oz
included Hayes’s lofty credentials of having “studied philosophy and
history at the University of Melbourne as part of an arts-law degree”
at the bottom of the story. But he’s also laid into Keating biographer Don Watson in Quadrant and literary critic Peter Craven in Overland in the past year, and after his attack on Craven, the SMH’s literary editor Susan Wyndham described him as a “brazen giant killer.”

But Hayes told Crikey he’s merely an apprentice lawyer working on a post-graduate degree. He says it was a MarchSMH poll which had Manne topping the list of Australia’s top 100 intellectuals
that prompted him to write the piece because he felt “there was another side
to the story that wasn’t being expressed.”