Reclaiming Patriotism Nation-building for Australian progressives
Tim Soutphommasane is a doctoral researcher in political theory at the University of Oxford. A 26-year-old first-generation Australian, he has worked as a freelance journalist and has written extensively for the British and Australian press, including the Financial Times, the Guardian, the Spectator, the Australian, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age. A member of the Australian Labor Party, Tim worked on the speechwriting staff of former New South Wales premier Bob Carr and on the staff of Kevin Rudd during the 2007 federal election campaign. Of Chinese and Lao extraction, Tim was raised in the southwest suburbs of Sydney, and holds degrees from Sydney and Oxford universities.
Reclaiming Patriotism Nation-building for Australian progressives Tim Soutphommasane
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, S˜ao Paulo, Delhi Cambridge University Press 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521134729 c Tim Soutphommasane 2009 First published 2009 Designed by Adrian Saunders Typeset by Aptara Corp. Printed in Australia by Ligare National Library of Australia Cataloguing in Publication data Soutphommasane, Tim. Reclaiming patriotism : nation-building for Australian progressives / Tim Soutphommasane 9780521134729 (pbk.) Australian encounters. Includes index. Bibliography. Patriotism–Australia. National characteristics–Australia. Australia–Social life and customs. Australia–Politics and government. 320.540994 ISBN 978-0-521-13472-9 paperback Reproduction and Communication for educational purposes The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10% of the pages of this publication, whichever is the greater, to be reproduced and/or communicated by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or the body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act. For details of the CAL licence for educational institutions contact: Copyright Agency Limited Level 15, 233 Castlereagh Street Sydney NSW 2000 Telephone: (02) 9394 7600 Facsimile: (02) 9394 7601 E-mail:
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For my parents, Chanthavone and Thinh
Contents
Acknowledgements Introduction
ix 1
1
The dog whistle excuse
14
2
Liberal patriotism and an Australian tradition
35
3
Citizenship and multiculturalism
62
4
Australian progressives and nation-building
89
5
Republican renewal
116
6
Reclaiming patriotism
136
Notes
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Index
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vii
The savage who loves himself, his wife and his child, and works for the good of his tribe as for his own, is in my view more genuine than that cultivated ghost, the citizen of the world, who, burning with love for all his fellow ghosts, loves a chimera. The savage in his hut has room for any stranger; the saturated heart of the superfluous cosmopolitan is a home for no one. Johann Gottfried von Herder
Acknowledgements
This book in one sense originated from my doctoral research in political theory at Balliol College, Oxford. In another sense it arose from my own process of reflecting on Australian patriotism and national identity – as a first-generation Australian, as someone active in the Australian Labor Party and as an expat living in England between 2004 and 2009 watching a revival of national pride take place back home. Along the way, I have discussed and debated patriotism with Australians and non-Australians alike, learning something new from each conversation. I have no doubt that this dialogue is far from over. Much like a national project itself, you could say that my understanding of patriotism is something that could never come to completion but is rather always becoming. I have been fortunate to have been given the opportunity of postgraduate study at Oxford. I am grateful for the support of the British Council and Balliol College, which, respectively, granted me a Commonwealth and a Jowett scholarship. The University of Oxford’s Clarendon Award fund and Oxford’s Centre for International Studies in the Department of Politics and International Relations also provided generous grants during the course of my research. I owe a number of people special thanks. My commissioning editor at Cambridge University Press, Tony Moore, has been a sagacious guide and gave me much heart in believing there was still a debate to which this book could contribute. His comments on my manuscript have been invaluable and I am happy to have had the opportunity as well to learn from his own work on Australian culture. Susan Hanley, Jodie Howell and my copy-editor, Sandra Goldbloom Zurbo, have also provided wonderful support and advice. I am indebted to Matt Pennycook, Nicholas Farrelly, Sam Indyk, Gerald Ng, Jeremy Spinak, Jeannie Messer, Alix Rule,
ix
Kurt Mitman, Nikola Casule, Gregoire Webber and David Williams ´ for reading draft chapters and, in some cases, the manuscript in full. My thanks also go to an anonymous reviewer who offered some incisive criticism on a previous draft, and to my doctoral supervisor, David Miller, who has helped shape, perhaps more than he realises, the theoretical aspects of my thinking on patriotism while I have been at Oxford. At the risk of omitting many others, I should like to thank James Button for his encouragement when I first had the idea to write a book, and also Bruce Hawker, Bob Carr, Geoff Gallop and Bob Hawke for sharing their thoughts on Australian patriotism and nation-building at various stages of my research. Finally, I thank my family – my mother Chanthavone, my father Thinh and my sister Sara – for their support over the years, but in particular for their forbearance during the summer of 2008–9 in Sydney, when much of the business of weaving together the threads of this book took place. I dedicate this book to my parents, who taught me very early the value of citizenship and the meaning of calling a country your home. Tim Soutphommasane Oxford
A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S
May 2009
x
Introduction
‘Aussie, Aussie, Aussie!’ The gathered crowd, numbering a few hundred in a section of Sydney’s Hyde Park, responded as only Australians would. But this was neither a sporting event nor some pantomime moment. The occasion was a citizenship ceremony, and the rallying cry came from a young man from New Zealand as he collected his citizenship certificate. The people in the crowd, most of them waving miniature Australian flags, were there to celebrate Australia Day 2009. Everyone watched as one by one the 18 individuals on the outdoor stage received their citizenship documents – official recognition of their naturalisation as Australians. Mostly young men and women in their 20s and 30s, they each wore their distinctiveness with pride. There was a young woman from Sarajevo wearing a traditional white, embroidered Bosnian dress. There was a man from Scotland sporting a tartan kilt. There was a man from Malaysia dressed casually in an unmistakable homage to Steve Irwin: widebrimmed hat, short-sleeved khaki shirt and matching shorts, a pair of brown boots. All, though, were now Australian citizens. Reiterating the new bond they shared with those watching on from the lawn, the master of ceremonies called on all citizens present, new and old, to reaffirm their commitment to Australia: ‘I pledge my loyalty to Australia and its people, whose democratic beliefs I share, whose rights and liberties I respect, and whose laws I will uphold and obey.’ The crowd obliged. Then everyone proceeded to sing ‘Advance Australia Fair’. Elsewhere in Hyde Park, groups of friends were basking in the afternoon sun with a glass of white wine or bottle of beer. Young parents tried their best to placate face-painted children amid the rising heat. Seniors settled into their seats in the shade to listen to the Royal Australian Navy marching band; they broke into voice when
1
it played ‘I am Australian’. A short distance away, people gathered around the bronzed sculptures and spraying jets of Archibald Fountain, the park’s central landmark. A Lebanese-Australian family posed for photos. A young Asian-Australian couple snapped some photos of their own. A trio of blonde teenage girls, caped in flags and wearing tops emblazoned with ‘Australia’, gossiped away. A white-haired Anglo-Australian man in his 70s sat in deep concentration licking his soft-serve icecream cone. Relaxed, friendly, good humoured, unpretentious – if this was a day for celebrating everything great about our country, then the people at Hyde Park seemed to be doing it pretty well. The patriotism on display seemed at ease rather than pompous, agreeable rather than aggressive. Yet not all manifestations of patriotism are so benign or praiseworthy. That same Australia Day in Sydney, along the beaches in Manly, hooligans carrying the national flag and chanting racist slogans, ran amok, harassing ethnic minorities, vandalising shops and smashing car windows. All across Sydney, police arrested more than 90 people for violent behaviour. It was not the first time bigots had hijacked our national symbols. Over the last few years, episodes of white ‘Aussie pride’ have tarred patriotism with the stain of jingoistic nationalism. In the minds of many, Australians would do better to avoid expressions of national pride that fire the blood. Patriotism is a Janus-faced phenomenon. There is the dark face
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of patriotism as vice, a dubious form of national loyalty that can
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verge on fanaticism. Contemporary experience seems to offer no shortage of examples of a love of country being used to justify government restrictions on individual rights, to fuel racist violence, and to support wars in foreign lands. Then there is the brighter side, patriotism as virtue, a loyalty that motivates citizens to make sacrifices for the improvement of their country. Whether it is through contributions in the form of taxes, participation in public deliberations, or physical defence of the community in time of war, a free society should prefer civic virtue over despotic coercion. Ideally,
citizens should take pride in their country, see its public institutions as their own and readily contribute to its flourishing. If patriotism is ambivalent in its political expression, then it is because the meaning of the term suffers from ambiguity. Is a love of one’s country merely an emotion or a psychological attitude? Is it a product of the authoritative demands of tradition or of considered reflection? Is it directed at one’s fellow citizens or the entity of the nation? Such questions cannot be answered with the simple pronouncement of ‘For my country’. The meaning of patriotism appears to resist definitive agreement or consensus. Many might well say that contemporary patriotism in Australia has been indistinguishable from racist chauvinism. According to this view, we have confused patriotism with an extreme form of nationalism, substituting cultural aggression for citizenship. Years of racial dog-whistling have fomented anxiety; anxiety has hardened into fear and fear into hate. All these sentiments have been given succour by a renewed sense of loving our country. Yet a more complex picture of patriotism has recently emerged. The election of Barack Obama as US president has shown that national pride can be liberal and inclusive, not just reactionary. Record numbers of Americans turned out to cast their vote, some queuing for more than half a day, because they believed it was their duty to help change their country. When the news of Obama’s victory came through, Americans spoke about being choked with tears of joy by seeing their national flag flapping in the wind. Some 2 million people turned out to fill Washington’s National Mall for Obama’s inauguration, while the rest of the world watched on their television screens, marvelling at the miracle of American democracy. ‘Yes, we can’ has become the clarion call of progresa truer path when it has been pushed off course. Closer to home, many Australians point to Kevin Rudd’s 2008 apology to the Stolen Generations as an ennobling, patriotic moment. It was perhaps the only time Australians have stopped collectively to listen to a speech
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sive patriotism: loving one’s country means working to set it on
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given in parliament. Again, here was an instance of one’s country being put right, of being able to feel great once more about one’s country. Just as collective pride can be a force for the baser elements of our nature, so too can it inspire citizens to do what is just and good. This is a book about contemporary Australian patriotism, and the place of identity and citizenship in Australian politics. More specifically, it is a book about how Australian progressives should be thinking about patriotism. By ‘progressive’ I mean very broadly those who sit left-of-centre on the political spectrum. In recent years, Australian progressives (or left-liberals) have been defined largely by their stance on issues concerning the so-called culture wars. Progressives tend to believe that reconciliation with Aboriginal peoples requires recognition of past wrongs as much as practical welfare policies. They tend to support the official promotion of multiculturalism and believe that government treatment of refugees in the past has been exceedingly harsh. They also tend to support the establishment of an Australian republic as an act of national maturity.1 Thus understood, ‘progressive’ is a label that, while associated with the Left, goes beyond simple political party affiliation. In more philosophical terms, the term ‘progressive’ describes a set of moral and political values, and an understanding of the proper role of the state in shaping people’s lives. As I use it throughout the book, progressive politics is a shorthand for modern social
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democracy. It represents a commitment to values of democracy and
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equality, community and pluralism, reason and autonomy – guided by a belief in social justice. The progressive typically believes in the use of the state to disperse social and economic power, and to ensure that all individuals have an equal opportunity to pursue a life of dignity and fulfilment. Progressive politics is different, in this sense, from a classical liberalism, which views the role of government as strictly concerned with protecting individual liberty, the rule of law and property rights: for the progressive, government should not confine itself to procedural justice but should aim to help individuals fulfil their potential. It is different as well from a
conservatism that views the role of government as concerned with preserving historical traditions and social moralities: for the progressive, a dogmatic adherence to custom leaves no room for the use of our reason and for the expression of cultural pluralism. And it is different, too, from a libertarianism committed to exposing all realms of social and economic life to the discipline of market competition: for the progressive, while open and freer markets are compatible with social justice, there remains a role for government to civilise capitalism when markets fail, as they inevitably do. Some will question why it is necessary to be thinking about patriotism in Australia at this juncture. Our culture wars appear to have died down; Australians seem to have moved on. Dealing with a global financial crisis and its accompanying economic fallout is the more pressing priority. To some extent, we may even welcome a brief cessation of cultural hostilities within our public debates. Yet there are three reasons why progressives should not dismiss the importance of clarifying their understanding of patriotism. The first concerns what could be called the challenge of solidarity. Within the West, questions of identity have gained in urgency amid unprecedented flux and social change. Global capitalism has disrupted local economies, accelerated deindustrialisation and triggered transformations in class and culture. Post-Second World War social liberalism has spawned a diversity of lifestyles and diluted social norms. Consumerism and narcissistic privatism have led to a decline in civic virtue. Perhaps most profoundly, waves of mass immigration have created multicultural societies that challenge the foundation of the nation-state – the assumption that citizens would share a collective identity based on a common ethnicity and culture. In the Australian case, the
West have made more concerted attempts to instil a sense of shared
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identity. In the United Kingdom, Prime Minister Gordon Brown
5
previous solidarity of a White Australia, buttressed by British race patriotism, has yet to be replaced by any equivalent unifying myth or bond.2 It is no surprise, then, that liberal democratic governments in the
has been promoting more explicit expressions of Britishness – proposing, among other things, an official statement of British values to ‘set down the values, founded in liberty, which define our citizenship and help to define our country’.3 Shortly after he was elected as president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy established a Ministry of Immigration and National Identity, the first time such a ministry has existed in that country. Over the last decade, German public figures and intellectuals have engaged in a prolonged Leitkulturdebatte about the impact that immigration has made on their national culture. Here in Australia, the Howard government introduced a citizenship test for immigrants, incorporating questions about Australian history and national values. Whatever the differences in national circumstances, the concern has been much the same. We may welcome diversity, but the benefits of cultural difference can only be realised if there is an overarching sense of belonging to a national community. Progressives cannot afford to ignore such matters. Any notion of social justice involves the redistribution of resources, or, perhaps more accurately, the sharing of resources. In a democratic welfare state, we share not only our income, our social services and our public spaces, but also a public conversation. As Prospect editor David Goodhart argued in 2004 in his seminal essay on diversity and solidarity, such sharing requires a set of common values, if not
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also a common culture:
6
And therein lies one of the central dilemmas of political life in developed societies: sharing and solidarity can conflict with diversity. This is an especially acute dilemma for progressives who want plenty of both solidarity – high social cohesion and generous welfare paid out of a progressive tax system – and diversity – equal respect for a wide range of peoples, values and ways of life. The tension between the two values is a reminder that serious politics is about trade-offs. It also suggests that the left’s recent love affair with diversity may come at the expense of the values and even the people that it once championed.4
In other words, we cannot take our common ground for granted. In a pluralistic society its discovery and affirmation require work. The second reason why progressives need to grapple with patriotism is more specific to the Australian experience, what I call the problem of intellectual complacency. The end of the Howard prime ministership has, for many, signalled the demise of a resurgent patriotism. During its first year in office, the Rudd government made some dramatic departures from the policies of its predecessor. As well as the apology to the Stolen Generations, there was ratification of the Kyoto Protocol. There was the abandonment of mandatory detention and the Pacific Solution. There was a summit bringing together the best and brightest of the nation’s minds to deliberate upon Australia’s future direction. All confirmation, you might say, of what many now regard as an iron law of our political culture: former prime minister Paul Keating’s dictum of ‘change the government, change the nation’.5 In this case, Rudd’s ‘new leadership’ has smoothened the patriotism that John Howard sharpened during his decade in power. Such apparent change should not lead us to believe that patriotism and the national story are no longer live political concerns. Debates about our identity never abate for very long, and they reemerge in new forms. For all the talk about Australians becoming more relaxed and comfortable about the national identity, there remains a restless yearning for an authentic statement of what Australianness must mean today. Even now, we are still debating the true place of Gallipoli and the Anzacs in our national self-understanding. Old myths about bush pioneers and workers – the Australian legend – seem to jar with the reality of a modern, multicultural Australia. When, even whether, we will get another
Apart from hardcore ideologues on the Right, few people seem
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interested in debating multiculturalism, national history or political
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chance to become a republic with our own head of state remains unresolved. In any case, Australians should not indulge intellectual apathy. It may appear that our culture wars have reached their conclusion.
correctness. But important questions remain unanswered. To what
extent has the nation changed since Howard was voted out of office? How are we to make sense of the years of cultural conservatism just passed? Have they actually passed? Progressives seem unable to answer these questions. They are still in search of a new national story to displace the one we were given during the Howard years. Love him or loathe him, you could not accuse John Howard of lacking a cultural narrative. Howard’s critics would say he was on a crusade to remake Australia in his own conservative image, defined by the bland monoculture of the Menzies years of the 1950s and 1960s, with its old-fashioned family values and reverence for Queen and empire. For Howard’s supporters, his time in office helped restore a sense of a traditional Australian national identity: Australia was a proud Anglo-Celtic country, with no need for the fashionable political correctness of elites, the Left’s ‘black armband’ view of history, the ‘navel-gazing’ of endless self-loathing debates about identity or the ‘mushy’ and ‘misguided’ policy of multiculturalism. Either way, Howard’s prime ministership offered a clearly defined conservative patriotism, with its own myths, heroes and defining moments.6 But must progressives reject patriotism if they wish to repudiate parts of the Howard legacy? There is a widespread assumption that they must, but the case is far from clear. This brings me to the third reason why patriotism should matter to progressives: the challenge of leadership and reform. While
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progressives are not blind to the potency of ideology, especially the
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Liberal–conservative ideologies they oppose, they can sometimes overlook the importance of articulating a positive cultural vision of their own. It is not always clear to Australian progressives why a left-liberal political agenda must take an interest in cultural questions. There is a widespread attitude of dismissal: either culture belongs to a less consequential political domain or moving on from the culture wars means not obsessively worrying about matters such as national identity. I adopt a different view. A progressive politics cannot afford to be lazy or to aspire to mediocrity. As with the rest of the
world, we are faced with the intergenerational challenge of responding to climate change. A global economic crisis has only thrown into bolder relief a changing international economic order. The Australian economy and workforce require upgrading for a more intensely competitive marketplace. Amid the tumult and transition, Australia must catch the tide of opportunity and position itself for new realities. And this, you could say, is only possible with a clearer idea of what a future Australia should look like. This is how culture fits into the picture. Leadership involves not merely negotiating the interests of various groups: it is more than just the quid pro quo bargaining that is the normal currency of politics. Leadership also involves an act of persuasion between leader and follower. Where leadership is most effective in mobilising resources – getting people to agree with change and to make sacrifices – it engages the values and identities of followers. Politics becomes elevated to a new moral plane.7 Yet for this to happen, leaders need to be able to tell a story to followers; they need cultural form as well as political and economic substance. It is the task of this book not just to tackle the challenge of solidarity and the problem of intellectual complacency, but also to offer the foundations of a progressive model of national identity and a cultural map for nation-building. The patriotism I defend is one in which loving one’s country is not reduced to ethnicity or race. It is rather a patriotism that demands of citizens a commitment to a national tradition, comprised of civic values and moulded by historical experience. Loving your country does not mean adhering to unquestioned myths or mindlessly repeating slogans, but being prepared to contribute to the improvement of your community and culture. The national
It is important that they now reclaim patriotism as a value of
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their own.
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project is something that never is but is always becoming. Understanding things this way requires some rethinking of Australian left-liberal politics. In recent years, progressives have made the error of surrendering all talk about national values to conservatives.
Here, I should declare my own interest. I am 26 years old and have been a member of the Australian Labor Party for more than a decade, having joined the Mount Pritchard branch in Sydney’s southwest when I was 15. Throughout my teenage years, Monday and Wednesday nights were often spent at branch meetings or at gatherings of the local Fairfield–Liverpool Young Labor Association. Many weekends during high school and university were spent letterboxing leaflets across Sydney and sometimes farther afield for state and federal election candidates, all for the reward of some cheap pizza after a morning’s work and the cheap thrill, if you can call it that, of being involved in a campaign. In more recent times I have worked for a Labor government in New South Wales (for Bob Carr when he was premier), and in 2007 worked on the ALP campaign in Kevin Rudd’s Canberra office. For the last five years, I have been pursuing postgraduate research at the University of Oxford in England, writing a dissertation about the political theory of patriotism. While it has in many ways been an abstract, philosophical project, my research has never been separated from questions about the kind of patriotism we should embrace. Even while ensconced in Oxford’s old libraries, walking daily down its cobbled lanes and in the shadows of its sandstone towers and spires, a world apart from the Sydney suburbs of Canley Vale and Bonnyrigg Heights where I grew up, it is hard not to think about home. And as a first-generation Australian, born in
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France to parents from southeast Asia, bearing Chinese and Lao
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ethnicity, the question of whether patriotism can be liberal enough to include those from all cultural backgrounds has for me a very personal significance. Spending time away in England, and watching from afar the rise of a new cultural assertiveness in Australia, seems only to have made such questions more poignant. To be sure, there has been no shortage of developments or events to pique my sense of patriotism. Whenever Australians do well, and not just in sport, I feel proud and want to know more. Whenever British friends or acquaintances bait me with some Aussie-bashing,
they frequently succeed in getting a rise out of me. There have been moments, too, when my love of country has been challenged by the ugliness of national pride. When the Cronulla riot took place in 2005, it felt as if I had been let down by my country and that I had even lost part of it. As did many others, I believed Australia had taken a turn for the worse under John Howard’s leadership, what with the demonisation of asylum seekers, the crass nationalistic fervour, the imported American right-wing ideology, the deception and the naked opportunism. When I decided to take a few months off from my doctorate to work on Labor’s election campaign in 2007, returning home felt as though it was almost a matter of patriotic duty. If only in a very small way, I wanted to do my part in restoring our country. Just how much Australia has changed since that election, I am not sure. But progressives have been stirred into the realisation that the nation still has the ability to remake itself, and that there is a public Australian tradition they should embrace as guidance. At the turn of the 20th century, Australia was known as the social laboratory of the world. As a place where social legislation had ‘forced the men of property to accept that all should enjoy a measure of material well-being’, it was a beacon of social and economic development to which all others looked.8 What Australia achieved then, it did through a combination of ambitious vision and determined nation-building. Today, few could say that our country is a leader in the world in the same way. Fed by complacency, we have come close to losing our way. It is the task for progressives to awaken Australia from its slumber, inject some collective aspiration into the public debate and make the case for comprehensive nation-building reform. a cultural change in how Australians understand themselves and their country. This begins with discarding what I call ‘the dog whistle excuse’, the default left-liberal position when it comes to patriotic expression. As chapter 1 argues, the lazy conflation of
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How, though, can this be done? As already suggested, it requires
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patriotism and racism is a political as well as an intellectual mistake that has the effect of alienating the liberal Left from a middle Australia that takes pride in our national identity, history and traditions. The second step is for progressives to get their concepts straight – a task that is dealt with in chapter 2. Patriotism does not have to mean jingoism. There is the possibility of a benign, liberal and inclusive love of country. It is important that left-liberals not dismiss patriotism with a swipe, but engage with its nuances. And while many believe patriotism is in substance distinct from nationalism, I argue that divorcing patriotism from nationality can do more harm than good. A genuine patriotism is a demanding one that challenges Australians to make their country live up to the best of their national tradition, as well as confront the misdeeds of their history. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the matter of reconciliation with Indigenous communities. The challenge of liberal patriotism also involves coming to terms with the value of citizenship and its application to a multicultural society, a topic tackled in chapter 3. There is the mistaken view, on the Left and the Right, that citizenship and multiculturalism are fundamentally opposed ideas. Any liberal model of patriotism should pursue the integration of immigrants, but this is best done through a liberal multiculturalism that balances the right of cultural expression with the responsibilities of citizenship. A more mature debate about cultural diversity would be possible if we paid closer
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attention to what official multiculturalism has actually involved.
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For too long Left and Right have been content to indulge fanciful distortions of multicultural policy. The remaining chapters consider some of the programmatic elements of a liberal model of patriotism. Chapter 4 examines the relationship between the Australian Left and a progressive tradition of political reform. The Australian Left is always at its most ambitious when it pursues a nation-building agenda. There is a reformist tradition, encompassing Deakin and Fisher, Chifley and Whitlam, Hawke and Keating, with which progressives should reconnect. In the contemporary context, a nation-building agenda should involve
a green New Deal aimed at securing economic security in a lowcarbon future. Chapter 5 explores whether the establishment of a republic will provide the best prospect of grounding a contemporary liberal patriotism. A renewed progressive politics should seek to leave its mark in the form of an Australian republic. Any revived republican push must not confine itself, though, to symbolic patriotism. The creation of a republic should be seized as an opportunity to rejuvenate our citizenship and the vitality of our public life. My aim in this book is to challenge Australian progressives to animate the national conversation with resumed purpose. The Australian Left should not squander the opportunity for nation-building it now enjoys with a Labor government in power – it must take the current when it serves. But this is only possible if there is a guiding cultural story. Drawing on the best of an Australian national tradition, progressives must articulate a vision of where Australia should be heading. This, in turn, is only possible once progressives reclaim patriotism as a liberal value.
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Chapter 1
The dog whistle excuse On a crisp February night in Oxford, the community of Australian postgraduate students gathered in a college bar for a quick pint before the main event. There was, that evening, some required viewing. At Oxford, it is a periodic ritual for Australians there to organise a live television feed in one of the colleges or town bars, sometimes for the cricket, sometimes the AFL or rugby. But no one had ever arranged a telecast of the day’s proceedings in parliament. This night, though, was the occasion for no ordinary sitting of MPs. It was still only two months after Labor’s election win and Kevin Rudd had yet to address parliament as prime minister. Rudd had made it the task of his first speech at the dispatch box to offer an official statement of apology to the Stolen Generations, a reversal of his predecessor’s stance on the issue. Howard believed it was unnecessary to say sorry for the good intentions of white Australians implicated in the mistreatment of Aborigines. Yet the weight of the national conscience was set against him: whatever the intentions, misguided paternalism was still just that. To use Rudd’s words, 14
the forced assimilation of Aboriginal children was a policy that ‘inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss’, as well as ‘indignity and degradation’ on ‘a proud people and a proud culture’.1 As the 50 or so of us watched the ABC’s live coverage and saw the large crowd that had congregated on the lawns outside parliament, it was clear that this would be a moment when the nation stood still. In our solidarity from afar, we would be standing – or rather sitting – with everyone else back home. Everyone had already read the transcript of the motion earlier that day. We knew what Rudd was going to say. And everyone, I suspect, shared the thoughts and feelings of those back home who were watching: a sense of a burden lifted, some measure of deliverance, but most of all a patriotic pride. It was fitting that we would find ourselves watching the apology at New College in Oxford. As friends and I walked through the college grounds on our way back home, we passed one of its landmarks, the tall, black, wrought-iron gate that opens up into its expansive, verdant gardens. Emblazoned at the top is the college’s motto: ‘Manners Maketh Man’. I could not help thinking that a nation had that night found its manners, and in doing so had taken a step towards a new maturity. The moment was a hopeful signal that we could bring to a close a culture war that had deeply scarred the national soul. Progressives, though, should not be so hasty in believing that the battle has been decisively won. On the liberal Left today some shibboleths remain
debilitating for modern politics. At their heart lies a disturbing prejudice, progressives have wrongly cast all invocations of national pride as the ‘dog whistle’ politics of racial prejudice. The idea of comes to debates about values and identity. Progressives will need to get over this – and quickly.
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the dog whistle has become an excuse to vacate the arena when it
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intellectual and moral vacuum. Fearing the perils of dancing with
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the nation. The current progressive thinking about these matters is
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unchallenged, among them ideological notions about patriotism and
15
The dog whistle and the culture war Maybe it is the natural talent we have as a nation for shorthands – you could not find another country in which people are more fond of giving each other nicknames – but, whatever the reason, Australians tend to reduce our prime ministers to single lines or phrases. Our political leaders, for all that they do during and after their time in office, find it difficult to shake off their taglines. Gough Whitlam? ‘Well may we say, God save the Queen . . . ’ Malcolm Fraser? ‘Life was never meant to be easy.’ Bob Hawke? ‘By 1990 no Australian child will be living in poverty.’ Paul Keating? ‘This was the recession we had to have.’ Kevin Rudd’s prime ministership is still in its early stages; the epitaph has yet to be written. What, though, of John Howard? One thing is clear. The cultural impact of Howard’s prime ministership will be the dominant legacy. Among his critics, Howard will be remembered for his politics of fear: ‘We decide who comes to this country, and the circumstances in which they come.’ Among his supporters, Howard will be remembered for something more. His leadership helped to bring the national identity back into balance by replacing tendencies of collective guilt and self-hatred with a new cultural confidence. In this view, Howard will be remembered as the leader who made it possible for Australia to be ‘relaxed and comfortable’ about its identity and place in the world.2 It is certainly true that Australians have become more openly
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proud of their national identity, more patriotic, perhaps more
16
nationalistic as well. Where once there was talk of Anzac Day dying out from a lack of public interest, dawn services on 25 April are now attended by large crowds, young and old. In our cities, diggers’ street marches are greeted by spectators six and seven deep. Today, tens of thousands of Australians travel to the beaches and cliffs of Gallipoli every year: to peer into the horizon of the Dardanelles at dawn at the sounding of ‘The Last Post’ has become the new defining act of patriotic remembrance. The question that lingers is whether this patriotism might involve something more menacing. Beneath the respectable veneer
of civic pride, is there not a belief that one’s country and culture must be superior to all others? That patriotism justifies doing all we can to defend our heritage? And in a multicultural society, might patriotism not flirt with racism? If race is the underbelly of contemporary Australian patriotism, then it is because race has represented the big battleground of our contemporary culture wars. Yet for many years there was bipartisan consensus among our political leaders that the issue should be kept out of the public domain. It was felt that debating matters of race and immigration would light a gunpowder keg, the explosion of which would leave consequences too destructive to contemplate. John Howard never subscribed to this consensus. While Opposition leader in 1988, he controversially argued for the reduction in the number of Asian immigrants. Echoing the sentiments of historian Geoffrey Blainey, who caused a similar stir in 1984, Howard suggested that the pace of Asian immigration needed to be ‘slowed down a little, so that the capacity of the community to absorb was greater’. He argued that the policy of multiculturalism placed an emphasis on ethnic difference at a cost to social cohesion. According to Howard, it was an ‘error’ to abandon the policy of assimilation in favour of multicultural accommodation.3 Howard’s anti-immigration declaration is my first political memory. I remember that my parents rather disliked Howard; they loved and admired Bob Hawke. At the time of Howard’s Asian immigration episode, they were – we were – newly arrived immigrants
would spend my first three years of childhood). But feeling that they we would emigrate to Australia. We all very happily naturalised as Australian citizens within three years of arriving. Like the 18 new
family, with beaming smiles, doing the same, posing with the local
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citizens I saw at Hyde Park taking photos of each other while they
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would never be accepted into French society, my parents decided
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Laos in 1975, my parents spent 10 years living in France (where I
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in Australia. After fleeing the communist takeover in their native
mayor at our citizenship ceremony in front of a portrait of Queen
17
showed off their naturalisation certificates, there are photos of my
Elizabeth II. With pride my parents would tell me I was officially an Australian. So the sting my parents felt from Howard’s comments was all very real. History tells us that Howard was firmly chastised for his Asian immigration intervention. It triggered a parliamentary motion to reaffirm Australia’s commitment to a non-discriminatory immigration policy (one in which future immigration minister and attorneygeneral Phillip Ruddock crossed the floor against Howard). It also contributed to Howard’s subsequent deposal as opposition leader by the Liberal party room. A chastened Howard became more subtle in his public statements about matters concerning race. When Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party emerged as a political force in the 1990s, thereby unlocking a torrent of anti-immigration and anti-multiculturalism feeling, Howard’s response was to say he was happy that a ‘pall of censorship’ on discussing immigration had been lifted, and that he respected Hanson’s right to air her views in a society that guaranteed free speech (the same thing he would say almost 10 years later when Bronwyn Bishop called for a ban on Muslim headscarves in schools). It was a sign of a new political tactic: acknowledge people’s anxieties, soothe them by offering a sympathetic ear, and, without saying anything explicitly, signal that you are thinking precisely what they are thinking. It was not until 2001 that this method gained a name in
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Australia – dog whistling – and at the same time reached its apogee.
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It was journalist Laurie Oakes who introduced the term into the public vocabulary. In his column for The Bulletin on the week of the 2001 election (the so-called Tampa election), Oakes described this new politics in the following way: The key feature of this election campaign has been a clever use of what professionals call ‘dog whistle politics’. A dog whistle is pitched so high that dogs hear it but humans do not. Dog whistle politics involves pitching a message to a particular group of voters that other voters do not hear.
John Howard wanted One Nation voters back. He also saw a chance to attract some traditional ‘blue-collar’ Labor voters with similar concerns. The Tampa episode provided him with the dog whistle he needed.4 Oakes’ summary says it all. Cast your mind back to that election, when members of the Howard government would repeat the mantras of ‘border protection’ and ‘national security’, and criticise Labor for being ‘soft’ or ‘weak’ on terrorism. Or to the ‘children overboard’ episode and the allegations made by the Howard government about asylum seekers from the Middle East throwing their children off a leaky boat to make sure they would be taken to Australian shores. Or, finally, to John Howard’s election campaign launch speech, when he unleashed that declaration of ‘We decide who comes . . . ’ The subtext on all these things for the targets of the dog whistle is not so hard to detect: We will keep these people out.5 Throughout Howard’s fourth term in government, the idea of the dog whistle framed how progressives viewed conservative Australian politics. Everything Howard said was deciphered as an attempt to engage the electorate’s subconscious. Teaching Australian history in our schools? Dog whistle. A citizenship test for immigrants? Dog whistle. Intervention in Aboriginal communities in the Top End? Dog whistle. On each of these issues a typical progressive would say that Howard was communicating in code to white Australians. His particular targets: people who felt their lives
ilar yearning for the old British Australia of two-parent nuclear Of course, hidden messages have long been a staple of political rhetoric. The use of coded rhetoric, for example, has long been part
fare’ (unemployed black single mothers), ‘people of faith’ (good,
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of the arsenal of American politics. Invoking phrases such as ‘family
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families and traditional values.
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those for whom mention of national values communicated a sim-
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had been turned upside down by economic and cultural change,
God-fearing Christians), ‘law and order’ (harsh jail sentences for
19
values’ (I do not approve of homosexuals), ‘single mums on wel-
black and Hispanic street gangs) and ‘states’ rights’ (racial segregation) are all well-worn techniques for American politicians, especially those on its conservative Republican Right. Perhaps because Australian politics has tended to be less polarised and less moralistic, there has been no same need to revert to code. According to conventional progressive wisdom, this has changed in recent years. Use words such as ‘patriotism’, ‘citizenship’ and ‘integration’ approvingly, and you are bound to be accused of employing euphemisms for chauvinism, assimilation and exclusion. Dog whistle politics has gained so much currency in our political conversations that it has become a pre-emptive verdict in any discussion of culture and identity.
The dangers of the dog whistle There are two reasons why dog whistle politics is a big problem for progressives. It is not so much the fact that people use the phrase ‘dog whistle’ as it is the mindset that accompanies its use. The whole idea not only draws on questionable assumptions about the use of race in our politics, but it also short changes our ability as citizens to engage in public debate. In the first place it involves a misdiagnosis of our politics. The temptation is to scan our body politic and pronounce that it is plagued by a cancer of racial prejudice and nastiness. The cause? Howard’s ruthless appeals to fear and anxiety. Here was a politician,
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with a government in tow, who had no qualms about manipulating
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the basest and foulest elements of the national imagination. Thus talking about Australian values was a calibrated signal to white Australia that it was all right to let its primordial fears take over. Writing in 2005 about the Howard government’s efforts to have Muslims embrace Australian values, writer Guy Rundle argued the whole purpose was ‘racism pure and simple’, an ‘attempt to paint the global Islamic community as some sort of desocialised rabble, who are so barbaric that they have to be told to teach their children the virtues of care and honesty’.6 In similar vein, former ALP national president Carmen Lawrence, in her Fear and Politics,
suggested that debates about values and national identity have been the direct result of a deliberate cultivation of public hysteria about minorities: Inflammatory remarks by federal ministers who have demanded that migrants who do not accept Australian values should leave or face deportation have contributed to this climate of fear. At a time when our leaders should be calming fears, they are playing on them. When they should be doing all they can to help us all to see events from the other’s perspective, they are inviting us to retreat into our own narrow identities. When they should be assisting us to recognise how our own actions and words can cause fear in others, they are giving signals that such sensitivities are unimportant. They are, in my view, playing with fire.7 Let me be clear. I sympathise with these sentiments. You cannot deny that fear has been part of the equation in Australia’s culture wars. But in the end these views do more harm than good. The mistake is to believe that fear counted for the whole equation of national values. There has been a tendency among progressives to dismiss John Howard’s politics as mere opportunism. Where others were scrupulous enough to avoid race politics, Howard was never, so the story goes, bound by the same rules. It is an appealing analysis, but ultimately a poor one. It misses the fact that Howard, far from being a simple, one-dimensional politi-
Blinded by their anger, many progressives failed to understand explained in The Prince, the successful politician understands that leadership requires being both a lion and a fox. One must be a cungeous lion with the vision to spot and scare away the wolves. When one is just a fox, one ends up being eaten by wolves; when one is just a lion, one ends up caught in traps.8
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ning fox with enough skill to avoid entrapment, but also a coura-
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Howard’s grasp of political leadership. As Machiavelli famously
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driven by deep conviction and ideological commitment.
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cian who did everything that was required to win, was also one
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On the fear narrative, Howard was a classic fox – clever, adept at sidestepping trouble and a master of deception. Certainly not a lion of courage. Yet for all of his tactical cleverness, and his indomitable will to power, Howard was not without substance. Beneath the rhetoric was a clear view of the national story. The Howard government’s agenda of Australian values was sustained by an ideological opposition to Paul Keating’s project of national cultural reinvention and perceived repudiation of Australia’s national history. In Howard’s worldview, he was trying to fight off the wolves of political correctness and self-loathing. Whether you agree with Howard is an altogether different issue. But depicting Howard as merely an opportunist encouraged us not to take him or his politics seriously. It encouraged us to believe that any reference to national values or social cohesion must stand for something more sinister – an agenda that dare not speak its name. This explains why so many people continue to treat all talk about Australian national identity and values as potentially divisive and best avoided in the first place. The second problem with the dog whistle metaphor has to do with power. By regarding all conservative cultural politics as dog whistling, progressives unwittingly paint themselves into a corner. The idea that the other side of politics communicates in code to the electorate, playing on some of its most basic and primitive anxieties about the nation, leaves you with little that you can do. The race
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card is the big trump of Australian politics; all you can do is fold.
22
Indeed, the mood among progressives at the height of the Howard years was one of complete demoralisation. People would talk about leaving Australia to escape a country that had turned its back on decency and tolerance. Australians who were already living abroad would talk about staying put until Howard was turfed out of office. Being an Australian in exile – one of ‘Howard’s exiles’, as someone once described it to me – was not just fashionable, it was a badge of honour. Living in England for some of the Howard years, I saw some of this first hand. While I never felt compelled to drift into indefinite
national estrangement, I knew no shortage of expat Aussies who refused to return home while Howard was still around. It was always curious to watch such friends in the company of expat liberal Democrat Americans in Oxford and London. An Australian could claim solidarity with an American living under the regime of George W. Bush: each was governed by a leader whose policies were cause for remaining away from their country. And in some ways the similarity between the two leaders was striking. Where Howard appealed to his constituency of white Australia with his dog whistle of Australian values and patriotism, Bush spoke to his constituency of evangelicals and terror-struck Americans through the foghorn of freedom and liberty. Both had the effect of sucking all hope out of progressives in their country. The obvious danger with dog whistle paranoia is that the vocabulary of Left liberalism can become built on disaffection. So long as Australians feel the need to withdraw into the shelter of our old identities, it becomes impossible to have progress. Public debates become less an opportunity for action and more an occasion for despair. Admittedly, despair has its strange allure. It lets you apportion blame to something else and gives you a chance to lament the wickedness of others. It can be a soothing palliative for idealists struck by political depression. However, despair can never ultimately be a cure. At least not when it is unaccompanied by an effort to set things right and to provoke your compatriots into believing in the national project
indifference for political commitment. These take the power out membership of a collective project, defined by a positive agenda; it ends up defined by what you are standing against. This has been
ship or solidarity because they have had no story of their own
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the case on matters of patriotism. Progressive Australians have been
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of politics. Being a progressive would then be no longer defined by
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to become a spectator rather than an actor, to substitute fatalist
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once again. What must be avoided is a despair that encourages you
to offer. Held captive by their own orthodoxy, the progressive
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standing idle, unable to claim ownership of national values, citizen-
voice was unable to respond to the cultural barrage of Howard and his army. With Howard’s departure from office some of this has changed, but the hard work of discarding the baggage of the dog whistle excuse remains. It begins with rethinking patriotism.
Progressive suspicions of patriotism Patriotism is not, as a rule, popular among progressives. This seems to be true in most Western democracies. Do a quick survey of essays about the Left and the nation, and a consensus emerges: to identify with the progressive cause seems to mean you must also adopt a sceptical, if not hostile, attitude towards national pride and allegiance. Defeatism is a prerequisite of belonging to the Left. Thus in 1945 George Orwell wrote about the rampant Anglophobia among left-wing intellectuals in his country: ‘a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases’. Even in the midst of the Second World War, Orwell noted, Anglophobia was rife on the British Left. Many were ‘undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece’. While no one wanted the Germans or Japanese to win the war, many ‘could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain’.9
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Writing of the USA in the 1990s, the late philosopher Richard
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Rorty observed that leftists ‘associate American patriotism with an endorsement of atrocities’. The American achievement marked not so much the republic and all for which it stood but ‘the importation of African slaves, the slaughter of Native Americans, the rape of ancient forests, and the Vietnam War’. Finding honour in American citizenship impossible, many leftists ‘think of national pride as appropriate only for chauvinists: for the sort of American who rejoices that America can still orchestrate something like the Gulf War, can still bring deadly force to bear whenever and wherever it chooses’.10
It is not just an Anglosphere phenomenon. Writing in France, Bulgarian-French critic Julia Kristeva has argued that French leftists believe ‘nationalism is in bad taste and patriotism downright trashy’. Left-wing intellectuals ‘sell off French national values’ for the sake of a vague and misunderstood cosmopolitanism. In an analysis that has resonance for an Australian audience, Kristeva wrote that the French Left has been blindly sympathetic to immigrants all while undermining ‘the national reality into which [immigrants] hope to become integrated, leaving to the far right the easy privilege of appropriating to itself the wealth of our cultures’.11 Such observations were prescient of the revival of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National, the rise of Nicolas Sarkozy and the eclipse of the French socialist Left (to say nothing of the One Nation phenomenon in Australia). These are not the rants of writers lacking progressive credentials and credibility. Orwell’s standing needs no elaboration: perhaps no other voice has been so admired by English-speaking democratic socialists and social democrats. Rorty was a doyen of the American academy and one of the Anglo-American fathers of philosophical postmodernism. Kristeva is one of the most influential modern thinkers in cultural theory and literary studies. Yet each of them is adamant that if you are part of the Left or identify as a liberal, you almost surely reject patriotism. This applies just as much to Australians, even if we do not tend to consider ourselves susceptible to national pride. The stereotype
of flag waving (at least not until very recently). As an old boss of character that you would not know the words to ‘Advance Australia Fair’ and stumble your way through it. There was a time when
at the pub. The Australian patriotism that did exist was always a
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Anzac Day was regarded not so much as a patriotic day but as a folk
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mine once said to me, it was in the past a mark of the national
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phlegmatic rather than the patriotic. Not for us the effusive displays
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of the Australian national character is certainly one based on the
quiet one, understated and laconic, and not prone to triumphant
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festival, or just another excuse for a day off work and getting drunk
outbursts. As historian Miriam Dixson has explained, ‘Australian patriotism has never been as explicitly self-affirming as that of, say, the USA or France’.12 If anything, our patriotism has always been one of a Dorothea Mackellar variety: there is nothing more patriotically Australian than loving our sunburnt country, our far horizons and our wide brown land. To be sure, a connection with the landform is an inevitable component of a sense of one’s country. National identity ‘would lose much of its ferocious enchantment without the mystique of a particular landscape tradition: its topography mapped, elaborated, and enriched as a homeland’.13 From parks to streets to buildings, landscapes are imprinted with the habits and preoccupations of a country’s culture. The English garden, the broad French boulevard, the dark German forest each speak of a certain cultural character in the same way that open spaces and harsh wilderness speak of ours. The vast distances between townships and cities helps explain the greater readiness of Australians to look to the state as a benign and paternal force.14 At the same time, our national character traits of cynicism and pragmatism are perhaps products of what novelist and poet Marcus Clarke referred to as the beautiful loneliness and melancholy of Australian nature – the ‘sullen despair’ of Australian mountain forests, the ‘defiant ferocity’ and ‘bitterness’ of the Australian bush and outback.15 It might even be said that an Australian mode of patriotism has been grounded more in a sense of
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place – in a physical love of country – than in any assertive political
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idealism or sense of an exceptionalist creed. Even so, Australian progressives have been unwilling to embrace patriotism as a value. The late author Donald Horne, for a long time the senior intellectual figure of Australian life, summed up this feeling in calling for a ‘civic faith’ to replace our sense of national belonging.16 In Horne’s view, any patriotic feeling bound up in the nation is dangerous because it inevitably appeals to an idea of ethnic unity and integrity. Entertaining it risks a return to White Australia, to the days when the masthead of the Bulletin would read ‘Australia for the White Man’ (which Horne himself eliminated while editor
of the magazine in 1967). In his Barton Lecture of 2001, Horne was still haunted by the Anglo-Australian patriotism of his 1930s childhood, whose songs were ‘Rule, Britannia!’, ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ and ‘Three Cheers for the Red, White and Blue’. This was a time when the following stanza had not yet been excised from ‘Advance Australia Fair’: When gallant Cook from Albion sailed, To trace wide oceans o’er, True British courage bore him on Till he landed on our shore. And there he raised old England’s flag, The standard of the brave. With all her faults we love her still. Britannia rules the waves!17 According to Horne, it is simply impossible to separate Australian patriotism from a history of racism and xenophobia. Any contemporary embrace of patriotism would indulge the old logic of preserving ‘the British race’, ‘the Anglo-Saxon race’. And the rituals and the rhetoric, the stories and the slogans of an Australian patriotism would be placed in its service. Instead of national patriotism, Horne argued that we should have a collective identity based on civic values alone, such as a belief in equality, the rule of law and parliamentary democracy. The ties that bind us as Australians should be those of our political values: ‘What we are expected to
What is significant is that it renounces the basis of a conventional family, or historical community – is no longer the object of our affiliation and our allegiance.
might be called soft values: compassion, equality, justice. Patriotism
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It is understandable why progressives might disapprove of patri-
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patriotic loyalty. The nation – and with it, any notion of race, or
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faith.’18 This would itself involve a form of patriotism, of course.
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hold in common – and what we do hold in common – is a civic
belongs to the family of hard values – duty, honour, glory – which,
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otism. The liberal or social democratic conscience is guided by what
more often than not, attach themselves to war and military endeavour. One of the lines most frequently quoted on patriotism is that of the ancient Roman poet Horace: ‘It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country’. Perhaps the most seminal statement of patriotism of all came from Athenian general Pericles’ funeral oration, as recalled by Thucydides. The patriotic citizen was one who would ‘never decline the dangers of war’ but lay their life at the feet of their country ‘as the most glorious contribution that they could offer’. Such offering would win for the citizen ‘that renown which never grows old, and for a sepulchre, not so much that in which their bones have been deposited, but that noblest of shrines wherein their glory is laid up to be eternally remembered’.19 Thus understood, patriotic virtue appears to belong more to the language of conservatives, for whom the importance of hierarchy, history and inheritance are paramount, than to the language of liberals or social democrats. Much of contemporary progressive thinking is defined by its universalism, the belief that our status as human beings has the most moral significance. One is a citizen of the world rather than a citizen of a city or country. Arbitrary lines on maps, drawn by history, often created by war and imperialism, should not limit our horizons. We belong to the community of humanity: that is why progressives believe in universal human rights. Whether in Sydney or Shanghai, in Melbourne or Mumbai, we are all entitled to be treated as the same.
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At first glance, patriotism does not accord with a progressive
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commitment to Enlightenment values: if reason were universal, it would transcend nationality, among other things. Pride in one’s nation resembles more a passion of the blood; it does not tend to be the product of calm deliberation. As liberal philosopher George Kateb has put it, patriotism involves the ‘worship of a false god’. It is ‘not only disguised self-worship, not only eager self-abjection, not only voluntary self-exploitation; above all it is idolatry’.20 The implication is that patriotism might constitute a religion or cult, wholly irrational and unaccountable to any morality. After all, if you are a good patriot, you should submit to the authority of whatever
is demanded of you in the national interest. There is no room to balance the call of patriotism against the rules of reason. The point of loyalty to your country is that you will make the sacrifice required, whether it is your autonomy in thinking for yourself, or, in the case of war, your life. The kind of patriotism exhorted by Horace or Pericles would not have allowed you to stop and reflect. Patriotic virtue was something you exercised out of the core of your character because you knew what was right. In short, patriotism is not generally regarded as compatible with a left-liberal view of the world based on universalism and reason. It was not always so. In the Australian case, leftist politics has been profoundly shaped by a tradition of labourism and radical nationalism dating back to the late 19th century, in which social equity and political reform were understood as organic expressions of Australianness. But this ideological tradition has been in retreat since the 1960s. Out of the countercultural forces unleashed by the Vietnam War, there emerged a local version of a new Left linked to postmaterial social movements. Australian leftist politics took a cosmopolitan turn. Influenced by identity politics, members of the political Left adopted more critical, even antagonistic, attitudes towards traditional expressions of national identity.21 Many would also say that an enthusiastic embrace of multiculturalism and Asian engagement during the Keating years has led progressives to drift farther away from patriotism over the last two decades.
national forms of solidarity. But any contemporary progressive against the grain, but the orthodoxy of anti-patriotism will need to be abandoned.
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political agenda cannot succeed without patriotism. It may go
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regard itself in broadly cosmopolitan terms, with an unease towards
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It may seem natural, in light of this, for leftist politics to
Australian progressives will not find it easy to shift the dead weight
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of left-liberal thinking. The dog whistle narrative alone is hard
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Politics requires patriotism
enough to abandon. It offers the path of least resistance, an easy way to lay all the fault for the oppressive years of the past at the feet of a cunning fox straight out of Machiavelli’s Prince. When married to an equally powerful ideological suspicion of patriotism, it can begin to get in the way of political action. Democracy is, at the end of the day, the achievement of many people working together. It is about movements and campaigns, corralling votes and interests, acting in coalition with others. You may not agree with everyone about everything, but you will need to find common ground. Whether it is the ballot box, a petition or a march, the principle is the same: build bridges or you cannot cross the river. What does this have to do with patriotism? The point is that to be politically effective, to be successful advocates for change and reform, you have to engage the minds of other citizens. At its most powerful, politics is a drama in which citizens are characters. You can never achieve anything by cutting yourself off from your own society or national community. Globalisation notwithstanding, the nation-state remains at the heart of our political life. Our national government remains the government that impacts our lives the most. So when it comes to crafting a story for citizens, it is a national story that carries the most weight. Our politicians do not address us as ‘fellow citizens of the world’ or in Esperanto; they address us as fellow Australians, in our language, and address problems as those
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foremost facing the Australian nation.
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To deny patriotism, then, is a sure path to political impotence. This is especially so given how the language and perspective of middle Australia is charged with a warm affection for our country and its qualities. Most Australians view our country through a patriotic lens. In their revealing portrait of ‘ordinary people’s politics’, academics Judith Brett and Anthony Moran found that Australians had an ‘overwhelmingly’ positive view of Australia: ‘They loved Australia, it was beautiful, the best country in the world’ and ‘they wouldn’t live anywhere else’. Here is a sample of the responses they document:
Oh yes, I am Australian and very proud of it. This is my country . . . [I am] just so proud to be Australian and of things that are Australian . . . the soldiers, the gum trees, the outback, the sea . . . mateship . . . We are the lucky country. We have vast open spaces and we are very warm hospitable people . . . You say Australia and that doesn’t put a lump in your throat – it’s just our country. But when you hear these old guys [Second World War vets] talk, and what they went through. You know they helped their buddies and that, they did their job, I’m proud of that.22 These kinds of feelings are precisely the ones Orwell associated with patriotism. For him, patriotism involved a ‘devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people’.23 It is not about putting your love of country on conspicuous public display, an excess many Australians associate with American patriotism and its Fourth of July pomp and pageantry. An Orwellian patriotism, subtle and contained, defensive rather than aggressive, is a close summation of the reality of patriotism (for the most part) in Australian society. Still, it is easy, too easy, to pathologise patriotism. As anthropol-
problem. It can create ‘citizens who see threats everywhere’ and points to paranoia about outsiders based on racialised fantasies about Australian identity and culture. The psychology of patriotism the harmful impact of immigrants, and Muslims in particular. Worrying, understood as ‘the prominence of a dimension of fear about
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becomes dominated by an intense ‘worrying’ about the nation and
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a culture of callousness towards ‘the Other’. In particular, Hage
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alism, the very defensiveness of patriotic sentiment can become a
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ogist Ghassan Hage suggests in his book Against Paranoid Nation-
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the fate of the nation’, was initially most pronounced among supporters of extreme right-wing anti-immigration movements such as One Nation in Australia or the Front National in France, but it has ‘now become the dominant cultural form of expressing one’s belonging to the nation’.24 What this portrayal suggests is that patriotism tied to a national identity has no place in a liberal society. The mistake of this is twofold. First, it denies that patriotism can assume a benign and perfectly acceptable form, the sentiment most Australians possess. Second, and of most concern, it denies that the kind of feelings of cultural loss associated with worrying are legitimate. By tying all cultural expressions about the nation to a nasty nationalism, you can end up ignoring the concerns many people have about social cohesion and national identity. This kind of blithe dismissal of social anxiety helped feed the emergence of Hansonism during the 1990s. Extremism is what results when mainstream politics fails to represent the opinions and interests of the majority of people. Which leads me to a point still underappreciated by some. In the face of rapid and far-reaching economic change, created by the decline of manufacturing and the rise of an informationbased economy, and accelerated by the cultural impact of globalisation and technology, there are fewer and fewer identities people can cling to as certainties. Neighbourhoods no longer have
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discernible characters. Formerly working-class inner-city suburbs
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have been gentrified. Outer suburbs have been filled with newly built McMansions. It seems no one these days is able to say that they have a chat with the next door neighbours over the backyard fence. You might think this part and parcel of living in a postmodern or postindustrial age that we need to get used to. Yet for many, such rapid dislocation only heightens the need to retain some sense of cohesion. The nation remains the last remaining source of stability and security. Lots of things around you may change, but you can always count on Australia being there.
All this makes national solidarity even more important for politics. Democratic politics is impossible without a sense of trust and loyalty among citizens. Why else would you listen to other individuals and groups in your society, or cooperate with them, unless you could assume that all parties share at least some common goals and aspirations? This is why anti-patriotism is such a fundamental problem for progressives. By disavowing patriotic feeling, one risks alienation from the very citizens who need to be addressed and persuaded. You start removing the cover of assurance, the blanket of trust, that public deliberation requires. Where you suggest to others that you do not share their concern for the nation, you leave yourself with no moral or political standing. In our public lives, as much as our private ones, we rarely take advice or criticism from our enemies. These are the realities progressive politics needs to front up to: a society of dislocation and profound flux in need of common ground and common feeling. If you are unable to offer people a narrative that engages with their values, you will be unable to build those bridges, those coalitions, that are the instruments of any effective democratic politics.
Conclusion The trouble with maxims and metaphors is that sometimes they
then using it to death. ‘Our casual pragmatism’, as speechwriter and
ald Horne first coined the phrase ‘the lucky country’ to describe by second-rate people who share its luck’.26 He never imagined his insight would have been abused by Australians who thought he meant the phrase as a compliment.
E X C U S E
Australia, he used it ironically: ‘Australia is a lucky country, run
W H I S T L E
author Don Watson observed, ‘attracts us to cliches ´ and makes us reluctant to discard them’.25 Perhaps most famously, when Don-
D O G
tralians have a habit of grabbing hold of a good line, distorting it and
T H E
can be so good that they start to take on a life of their own. Aus-
33
Something similar has happened with dog whistle politics. The term has become so ubiquitous that it has encouraged a laziness in the way many look at our cultural politics. Any talk about the need for a sense of national belonging gets dismissed as an appeal to latent chauvinism and prejudice. Patriotism has been cast as a form of psychological dysfunction, despite its integral place in the national imagination. Progressives need to unshackle themselves from this conventional wisdom. Solidarity is in fact a prerequisite of any positive political agenda. But is it possible to have a left-
R E C L A I M I N G
P A T R I O T I S M
liberal patriotism?
34
Chapter 2
Liberal patriotism and an Australian tradition The words ‘liberal’ and ‘patriotism’ do not usually go together. More often than not, patriotism is regarded as something distinctly illiberal. The great Russian writer Leo Tolstoy regarded patriotism as an immoral sentiment that encourages an exclusive concern for the well-being of one’s own people. Motivated by a blind love of country, patriots pursue the good of their own nation at the expense of every other. For Tolstoy, patriotism meant one thing and one thing only – war: ‘Seas of blood have been shed over [patriotism]; and will yet be shed for it, unless people free themselves of this obsolete relic of antiquity.’1 Tolstoy finds himself in good company. Albert Einstein referred to national pride as ‘an infantile disease’, as ‘the measles of mankind’.2 Philosopher Isaiah Berlin similarly believed that an inflamed national consciousness encouraged ‘the elevation of the interests of the unity and self-determination of the nation to the supreme value before which all other considerations must, if need be, yield’.3 How does one argue against the cumulative wisdom of such giants as Tolstoy, Einstein and Berlin? The Australian historical experience suggests that Australians probably cannot claim immunity from the dangers of national pride
35
and ethnic chauvinism. The pallid ghost of White Australia continues to haunt the national story. Nevertheless, it seemed for a while that Australia had managed to shake off its past. In the second half of the 20th century, large numbers of non-British immigrants began arriving on these shores: first, in the two decades following the Second World War, from southern and eastern Europe, then, from the 1970s onwards, from Asia. Colour and ethnicity were injected into the complexion of Australian society. Today, 25 per cent of Australians were born overseas (with an additional 18 per cent being born in Australia but having at least one parent who was born overseas).4 Yet this burgeoning diversity did not bring with it the Balkanisation and social division that some had predicted. Any patriotism appeared relatively contained: no violent unrest, none of the viciousness usually associated with breast-beating jingoism. Even the troubling explosion of Hansonist anti-immigrant populism was contained relatively quickly. Australia could boast that it was, by and large, an immigration and multiculturalism success story. Arguably, any such pretence came to an end one Sunday in December 2005, abruptly shattered by a rioting mob of 5000 on the streets of Cronulla. Urged on by well-publicised mobile SMS messages calling for ‘Aussies’ to reclaim Cronulla Beach from ‘Lebs’ and ‘wogs’, young sunburnt ‘100% Aussies’, roused by the tunes of ‘Waltzing Matilda’ and ‘Advance Australia Fair’, viciously attacked anyone unfortunate enough to be of Middle East-
R E C L A I M I N G
P A T R I O T I S M
ern appearance or anything other than white. The sleeping dragons
36
of national pride had awoken, and our summer skies saw a tempest dropping fire. For many Australians, Cronulla demonstrated beyond all doubt the dangers of patriotism. But a love of country need not lapse into unthinking racial violence. Properly understood, patriotism can be a civic virtue grounded in shared political values and a historical tradition. It is possible to have a liberal patriotism in which pride in one’s country is tempered by responsibility and enriched by public debate. If the patriotism that exists today does not yet resemble this, that is all the more reason to work at making sure that it does.
What is patriotism? Until recently, Australians did not really make explicit displays of their patriotism. It has been more customary for us to associate patriotism with the rhetoric and ritual of US political culture – the grand speeches declaring America’s divine mission, the fanfare of street parades, the pledging of allegiance to the Stars and Stripes. Patriotism can appear to exist in an alien language of magnificent abstractions. An average American is genuinely moved by the idea that their country was founded as ‘a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal’ (to borrow the words of Abraham Lincoln in his Gettysburg Address). Australians do not have an equivalent sense of a national mission. Just compare the documents of US and Australian public life. Where the Americans have their Declaration of Independence proclaiming self-evident truths, and a constitutional preamble expressing the wish of ‘We the people of the Constitution (officially, it is the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act 1900) that speaks of the people of the colonies of mania agreeing ‘to unite in one indissoluble Federal Commonwealth under the Crown of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland’. would misunderstand patriotism if we believe that it refers only
level, it simply denotes that you care, in a very special way, about your country and fellow citizens. This is a lot more demanding than what it might at first appear.
lightly, without seeing it as entwined with an ideal of living well.
T R A D I T I O N
To be a patriot is not simply to share a collective consciousness;
A U S T R A L I A N
universal promise (such as liberty, democracy). At its most basic
A N
to an exceptionalist belief that one’s nation holds some kind of
A N D
Dismissing patriotism on this basis misses a bigger point. We
P A T R I O T I S M
New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Queensland and Tas-
L I B E R A L
United States’ to ‘form a more perfect union’, Australians have a
To love your country, though, is to see your national identity and
37
identifying as Australian does not, on its own, make you an Australian patriot. After all, you can wear your sense of national identity
membership of a community as important to how you lead your life. Indeed, the term ‘patriotism’ comes from the Latin patria, denoting fatherland. To be a patriot is to have a patrimony, to inherit the life of one’s country as passed down from prior generations and, moreover, to receive it with sincere gratitude.5 Such an attitude reflects three dimensions to patriotism: morality, identification and citizenship. In the first place, patriotism involves a form of morality. It involves some set of rules about how you should treat others. A patriot is someone who has a special concern for the welfare of their country and compatriots. Someone could not be considered a patriot if their country counts for little or nothing in their moral thinking, where, for instance, the person refuses to allow their nationality or citizenship to bear upon how they consider others. In such a case, it would be more appropriate to describe such a person as a cosmopolitan. By contrast, the patriot is normally willing to do more, to sacrifice more, for their country over others, and for their compatriots over people in general. Patriotism involves a demand to consider the needs of your country and compatriots as generating strong reasons for acting one way over another.6 Second, patriotism involves loyal identification with your country. A patriot will regard their connection with their country as inseparable from their own sense of who they are. As such, the
R E C L A I M I N G
P A T R I O T I S M
patriot feels pride when their country prospers, shame when it
38
declines and indignation when it is harmed. More than this, the patriot has a belief that their country has particular qualities or merits that make it worthy of their love and devotion: American patriots may point to their country’s embodiment of liberty; an Australian patriot may highlight their country’s commitment to a fair go and equality. What sets patriotism apart from a crude preference for one’s country is that it is based on identifying with well-defined and praiseworthy features of one’s country.7 There is the third dimension: patriotism’s connection to citizenship. In the context of modern democracy, patriotism exists in
the setting of a community with shared values and a shared way of life, and whose members have defined rights and responsibilities. This is a community whose members are not divided into defined classes or estates, but share the common status of citizen. One’s countrymen and women, as fellow citizens possessing equal rights, have the balancing obligation to contribute to a common good and to make collective decisions about its welfare. They also share a certain legacy, such as the common liberty of a society, its particular set of public institutions, its cultural attainments. These comprise a collective achievement that is more than the sum of the value it has for individual citizens.8
How is patriotism different from nationalism? If this is what patriotism involves, in what ways might it be different to nationalism? Many would say a concern for one’s country, munity are also qualities of nationalist attitudes. For the critics of patriotism, it is only a short step from this to dismissing patriotism of nationalism. One way of rescuing patriotic sentiment from this apparent problem is to make a strict distinction between patriotism and
he stressed there was a fundamental difference between that and and exclusion of the most calculating kind’, patriotism was an inclusive and cosmopolitan affection for your country. A patriot
community where they have lived side by side and whom he has known for many years but a nationalist will remain suspicious of someone who does not seem to belong to his kind of people or, more likely, his kind of thing.9
T R A D I T I O N
will not exclude a person from another race from the
A U S T R A L I A N
being a patriot. Whereas nationalism dealt in ‘jingoism, populism
A N
July 2007 attacking John Howard for being a divisive nationalist,
A N D
nationalism. When, for instance, Paul Keating gave a speech in
P A T R I O T I S M
altogether. The reflex is to throw patriotism out with the bathwater
L I B E R A L
loyal identification with one’s country and membership of a com-
39
Keating is, of course, right about there being a difference between nationalism and patriotism, if one understands nationalism to mean, by definition, a belief in the superiority of one’s nation. There is an attractive simplicity in claiming all that is good about a love of your country for patriotism and blaming all of its excesses on nationalism. However, that amounts to defining your way out of the problem. If there is a difference between patriotism and nationalism, it exists at the most abstract level. Patriotism refers to a basic sentiment of solidarity among citizens, and is in this sense a political principle. Nationalism, on the other hand, is usually derived from an attachment to the culture of your country.10 But that is where the blackand-white clarity ends. Nationalism, even though it is derived from notions of culture, is never a purely cultural sentiment. Expressions of nationalism are inevitably political or ideological: political actors frequently appeal to ideas about a national destiny or cultural integrity to justify their decisions or mobilise public support. Patriotism, meanwhile, is an attitude that almost inevitably draws on a sense of cultural affinity. The dividing line between the political and the cultural is a blurry one at best. In the Australian case, civic solidarity has always been infused with feelings of cultural belonging. Unlike in the USA, where the collective identity is defined by a political creed vindicated in a war of independence, or France, where there is a pronounced republican ethos built, again, on revolution, the civic dimensions of an
R E C L A I M I N G
P A T R I O T I S M
Australian identity are relatively weak. Australians do not have a
40
long history of considering themselves as fellow citizens, united by political bonds. Strictly speaking, Australian citizenship as a legal status was only formalised with the passage of the Nationality and Citizenship Act 1948 (Cth) (which actually came into effect in 1949). Up to that point, all Australians were subjects of the British Crown; the Constitution makes no mention of citizenship.11 Moreover, Australian political culture has been shaped by the utilitarian assertion of rights more than by the lyrical flights of sentimentality. As historian W. K. Hancock put it in his Australia,
‘Australian democracy has come to look upon the State as a vast public utility, whose duty it is to provide the greatest happiness for the greatest number’. The members of an Australian polity have seen themselves as each ‘a fragment of the sovereign people; each of them is a subject who claims his rights – the right to work, the right to fair and reasonable conditions of living, the right to be happy – from the State and through the State’.12 Historically, there has been limited purchase in the idea that Australians share a common bond by virtue of their membership of a polity. That the civic aspects of Australian identity have lacked prominence reflects the central place of nationalism in the Australian consciousness. For much of the last century, and going back far beyond, the idea of an Australian people has been underpinned by British racial solidarity. From Henry Parkes’ ‘crimson thread of kinship’ to Edmund Barton’s idea of ‘a continent for a nation, and a nation for a continent’ to Robert Menzies’ idea that the British see that race – a British race myth – was the basis for expressions of an Australian community.13 When the colonies federated in 1901, to be a Commonwealth that would be set aside for the ‘noblest race upon this sphere’, excluding from its domain people from ‘the servile nations of the world’:
to be as a white nation. In the words of the Federation sonnet, Australians cherished the hope of becoming a people of ‘one dear blood’.14
Therein lies my answer. Part of the reason so many progres-
T R A D I T I O N
In light of all this, it may be asked why we should discuss questions
A U S T R A L I A N
adamant that if Australia was to have a future at all, it had
A N
divided as they were on so many other questions: all were
A N D
Town and country, radical and conservative, rich and poor,
P A T R I O T I S M
the bond between the people across the land was clear. This was
L I B E R A L
represented ‘bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh’, we can clearly
sives remain so wary of any expression of collective identity lies in
41
of Australian identity in terms of patriotism rather than nationalism. Surely nationalism has form; patriotism does not.
their belief that it would promptly be absorbed into a nationalist ideology of cultural integrity. By focusing on patriotism, we are drawing attention to the role of citizenship in defining our sense of community. We are, in effect, prioritising a basic idea of political membership over one of ethnic or racial belonging. At the same time, adopting a language of patriotism need not mean jettisoning notions of nationhood or nationality. While Keating’s design in drawing a clear line between patriotic and nationalist sentiment was clear, it leads us down the wrong path. There are limits to how far a distinction between patriotism and nationalism can take us. In practice, as Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has noted, ‘nationalism has become the most readily available motor of patriotism’, so much so that ‘we can have trouble distinguishing them’.15 In a world of nation-states, any meaningful sense of patriotism still requires the nation. The boundaries of most political communities overlap with those of national ones, or at the very least rely on an implicit nation. When we speak of our sense of belonging to a polity and of our political status as citizens, we are basically referring to our membership of a national community. The reality is that a purely political form of patriotism will never be enough. Insisting on a strict separation between patriotism and nationhood can end up leaving a love of country emotionally hollow. It is possible, of course, to propose that any love of our country should be one expressed in terms of political values, say, a
R E C L A I M I N G
P A T R I O T I S M
love of common liberty as expressed in laws protecting our freedom
42
from arbitrary tyranny. This might work in a classical Athenian citystate in which each and every citizen participates in the political affairs of the community. But to speak of being attached to one’s laws, even if they are derivative of liberty, seems a sterile sentiment. Few would say we live in such a society that can be sustained through such legalistic bonds of cohesion; nor are we moving to one. Even in Europe, where some philosophers and thinkers point to the development of a constitutional patriotism – a supranational form of patriotic identification anchored in the shared values and institutions of the European Union – national identities have yet
to be superseded by cosmopolitan, civic identities divorced from nationality.16 It does little good to build castles in the air. The trouble is that any strictly political sense of patriotic feeling is ultimately derivative of a more basic sentiment. The meaning of the concept is lost if we fail to understand patriotism as involving, in essence, a love of one’s homeplace. But what makes our country a homeplace? What constitutes the particular place and its particular way of life, if not the nation and its culture? Even the most abstract of political values and ideals need a local context before they can have pulling power. Values can only motivate us when they are grounded in something more immediate. Where the American loves liberty or freedom, this love will be tied into their appreciation of acts such as their declaration of independence, speeches such as the Gettysburg Address and historical figures such as Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln. Similarly, where the Frenchman or woman loves their liberty, this love is likely to events such as the storming of the Bastille and the French Revolution, symbols such as the tricolore and Marianne, the lyrics of ‘La involve?
National values and a public culture ues and a national historical tradition. Let me deal first with national
agreement about ‘shared values’, and every tradition contains plural voices. In our recent debate about ‘Australian values’, for instance, there has been anxiety among progressives that national values are then become just another way of saying white. Short of that, it might just turn into superficial mush: to believe in Australian values you need to drink VB, drive a ute, enjoy barbeques, go to the beach and follow the cricket.
T R A D I T I O N
directed against particular minority groups. Australianness might
A U S T R A L I A N
stones for the national life. Admittedly, there is often much dis-
A N
values. We can understand these as the ideals that serve as touch-
A N D
An Australian patriotism involves two components – national val-
P A T R I O T I S M
Marseillaise’, and so on. What, then, might an Australian patriotism
L I B E R A L
be bound up with an understanding of la R´epublique franc¸aise, with
43
Such reservations show some of the difficulty involved in talking about values. For one thing, values are not easy to pin down as concepts. It can be unclear whether national values represent aspirations we should attempt to fulfil, whether they in fact represent a historic reality or whether they involve both. For another thing, what is the relationship between national values and national character traits? When we speak of Australian values, are we referring to such elements as a larrikin streak or a laconic sense of humour? A reluctance to accept authority? A willingness to cut people down to size, even to celebrate mediocrity? A cheerful readiness to have a go? When talking about culture and values, it seems easier to fall back into discussing everyday national qualities that are readily discernible rather than a catalogue of more abstract, philosophical values. It is easier to debate whether Australians suffer from Tall Poppy Syndrome than whether they are faithful to liberal equality. Clarity is at a premium here. The kind of shared values I am talking about are values or standards that dictate how we as citizens, under a common law and government, and belonging to a national community, must conduct our life together. In the Australian sense, we might say these include ideals of fairness, equality and mateship, principles of representative democracy, free speech, tolerance and the rule of law, and English as the national language. One way to explain national values is to draw a distinction between values drawn from a public culture and values drawn from
R E C L A I M I N G
P A T R I O T I S M
a private culture.17 A public culture is concerned with the ideas
44
in a community that fixes citizens’ responsibilities and provides a vocabulary for social life. It is embodied in the common language of a community and its institutions of government, law, economy media, and education. A private culture, on the other hand, concerns things such as religious beliefs, family customs and personal lifestyles. These, more often than not, are associated with particular ethnic groups and histories. Thus defined, the cultural values of a public culture need not exclude those from different ethnic or racial backgrounds. A public culture leaves room for many private
cultures, including those of ethnic minorities, to flourish within the borders of the nation. You can be Australian and Christian as well, or Buddhist or Muslim or atheist, for that matter. There is nothing about belonging to an Australian public culture that prevents you from also participating in an Italian or Chinese or Lebanese culture. There is one obvious hurdle to associating broadly civic values with a national culture. Democracy, equality, fairness, rule of law – none of these values are uniquely ours but are shared by liberal democracies everywhere. So what makes these Australian values, and how can they prove themselves worthy of affection and loyalty? Similar questions have been asked in Britain over the last two years, in light of government plans to introduce an official statement of British values that would accompany a bill of rights and responsibilities. According to some national values sceptics in Britain, it makes sense only to speak of a ‘British statement of values’ rather catalogue of British national values confuses values for slogans: it is simply not possible to reduce British values to slogans such as such as France and the USA were born of revolutions.18 All such points may be raised in respect of an Australian discussion of national values and how it is that we make sense of civic At their most basic level, civic values will be rather bland stuff: no
to the substance. To say things are ‘Australian’ or ‘our’ values is not to claim them exclusively as ours; it is only to make the point that they are built into a distinctive history of our own. That is have mentioned will remain generic, cold and remote values until they are suffused with the subtleties of national experience. Hence, representative democracy in Australia means something different
T R A D I T I O N
what gives them a particular national flavour. The civic values I
A U S T R A L I A N
is only with a particular historical tradition that form can be given
A N
reasonable person would object to liberty or equality or fairness. It
A N D
values as Australian. By no means, though, are they fatal criticisms.
P A T R I O T I S M
‘liberty, equality, fraternity’ or ‘the land of the free’ because states
L I B E R A L
than a ‘statement of British values’. Others suggest that offering a
45
to what it means in Germany, much like free speech in the USA has a different quality from free speech in Britain, and much like freedom of religion in France takes a different shape to freedom of religion in Canada. Each context gives a different flavour to the universal.19 One of Australia’s most influential historians, Russel Ward, once acutely observed the ways in which historical context shapes the national self-understanding. In his magisterial work of 1958, The Australian Legend, Ward argued that a national character is not entirely ‘a figment of the imagination of poets, publicists and other feckless dreamers’, but connected with reality in two senses. First, ‘it springs largely from a people’s past experiences’. Second, the historical content of national values carries normative power: ‘it often modifies current events by colouring men’s ideas of how they “ought” typically to behave’.20 Ward’s point is worth bearing in mind. It is precisely the content of a historical tradition that provides any patriotism with an anchor, not only in reality and experience but also in a moral picture of the world.
An Australian historical tradition It remains to answer what the historical content of an Australian tradition must involve. We can begin with the obvious starting point: the Anzac legend. Of all the events in the Australian experience, the Anzac landing at Gallipoli continues to resonate the
R E C L A I M I N G
P A T R I O T I S M
most. To be sure, all national stories posit a moral and spiritual
46
connection between war and ideas of nationhood. But 25 April 1915 remains the cathartic moment for an Australian nation. At the time, Australia still remained unproven in battle; the blood sacrifice of Gallipoli earned us our stripes. As historian John Hirst remarked, When the Australian troops fought so magnificently in the tangle of hill and gullies at Gallipoli – and when all the world acknowledged it – there was an almost palpable settling of the national mind . . . Australians said that they
became a nation at Gallipoli and this was because the greatest obstacle to their feeling themselves to be such had suddenly been removed.21 If there was a settling of the national mind, Gallipoli and the First World War helped to achieve a setting of it as well. Andrew Fisher (then Opposition leader) may have declared at the outset of the war that Australia would defend Great Britain ‘to the last man and the last shilling’, but Australians ended the war with a keener sense of their identity. On his way to Europe as the Sydney Morning Herald’s war correspondent, Banjo Paterson wrote of the AIF battalions on board his ship that ‘the ranks were full of Yorkshiremen, Cockneys, and Cousin Jacks . . . Any one of them would sooner be shot as a private in the Coldstream Guards than get a decoration in a nameless Australian force’. Yet, Paterson continued, ‘by the end of the war, we ourselves had a tradition’.22 representation of an Australian egalitarianism and mateship. Fighting alongside British officers who were the product of a rigid social and deeply suspicious of authority; their camaraderie was an outward reflection of an ethos of mateship and an attitude of insouciant larrikinism. Nowhere was this better captured than by war histothe War of 1914–1918, when he famously took a photograph of
tralian cricket team under Steve Waugh re-enacted the event when it visited Gallipoli in 2001.) There is, admittedly, an element of myth in Anzac, as there
thing more visceral, more emotional and ultimately more moral.23
T R A D I T I O N
is in all traditions, not least national ones. We suspend our judge-
A U S T R A L I A N
Turks, while shells from the enemy passed overhead. (The Aus-
A N
Australian troops at Gallipoli playing cricket in full view of the
A N D
rian C. E. W. Bean, author of The Official History of Australia in
P A T R I O T I S M
class structure, diggers represented a spirit bound by no formalities
L I B E R A L
There is another powerful dimension to Anzac – its symbolic
It does not matter whether Anzac diggers were really the epitome
47
ment in submitting ourselves to the legend. We substitute for literal truth a more ecstatic truth; literal accuracy gives way to some-
of egalitarianism, mateship and larrikinism: it is enough that we take them as so. Sacrifice does not just earn a nation’s stripes; it also demands that we pay our gratitude by giving the benefit of the doubt. In any case, the Anzac story represents the continuity of a bushman and pioneer legend deeply embedded in the national consciousness and exemplified in the bush literature of Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson, in the paintings of Tom Roberts and in the fervently nationalistic pages of J. F. Archibald’s Bulletin. In his official war history, Bean makes the link explicitly, suggesting that the digger’s skill as a soldier would necessarily be drawn from the arts of bush life: He learns something of half the arts of a soldier by the time he is ten years old – to sleep comfortably in any shelter, to cook meat or bake flour, to catch a horse, to find his way across country by day or night, to ride, or, at the worst, to ‘stick on’.24 Despite Anzac’s central place in the national imagination, there are clear limits to how far we can derive an Australian tradition from its legend. It appears difficult, for instance, to connect the Anzac story with an aspect of the Australian tradition that is sometimes underemphasised: democracy. Part of this can be explained by the particular character that values such as mateship and egalitarianism bushman, they are by some degrees removed from an Australian democratic political tradition. The democratic impulse of the Australian character, so often regarded synonymously as egalitarian, has remained as much a social ethos as it has a political one. In the words of Hirst, the Australian tradition has involved an egalitarianism –
R E C L A I M I N G
P A T R I O T I S M
have assumed. Frequently tied to the image of the digger and the
and democracy – of manners.25
48
of not hearing anyone addressed as ‘sir’. (In the words of Henry
There is much truth in this. Visitors to Australia are often struck by the informal egalitarianism of its social mores: the phenomena of sitting in the front seat in a taxi, of people calling strangers ‘mate’,
Lawson’s bush ballad ‘The Shearers’, Australians ‘call no biped lord or sir, [a]nd touch their hat to no man!’) The contrast with other English-speaking nations is certainly marked. In the USA, for example, it is simply unheard of for students at university to refer to their tutors and lecturers by their first names; it is always ‘professor’, even if they are not full professors. In Britain, you would be committing a grave faux pas in some circles were you to greet someone with the informality of ‘Nice to meet you’ instead of the more proper greeting of ‘How do you do?’ This is to say nothing of other delicate social matters in the company of some Britons such as remembering who enjoys precedence of title among an earl, a baron and a viscount, or remembering whether one should address someone as Sir rather than Lord, or Dame rather than Lady. However, we should not make the mistake of reducing our democratic tradition to nothing more than an egalitarianism of manners, to nothing more than national social traits. Australian the 20th century, Australian society was set apart from all others by the egalitarianism that structured its government, economy and ment’, a consensus supported by parties across the political spectrum that delivered Australian workers the highest living standards in the world. The government of Australia would be guided from security for workers (and which was in turn underpinned by the
siderations of profit nor calculations of productivity, but by judicial reflection. As enshrined by Justice Henry Bournes Higgins’ Harvester Judgement of 1907, workers were guaranteed ‘a fair and
As Kelly described it, wage arbitration represented ‘the greatest
T R A D I T I O N
equitable’ basic wage that was reasonable for ‘a human being in a
A U S T R A L I A N
wage arbitration, in which workers’ wages were set neither by con-
A N
White Australia policy). Central to the Settlement was a system of
A N D
its outset by a bargain that offered protection for industry and wage
P A T R I O T I S M
law. Journalist Paul Kelly famously called it ‘the Australian Settle-
L I B E R A L
egalitarianism has been expressed in institutional form. For much of
institutional monument to Australian egalitarianism and its quest
49
civilised community’. This was the Australian egalitarian ethos and commitment to a fair go expressed in bureaucratic and legal form.
for social order’, an endeavour to ‘defy the anarchy of the marketplace and impose a system of just prices to secure his material dignity’.26 It was a manifest civilisation of capitalism. The picture is complicated somewhat by the dismantling of the settlement in the 1980s and 1990s by the Hawke and Keating governments, and subsequent reforms undertaken by the Howard government. Yet that reflected as much as anything else the necessity for Australia to transform its economy and society to meet the demands of a globalised world. To regard such necessary reform as a betrayal of egalitarianism would be a mistake. Even with the embrace of a more open economy, the Australian way has not gone down the path of Thatcherism or market fundamentalism. Microeconomic reforms were, in the 1980s, accompanied by, for instance, the provision of an enhanced social wage, in which boosts in government spending on social services and public goods would compensate for some of the losses incurred by economic restructuring.27 As the unpopularity of the Howard government’s WorkChoices policy showed, the pursuit of market flexibility at the expense of workers’ rights was, and remains, unpalatable to much of the Australian public. All throughout Labor’s 2007 election campaign, voters in focus group after focus group would respond that they would otherwise vote Liberal but for the concerns they had about WorkChoices. An Australian public tradition is not merely one of social democracy, however. There is a democratic political tradition, quite
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distinct from any social egalitarianism, of which Australians can
50
rightly be proud. While in many ways a young country of the New World, Australia is also one of the world’s oldest democracies. Selfgovernment was established in the colonies in the 1850s, beginning with the establishment of a bicameral parliament in New South Wales, and federation at the turn of the 20th century brought with it the Commonwealth parliament. There is a valid case for saying that Australia is the oldest continuous democracy in the world: in 1903 it became the first national parliament to permit women to vote and to stand for office (although New Zealand was the first to grant women the vote, in 1893). Apart from a slight hiccup
in 1975, namely, Gough Whitlam’s sacking as prime minister by the governor-general, Australian democracy has proved itself to be enduringly stable. This can sometimes be forgotten, in part because Australian democracy lacks the romantic lustre of other democratic traditions. It was not founded by revolution, but by a bloodless act of federation. It has been characterised by a relative tedium from the start. When the colonies agreed to form a commonwealth, British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain, responsible for introducing the Constitution Bill to the House of Commons in Westminster, described it as ‘a monument of legislative competency’. Hardly anything to get the pulse racing, even if Chamberlain did not intend it as a backhanded compliment: he would go on to praise the drafters of the Bill for their ‘moderation, patience, skill, mutual consideration and patriotism’ for producing ‘so great a result’.28 Exciting in a revolutionary sense it might not be, but the story Chamberlain’s words: it has been a great result, and it has been the product of much moderation, patience and skill. Far from giving component of an Australian tradition worth celebrating. To achieve and sustain a peaceful, stable national democracy has been no mean feat. Certainly, the figures driving the federation movement saw urgent attention. Alfred Deakin, Australia’s second prime minister
of political intellect and constructive ingenuity’, representing ‘the highest development of the possibilities of self-government’.29 Built on an inheritance of Westminster parliamentary democracy and an
To understand why it is important to identify an Australian his-
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English common law, and embellished with American-influenced
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drafting of a new federal constitution as ‘the last and final product
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and the undisputed giant of early Australian politics, regarded the
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the founding of a nation as anything but small, and a task requiring
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us cause to feel disappointed, we should find in this an integral
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of Australian democracy would be appropriately summed up by
torical tradition, one need only consider the person who declares
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federalism, Australian democracy has been an achievement truly deserving of our admiration.
his patriotism but is unable to explain why he loves his country. A patriotism that is incapable of articulating the merits, qualities and achievements of one’s country would be a superficial one indeed. It might even be considered a form of hypocrisy. There is no need, though, for Australians to worry about this: there is an identifiable and praiseworthy national tradition. A distinctive brand of egalitarianism, a robust democracy supported by an Anzac myth – these are the foundations of an Australian patriotism.
Aboriginal dispossession and responsible patriotism If patriotism is defined by a historical tradition, we should also be honest about what kind of history we are talking about. A tradition will be comprised in part of myth. As French historian Ernest Renan noted in his seminal lecture, ‘What Is a Nation?’, the mythical value of a tradition lies at the very heart of the image of a nation’s soul. Two things, in turn, constitute this soul: one, the nation involves a ‘daily plebiscite’, existing only so long as its members have the present-day will to belong together and to continue their life in common; and two, the nation looks to the past and the common possession of ‘a rich legacy of memories’. As Renan put it: The nation, like the individual, is the culmination of a long past of endeavours, sacrifice, and devotion. Of all cults, that of the ancestors is the most legitimate, for the ancestors P A T R I O T I S M
(by which I understand genuine glory), this is the social
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have made us what we are. A heroic past, great men, glory
to perform still more – these are the essential conditions for
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capital upon which one bases a national idea. To have common glories in the past and to have a common will in the present; to have performed great deeds together, to wish being a people.30 Here, patriotism starts to become problematic. To have ‘common glories in the past’ implies that a nation can focus only on certain parts of its history as symbols of its collective image.
‘Forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error,’ Renan explained, ‘is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation, which is why progress in historical studies often constitutes a danger for nationality’.31 Those shadowy aspects of history that cast shame on a nation are supplanted by those episodes that illuminate a heroic past. The reason is obvious. Where shame overpowers the national conscience, it risks making any kind of national pride impossible. The ugly facts of historical reality can undermine a nation’s claim to a glorious past that can inspire generations in the present and future. The Australian national tradition has always had one especially dark part of its history that a patriotic narrative seems to do better without – the treatment of Aboriginal Australians at the hands of British settlers and their successor society. Anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner, in his 1968 Boyer Lectures, called it ‘The Great Australian Silence’.32 To be sure, the attention Australians give way since Stanner’s time. What he called a ‘cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale’ has been, if only in part, redressed historians who teach history at our universities and design curricula for school children. And his suggestion that ‘We have been able for so long to disremember the aborigines [sic] that we are now hard to ring less true now. Most Australians today are conscious of the
but also through successive generations of racist violence, exclusion and paternalism. Yet if we are to embrace an Australian patriotism, and, by impli-
rule out an unreconstructed settler history. We can rule out sim-
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cation, a national tradition of which we can be proud, how are we
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of our national history, not only at the time of British settlement
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injustices that Aboriginal Australians have suffered over the course
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put to keep them in mind even when we most want to do so’ seems
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by greater sensitivity to Aboriginal history, for instance, among the
L I B E R A L
to the historical treatment of Indigenous peoples has come a long
plistic ideas about the British bringing civilisation to an Australia
53
to reconcile the historical dispossession and mistreatment of Aboriginal Australians with the national story? In the first place, we can
occupied by primitive nomadic tribes, a national story that rendered Aborigines all but invisible. This seems reasonable enough, even if some conservatives should object that it leads to a black armband view of history. According to this objection, any healthy sense of patriotism should involve drawing up what Geoffrey Blainey called the ‘balance sheet’ of Australian history: if we weighed the good and the bad in our past, we would find a positive balance and an Australian tradition of which we can be unapologetically proud.33 There is surely a questionable logic, however, in reducing the national history to the metaphor of a balance sheet. Our national self-understanding should not involve a crude exercise in accounting, adding up triumphs in one column and subtracting from them the failures we add up in another. Patriots need not walk around with a moral abacus. Believing that they must involves a failure of imagination, a lack of faith in the ability of a nation to recognise injustice as well as achievement. There is no reason why patriotism must involve wholesale historical denial. Admitting the wrongs of the past, a recognition of responsibility, does not make it impossible to love our country. We should be clear about what responsibility means. Not all Australians believed, for example, that there should have been an official apology offered for past injustices such as those committed against the Stolen Generations (let alone for other misdeeds). To
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be sorry for something suggests that one bears causal or historical
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responsibility for the action in question. I am sorry for spilling coffee on you because staining your shirt (and possibly burning your skin) would not have happened but for my spilling the coffee. To put it simply, none of us today can be held responsible for the deeds of previous generations of Australians toward Aborigines. This is true even for those with ancestors who may have been directly involved in past mistreatment of Aborigines. We do not, in this respect, inherit ‘the guilt of our fathers’, to use the words of German philosopher Karl Jaspers; we are responsible only for our individual actions.34
Nevertheless, there must be reconciliation of some kind. There is cause for responsibility. In the words of Paul Keating, in his 1992 Redfern Park speech: We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the diseases. The alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion. It was our ignorance and our prejudice. And our failure to imagine these things being done to us.35 In his apology to the Stolen Generations, Kevin Rudd argued, correctly in my view, that enjoying the benefits of a legacy cannot be separated from its darker aspects: put simply, the laws that our parliaments enacted made the Stolen Generations possible. We, the parliaments of the to our laws . . . As has been said of settler societies elsewhere, we are the bearers of many blessings from our burdens as well.36 Rudd would go on to note that dealing with the matter was a matter of ‘wrestling with our own soul’, and until we fully confront the over us and our future as a fully united and fully reconciled people’.
If we do bear responsibility as a national community for the wrongs of the past, then it involves something other than any literal or causal sense of responsibility. Rather, all non-Indigenous Aus-
human and cultural capital accumulated within it.37 The other side
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tralians bear a moral responsibility for the mistreatment of Abo-
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implicates the Australian nation at large.
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Any responsibility on the part of parliaments also, quite naturally,
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truth of historic injustice, ‘there will always be a shadow hanging
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ancestors and therefore we must also be the bearer of their
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nation, are ultimately responsible, not those who gave effect
of the equation is that we also must be prepared to acknowledge
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rigines. This comes with inheriting a certain tradition. Where we claim a tradition as our own, we naturally benefit from the physical,
responsibility for the tradition, even its more unsavoury or shameful elements. This was precisely the point made in Rudd’s Stolen Generations apology. Again, not everyone will agree, and it is not just a disagreement based on a flawed black armband view. In an essay on Australia’s history of mistreating Aborigines, Hirst suggested that subscribing to a tradition may require a certain acquiescence to the misdeeds of our predecessors, that we cannot be sorry about some things in our history, regardless of how bad they were. For Hirst, the situation is much like that described by Rudyard Kipling, who, in responding to an Australian critic of the moral wrongs of the British empire, said, ‘A man might just as well accuse his father of a taste in fornication (citing his own birth as an instance) as a white man mourn over his land’s savagery in the past.’ Adopting a hard realist view of history, Hirst argued that ‘it is morally impossible for settler Australians to regret or apologise for the conquest on which colonial Australia was built’.38 If there is a dark past to our nation’s history, and we are the beneficiaries of that history, then we would be hypocrites to be sorry about it. It is a confronting thesis. The kind of patriotism implied suggests that we accept the nasty parts of a national tradition with a dose of sangfroid. But a truer patriotism is perhaps one in which a responsible memory, rather than Renanesque forgetting or Hirstian indifference, is the response. The task of a historically sensi-
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tive patriotism, as Noel Pearson has eloquently argued, is to offer
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‘acknowledgement . . . of the past and its legacy in the present, recognising that racism is not a contrivance, that Indigenous people endure great hurt and confront barriers as a result of racism’. Moreover, it is to take ‘responsibility for the fact of racism, and work to answer and counter it’.39 Patriotism, as much as it is derived from a past, from a tradition, should be forward looking.
The liberal tests for patriotism So far, this chapter has considered the requirements of a contemporary Australian patriotism: the necessity of grounding national
values in a historical tradition, and the challenge of responsible memory. But in what sense could an Australian patriotism be considered liberal? In what sense can progressives claim patriotism as a value of their own, rather than as an inherently conservative value? A progressive ethos, recall, is defined by a commitment to liberal democracy that encompasses autonomy, reason, social justice and pluralism. That social justice and patriotism are compatible values should be apparent: at an abstract level, solidarity needs to underpin redistribution and equity; at a more historical level, Australian patriotism has been shaped by a strong egalitarianism. If there are to be questions about whether an Australian patriotism can meet the normative test of liberalism, then they lie elsewhere, with respect to reason, pluralism and autonomy. First, reason. The question here concerns how patriotism can be reconciled with liberal ideas about acting according to reason and universal moral rules. Many will trace the liberal idea of reason to true, or right, or good, or beautiful can be shown to be valid for all men by the correct application of objective methods of discovis frequently taken to mean that acting morally must mean acting impartially. If this is so, we clearly have a predicament. Patriotism sanctions a morality based on partiality: it stands for a special confore be immoral, or so the argument goes. Special concern involves
The better view is that liberal reason and morality need not be bound by a strict form of universalism. That would be self-defeating. Any liberal value system should accommodate what philosophers beyond universal commitments to humanity. We all have intimate ties that link us to family, friends and community. To deny such relationships any moral standing seems to put abstract reason above our humanity.
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call a commonsense morality.42 We all have associations that go
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regard for others.41
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a form of group egoism, a form of self-preference contrary to equal
A N D
cern for one’s fellow citizens and country. Patriotism might there-
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ery and interpretation, open to anyone to use and verify’.40 This
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the Enlightenment and its fundamental contention that ‘What is
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Acting partially towards our compatriots or fellow citizens also does not imply that we are justified to do everything and anything so long as we invoke the nation. A liberal patriotism is bound by universal moral rules. We can be justified to give preference to our country and to our fellow citizens, but only over and above a certain threshold of morality. What we are not permitted to do is transgress certain basic rules of morality. There are some things that a cry of ‘For my country’ cannot justify: the soldier who wantonly slaughters innocent civilians during military conflict cannot hide behind a defence of patriotism. At least not behind the kind of patriotism I am defending. There remain two additional challenges to a liberal patriotism. There is, first, the concern that patriotic feeling can violate the kind of tolerance and mutual respect that characterise a pluralistic society. Patriotism can be perfectly fine and good, so long as you are ‘one of us’. The Cronulla episode made this clear enough; one man’s patriotism may be another man’s jingoism. The Sydney Morning Herald’s Bernard Zuel, for instance, recounted how flag-bearing ‘patriots’ at the 2006 Big Day Out music festival in Sydney intimidated others to affirm their Aussie pride and in some cases kiss the Australian flag. There was no escaping the new patriotism: ‘If you weren’t facing a sweaty, frying-in-the-sun bloke . . . waving a flag in front of you or at you, the image of the flag was on bikinis, T-shirts, bandannas, bare backs and sunburnt faces.’ But, Zuel continued,
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themselves, to enjoy their moment for themselves. Everyone
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it was not enough for many of the patriots to announce
type to be referred to as being ‘of Middle Eastern
As someone from an Asian background, who grew up during the
58
1990s at the height of Hansonism, I can understand this well
else was required to participate . . . maybe it was my imagination, but some of us who [didn’t] fit the Ramsey Street model of ordinary Australia – who may even be the appearance’ – occasionally felt a little more pressure to join in and join in now in these activities.43
enough. This is hardly the stuff anyone in a liberal society would like to endorse. It can distort the picture a little to take Big Day Out patriotism to be representative of patriotism generally, but many would say that even benign expressions of patriotism can conflict with a value of pluralism. There is no way to rebut this at the level of principle. Yes, national pride can lead to excess. However, it would be absurd to insist that a model of patriotism must legislate for any and all contingencies. As with all things in life, you cannot make guarantees about everything. There is always room for human error. We do not, for instance, frown upon love for one’s parents or children or spouses simply because there may be some children or parents who fail to learn that loving wisely is not the same as loving too well. So it should be with patriotism. This brings us to the third prong of the liberal test. If we are to base patriotic sentiment on membership of a national tradition, Might it mean that we must also submit our own judgement to the authority of that tradition? That we should withhold questioning history that are unjust? As my discussion of Aboriginal history and memory suggests, I do not believe we need to subordinate reason and justice to national tory. When John Stuart Mill wrote On Liberty, one of the found-
give ‘dull and torpid assent’ to ‘dead dogma’ rather than adopting beliefs as ‘living truths’ subjected to scrutiny. ‘He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for imitation.’44 Where we let our patriotism insulate our history from critical reflection, we would deprive ourselves of our dignity in this same way.
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him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of
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of custom and tradition as an oppressive force. It led people to
A N
ing texts of liberalism, he famously railed against the authority
A N D
myth. From a liberal point of view, this would hardly be satisfac-
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parts of its history, or even endorse certain elements of a national
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might this lead to a conflict with a liberal value of autonomy?
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Of course, the morality of patriotism implies that we must at one level exempt some fundamental aspects of that community’s life from criticism. ‘Patriotism,’ according to philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘has to be a loyalty that is in some respects unconditional, so in just those respects rational criticism is ruled out.’45 We need only point to the use of the term ‘un-Australian’ in public debates to see how the authority of tradition and a critical autonomy can clash. In recent years you can leave yourself open to the accusation of being ‘un-Australian’ when you question certain values or parts of the national identity. Rightly understood, patriotism can be liberal, and leave room for criticising the policies conducted in the name of one’s country. An Australian could have opposed Australian participation in the American-led invasion of Iraq without renouncing his patriotic concern for Australian servicemen. There is a distinction, to borrow the words of Mark Twain, between supporting your country and supporting your government. At the same time, this distinction between government and country does not mean that patriotism must guard one’s national identity and culture from critical scrutiny. MacIntyre’s view notwithstanding, a love of country does not prevent us from ever questioning the national culture or acts committed in the name of the national interest. But patriotism does mean that our criticism should assume a certain form. Although we may reflect critically
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on our country, a love of country precludes us from radically ques-
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tioning all aspects of the national story at once. Where citizens do criticise or question aspects of the national story, they ideally do so from within the national tradition, with reference to aspirations contained therein that have yet to be fulfilled or that have been disappointed.46 My point is not to deny that people may question the national story from outside the national tradition. It is merely that any social criticism of a tradition is most effective or most powerful when it is done from within rather than from without. Such engagement with a tradition is in fact integral to any liberal patriotism. As I have argued, a tradition would mean little if we are
unable to work at it, to contribute to it and to enrich it with our experiences and efforts.
Conclusion Patriotism involves loving your country. What this really means is that you are committed to a national tradition based on a common set of values and a shared historical experience. This can be entirely compatible with a liberal commitment. An attachment to tradition need not prevent us from self-criticism. In the same way that our personal lives cannot grow without us occasionally taking a good, hard look at ourselves – or without listening to some critical advice from others – so it is with a national tradition. Debates about the national identity and culture, far from being un-Australian, can reflect a genuine love of country. Critical engagement has a special role in the context of a liberal political society. Citizenship in a liberal community is by its nature to each other’s views and reasons. It is within these limits that a dialogue on national identity takes place. Yet do we have the ability a citizenship appropriate for a multicultural society?
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as a national community to engage in this kind of debate and is such
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deliberative: it requires that citizens debate each other and listen
A N D A N A U S T R A L I A N T R A D I T I O N
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Chapter 3
Citizenship and multiculturalism On an autumn morning in Sydney in late April, as I sat in a eucalyptus grove on the school grounds, I listened as one of my fellow students delivered an oration in remembrance of those who fought and died for our country. It remains one of the enduring memories of my time at high school. We took our patriotism and the business of Anzac pretty seriously at Hurlstone Agricultural High. Our school motto was Pro Patria (For My Country), as in Horace’s exhortation of Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (‘It is sweet and right to die for one’s country’). Our most celebrated old boy was John Hurst Edmondson VC, whose gallantry during a bayonet charge at Tobruk in 1941 earned him a posthumous Victoria Cross. Our principal and head teacher would, at school assemblies, make the whole school repeat the singing of the national anthem until they felt it was sung with the requisite gusto. Yet there was something about that Anzac ceremony that did not seem quite right. There was something strange about how my schoolmate spoke about the Anzac spirit, about how ‘our forebears’ fought to defend ‘our country’ and ‘the Australian way of life’. 62
They were noble sentiments, that I cannot deny. There was just
something incongruous about having this particular student delivering them. After all, she was someone like me: distinctly Asian, even if like me she had an unmistakable Australian twang. Being someone like me, it seemed a little out of place that she would be speaking about our forebears. I felt as if I were being asked to play along with a kind of sophistry that caused me some discomfort. As a 15 year old, I felt sharp pangs of moral doubt about Anzac. It was not that I failed to appreciate its central place in our civic imagination. But how could I reconcile this act of national remembrance, this commemoration of our forebears with the fact that my own forebears never fought in Gallipoli, and would never have been allowed in Australia under the White Australia policy? How could I reconcile Anzac patriotism with my own cultural reality? Patriotism may be able to pass the test of liberalism at the level of principle, yet there is another, perhaps more definitive, test. Advancing an Australian tradition based on the Anzac legend, egalitarianism and our democratic achievement may help bring into focus the historical content of an Australian public culture. However, there is a danger that history can lock us into a national idenguard against allowing touchstones such as Anzac to speak on behalf of just some Australians rather than for all of us. In a multicultural Australia, loyalty to a national tradition must not collapse into nostalgia.
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tity ill-equipped to represent our contemporary diversity. We must
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A diverse society calls for a patriotism that is more than an affirmation of a traditional national character. The risk here is that celebrating a particular historical tradition can privilege a certain cultural or ethnic understanding of Australian identity. Patriotism could then be invoked as a conservative political strategy to close off public debate about identity and culture.
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A national story and diversity
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Critics of the Howard years would argue that conservatives were able to use a renewed national pride to do precisely that. It is telling that, as prime minister, Howard boasted that we’ve come back from being too obsessed with diversity to a point where we are very proud and conscious of those ongoing, distinctive, defining characteristics of being an Australian, which we tend to identify with what I might call the old Australia. On a separate occasion, Howard suggested that ‘We no longer are mesmerised by the self-appointed cultural dieticians who tell us that in some way they know better what an Australian ought to be than all of us who know what an Australian has always been and always will be’.1 The problem with this vision of national identity is that it suggests we ‘know what an Australian has always been and always will be’ (emphasis added). For Australians from a minority background, this is enough for the warning bells to start ringing. If there is a metaphysical core to an Australian nationality, it is doubtful that the ‘ethnic’ could ever be truly Australian. It may be that you bear an Australian legal nationality. It may be that you feel and understand yourself as Australian. But the implication is that you can never be as Australian as some others. These were the kinds of thoughts that floated in my own mind at that Anzac ceremony all
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those years ago. If Anzac is so integral to the national identity, and
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if everyone else around me enjoyed a connection to it because it was their ancestral legacy, then this lack of connection on my own part suggested that I might not be able to claim the Australian story as my own. Similar doubts apply to other aspects of an ‘authentic’ Australian identity such as the bush legend. There is no question that the romance of the bush continues to have its pull,2 but to continue speaking about a bush myth seems to indulge old stereotypes, especially given that most Australians live in urban areas, and have done since the turn of the 20th century. Outside country towns, you
would be hard-pressed to find someone walking under the wide brim of an Akubra, or cloaked in a Driza-bone stockman’s coat. The image of the bushman conjures up kitschy caricatures of the ingenuous Mick Dundee, the quixotic man from the Snowy River or the muscle-bound drover from Faraway Downs. It may serve to entertain some popular portraits of an Australian character – not least among foreign tourists fascinated by the Australian outback – but the ability of the bush legend to represent a contemporary, diverse and urban Australia is dubious. It was revealing that when I went with my mother and sister to see Baz Luhrmann’s Australia at my local cinema in the southwest suburbs of Sydney, a part of the city better known as its ethnic, immigrant melting pot, we found ourselves the only non-Anglos (at that, the only ones under 60 years old) in a theatre audience of some 20 or so people. For a first-generation Australian such as me, coming to terms with Anzac and the bush myth, two seemingly fundamental components of an Australian identity, involve very real conundrums. With time, I have come to accept Anzac as part of my own story, even if in 1915 my maternal and paternal grandfathers were to be found, respectively, toiling away in a paddy field in Vientiane and Turks on the beaches of the Dardanelles or Germans in the trenches of Ypres or Passchendaele. But while I am unable to claim direct lineage back to Anzac, the whole legend can still resonate for me because I can relate to the mateship and the egalitarianism.
The point to take from this is that national myths cannot be
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own way as well. It helped that I spent my six years of high school
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As for the bush legend, I have managed to relate to it in my
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running a business on the banks of the Mekong, rather than fighting
judged exclusively for their literal truths. What I call a more ecstatic
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at a place where agriculture was a compulsory subject. Spending mornings wandering the school farm rounding up sheep and cattle, and sharing classes with country sons and daughters from Cowra, Wagga Wagga and Goulburn, helped give me an understanding (if incomplete) of a rural Australia I otherwise would not have known.
truth points to the power of myth as metaphor. The true power of a tradition lies in its capacity to inspire, to give us something to aim for, something to live up to. In this sense, what is most important for patriots is not merely that they belong to a national tradition. What matters most is the best of the tradition.3 We should love our country properly, not blindly; we should demand that our country be worthy of our love. That is why traditions such as Anzac can speak to all Australians, even when subscribing to the myth demands (as it does in my case) an imaginative leap. It is not about whether your ancestors were there, but about whether the idea is worth endorsing. When we point to central moments in our national history, we are really looking for examples of what a national tradition should represent when it is at its best. At the same time, this means confronting the worst in the national tradition. Patriotism would amount to very little if it just involved looking to the past for sentimental consolation. A true patriot is steeled for the prospect of ‘confronting a story in which evil may loom larger than good, and the good that is perceptible is not instantiated in anyone or anything in pristine radiance’.4 In the case of the Australian tradition, there is certainly cause for ambivalence. Consider the catalogue of our national values. Our democratic achievement of federation, admirable though it was, was nonetheless part of a White Australia vision that aimed
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to exclude Asians and other coloured races. Mateship might be
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a celebrated form of folk fraternity and solidarity, but it can also have an oppressively conformist (and masculine) character; as Ward observed, it was such that by the 1880s in country towns, ‘often one could refuse an invitation to drink [at a pub] only at one’s peril’.5 A relaxed Australian ethos of egalitarianism may reflect our democratic temper, but it can also lend itself to valuing mediocrity and to a zeal for cutting down tall poppies. The notion of a fair go may appeal to our sense of justice, but it starts to sound ludicrous when used to demonise asylum seekers for queue jumping. Further, a British inheritance may have given us parliamentary democracy,
the rule of law and the English language, but it also left a legacy of systemic mistreatment and dispossession of Aborigines.6 Even so, it would involve a failure of imagination and a lack of emotional generosity to believe that such tensions should rob the values of an Australian tradition of moral power. Without denying the ambiguities attached to federation and White Australia, mateship and egalitarianism, even the legacy of British settlement, sources of moral inspiration can still be found in an Australian tradition and history. Former premier of New South Wales Bob Carr made the point well early in 2009 when he responded to Australian of the Year Mick Dodson’s call to abandon 26 January as our national day: We should approach Australia Day, to understand, celebrate, commemorate and, yes, mourn, our nation’s history in its entirety. But most are unlikely to accept it should become a day of apology. Instinctively we want to honour our achievements as a nation . . . This leaves January 26, the day the whole brave, self-mocking, patient, largely successful exercise in nation-building began. It is the one day that speaks of all that happened, the good and bad, the inspiring and shaming. The story of us all. There is no reservations behind us. Well used, it will tell future generations what really happened: the brutality, the heroism, the tenderness, the patience. It will teach the
bad, the inspiring and the shaming, as Carr put it. Where we believe
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As Carr concluded, ‘There is no other day that says it all’.
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humility as well as pride.7
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alternative. And it is altogether appropriate. Let us put all
that we must protect our national identity against subversion, we
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Indeed, there is nothing about loving one’s country that prevents a celebration of achievements from going hand in hand with an acknowledgement of misdeeds. An enlightened patriotism recognises that a national tradition is only in good order when it is vitalised with debate, when we are prepared to reflect on the good and the
err into thinking that our nationality should be guarded from all scrutiny. Our sense of what it means to be Australian is not weakened by re-interpreting our national identity in light of contemporary realities. We express our membership of a national culture not by adhering to one authoritative interpretation of it, but by participating in debates about it. The citizen who questions aspects of the national culture or identity does so only because they are committed to the nation in the first place, and care about it living up to what it should be. Our love of country is more strong and true when we can question and debate aspects of our history, traditions and culture, without fearing we will be labelled un-Australian. For all those who may be first- or second-generation Australians, this should be enough to ensure that the voices of immigrants and their children have a place in the national conversation. But is it?
The legacy of White Australia If there are reasons for doubt, it is because the history of Australia’s treatment of immigrants has been so troubled. No one could deny that the development of Australia has been profoundly shaped by immigration. Apart from the Aboriginal population, all Australians can trace their lineage to a country overseas: the convicts, free settlers and other immigrants from Britain to the colonies, the ‘£10 Poms’ from the UK who arrived between 1949 and 1972, the ‘New
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Australians’ from the Baltic states and from southern Europe in the
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years following the Second World War and, most recently, since the 1970s, the immigrants from Asia. Yet the national memory has been based on a different vision of Australia. Non-Indigenous Australians may all have been immigrant settlers, but in the Australian national imagination, the nation’s economic and political life has always been under threat from outsiders. Thus, when the first Australian Commonwealth parliament convened after federation in 1901, it made its first substantive item of business to pass the Immigration Restriction Act. This was the
legislative architecture of the White Australia policy, designed to protect the new Australian nation from an influx of ‘Asiatics’ through the administration of a dictation test to all prospective immigrants. An ideology of White Australia was, even by then, well rooted in the political culture. There were widespread fears of a Chinese invasion of Australia during the 19th century that dated back to concerns about indentured labour during the 1840s, and were fuelled by the widespread anxiety about Chinese presence in the colonies during the goldrushes of the 1850s and 1860s (which exploded in mob violence at Lambing Flat in 1861). While such anti-Chinese sentiment subsided for some time, it was revived in the 1880s and culminated in 1888 when a march of some 40 000 people in Sydney prevented Chinese passengers on a ship named the Afghan from disembarking. All colonies, except Tasmania, shortly after passed legislation effectively prohibiting all Chinese immigration into Australia. With that, a policy of racial exclusion came into effect, well before federation.8 In one sense, White Australia was not a policy of crude racism, but an ideology that fused cultural ideals with civic nationhood. For Australians during the late 19th century and the early years of federation, not to mention much of the 20th century, a society from external cultural and racial threats. For Deakin, speaking in the House of Representatives during the Immigration Restriction Bill’s second reading, ‘unity of race is an absolute essential to the unity of Australia’ since it meant that its people could ‘intermix, intermarry
towards the same ideals’.9 The purity of the Australian civic nation required racial exclusion. Cast your mind forward to the 2001 Tampa crisis, and you would be tempted to conclude that there is a continuity of Australian attitudes on race and immigration. As historian Ann Curthoys observed:
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nation of one people ‘inspired by the same ideas and aspiration
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and associate without degradation on either side’, and ensure a
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that enjoyed English civil and political liberties had to be protected
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The parallels between the Afghan and the Tampa crises are striking – the desire to exclude, the refusal to allow a ship to land, the attempt to rush through new legislation to ensure that the undesired immigrants were in fact illegal, the intervention of the courts, the sense of siege, the rumours of many more to come, the lack of faith in the resilience of the existing society, and above all the massive popular support for the government’s actions. Although the parallels cannot and should not be drawn too far, for so much had changed in the intervening 113 years, the Chinese on the Afghan and the Afghans on the Tampa point to a common thread of exclusionism in Australian responses to immigration. In racialised discourse, the objects of racial fear and hostility might change, but the strength of feeling seems to continue very much the same.10 Caution should be exercised in making such observations. The suggestion is not that Australia is an unreconstructed or unapologetically racist nation. Nor is the suggestion that we impose our own contemporary judgement on a society of a different historical era. The suggestion is merely that the cultural anxiety of white Australia is ingrained in the national consciousness. There is a fine line here that progressives in particular do not always manage to tread. When elements of our contemporary polit-
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ical culture appear to revive an ideal of an authentic, racially
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homogeneous Australia, this can be readily cast as a desire to resurrect the ideology of White Australia. A more astute interpretation would be to understand this in terms of ‘Fortress Australia’. As cultural theorist Ien Ang has explained, this concerns ‘a desire to maintain a closely guarded boundary around Australia as a separate nation-state’. Cultural anxiety ‘is not just about “race” but, in a more complex and profound way, about space: the space or territory of Australia as a nation’.11 Little wonder the slogan of ‘We decide who comes here . . . ’ was so terribly potent.
At the risk of labouring the point, the enduring legacy of White Australia cannot be overstated. Immigration has always been viewed as fundamentally implicating the cultural integrity and political sovereignty of the nation. Returning once more to 1901, in moving the Immigration Restriction Bill for its second reading, Prime Minister Edmund Barton noted, ‘I need make no apology for calling this one of the most important matters with regard to the future of Australia that can engage the attention of this House’. Later in the same speech, Barton would observe that ‘self-preservation is the highest law’. White Australia, from its inception as official policy, was a matter of national survival. Much of this can be attributed to the prevailing social thought. Barton’s views, along with those of Deakin, his successor, were much inspired by the writings of Charles Pearson, an English scholar who became a colonial intellectual powerhouse in Victoria. In his highly influential book of 1893, National Life and Character: A Forecast, a volume read and admired by William Gladstone in Downing Street and by Theodore Roosevelt in the USA, Pearson issued a grim warning about the future of the Anglo-Saxon race. The ‘higher races of men’ would soon be ‘elbowed and hustled and perhaps even thrust aside’ by hitherto servile peoples, by the rise of under tutelage, but independent or practically so, in government, monopolising the trade of their own regions, and circumscribing the industry of the European’.12 This forecast was promptly taken up by Australians as a timely warning about the Yellow Peril, the
featured stories about Asian invasions and local resistance. Within
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Australian continent.
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teeming hordes of Chinamen who were jealously eyeing the vacant
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‘the black and yellow races, no longer too weak for aggression or
these stories, as historian David Walker noted in his Anxious Nation,
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The invasion narrative has, it could be said, dominated Australia’s historical understanding of Asia.13 Moreover, the narrative has been merged with other aspects of Australian cultural mythology, most notably, the bush legend. Story-telling in the Australia of the 19th century, particularly in its literary fiction, routinely
‘it was the bushmen from the rough interior who inevitably formed the core of a guerrilla resistance to Asiatic armies’.14 Lest we think these are simply relics of a bygone literary tradition, during my early years at high school I had classmates who eagerly read John Marsden’s Tomorrow, When the War Began, part of his Tomorrow series of young adult fiction and reportedly the most successful such series ever published in Australia. The plotline of the series: an Australia that was being invaded by a generic, unnamed Asian country from the north that splits Australia in half and forces Australian women into sex slavery for the occupying army. Its protagonists: a band of Australian teenage guerrilla fighters led by a girl from a sheep and cattle property.15 The threat of Asia still looms large in the Australian imagination. When Pauline Hanson emerged on the political scene in 1996, she announced herself with a maiden speech to parliament making her own forecast about an Australia being ‘swamped by Asians’. When the Bali bombings took place, it confirmed the proximate danger of Asia. Consider as well the Schapelle Corby episode, coloured as it has been by uncritical portrayals of Corby as an innocent, vulnerable to the leering clutches of brown Indonesian prison guards (and also the more recent case of Harry Nicolaides, a young Australian writer jailed for l`ese-majest´e in Thailand but subequently pardoned by the Thai king). It is no accident that one of the top-rating television programs is Channel 7’s Border Security, a show that takes a behind-
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the-scenes look at Australia’s immigration and customs officers on
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the frontline of protecting Australian border integrity against drugrunning foreigners and other suspect aliens (mostly dubious Asians and Middle Eastern-looking people). Given that Australians continue to view Asia and immigration with suspicion, we may wonder whether we can genuinely reconcile patriotic solidarity with multicultural diversity. The more pessimistic among us may say that we cannot, but I believe we can; in many respects we already have. Immigration, and the cultural diversity that it brings, need not be viewed as a threat. Rather, we should treat diversity as something to be valued.
Why value cultural diversity? The idea that cultural diversity must be accommodated in some way begs one very basic question. Why, exactly, should patriotism be inclusive of diverse voices? We do not always bother to make clear the reasons. Part of this silence is related to how Australians can be so ruthlessly pragmatic in settling questions of public policy. In debates about cultural diversity, the first instinct among many is to turn to whether the economics of immigration holds up. Indeed, over the last two decades, government policy on immigration has been based on the concept of ‘productive diversity’.16 Immigrants are understood foremost as an input to economic efficiency: they provide an injection of foreign entrepreneurial skill and drive into the economy, enhance the country’s ability to develop export or trade links with their others and are an effective way of meeting our chronic skills shortages.17 To underline the point, Australia’s immigration intake during the last decade or so has shifted emphatically away from family reunion and humanitarian programs to skilled migration. Reducing immigration to a question of efficiency has its problems, however. It is difficult to put an accurate numerical value on nomic benefits of cultural diversity are frequently intangible or are realised over the long run. Just think, for instance, about how we might have tried to measure the economic contribution of some of the late Richard Pratt – when they were newly arrived immigrants.
cultural diversity in strictly economic terms. That would miss
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There is simply no straightforward equation to use. When the var-
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Australia’s most successful entrepreneurs – such as Frank Lowy or
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the contribution of immigrants to a national economy. The eco-
the point. There are some things that we simply should not try
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ious burdens that immigration can place on an economy, such as the need to invest in physical infrastructure and public services, are taken into account, the net monetary benefit of immigration can end up looking marginal. More fundamentally, we should be careful to avoid debating
to quantify with numbers or subject to a cost–benefit analysis. Diversity is as much a social issue as it is an economic one. One thing is clear. Cultural diversity has made any notion of solidarity or a shared identity a lot more complicated. Talking about being Australian was simpler when our country was a more ethnically homogeneous society. During the years of the White Australia policy, more than 90 per cent of Australians were Anglo-Celtic.18 Today, 16 per cent of Australians – myself included – speak a language other than English at home.19 Look in your phone book and names such as Newman are closely followed by Nguyen, Peterson by Petrovski, Ross by Rossi. That diversity has transformed our social landscape is undisputed. Granted, the experience on the streets and suburbs of our main cities is vastly different from that on the streets of Orange, Bundaberg, Port Augusta and Geraldton. There will still be places where ethnic names will not only remain unpronounceable but provoke a bemused response, where hearing another language being spoken in public might attract some glares. But the point stands. Australia’s cultural mix has changed, and an Australian national identity has changed along with it. Still, the question why an Australian tradition should go out of its way to recognise this diversity remains to be answered. Why must cultural identities matter at all in considerations of public policy? Why is it not enough that people are treated by the state as
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equals without regard to heritage? Surely our backgrounds should
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count for very little, so long as there is no discrimination on the grounds of race or ethnicity. Dealing with diversity, in one view, is best done by adopting an approach that is blind to difference, by taking no account at all of cultural identities. There is an appealing clarity that comes with this differenceblind approach. It eliminates the need to conduct the difficult business of recognising identities. In his book Identity and Violence, Nobel laureate Amartya Sen explained some of the potential problems.20 Among other things, any recognition can imply that a person’s cultural group provides the definitive source of their
identity. This can ignore how personal identity is also shaped by features such as gender, class and politics. Moreover, it implies that individuals may have little choice over their affiliations. Sen has referred to this kind of thinking as a ‘plural monoculturalism’. This is a picture of society in which cultures can live in isolation from one another. A national community that contains diverse groups becomes a ‘community of communities’. The obvious trouble with this is that it invites minorities to participate in society solely through their own cultural communities, and not as citizens as well. It can end up prioritising the integrity of traditional cultures over all else. But the problems of plural monoculturalism do not clinch the argument for a difference-blind approach to culture. As Sen himself has highlighted, a sympathetic regard for diversity can distinguish between the different forms of cultural expression. It is wrong to cast all sympathy for cultural diversity as support for plural monoculturalism. There is in fact a liberal middle ground on diversity. Its starting point is that culture is not the ultimate value. In a liberal society, expressions of cultural identity should be valued only to the extent that they contribute to individual autonomy or social cohesion. dimensions of civic exclusion. By this, I mean that a political community can, for various reasons, fail on the count of equal citizenship. This can happen in two ways. First, there may be systemic discrimination, which is to
Asian triads, Muslim terrorists) or even a health threat (the hysteria
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realm of social life. The other failure is more insidious: there may
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say that a community fails to offer equal opportunity across the
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The concern here is not with culture as such, but with the cultural
propagated by some groups about HIV-infected immigrants from
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be societal prejudice against particular ethnic or cultural groups, which takes place when, short of legal discrimination, there is negative stereotyping of particular minorities. Immigrants can, for example, be portrayed as an economic or cultural burden (ethnic ghettoes, welfare sponges), a danger to social order (Italian mafia,
Africa). When it comes to discrimination and prejudice, though, cultural minorities fail to receive a fair deal. The resulting injustice harms not just individual life chances but also social harmony more generally. We can now see the problem with a difference-blind stance: it is unable to say much at all about such failures of equality and fairness. By showing a studied indifference to identities, and insisting that the playing field is always level, it can end up ignoring the cultural aspects of injustice. A difference-blind stance can end up affirming what political philosophers have called ‘misrecognition’. As Charles Taylor argued in his influential essay on multiculturalism, discrimination or sustained prejudice can have significant consequences: our identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by the misrecognition of others, and so a person or group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves. Nonrecognition or misrecognition can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being.21 Modern citizenship requires, then, not only state guarantees of legal rights but also some measure of equal respect from one’s peers and fellow citizens. The kind of dignity in mind here is one that extends one’s heritage and background). Anything short of equal dignity involves full citizenship for some, second-class citizenship for others. Despite its claim to transparency and fairness, a difference-blind form of citizenship can lead us precisely down this path.
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to some respect for one’s identity (which is inevitably shaped by
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descriptive term used to convey the reality of different ethnic and
The kind of defence of cultural diversity and identity I have offered is frequently referred to as ‘multiculturalism’. The term perhaps does more to obscure matters than clarify them. It is at once a
cultural groups in society, and also a political term used to denote public policies offering support for the expression of culturally different identities.22 More often than not, debates about multiculturalism involve people talking across one another, each armed with their own definitions and agendas. Much of the disagreement does not concern multiculturalism as social reality. Few people would dispute that our society has changed in its ethnic and cultural complexion. Rather it concerns multiculturalism as public policy, that is, whether we should recognise cultural identities in policies pursued by the state. As public policy in Australia, multiculturalism represents a rejection of policies of cultural assimilation. In historical terms, multiculturalism emerged as a policy in the early 1970s, driven by a social justice agenda aimed at redressing immigrant disadvantage. During the immediate post-Second World War years, the expectation of immigrants was that they should leave behind their old identities and simply acculturate as ‘New Australians’. Governments made no effort to adapt public policy to cultural differences, and even discouraged the expression of immigrant cultures. With the advent of multiculturalism came legislative efforts to stamp out racial discrimination. In addition, governments took SBS TV and radio, and financial grants to ethnic communities) and to promote fuller participation in the labour market and the public sphere. More recently, multiculturalism has been contrasted to a pol-
retained). In a widely reported speech to the Sydney Institute in
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izenship. The language of multiculturalism has been in retreat.23
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icy stance of integration that emphasises social cohesion and cit-
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active steps to promote cultural expression (most notably through
February 2006, then treasurer Peter Costello lashed out at ‘mushy
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By January 2007, the Howard government had abandoned all use of the term ‘multiculturalism’ in its policies on immigration and ethnic communities, and changed the name of the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs to the Department of Immigration and Citizenship (a name the Rudd government has
misguided multiculturalism’, contrasting its permissiveness to ‘the expectations and the obligations that the great privilege of citizenship brings’.24 Many have viewed multiculturalism as a shorthand for a form of ethnic separatism, an ideology in support of the kind of plural monoculturalism criticised by Amartya Sen. The idea of multicultural policy has been fundamentally misrepresented by supporters and critics alike. There has been a failure to recognise that integration and Australian multiculturalism are not mutually exclusive. On the one hand, supporters of multiculturalism on the Left frequently portray the policy as interested only in protecting cultural diversity, as though diversity should be valued as an end in itself. On the other hand, critics of multiculturalism on the Right paint it as a form of postmodern relativism that requires us to disown our national identity and endorse all cultures as being of equal value, regardless of how odious or oppressive some cultural practices may be. Few have actually bothered to look at the content of policy. Official multiculturalism in Australia has never been of a mushy variety. It has in fact been anchored in a model of liberal multiculturalism that values diversity only to the extent that it promotes choice and autonomy, and to the extent that it is grounded in common civic values.25 It has never, for example, provided minorities with licence to do whatever they like on the grounds that ‘it’s my culture’. When right-wing commentators such as Janet Albrecht-
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sen, Frank Devine, John Stone and Piers Akerman take aim at mul-
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ticulturalism for undermining Australia’s liberal values and the rule of law, they are attacking nothing more than a straw man of their own making. Australian multiculturalism has been very different from the multiculturalism practised elsewhere. In the UK, for instance, multiculturalism was a policy defined by an ideal of a ‘federation of communities’, of groups living side by side but not necessarily interacting with each other.26 In the USA, multiculturalism has been concerned solely with issues of ethnocentric representation and
portrayers of the Other in school curricula.27 But in Australia, there has been in operation a ‘citizenship model’ of multiculturalism.28 Multiculturalism as a policy has been defined firmly in terms of the rights and responsibilities of Australian citizenship. Thus, from the point of its initial adoption, multiculturalism has been expressed, very explicitly, in the universalist language of citizenship. Its first official codification in the Galbally Report of 1978 emphasised that ‘the development of a multicultural society will benefit all Australians’, with the emphasis on ensuring that ‘all members of our society have equal opportunity to realise their full potential and . . . equal access to programs and services’.29 In case the point was not grasped the first time around, a subsequent report by the Australian Council on Population and Ethnic Affairs was entitled Multiculturalism for All Australians, and underscored that everyone should have a ‘primary loyalty to Australia’.30 The theme can also be found in the 1989 blueprint, National Agenda for a Multicultural Australia, which gave multiculturalism its most emphatic and detailed official statement.31 In this document, multiculturalism was defined in no uncertain terms as something conferring a right on individual citizens to express their cultural identity, but balanced by an obligation to accept the rule of law, parliamentary language and equality of the sexes. Our multiculturalism has, in other words, always had a citizenship test built into it. Therefore, when critics suggest that multiculturalism invites a descent into lawless cultural relativism, it is absolute nonsense.
political culture and civic values. Far from stifling ethnic minorities’ integration, it has been aimed precisely at securing their full membership as citizens of an Australian community. Rather than an ideology celebrating difference for no end other than itself, official multiculturalism has expressly aimed to integrate ethnic and cultural minorities as citizens.
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policy. Official multiculturalism has been anchored in our liberal
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Nothing of the sort has been sanctioned by Australian government
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democracy, freedom of speech and religion, English as the national
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Cultural literacy Aligning the values of patriotism and multiculturalism does not guarantee harmony between solidarity and diversity in practice. An inclusive patriotism requires the national culture to be subjected to active re-interpretation. Citizens must be engaged in an ongoing dialogue about the content of their national identity and must exercise a certain imagination about the national tradition. Only a certain kind of citizen – a culturally literate citizen – can deal with a national identity in this way.32 It is by no means straightforward to come to grips with the ambiguities and contradictions of a national tradition. Not everyone will find it easy to make sense of the fact that genuine patriotism involves pride as well as shame, celebration as well as criticism. An ideal liberal patriot would be able, for example, to admire the achievement of figures such as Henry Parkes, Alfred Deakin and George Reid in building an Australian federation. At the same time the liberal patriot would appreciate the ambivalent legacy of such founding fathers. These were, after all, men fervently committed to keeping Australia free of Asians and other non-white races (though it was not a simple case of such men believing that other races were inferior – Deakin, for instance, believed that ‘Asiatics’ such as the Japanese should be excluded from Australia precisely because they possessed ‘high abilities’ and would be ‘our most formidable competitors’.) The kind of literacy involved here can be achieved in two ways.
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In the first place, it is necessary to transmit historical knowledge and
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sensibility in schools. This must involve the teaching of history in the form of a national curriculum. Second, it is necessary to ensure that those not educated in our schools have the opportunity to master such knowledge. Active steps should be taken to ensure that immigrants gain familiarity with Australia’s national story. There are certain things every Australian, native-born or immigrant, should know that involve more than just knowledge of the national language. This is because being integrated into a national culture means having some sense of belonging to a tradition, with all the moral and
historical richness that this involves. A national identity is drawn from a culture comprised of a certain vocabulary and set of symbols. To illustrate, let us take the fact that Australians, Britons and Americans all speak English and, by virtue of that, speak a common language. While this may be so, this is not enough to constitute cultural literacy. Hence, a Briton hearing ‘Waltzing Matilda’ may think that the song is about a girl called Matilda. An American hearing ‘Jerusalem’ may have no idea that it is a hymn about England. An Australian may be left utterly perplexed by ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’. While in each case, English is the common language, this cannot on its own secure the proper understanding of the respective cultural meanings of these national songs or anthems. Yet the particular character of a culture will be expressed through such subtleties of understanding. The importance of such nuance has in recent years been lost on progressives, who have tended to be deeply hostile to the need for cultural literacy. Most notably, progressives almost universally condemned the Howard government’s introduction of citizenship tests for immigrants. For many, the citizenship test was a relapse to White Australia, a latter-day version of the old dictation tests used to keep non-whites out of the country. The tests were an the right to vote and become a citizen if they do not know our national floral emblem is the golden wattle? What difference does it make if immigrants do not know about Don Bradman or Dawn Fraser?
prospective citizen should know the difference between the Don
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tant than others, this much can be granted. Furthermore, any
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Some items of historical and cultural knowledge are more impor-
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instrument of unjust exclusion. Why should someone be denied
and Dawn Fraser, if native-born Australians did not have to know
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demand for such knowledge should be applied to both prospective and native-born citizens (for example, a native-born citizen could be required to take a citizenship test before they could vote, a test that could be administered at the same time they sit their driving licence test). It would verge on a form of hypocrisy to insist that a
the difference between Alfred Deakin and Andrew Fisher, between Doc Evatt and Doc Martens. There is no convincing reason why birthright citizenship should not be subjected to the same standard of cultural knowledge. 33 As one newly naturalised Australian I met last year reminded me, there is little worth commending about a state that seeks to inflict faint (or not so faint) humiliations on those subject to its power. The mistake many progressives make is to believe that any affirmation of cultural literacy is impossible without making some groups feel unwelcome. At play here is some sloppy thinking about the relationship between multiculturalism and citizenship. The implication is that we would be better off disregarding cultural literacy as a prerequisite of citizenship. Yet the integration of immigrants from diverse cultural backgrounds can only be enhanced when everyone in the community has a mastery of the standard language and cultural vocabulary. The immigrant who learns the meaning of ‘Waltzing Matilda’ in no way loses their own unique cultural perspective and identity. They only gain in their ability to have some common ground with others, and to participate fully in the life of the nation. ‘The traditional forms of literate culture’, as American educational theorist E. D. Hirsch, Jr., has noted, ‘are precisely the most effective instruments for political and social change’.34 The promotion of cultural literacy can have a liberalising and democratic effect, not least on immigrants.
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The ridiculing of the citizenship test has to some degree
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obscured the role of cultural literacy in any comprehensive integration policy. In other liberal democratic countries, citizenship exams are largely considered an important ritual in the integration of immigrants. In the USA, for instance, there is little that gives the newly naturalised American citizen more pride than to be able to explain the origins of that country’s Civil War, or to extol the virtues of George Washington or Martin Luther King, Jr., with the knowledge that American history was now their history as well. I suspect those who pass the Australian test would feel a similar swelling of pride in their new ownership of the national history.
There is a more practical function to cultural literacy as well that can be overlooked. In the UK, prospective citizens are given a handbook called Life in the United Kingdom to study before they sit their citizenship test. The book covers, among other things, what to do when you spill another person’s drink in a pub, what to do when you have problems with your landlord or neighbours, and the rights a citizen has when stopped by police. Cultural literacy is not confined, then, to esoteric knowledge about national history or mere trivia. It also concerns everyday life. Familiar knowledge of such aspects of national life are a given for natives. For immigrants, especially those from vastly different societies, a helping hand on the cultural knowledge needed in a new country can go a long way to facilitating the process of integration. There is a line to be drawn between the different forms of knowledge instrumental to cultural literacy. The concern should not be focused exclusively on knowledge about local lifestyles and social customs. An immigrant can probably participate in Australian society in all meaningful respects without knowing the difference between a pint, a pot and a schooner. Besides, there is not much to be gained from forcing immigrants to become familiar with the lifestyle and customs of a national culture, with, that is, a prifor example, was completely perplexed by the rules of cricket when I first took up the sport as a child. But over the years, he came to admire Shane Warne’s leg spin and to find Mark Taylor’s habit of chewing gum in the slips more than just a little irritating; he can
civic values. It is a commitment to values of individual liberty,
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cricket on the television in the background on a summer’s after-
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also appreciate a glorious cover drive when he sees one. Having the
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vate culture. Acculturation is a process that takes time. My father,
equal rights before the law, representative democracy, free speech,
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noon is for him second nature now, yet the process was organic. My father cannot really pinpoint when he came to understand and enjoy cricket. If it does take time, it also requires a foundation. That is why any liberal notion of cultural literacy should be focused on core
freedom of religion and equality of the sexes that matter most. The kind of literacy required here is to understand how such values, while they may be regarded as universal liberal values, have a deep connection to a particular national history and tradition.
Dual citizenship So far I have looked at two dimensions of a progressive response to cultural diversity: a liberal multiculturalism focused on citizenship and the promotion of cultural literacy. These should not be viewed in isolation from the end game of integration: the naturalisation of immigrants as citizens. Understanding naturalisation as an endgame need not mean that integration must only be a oneway process. We should not demand immigrants do their best to become members of the national community without demanding anything of native-born citizens. A liberal multiculturalism that offers recognition of diversity actually involves mutual accommodation. There is a responsibility on the part of the existing society to accept that its culture will be changed by new arrivals.35 Ultimately, though, the ideal common ground between those born overseas and those born within the country is that both are full and equal members of the national community. Both are fully fledged Australian citizens. That the integration of immigrants should involve a path to naturalisation makes good sense. The adoption of legal nationality
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marks the transition from stranger to citizen. Citizenship through
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naturalisation also represents the most liberal or consensual way for an individual to assume membership of a polity. In contrast to those people who are ascribed citizenship at birth, either by virtue of being born within a state’s jurisdiction (the principle of jus soli) or being born to parents who are members of a particular state (the principle of jus sanguinis), the naturalised citizen has assumed political membership through an act of consent. At that, there is mutual consent to membership. Naturalisation is, after all, an expression by the existing community of its willingness to accept new members. Viewed in this way, the naturalisation of immigrants can bolster the
stability of a liberal democratic regime. ‘The regime’s legitimacy,’ as political theorist Bonnie Honig has observed, ‘is shored up by way of the explicit consent of those celebrated foreigners – immigrants – who, almost daily, are sworn into citizenship in the nation’s naturalisation ceremonies.’ It is these consenting immigrants who address ‘the need of a disaffected citizenry to experience its regime as choiceworthy, to see it through the eyes of still-enchanted newcomers whose choice to come here also just happens to reenact liberalism’s . . . fictive foundation in individual acts of uncoerced consent’.36 In consensually entering into membership, the naturalising immigrant assumes the various obligations of citizenship. There is, most importantly, the duty of overarching allegiance to their adopted country. It is customary, for instance, for naturalising immigrants to take an oath or pledge of loyalty upon being conferred citizenship. As said by those 18 migrants at Hyde Park on Australia Day, new Australian citizens ‘pledge my loyalty to Australia and its People, whose democratic beliefs I share, whose rights and liberties I respect, and whose laws I will uphold and obey’. In the USA, new citizens take an oath to support and defend and bear ‘true faith and allegiance’ to the Constitution, to bear arms all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which the applicant was before a subject or citizen’. In Britain, new citizens pledge that they ‘will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty . . . her Heirs and Successors,
There is a problem that arises here. Currently, Australians are
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respect its rights and freedoms’, and ‘will observe its laws faithfully
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according to law . . . will give my loyalty to the United Kingdom and
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when required, and ‘to renounce and abjure absolutely and entirely
permitted to hold dual nationality. This development has even been
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and fulfil my duties and obligations as a British citizen’. What such a pledge of loyalty and true allegiance to one’s new country embodies is a recognition of the exclusive character of citizenship and political membership. As a citizen, a person should be bound to only one community, lest they have divided loyalties.
encouraged in recent times. Many believe dual nationality involves a formal acknowledgement of the multiple identities and allegiances of a globalised age. It may also foster better integration of immigrants into the political community by reducing the cost of naturalising, since many immigrants are deterred from naturalising for fear that they would lose their original nationality.37 If we are serious about patriotism as a value, this is a troubling development. We should not be apologetic about the cost of adopting citizenship being high; the stakes are not small, after all. For where a liberal state tolerates or even encourages immigrants to retain citizenship of their original country, does this not imply that there is no necessary obligation to bear allegiance to their adopted country? The risk is that dual nationality weakens loyalty by making exit from the political community much easier. As one critic put it, ‘For a person with two or more citizenships, no one citizenship can be as important as his one citizenship is to a person who only has one’, with the result that ‘citizenship becomes less a matter of identity and more one of utility’.38 This was a question some people raised in 2006 with respect to Lebanese-Australian dual citizens. The bombardment of Lebanon during Israel’s conflict with Hezbollah left some 25 000 Australian citizens awaiting evacuation, many of whom held both Australian and Lebanese passports. According to some Australian commentators, the situation reflected a situation in which Lebanese-
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Australians with dual nationality were bearing Australian pass-
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ports not out of loyalty but out of convenience. Those stranded in Lebanon, it was argued, were only Australian when it suited them, in this case, when they needed the Australian government to bail them out. That Australian authorities should go to the aid of Australian citizens is beyond question; it is a fundamental principle of political membership that citizens receive the aid and protection of their state when they are in danger. But there is a background question of whether such rights must involve a responsibility to demonstrate unequivocal loyalty to the country whose seal is borne on your
passport. This is a point that applies as much to dual citizens with Australian and Lebanese passports as it does to those with British or US passports. The question is not one of ethnicity or race, but one of principle. One thing should be made clear here. We need not expect that immigrants will abandon all emotional attachment to their native country the moment they naturalise. They may well have relatives still living in their country of origin. They are likely to retain cultural identities, values and practices drawn from their old countries and, indeed, to regard their old countries with affection. These in and of themselves are not objectionable. We have moved beyond the old days of heavy-handed cultural assimilation. A multicultural identity is not antithetical to a national identity. The presumption behind normative models of liberal multiculturalism, however, is that any right to cultural identity is accompanied by an overarching sense of loyalty to a national identity. This is to return to the idea of exclusivity. To adopt citizenship of a country is similar to the idea of entering a marriage. There are exclusive obligations of fidelity. Herein lies the crux of the difficulty with dual nationality: it seems to offer no answer to the question of how a new citizen should respond if conflicts between allegiances seems to sanction a form of political bigamy. If, for example, the two countries to which the new citizen belongs should go to war with each other, which side must the dual citizen choose? How a citizen possessing dual nationality would discharge their patriotic
an Australian nation-state could once have presumed its citizens
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And this, surely, points to one compelling reason to doubt whether
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obligation when faced with conflicting loyalties is not at all clear.
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should arise. If we were to apply the matrimonial metaphor, it
would share the same ethnic or cultural heritage, then it cannot
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dual nationality can be accepted as appropriate.
Conclusion A multicultural society, resulting from successive waves of mass immigration, has complicated citizenship and national identity. If
any more. This chapter has focused on two particular challenges emerging from the development of a multicultural society. First, there is the challenge of ensuring that national traditions and myths do not exclude those from minority ethnic or cultural backgrounds. National myths such as Anzac should be unifying myths that speak not just for some but for all. Second, there is the challenge of integrating immigrants in a way that balances the expression of cultural identity and the maintenance of social cohesion. The question here concerns the possibility of pursuing a coherent regime of citizenship but avoiding the cultural assimilation of minorities. On both fronts, the test is whether patriotism can be inclusive enough in a multicultural Australia. Multicultural realities do not require renunciation of a civic solidarity based on a national tradition, though they do demand that our traditions are conceived of in a particular way. What matters most is the best of the tradition. When we love our country properly, we do not love it blindly but demand that it be worthy of our love. A responsible and inclusive patriotism requires that we not only celebrate the triumphs of the Australian story, but also confront its misdeeds and ambivalences – the systematic dispossession of Aborigines and the legacy of a White Australia ideology. It also requires us to value diversity. This chapter has advanced a particular understanding of cultural diversity, arguing in favour of a liberal multiculturalism that understands the expression of cultural diver-
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sity as a means of securing equal citizenship for everyone. This is
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broadly consonant with official multiculturalism in Australia, which has always involved an integrative effort rather than an ideology of separatism.
Chapter 4
Australian progressives and nation-building New leadership. Fresh ideas for the future. An education revolution. Fixing the federation. When Kevin Rudd led Labor to office in 2007, he did so promising change. It was an irresistible proposition for an electorate weary of an 11-year-old government that was running out of energy and ideas. Not long after the 2007 election, flushed with the excitement of a Labor victory, I sat down at home in Sydney to write a dispatch for the British magazine Prospect. What could Australians expect from their new prime minister? The fact that Rudd was still a relatively new figure on the Australian political scene only made the guessing game more interesting. His leadership offered a blank sheet onto which everyone could write their aspirations, if not idealisations. There were a few things about Rudd that were clear. While very much one whose leadership remained a work in progress, this was to some extent offset by evident strategic nous and media flair: recall, for instance, his address to Chinese Premier Hu Jintao in fluent Mandarin at the APEC summit of September 2007. It was clear, too, that Rudd would bring a certain temperament and style
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of governing to the Lodge – this was likely to be a presidential prime minister, rather than one leading a cabinet based on primus inter pares. Certainly, there was no question about his discipline and stamina. Rudd already had a reputation for running his staff ragged from five in the morning until midnight; he practised the kind of work ethic one might expect from a man whose hero is a Lutheran pastor. The likely substance of a Rudd prime ministership in 2007 was less certain. While Rudd’s refusal to be drawn into the culture wars was striking, as did many others I wanted to believe a Labor government would bring about a major realignment in the Australian political landscape. In opposition, Rudd spoke in the language of future challenges, leaving the way open for an enlarged Australian self-understanding. At the same time, he had arguably been opaque about what his governing philosophy would involve. Just how different Rudd would be from Howard was unclear. As I concluded in my Prospect article, ‘Whether new leadership will mean a “new Australia” remains to be seen’. Close to two years on, Rudd continues (at least at the time of writing) to enjoy strong approval ratings, but he has not been immune from criticism from within progressive ranks. Most notably, Paul Keating declared in July 2008 that Rudd’s leadership was lacking a cultural narrative and still searching for a unifying vision. If this sounded like a premature critique, then it also
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reflected certain expectations Australian left-liberals have of pro-
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gressive prime ministers. Political success is not the same as electoral success – it is about policy achievements. Leadership should be about reform, about building a better country. The test of leadership for progressives is one of applied patriotism or nation-building.
Patriotism and a politics of the common good So far this book has offered a set of arguments about patriotism and how progressives should embrace a critical love of their country.
Grounded in an Australian public tradition, a progressive patriotism is inclusive of difference and welcomes critical debate. But what does all this have to do with nation-building? The connection may not at first seem clear. Love of country exists as loyalty to a national tradition. It radiates as civic virtue. Good, patriotic citizens have a clear sense that they belong to a community and a historical tradition and, loving their country, they are prepared to contribute to its flourishing. Yet, when taken at the level of the community, patriotism can provide the basis for creating a stronger and more prosperous country. A body of patriotic citizens will make sacrifices for building the social, cultural and economic infrastructure of the national community. It will find a collective purpose in working to make their country a better place. In a very basic way, then, patriotism and nation-building are two sides of the same coin. Patriotism is a prerequisite of nation-building reform, while nation-building is the programmatic expression of patriotism. first concerns the value of public deliberation. In a deliberative democracy, citizens belong to a community of debate.1 In one sense, this involves an ideal of what politics should involve: a polity whose based on reason and evidence, in which citizens treat one another with equal respect and attention. In another sense, deliberative politics captures the reality of liberal democratic politics. When our political leaders take decisions, they are called upon to offer of the people. Politics in a democracy is conducted through consent, we are successful in politics, we must be able to convince our fellow citizens of the good reasons for acting in one way over another. The second concerns the value of solidarity. Our political culture has always had, as noted earlier, a peculiarly utilitarian character.
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not coercion or compulsion. As was suggested in chapter 1, where
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public justification and are held accountable to the sovereign will
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collective decisions are taken through a process of public debate
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Adopting this view of politics involves two propositions. The
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To recall Hancock’s observation, ‘to the Australian, the State means collective power at the service of individualistic rights’, with government ultimately regarded as a vast public utility whose paternalistic role it is to provide for the welfare of the people. As such, politics is easily regarded as an extension of the individual’s sphere of selfinterest, and an aggregative activity in which individual preferences are added up to arrive at some collective mandate for government. A certain majoritarianism has traditionally dominated Australian political culture. Where we take patriotism as an organising principle of politics, we end up with a very different picture of what the political sphere involves. Politics is not about managing plural private interests, or just another arena in which actors attempt to maximise their private wealth and income or institutional power. There is something else at stake. As the Roman philosopher-statesman Cicero wrote, valuing patriotism is to value politics – and government – as an expression of a popular will: a commonwealth is the property of a people. But a people is not any collection of human beings brought together in any sort of way, but an assemblage of people in large numbers associated in an agreement with respect to justice and a partnership for the common good. The first cause of such an association is not so much the weakness of the individual as a certain social spirit which nature has
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implanted in man.
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Thus understood, membership of a political community involves an important civic bond. It is to belong to a community of citizens who care about a common good and not simply about themselves. A liberal democratic polity, rooted in popular deliberation, can only flourish when citizens are willing to put the common interests over and above private gain. It requires that citizens be patriotic. There is the question of whether an Australian political culture could sustain a politics so conceived. How can we reconcile this with a political culture built on an ‘essentially Benthamite’
view of politics, involving a rationalist and instrumentalist attitude towards the state?2 Is a patriotic politics of a common good not more suited to a republican mode of politics oriented around small city-states?3 How can we square the idea of a common good with a modern representative political system such as ours, structured as it is around political parties that have historically represented distinct class interests? In the first place, we should avoid conflating a patriotic common good with an idealisation of republican solidarity. Patriotism, at least the kind proposed here, is not identical to the bonds of republican membership insofar as it is bound up in a national identity and solidarity. The political elements of a love of country are overlaid with certain cultural elements in the form of a national historical tradition. Even in countries such as France or the USA, where political creeds were founded in revolution, patriotism has effectively been nationalised. The national bond, as it is said in France, is also the civic bond, with the national culture (beliefs, memories, values, common good cannot, even there, be reduced to something strictly political in the manner of a classical republican love of the common liberty or laws. To speak of a common good in a nation-state tradition that citizens have a responsibility to support. As for a common good in a partisan two-party system, it is true that Australia’s political system is one defined by adversarial competition between (primarily) two parties, and has been since 1909, Reid’s Free Traders agreed to a fusion to combat the Australian characterised by class divisions: a Liberal Party defining itself as the champion of the middle class, and a Labor Party advancing the cause of Australian workers. While much has been said in recent decades about the convergence of Australia’s political parties, that they are Tweedledee and Tweedledum, there has always been a
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Labor Party. This being so, Australian politics has, historically, been
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when the non-Labor forces of Alfred Deakin’s Liberals and George
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is to speak of something resembling a national interest or a national
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traditions) acting as the foundation of democratic solidarity.4 The
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clearly drawn line of division between the parties, if not in policy substance then certainly in ideology. Yet it should not be concluded from this that there is little viability to an Australian politics of a common good, conducted in the name of all citizens and an overarching community. Political party competition does not mean a perpetually divided mode of governance that oscillates from faction to faction, from clique to clique. As political philosopher Edmund Burke wrote in the 18th century, a party need not be regarded as merely a vehicle for vested interests and patronage. It is, rather, ‘a body of men united for promoting by their joint endeavour the national interest upon some particular principle on which they are all agreed’.5 In the Australian case, political conflict has traditionally been defined by class-based divisions but this has not necessarily involved conflicting material class interests. Australian politics has involved, as Brett has argued, ‘a conflict between class-based world views: between the middle class’s construction of the political world as based on individuals’ principles and virtues and the working class’s construction of it as based on classes’ competing material interests’.6 Partisan competition is still ultimately a means for pursuing the end of a national interest.
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Australians’ ambivalence to nation-building
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So much, then, for making the patriotism connection. Let us be more clear, though, about what exactly is meant by nation-building. While its meaning appears self-evident, it can at the same time be a confusing phrase. Its usage spans efforts to build a civil society in war-torn failed states or developing countries, to infrastructure developments in advanced industrialised economies, to programs of national education aimed at moulding citizens from children and immigrants. As referred to in this book, nation-building means the use of ‘political means to reinforce and to shape a national identity’.7 This involves both soft and hard elements: the soft refers to the
cultural reproduction of a national identity through education and citizenship policies, the hard to the physical building of economic and social infrastructure.8 Nation-building takes place in every nation-state. As noted by the late Ernest Gellner, one of the most influential scholars of nationalism in the 20th century, the nation usually follows the state, rather than the other way around.9 Communities will use political power to shape public institutions in order to reinforce a particular national identity. Political states are never neutral with respect to identity: they conduct their affairs in a particular language, are born of a particular history and have an inherent interest in replicating such conditions.10 All states bear the distinguishing mark of nationalist efforts of self-determination, efforts, that is, to determine the content of national self. Australian nation-building needs to be put into context. Much Australian understanding of nation-building has been associated with the notion of settling the vast geography of our continent:
nation-building in an empty continent. It had to build from scratch. And the ‘building’ was literal. It consisted of connecting places by roads, by rail, and by sea through ports and networks of regional stations, ornate classical parliament houses in each colony (the cost of which nearly drove some of the early colonies bankrupt). It meant building government administrative precincts and constructing local
uments: these remain the currency of Australian nation-building.
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organisations and specialist government commissions.11
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housing projects often with innovative statutory authority
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and jetties. It meant building palatial central railway stations
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Over time, Australia arguably developed a fascination with
This is not altogether different from the way nation-building is used
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Even when nation-building is invoked in non-colonial contexts, it still retains its connection to the building of physical infrastructure, particularly iconic public works projects such as the Snowy Mountains hydroelectricity scheme. Dams, bridges, roads, mon-
in other New World or settler nations such as the USA or Canada, where a nation is created out of a wilderness mythologised as hostile or barren. This physical perspective can sometimes obscure the inevitable ideological elements of nation-building. In the narrative of American nation-building, for example, the westward movement of settlers and the expansion of the Union was rationalised as part of the manifest destiny of an American nation to tame the continent all the way to the Pacific; the settlement of immigrants from all corners of the world was celebrated as part of an ethnic melting pot out of which a nation united by political allegiance would emerge (e pluribus unum). Much of Australian nation-building, especially around the time of federation, was similarly imbued with a national ideology (that of New Protection). The political, economic and social apparatus of the new Commonwealth – wage arbitration, tariff protection, immigration restriction – was portrayed as an expression of an Australian Britishness that was superior to the Britishness of the motherland in securing social development (and in preserving racial integrity). The emergence of the Gallipoli–Anzac myth a decade and a half later served to galvanise a cultural solidarity based on mateship and egalitarianism. But the ideological or soft components of Australian nationbuilding have been overshadowed by its physical or hard dimensions. The imperative for Australians to build a nation of
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citizens was arguably never as intense as it was in other nation-
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states. The overwhelmingly British character of the Australian population meant Australians could draw upon deep reservoirs of race patriotism. This becomes clearer when the history of Australian nationbuilding is compared to nation-building in Old World Europe. There, internal heterogeneity lent greater urgency to the task of actively cultivating a shared identity. In France, for example, governments of the Third Republic embarked on a comprehensive nation-building program aimed at transforming ‘peasants into Frenchmen’.12 A system of national education was established
to ensure the subordination of regional tongues and customs to a French national language and culture. Children were taught a French national history, geography and literature that inculcated republican political values and affirmed the greatness (grandeur) of France. In Germany, unification of the various Germanic states in 1871 similarly saw Otto von Bismarck implement educational reforms aimed at securing state control over education and the establishment of German as the universal language of schooling. Through Bismarck’s kulturkampf, the newly formed German nation saw the fulfilment of philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s vision of creating a system of national education as the ‘means of preserving the existence of the German nation’ and of instilling in future Germans a spiritual, patriotic love of the fatherland.13 For all of the physical nation-building in Australia, there has been nothing comparable to such systematic promotion of national citizenship. Australian children can complete 13 years of schooling without receiving a structured teaching of our national history. and, apart from New South Wales, there is no state or territory in which the teaching of Australian history is a compulsory requirement for schools. It remains an anomaly that Australia remains one department of culture. It is as though we have been unable to allow ourselves to think seriously about an Australian national culture, or at least not without a great deal of self-consciousness. The contemporary story of Australian nation-building is, morefact that nation-building has international connotations for many
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over, one of confusion. Part of this can be explained by the
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of the few countries in the world without a dedicated ministry or
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Perennial debates are still conducted about a national curriculum
lic debates. When Australians think about nation-building in our
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country, we are likely to think of it as something that has already
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Australians. In recent years so many of our efforts at nation-building have been directed elsewhere, in the form of humanitarian assistance, peacekeeping and reconstruction in East Timor and the Solomon Islands, Iraq and Afghanistan. Part of this also has to do with the underdeveloped language of nation-building in our pub-
been done by pioneer settlers in realising the ambition of making a nation for a continent. In other words, the Australian nation does not need building. It has already been built.
Nation-building memory The tendency to regard nation-building as just a synonym for physical infrastructure has meant that many fail to appreciate nationbuilding as representing a tradition of governance and political reform.14 Nation-building has been emptied out as a concept. The narrow association of nation-building with major infrastructure projects has led it to be divorced from a broader national story. On one interpretation, this mirrors the actual decline of nationbuilding in Australia. According to sociologist Michael Pusey, the rise of economic rationalism among political and bureaucratic elites has led to the widespread support for smaller government and freer markets.15 The result has been greater resistance to public spending and an active role on the part of government in the national economy. Whereas Australian elites once viewed the state as an instigator of economic development and a provider of capital investment, the new neoliberal orthodoxy prescribed an institutional retreat from the economy. Public spending would crowd out private investment. Governments should be retiring public debt rather than adding to it, and not be engaging in big nation-building projects.
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Pusey traces this ideological shift to radical changes within
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the structure of the Canberra bureaucracy. Centrist and moderate public servants committed to nation-building (in the mould of economist Dr Herbert ‘Nugget’ Coombs) were being replaced by a new generation of free market evangelists. As Pusey wrote recently: An older generation of broadly experienced and more broadly educated small L liberal and Fabian intellectuals – most of them with degrees in humanities, social science and the law, were losing out to a new elite of younger, dry,
narrowly-trained, neo-liberal economists who were, from the early 1980s, being reeled up into the central agencies through the mechanism of accelerated promotion.16 Put on short-term contracts and armed with ideological zeal, these new mandarins quickly overwhelmed the old guard within the top ranks of the Commonwealth public service. The result has been that public policy in Australia is set within an ideological mould that is, at least in principle, averse to public expenditure, to public borrowing, to what we used to call the ‘mixed economy’, to planning per se and to the deployment of state power to steer the national economy into a kind of mid and long-term nation-building initiatives. Or as Pusey put it in his seminal book of 1990, Economic Rationalism up destroying the ‘integrity’ of a national public culture of social democratic labourism.17 The Pusey thesis is debatable. It assumes, wrongly in my view, able. It supposes that the only model of nation-building is a statist or corporatist model of governance. However, the idea that economic development is served by more open markets and competition does not preclude an active role for government. Public involvement in ership. Modern social democracy has recognised that the state may direct provider when it comes to public goods.18 There is also a crucial role for government to play in designing markets so that they function well. The critique of economic rationalism implies that nation-building takes place only when government is the spender or the builder. It fails to acknowledge that nation-building can take place when government is a designer or facilitator.
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need to play the role of guarantor rather than merely the role of
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economic activity is not confined to public funding or direct own-
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that nation-building and economic liberalism must be irreconcil-
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in Canberra, the ‘locust strike’ of economic rationalism has ended
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Nonetheless, the advent of economic rationalism highlights an obstacle to forging a contemporary Australian nation-building program. Much of the agenda of structural economic reform during the 1980s and 1990s was directed at dissembling the Australian Settlement, the central institutional expression of Australian nationbuilding in the 20th century. It could be concluded from this that the Australian response to globalisation involved a rupture in our political culture, a relegation of nation-building. This would be wrong. There is a continuity of nation-building in our political history, to which structural economic reforms belong, and of which progressives can claim ownership. Such continuity is not immediately obvious. Many would trace the lineage of Australian progressive nation-building to a radical nationalist tradition, an assertive cultural ideology that advanced an independent, anti-British view of Australian nationhood. Built around a 19th century worker culture based on egalitarianism, larrikinism and mateship, this radicalism involved ‘the assertion of the validity of values which were thought of as distinctively Australian’.19 For the vast majority of the 20th century, it provided the cultural glue for an Australian Labor Party that regarded itself as the custodian of working-class interests and left-wing collectivism. But as with most traditions, Australian progressive political thinking derives from multiple strands. To limit nation-building to radical nationalism is to turn a blind eye to the liberal, middle-
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class elements of the Australian progressive tradition. Indeed, the
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Australian Settlement, so central to 20th century Australian nationbuilding, was the result of a compromise between the Deakin-led Liberals and the Labor Party. It was born of a left-liberal or social democratic consensus. While Deakin may have been the architect of the fusion of non-Labor parties, his opposition to Labor was oriented around organisational issues rather than policy, namely, the solidaristic requirement for Labor members to subordinate their judgement to the will of the party. Labor might have entertained, among other things, a more class-centric view of Australian society than the Liberals did, but according to Deakin it was ‘not
distinguished from the Liberal Party in regard to its main principle of seeking social justice’. Nor was it ‘divided from the Liberals when we trust the people with the powers of self-government’ or ‘divided from us in our use of the powers of the State’. The difference for Deakin was one of degree: Labor ‘has associated with it those who [ . . . ] go faster and further than we do, though the bulk of the party blends with our own’.20 Deakin’s observations point to the core of an Australian leftliberal tradition: a social democratic commitment to social justice and material well-being, a belief in the positive role of the state to empower the lives of its citizens. That is the Australian progressive way. If nation-building is to involve the construction and improvement of a distinctive nation, the Australian measure of success is how truly it realises the ideals of egalitarianism and a fair go. Moreover, building the nation was not a mere exercise in physical construction, but was one in the construction of an enlarged sense of self. It involved taking steps to secure the destiny of Australia as This is the tradition that can be identified in Deakin as well as in Andrew Fisher, the man responsible for leading the first Labor government in the world to claim a parliamentary majority in its own he held on three separate occasions) oversaw the establishment of the Commonwealth Bank, the founding of a national paper currency, the construction of a railway traversing the continent from east to west, the reform of financial relations between federal and the building of an Australian naval fleet. It is a tradition that can
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state governments through per capita redistributive payments and
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right, and whose oft-forgotten prime ministership (which position
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an example of civilised modernity in the family of nations.
be identified in the brief but busy government of Gough Whit-
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lam: a new nationalism, epitomised by a more independent foreign
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be identified in the postwar leadership of Ben Chifley: the decision to embark on a program of mass immigration from the wartorn countries of Europe, the creation of the Snowy River hydro scheme, the vast program of public works, the founding of the Australian National University as a national research university. It can
policy, the adoption of an honours system that moved Australia away from imperial symbols of nationhood, the creation of universal healthcare in the form of Medibank (the precursor of Medicare), the implementation of free university education for all, the establishment of an urban development policy, strong support for the Australian arts, the passage of the Racial Discrimination Act and the birth of a liberal multiculturalism. It can be identified as well in the wide-ranging reforms and new directions of the Hawke and Keating years: the floating of the Australian dollar, the deregulation of the financial sector, the removal of tariff walls, the establishment of compulsory superannuation, the closer engagement with Asia, the raising of a debate about a republic and the beginnings of Aboriginal reconciliation. This is by no means an exhaustive record of progressive Australian nation-building. The initiatives of some Liberal prime ministers no doubt warrant progressive credentials. Consider, for instance, the progressive liberalism of Harold Holt in cultivating ties with Asia, in bringing the White Australia policy to an end and in signalling a new sense of Australian purpose to counter declining British race patriotism. Or Malcolm Fraser’s leadership in establishing SBS and in fleshing out the institutional content of a liberal multiculturalism. However, what all the policies of Deakin, Fisher, Chifley, Whitlam, Hawke and Keating share in common is a certain continuity
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of a reforming tradition. In the first place, this tradition is based on
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a certain centralism. The Labor Party has been characterised by its belief that its social democratic objectives can only be pursued from the centre. It has historically been the case that the Coalition parties have been the parties of states’ rights and more ardent defenders of a federal system in which divided government serves as a check on overextended government power and as a protector of individual liberty. (The Howard government’s centralising tendencies, in this respect, were somewhat of an aberration.) The tradition discussed here is not simply defined by its view of the federalist machinery of government. At the core of its substance
is an ideological view about the role of government in Australian society and the lives of its citizens. There is a belief about modernising Australia, guided by a politics of the common good defined by an ethos of fairness and equality and a humane sensibility. As Chifley famously put it, the great objective was ‘the light on the hill’, the mission to fight ‘to give the Australian people equality of opportunity’, and to bring ‘something better to the people, better standards of living, greater happiness to the mass of the people’.21 When Whitlam assumed the mantle of reform, he explained another aspect of this tradition – the belief that the wellbeing of citizens could never be separated from the community to which those citizens belong, and could never be secured through formal equality alone. ‘The basic services and opportunities which determine the real standard of life of a family or an individual,’ Whitlam said, ‘can only be provided by the community and only to the extent to which the community is willing to provide them.’ This did not imply, it should be noted, an all-encompassing state reformers would still accept, was that ‘a citizen’s real standard of living, the health of himself and his family, his children’s opportunity for education and self-improvement, his access to employment ation and cultural activity’ were determined as much by income as by ‘the availability and accessibility of the services which the community alone can provide and ensure’.22 If Chifley pointed to the ends of nation-building, then Whitlam pointed to the means – a every citizen access to opportunity.
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solidaristic community prepared to pool its resources and guarantee
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opportunities, his ability to enjoy the nation’s resources for recre-
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dedicated to welfare. Whitlam’s point, and a point all progressive
in progressive politics. When I returned from England to join the
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Labor campaign for the 2007 election, I was immediately struck by
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Recovering a lost tradition The left-liberal tradition of Australian nation-building is a lost tradition that progressives today need to recover. The good news is that the language of nation-building has been making a comeback
the enthusiastic embrace of nation-building in party speeches and policy documents. Many would trace this back to Kim Beazley’s two periods as Labor leader: it was no accident that when Beazley retired from politics, he said he wished Australians would remember him as a man ‘obsessed with nation-building’. In more concrete terms, the return of nation-building came in April 2007, when the Labor national conference moved to adopt in its policy platform a chapter on nation-building and infrastructure investment. Seconding the motion at the conference, then shadow minister for transport Martin Ferguson drew on the legacy of Paul Keating, praising him for making the link between transport infrastructure and economic efficiency in his One Nation economic plan of 1992. Keating’s establishment of compulsory superannuation, which, by its 15th anniversary in 2007, had been responsible for generating more than $1 trillion of pension funds, was lauded as ‘the greatest achievement ever of the Australian Labor Party’. As Ferguson noted, ‘Paul Keating’s was the last great vision for nation-building in this country’.23 This revival of nation-building continued throughout 2007 and into the election campaign that year. When, as Opposition leader, Kevin Rudd made his budget reply in May he referred to Labor’s planed national broadband network as ‘the nation-building that the nation needs’, comparing it to the 19th century efforts of governments in creating railway networks. The theme of nation-building
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entered elsewhere into Labor’s campaign rhetoric, for instance, its
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promise of an education revolution and its pledge to invest in infrastructure. A nation-building focus has intensified for Labor in government. In its first year, the Rudd government established Infrastructure Australia, an advisory council tasked with identifying investment projects that would eliminate ‘infrastructure bottlenecks’. In a speech given in October 2008, Prime Minister Rudd said, ‘visionary nation-building plans have long been fundamental to Australia’s economic growth and development’, affirming that, ‘[t]he Government I lead is committed to renewing [a] vision for nation-building
in the 21st century’.24 Announcing in December 2008 a $4.7 billion nation-building package of capital investments in rail, roads and education infrastructure, Rudd pronounced: ‘The Government unequivocally believes in nation-building. We’ve said that from day one, we believe it today. It will be our doctrine into the future as well.’25 When the government released its $42 billion stimulus package in February 2009, it was called the Nation-Building and Jobs Plan. And when in May Treasurer Wayne Swan delivered his second Budget as treasurer, he announced a $22 billion investment in roads, rail, ports and clean energy, boasting that its central task was ‘Nation-building for the Recovery’. On all appearances, it seems that nation-building is very much back in vogue and set to enjoy a rebirth in public life. But is nation-building just a catchy slogan? What do Australia’s left-liberal political leaders really understand by it? Is their understanding consistent with the kind of nation-building and reformist tradition outlined here? embraced nation-building in their rhetoric. All governments and political leaders need to place their agendas into some sense of partisan continuity. Hence, in a speech in September 2008, in which we have sought to be nation builders – rather than our opponents who have never believed in nation-building’. Labor, Rudd continued, has ‘always sought to build up the nation’s hopes rather than play to the nation’s fears – as our opponent routinely have done’. A direction of the current Labor government, as it had been ‘alive in
Australian put it, ‘To the old-Labor way of thinking, nation-building
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Whitlam, alive in Hawke, alive in Keating’.26
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tradition of centrist reform was the guiding force behind the policy
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he paid tribute to Gough Whitlam, Rudd noted, ‘As a movement
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It makes some sense that the Rudd government and Labor have
was code for picking a lucky project or industry and delivering
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Yet, as it is being invoked by some figures in the Labor government, nation-building is often merely a shorthand, if not simply for physical infrastructure, then for an activist industry policy or a protectionist form of economic patriotism. As Lenore Taylor of the
truckloads of cash’.27 For former Labor leader Mark Latham, the billions of dollars allocated to infrastructure investment would be used ‘to support the Government’s preferred industrial projects, companies and unions’, embodying ‘a belief in government intervention and preferment’.28 This touches on some elements of the history of nation-building about which we should have reservations. As it has been used in the past, the language of building a nation has sometimes been a shield for excess. According to journalist Richard Evans, ‘since colonial times, Australians have been suckers for white elephants’. We ‘ran up massive debts to fund the construction of railways, dams and bridges, schemes that were often motivated more by status than economy’.29 As well, the fact that much of Australian nation-building in the past has been bound up in an ideology of Fortress Australia and an image of a white Australia under threat from Asian hordes in the north cannot be overlooked. Mass postSecond World War immigration from Europe, for example, was dictated by the belief that Australia needed to populate or perish. As has been argued here, though, an imperfect historical record does not render a tradition void; it is the best of the tradition that ultimately counts. There is less to worry about any historical baggage when nation-building ambitions draw upon a well-articulated contemporary vision of Australia. In more philosophical terms, there remains some progressive
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ambivalence about the place of markets and the precise role of
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government in a 21st century agenda of nation-building. In a speech that spelt out the ideological content of his leadership, Rudd has said that his government recognises ‘the power of targeted government intervention – while also recognising the limitations of government in the form of an all-providing state that only serves to suffocate the enterprise of individuals’.30 In his much-debated essay on the global financial crisis in the Monthly in February 2009, Rudd declared that ‘[t]he great neoliberal experiment of the past 30 years has failed’; there was a need to reinstate a Keynesian tradition of social democracy involving a more central role for government in the
economy. In the same essay, he wrote that he favoured ‘a system of open markets, unambiguously regulated by an activist state, and one in which the state intervenes to reduce the greater inequalities that competitive markets will inevitably generate’.31 Open markets and an activist state? Competitive markets and state regulation? There is a nuance here that can easily become lost, especially at a time when global financial markets have failed rather spectacularly. After all, Rudd has not held back in blaming the excesses of neoliberalism – what he has called ‘that particular brand of free-market fundamentalism, extreme capitalism and excessive greed which became the economic orthodoxy of our time’ – for the current crisis. But highlighting the limits of markets and the need for greater government intervention can appear to repudiate aspects of the reforming Labor tradition of which the Rudd government claims it is a part, namely, the Hawke and Keating legacy of liberal microeconomic reform, aimed at opening up the economy to competitive market forces. This is not, we can guess, Any revival of a left-liberal reform tradition must not exclude the legacy of the Hawke–Keating years. This is about more than partisan Labor niceties or the aesthetic presentation of a historof modernising the Australian economy for a global economy would involve a flawed recovery of a progressive, left-liberal nationbuilding tradition. For a time, this economic legacy was regarded as anathema: economic rationalism was seen in some quarters as high interest rates and ‘the recession we had to have’. In the years
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having gone too far, Labor’s period in office was associated with
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ical narrative. Failure to acknowledge the Hawke–Keating legacy
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Rudd’s intention.
markets and an old-fashioned mixed economy are neither desirable
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nor viable. Understood in this context, the Hawke–Keating years
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immediately following 1996 and the heavy defeat of the Keating government, Labor’s parliamentary ranks did little to defend the economic necessity of reform and the remaking of the Australian tradition. No one now disputes, however, that a return to the Australian settlement of a statist political economy, highly regulated
never represented a wholesale disavowal of nation-building; they represented a re-gearing of it. As the Pusey critique of economic reform makes clear, statist attitudes about government remain among the ranks of our intellectuals. At a more popular level, the Australian people continue to have expectations of an activist government. The credibility of the economic reforms of the 1980s and 1990s have come into question. According to cultural historian Mark Davis: Australians have become suspicious of the claim, a cliche´ of politics since the late 1980s, that better times are around the corner and all that’s needed is more sacrifice and further economic reform. What happened as a result of all the previous reforms, they wonder, and all the previous sacrifices? They are suspicious most of all because it seems increasingly likely that the money being made is going elsewhere: that they aren’t, and perhaps were never intended to be, the real beneficiaries of the sacrifices that they’ve made.32 To believe that reforming Australia to compete in a global marketplace is incompatible with an Australian fair go, though, involves a misunderstanding. It confuses, in a very fundamental sense, government intervention per se with nation-building. The active participation of government in society and economy is a means
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of creating a stronger nation, rather than an end in itself. The
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content of nation-building is something that is always evolving, although its ethos remains the same: the project of realising the nation is always ongoing, and political leaders must always respond to change.
Climate change If nation-building is indeed about change and responsibility, can there be a bigger challenge at the moment than climate change? Any nation-building aspiration would be a poor one if it did not
address this matter. Few would dispute that the issue is a perfect moral storm, a political, economic and environmental challenge of profound urgency. Unless the climate crisis is resolved by dramatically reducing our greenhouse gas emissions, we risk facing the destruction of human civilisation. Sceptics out there can still be found, but the scientific evidence is overwhelmingly clear: Arctic polar icecaps are melting, sea levels are rising, weather patterns are becoming increasingly violent and unpredictable. All are connected with human-induced rises in greenhouse gas emissions. The worst-case scenario, in which nothing is done, is one in which the planet would experience calamitous temperature rises of as much as 6 degrees Celsius. Such a rise would be catastrophic. Coastal cities would need to be evacuated as rising seas erode coastlines, agriculture would become impossible in many regions across the world. In such a world, there would be food shortages and famine, conflict and war, and mass migration of peoples across borders and continents.33 a rise in temperatures of something around 1–2 degrees Celsius), climate change will have profound consequences. Australia is in line to be hit especially hard, given our harsh and temperamental environmore frequent and severe. Rising temperatures, for example, could well mean that the kind of fiery fury that engulfed Victoria that Black Saturday of 7 February 2009 will become more horrifyingly common. warming. Prime Minister Rudd may have once described climate
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Even so, there remains a cognitive dissonance about global
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ment. Natural disasters such as bushfires and storms may become
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Even with possible mitigation efforts (optimistic forecasts place
economic costs of any policy response, most notably, an emissions
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trading scheme (ETS). For the most part, we still consider climate
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change as ‘the great economic, environmental and moral challenge of our time’, but we still struggle to place the issue within our national story, let alone within a reformist nation-building agenda. Many fail to appreciate just how urgent the climate crisis really is. In the climate debate, much emphasis remains firmly on the likely
change crudely in terms of a constraint on our future capacity for economic growth rather than an imminent threat to our very physical survival as a human race. Changing our ways to avert climate disaster will not be easy. According to scientists, if we are to offer an adequate response to climate change, the world will need to halve global greenhouse emissions by 2050 and find ways to overhaul the structure of the global economy. The economy of today, dependent as it is on cheap fossil fuels and carbon-intensive industrial activity, will need to be transformed into a more climate-neutral economy of tomorrow. Most importantly, there needs to be a unified global political response. This will be the challenge of the Copenhagen conference in December 2009: to secure some international cooperation led, one can only imagine, by the USA and China. There will need to be changes as well to how business is conducted and how we live our daily lives. From buildings to transport to the goods produced and consumed – nothing can be left unexamined. Therein lies the problem. It may be that most educated Australians are aware of a crisis of living within the planet’s means, but many demur at having to make sacrifices to their existing quality of life for the benefit of environmental sustainability. It is one thing to agree that we need to do more to curb greenhouse gas emissions, but try telling families that they might have to pay a whole lot more for their airconditioning or petrol or large plasma screen television,
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or that they should cycle 45 minutes or take public transport to
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work. Or, amid a recession, that an ETS might mean the loss of some jobs as a cost of structural adjustment. For Australians, part of the problem in biting the bullet lies in our national self-understanding. We may often express our patriotism in terms of a love of the physical aspects of our country – an affection for the natural beauty of a land bathed in sunshine – but this rarely plays itself out as a concern for the environment. Adopting a nation-building mindset may even make things worse, given that so much of our nation-building tradition has regarded
the environment as something not so much to cherish as something to conquer. The physical building of a nation cannot be done without felling the trees, cultivating the land, damming the rivers and laying down roads and railways through mountains across deserts. We cannot forget, of course, that we have historically made our living from the land. Even if we may no longer ride on the sheep’s back, primary industries still play a central role in the nation’s social and economic life. Commodities, including mineral ore and rural goods, account for the bulk of merchandise export income. A good deal of the prosperity of the last decade has been generated by a resources boom in Western Australia and Queensland, fuelled by Chinese demand for raw materials. Our natural resources are likely to continue to generate export revenue well into the future, with much of the nation’s mineral wealth still largely untapped. Australia has, for instance, the largest identified reserves of bauxite, lead, nickel, tantalum, mineral sands, zinc and uranium in the world, as they are mined.34 The weight of our history and economy does not stand against a progressive push to act on climate change. If nation-building is ourselves of our obligation to pass on the patrimony that is our beloved brown land – its flora and fauna, rivers and forests. Climate change merely adds urgency to a patriotic obligation of learning to live within the constraints of the land. In the words of scientists country as a society that intends to be here forever rather than ‘as consumed and they have to find somewhere else to live’.35 In many ways, Australians still harbour an us-against-nature mindset. We have not grasped the seriousness of the crisis we face as a nation likely to bear a disproportionately large brunt of adverse climate change.
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another bunch of blow-ins pillaging whatever they can before it’s all
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Mike Archer and Bob Beale, we need ‘to go native’ and live in our
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to involve an applied patriotism, we should not hesitate to remind
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and new mineral resources are being found at about the same rate
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Should a language of environmental patriotism not be enough, we can always fall back on the more familiar language of economic good sense. Contrary to much current thinking, there is no tradeoff between reducing greenhouse gas emissions and our economic well-being, at least in the long run. Once we think in terms of what lies ahead in 20 or 40 years (and beyond) rather than what lies a few months or few years ahead, we can see quite clearly that any trade-off is illusory. Our economic well-being cannot be separated from environmental sustainability. Indeed, long-term job creation for Australian workers will increasingly be found in low carbon and renewable energy industries. The challenge for progressives is to make sure such long-term realities are not lost amid more immediate priorities of stimulating the Australian economy. For the Rudd government, there needs to be both long-term and short-term responsibility. While the moral and environmental imperatives are clear, the problem of climate change does not lend itself to an elegant political solution. We should be under no illusion: we will not be able to heal the earth overnight, and certainly not through heroic unilateral action. The best economic and scientific modelling may tell us that we must cut our greenhouse gas emissions now, and sharply, but it would be grossly irresponsible for an Australian government to act alone when there is no certainty of international coordination. It makes sense, then, that the Rudd government has delayed the implementation of
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an ETS until 2011 (though it has left open the prospect of cutting
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emissions by 25 per cent on 2000 levels by 2020 should there be international agreement to join in such action). Progress is likely to be piecemeal rather than revolutionary. At the same time, any deferral of an ETS must not involve a complete deferral of action. In one sense, the economic crisis provides an opportunity to lay the foundations for a green New Deal that will shift the Australian economy from high to low carbonintensive activity. It is especially crucial for governments to invest in a greener economy during a recession, when economies have more
slack. Failure to go green as soon as possible would exacerbate the burden of adjustment, especially for future generations who would bear the cost of our delay. In the case of the ETS, implementation of the scheme should ideally happen before the economy moves into a phase of recovery. We should be warned: other advanced economies are already moving ahead in greening their economies. The European Union had an ETS in operation by 2005. According to the United Nations Environment Programme, US$148 billion was spent on clean energy projects in 2007, an increase of more than 60 per cent on the previous year.36 To date Australia has been missing out on the boom in green collar jobs. Compare Australia’s performance to that of Germany, which already employs 250 000 people in renewable energy industries.37 In America, the Obama administration’s US$787 billion economic rescue plan devoted more than US$100 billion to energy efficiency in buildings, the development of wind and solar power, and improvements to public transport. President 5 million new jobs in clean energy. To be fair, the Rudd government has offered some encouraging signs, for instance, providing rebates for home ceiling insulation as part of its economic stimuclean energy initiatives such as carbon capture and solar energy. But talk about Australian green collar jobs remains shockingly underdeveloped. We may be slow off the mark, but Australia is nonetheless well there is scope, as scientist Tim Flannery has persuasively argued, bone of our new energy economy’.38 Australia has significant expertise and existing infrastructure to explore carbon capture technology, hot-rocks energy reserves, which, if properly exploited, can power the entire Australian economy for generations to come. But clearly, policymakers need to do more to shift the focus on
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for developing clean coal and geothermal power into the ‘back-
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placed to benefit from going green. In addition to solar energy,
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lus package, and allocating $4.5 billion in the 2009–10 Budget for
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Obama has promised $150 billion over 10 years to help create
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the positive task of creating a new, low-carbon economy, which is the only sure way to ensure economic security in the 21st century.39 For progressives, putting climate change at the heart of a nation-building agenda is not only good economic sense, but also a natural extension of an Australian patriotic love of the land.
Conclusion The standard against which left-liberal political leadership should be measured is that of nation-building. Reform agendas need to be guided by an aspiration to strengthen the nation and to enlarge the nation’s sense of itself. This is no less true today than it has been in the past. The current Rudd Labor government will ultimately be judged by its nation-building contribution. Any such contribution cannot be limited to the construction of infrastructure. Nation-building also encompasses efforts to strengthen the national identity and culture more generally. This is not always grasped: nation-building is often used by ministers as a synonym for infrastructure projects or as a mere slogan. The danger of this is that left-liberal politics today risks returning to conducting politics within a cultural or historical vacuum. Putative reform is never enough. Progressive politics and leadership require some sense of a national story, some sense of a guiding purpose. This aspect of a left-liberal political revival in Australia remains a
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work in progress, especially with respect to climate change. The
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Rudd Labor government must do more than embrace a language of nation-building ambition. The real test is not only whether it can deliver on policy, but also whether it can back it up with a convincing vision and narrative. The model of nation-building put forward here is based on two ideas. First, nation-building represents an applied patriotism, a programmatic expression of a love of country. Second, there is a very distinctive left-liberal tradition of Australian nation-building that incorporates Deakin and Fisher, Chifley and Whitlam, Hawke and Keating, a political tradition based on a belief in governing to
modernise Australia, guided by values of fairness and a humane appreciation of the dependence of individual happiness and strong communities. If nation-building is to involve an applied patriotism, then the underlying political philosophy of an Australian nationbuilding can be found within this social democratic tradition.
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Chapter 5
Republican renewal Australian politicians are hardly global figures. So when Kevin Rudd spent five days in London in April 2008, it might have otherwise passed unnoticed by the British public. But, then, there is a rule about Australian politicians winning the attention of Britons: if all else fails, invoke the republic. Sure enough, the prime minister declared, just hours before an audience with the queen at Windsor Castle: ‘Once a republican, always a republican.’ Australia would, Rudd said, see in the coming year ‘an accelerating public debate’ about a republic. It was enough to gain Rudd some coverage in the British press, and excitable Tory monarchists took notice. That accelerating public debate has not materialised, at least not yet. Apart from featuring in the Rudd government’s 2020 Summit in 2008, where it garnered enthusiastic responses from the Summit’s 1000 delegates, the republic remains off the national political agenda. For now, any questions about the republic have been deferred. There is a global recession to worry about first, and there has not yet been the requisite debate on how a second republic referendum process might proceed. But with the leaders on both 116
sides of Australian politics avowed republicans – current opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull was, as most readers would recall, the chair of the Australian Republican Movement during the failed 1999 referendum – it seems only a matter of time before the republic returns to our public debate. When it does, progressives should be ready to make the case for embracing a republic and for taking the final step towards Australia’s coming of age as an independent, self-determining nation. An Australian head of state, and the catharsis of constitutional maturity, would provide us with a more focused love of country. There would be no more emphatic statement of the nation’s ability to express its identity than to have a system of government of our own making, and to shake off our vestigial imperial ties to Britain. A republic should be considered integral to any comprehensive progressive patriotism. Any left-liberal agenda of nation-building cannot be limited to technocratic programs of infrastructure development, but must also seek to rebuild civic institutions and revitalise public life more generally. Any such ambitions rest on a certain vision of community. A liberal, patriotic polity will be one in which citizens take their rights and responsibilities seriously, and understand their identity as shaped by the national conversation. In turn, this requires our public institutions to channel civic virtue. The creation of an Australian republic offers an opportunity to realise this. Yet, for this to happen, any republican movement must progress beyond the patriotic symbolism of substituting ‘one of us’ more seriously about the civic substance of their republicanism.
The implications of patriotism on our constitutional system of government may not always be self-evident. The kind of liberal
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Is it patriotic to support an Australian republic?
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for the queen as head of state. Republicans need to start by thinking
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patriotism I defend involves a love of country defined by a commitment to parliamentary democracy and the rule of law, a belief in fairness and egalitarianism, and an acceptance of diversity, within limits. Constitutional monarchists and republicans alike could endorse this set of values. You could even suggest that it would lend itself to supporting a monarchy over a republic. If a patriotic citizen is someone who takes their national history and tradition seriously, how in the Australian case can this be separated from a British inheritance that encompasses the monarchy? For a long time, Australians made no distinction between Australianness and Britishness. As author Donald Horne explained, patriotic loyalty in colonial and provincial Australia was primarily a matter of the Empire and the Monarch. Loyalty was due to Australia because it was ‘British’. To the extent that Australians deviated from ‘Britishness’ they denied their heritage and their destiny. To distinguish between the interests of Australia and Britain was disloyal.1 This was not just a matter of cultural allegiance or racial affinity. Britishness was as much about civic order as it was about shared ancestry or blood.2 Throughout our history, the British legacy of constitutional liberty has been regarded as inseparable from Australia’s achievement of democracy. When the colonies (with the exception of Western Australia) won self-government in the 1850s, for parliamentary government under the Crown. ‘The spirit of the British monarchy,’ an 1853 Sydney Morning Herald editorial mused, ‘is essentially stable, essentially great, essentially majestic’, making possible a polity ‘well knit in all its parts, healthy, strong, vigorous, but held in due subjection by its constitutional chief, the hereditary
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their new liberty was understood as an expression of a British genius
Sovereign of the empire’.3 Similarly, the movement for federa-
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New South Wales Premier Henry Parkes, reminded his supporters
tion represented to colonists at the time an advanced statement of Anglo-Saxon parliamentary government. In urging the colonies to come together as a united Australia, the father of federation,
‘to honour the heroic Englishmen of the seventeenth century who must ever command the homage of the students of our constitutional history’.4 Well into the 20th century, our political leaders continued to regard the Australian and British democratic traditions as one and the same. Thus, for Robert Menzies, the roots of Australian democracy ‘are deeply set in the history and character of the British people’.5 The British race myth can no longer offer the organising principle of an Australian identity. It has not done so since the 1960s. Given the demise of the British empire, Britain’s application to become a member of the European common market, Australia’s increasing engagement with Asia and changed attitudes to race in light of multiculturalism, an unvarnished Britishness cannot capture the character of Australian society. Holding fast to the British monarchy, and implicit ideas of British race patriotism, would involve a failure of liberal patriotism. In any case, loving our country does not mean being crudely beholden to the past. It means valuing the best of our national tradition and drawing from it guidance for meeting our contemporary condition. There is nothing about an Australian patriotism that should consign us to supporting a constitutional monarchy out of loyalty to a British inheritance. What, then, constitutes a positive patriotic case for a republic? For most Australians, the idea of a republic is often understood in terms of severing the last formal constitutional ties with Britain. But a distinctly republican system of government might also involve a idea of a republic implicates a long tradition of political thought. In classical philosophy, dating back to Aristotle, a republic represented a balanced government comprised of monarch, aristocracy and democracy, each representing the three estates of society. political thought in Italy, which influenced political thought first in England and then in the USA. In this tradition, a republic entails a democratic and representative form of government that would
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Modern republicanism can be traced back to humanist Renaissance
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different character of politics. It should be borne in mind that the
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refine and enlarge the public views by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations.6 Thus understood, there is a basic contrast in principle between a republic and a monarchy. A republic denotes a political community rooted in the popular will of citizens and conducted for the common good; it denotes a society in which people govern themselves, through elected representatives, and on the basis that every member of the society is of equal standing. A monarchy, in its most literal sense, means ‘the rule of one’. Those who belong to a community governed by a monarch are not citizens, but are subjects of a monarch who attains office by virtue of birthright. The connection between a republic and patriotism should be clear. Monarchical government is in a very basic sense antithetical to patriotic citizenship. The principle of citizenship embodies an aspiration to civic virtue, since public decisions in an ideal polity will be made according to the common good by representatives accountable to the people. Clearly, monarchical rule violates this idea: sovereignty resides not in the people but in the Crown, with the highest public offices filled through birth. As one Australian republican plea in the 19th century put it, ‘Being born equal every
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man should have an equal right to aspire to the highest position
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of the land; the voice of the people and not birth should appoint all dignitaries of the state’.7 The best guarantee against corruption of the polity is a state based on liberty, civic equality and careers open to talent. This, at least, is the republican formula for civic virtue. These arguments exist at the more abstract end of the spectrum of patriotic arguments (and the matter is complicated by parliamentary democracy under the Crown and the idea of a crowned republic, as will be explored later). In more concrete terms, the
patriotic case for an Australian republic can be put forthrightly. There is an anomaly in having as head of state the monarch of a country other than our own. Any allegiance to our public institutions seems divided between the monarch and the Australian people and nation. National sovereignty should ultimately be based on homegrown public institutions. As declared by the founding members of the Australian Republican Movement in 1991: We assert that the freedom and unity of Australia must derive its strength from the will of its people. We believe that the harmonious development of the Australian community demands that the allegiance of Australians must be fixed wholly within and upon Australia and Australian institutions.8 Put another way, the patriotic case for an Australian republic is to ensure that our head of state is one of us, someone who can embody our aspirations and identity in ways that a British monarch in the 21st century just cannot. Creating a republic would involve an act of recognition, a signal that Australia was no longer a nation mewling and puking in the nursing arms of its colonial mother. In Paul Keating’s words, a republic could deliver a new sense of national unity and spirit, grounded in the proposition that ‘we are simply and unambiguously Australian’ rather than ‘a political or cultural appendage to another country’s past’.
Beyond a symbolic republicanism ation, of breaking with the past and creating our nation anew. Perhaps this has been part of the problem with the case for a republic. It becomes easy for critics to cast any change as radical and too great served Australia well. It invites monarchists to offer that cry of ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’. And in much of the public mind, whether it is born of ignorance or something else, a republic conjures images
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a departure from a system of constitutional government that has
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Recent republican language has carried this explicit tone of repudi-
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of an American-style presidency in which the head of state is also the executive head of government. It is no surprise, then, that contemporary Australian republicanism has been characterised by a ‘patriotic minimalism’. Republicans have largely sought to confine any constitutional change to a symbolic expression of Australian national identity.9 There is also a structural explanation why modern Australian republicanism has been expressed this way. If symbolism has triumphed over substance, it is because much of our constitutional system is already effectively republican. The Australian polity has rightly been described as a ‘crowned republic’. While the queen is the head of state, we are governed as a parliamentary democracy. The Crown may sit at the summit of our political system, but the power of our government rests in the authority of the people and is exercised according to the rule of law. Despite being a constitutional monarchy, there has never been any real question of Australia not exercising independent sovereignty. True, the Commonwealth Constitution came into effect as schedules to a British Act of parliament (namely, the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act 1900), but the Constitution itself is amendable only by consent of the Australian people through referendum. Any imperial restriction on the legislative power of the Commonwealth government was removed in 1931 with the Statute of Westminster. With the Australia Act of 1986, the paramountcy of imperial laws in the states
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was brought to an end. Australia has, in substance if not in form,
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been a republic, a point many contemporary republicans would concede. The upshot is that Australia’s constitutional monarchy is really (ostensibly) of symbolic relevance. Against this background, the modern push for an Australian republic has found its intellectual foundations in a 19th century radical nationalist tradition of republicanism that is linked to figures such as Henry Lawson, George Dibbs, John Dunmore Lang and William Lane. For such men, Australian self-government would be an opportunity for non-monarchical government, the republic a cultural cause for the expression of an original Australian
national identity. As Lawson put it, Australian colonists had to choose between The Old Dead Tree and the Young Tree Green The Land that belongs to the lord and Queen, And the Land that belongs to you. Remaining subjects to a British Crown was, in Lawson’s view, offensive to Australian sympathies: Why on earth do we want closer connection with England? We have little in common with English people except our language. We are fast becoming an entirely different people. We are more liberal, and, considering our age, more progressive than England is. The majority of English people know nothing of Australia, and even the higher classes understand neither us or our country. The latter entertain a sort of good-natured contempt for us which is only the outcome of their contact with our own shoddy aristocracy, which is several degrees more contemptible than that of England.10 For Lawson, the matter was really quite simple. Australia should not be ‘a mere outlying suburb of England’ or a ‘mere handful of expatriated people dependent on an English Colonial Secretary for guidance and tuition’.11 It had to stand on its own. These threads of Australian nationalism are readily detectible in the fabric of our modern republicanism, particularly during the sively Australian’ was the true mark of Australianness, and for whom national self-respect could never countenance ‘doffing lids’ and ‘tugging the forelock’ to the British establishment.12 Keating’s republic was primarily a matter of national identity, his
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1990s. Consider the rhetoric of Keating, for whom being ‘aggres-
For all that we may admire about Keating’s vision, it had the
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effect of distilling Australian republicanism to cultural symbolism.
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agenda motivated by the need to forge an authentic, distinctive Australianness.
In turn, importing radical nationalist sentiment into contemporary republicanism has stripped the republic of any real social and political ambition. As political historians Mark McKenna and Wayne Hudson have observed, ‘[t]hroughout the 1990s Australia’s patriotic minimalists not only championed political stasis, they also insisted on detaching the republic from a range of political issues that shared the federal political agenda’. By merely ‘linking the republic to warm expressions of patriotic inner glow, Australian republicans have attempted to detach the republic from substantive political issues’ and ‘campaigned for a republic without having any clear, coherent or sophisticated conception of what a republic might mean’. In the end, ‘[t]he republic was neither a ship of dreams nor a vessel of political reform’ but ‘was reduced to a slogan – resident for President’.13 Dictated by romantic nationalism, republicanism constituted little more than a case for the ‘renovation of symbols’.14 All this has obscured a second distinctive strand of Australian republican thought. Far from being the preserve of radical nationalism, republicanism has also been shaped by a progressive, liberal reformist tradition. As McKenna highlighted: There is a republican tradition that is yet to be fully acknowledged. This is the tradition of David Blair, Henry Parkes, Alfred Deakin and George Higinbotham. The tradition of Australian liberalism which held that the
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essence of republican government was already built into
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Australia’s State and federal Constitutions – the tradition of the disguised republic.15 These liberals displayed keen republican instincts, even if they did not seek a definitive separation from the British Crown; for them, a republic was not understood strictly in terms of antimonarchical government. Thus, for Parkes, the word ‘republic’ ‘does not convey any necessary distinction between one form of constitution and another’. There was ‘just as much a republic in England as there is in the United States, the only difference being,
that in the one case the word is not used, and in the other it is’.16 According to Parkes, popular power exercised under the Crown was in substance as good as republican government. During Parkes’ time the connotation of a republic was, to be sure, much different to its contemporary usage. Although there remained the shadow of the Cromwellian Protectorate, using the language of a republic represented an approving nod to classical notions of statecraft and virtue. These would have been germane points of reference for politicians seeking expanded selfgovernment. Colonial politicians, many of whom were schooled in Latin, would have been familiar with the history of the ancient republics of Greece and Rome. Many would have been cognisant of the etymological root of the word republic – res publica, or the ‘public thing’. Many would have been schooled as well in the republicanism of Harrington, Paine and Madison, and well versed in the history of the French and American revolutions, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688. As much as a republic would have meant the cultural shoots of a Young Tree Green for radical nationalists, it meant, for liberal republicans, an anti-despotic, balanced and representative self-rule, with ancient roots in classical government. It was no accident that when the colonies did federate, they did so not as the United States of Australia or the Federation of Australia, but as the Commonwealth of Australia. Alfred Deakin explained at the National Australasian Convention of 1891 that the use of the word ‘commonwealth’ ‘indicates that the state is formed for a specific purpose – the common good of its people, monwealth’ meant treason against the Crown, Barton replied that it meant no disloyalty to the monarch. It is, rather, ‘associated in the minds of Englishmen with government for the public good – with government for the people – and as it so expresses in itself the republican in name, the new Australian federation was nonetheless informed by a disguised republicanism of a parliamentary democracy conducted under the Crown.
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very essence of government for the good of the people’.18 While not
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for their common-weal’.17 Against objections that the word ‘com-
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Rediscovering this liberal strand of Australian republicanism will be vital to a revived republican agenda. For progressives committed to nation-building, placing the common good back in the centre of our political language must be one of the tasks of civic renewal. So far the calls for a republic have been based primarily on a rejection of the British monarch. Australian republicanism has failed to offer enough republicanism.
The civic vacuum Australian republicans need to offer a positive vision of what a republic can do to enhance our system of government. The questions to be answered do not just concern the model of the republic Australia should adopt, important though that is. There is a more important, prior question: Upon which values should our polity be based? A republic is an opportunity for a refounding moment, for us to define for ourselves again what it means to be an Australian citizen. It is not a matter that should be confined to replacing the British monarch as head of state. We should not be afraid to embrace such idealism. Too often we like to retreat to our pragmatism of character, our political apathy, our refusal to indulge rhetoric. Author and historian Inga Clendinnen has called this our ‘scepticism in the face of bombast’.19 But Australians are not a people completely devoid of idealism; it is just that what we idealise most is our sporting achievements. Our
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pantheon of national heroes is replete with cricketers and swimmers
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rather than statesmen and writers. The greatest national glory to be won is to be the captain of the national cricket team or to win Olympic gold in the pool. Given this, it may be an uphill battle to persuade Australians to take questions of political reform and citizenship more seriously. Our obsession with sport, combined with our easy going, sun-loving lifestyle, help define the Australian way of life, as much for ourselves as for outsiders. While we may not all agree with caustic observations about sport having ‘addled the Australian consciousness’, few
would deny that sport has occupied the heart of the national character for a very long time.20 This was in part an accident of history. It was, as author David Malouf has argued, the sporting teams who were sent to England in the 1870s that ‘first established us, in British eyes, as a single nation, long before we had made the move to official nationhood’. And it ‘was through rivalry on the field, in which we often turned out to be superior, that a kind of equality grew up between us when in other areas the Australian states were still minor dependents’.21 Part of it, though, stems from something innate in our spirit. Sport has always been our civil religion. When Mark Twain set foot on these shores in the 1890s, he was awestruck by the importance of Melbourne Cup Day in the colonies. In an observation that captures our curious madness with sport, he noted that Cup Day was ‘Supreme’, commanding ‘an attention, an interest, and an enthusiasm which are universal – and spontaneous, not perfunctory’. Twain could ‘call to mind no specialised annual day, in any country, whose approach fires the whole land with a conflagration of conversation and preparation and anticipation and jubilation’.22 Truly, Australians can say that there is no other nation that stops for a horse race, and has been doing so for close to 150 years. It can be tempting to piece from this a certain view of the Australian character. ‘Do we inhabit a paradise of brainless, soulless, sun-tanned flesh?’ Critic Peter Conrad posed this question in his Boyer Lectures of 2004.23 Not long ago, I was reminded of how Australia continues to be viewed by much of the world. While I that the newspaper would editorialise about some developments in Australia. Predictably, I ended up being given the task of writing the editorial. When one copy of the draft was returned to me later that day, one member of the editorial board had scrawled ‘Australia = Horne’s description of the Australian dream as ensuring that ‘everyone has the right to a good time’.24
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a national gift for play’ in the margins. It was not far off Donald
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was working at a London broadsheet newspaper, it was decided
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Some will no doubt dismiss this as cultural cringe. According to academic Waleed Aly, a preoccupation with sport is no indictment on our culture, since ‘[c]ulture is broad enough to find expression in sport, and sport has the capacity to transcend the realm of mere pastime’. Sport performs a deep cultural purpose, in that it helps to educate us in our humanity: This is the true function of the Australian sportsperson. They are the characters that define our national story, and it is from these stories – not from parliaments – that societies so often derive their values. From the great war-time all-rounder Keith Miller we learn about humility and humanity; from Steve Waugh we learn grit and courage. From tough, Depression-era footballers such as Jack Dyer and Bob Rose, we imbibe hope.25 We should be wary, though, of celebrating our love of sport so uncritically as an essential, unchangeable part of our national character. Sport itself is not as pure or innocent as we may sentimentally paint it to be. Consider, for instance, how sport has been shaped in recent times by a corporatisation that has insidiously undermined our cherished egalitarianism. Where once stadiums were a place where people from all walks of life could mix and mingle, a social leveller, they are now organised with mezzanine level corporate boxes and VIP suites, ‘on demographic lines, designed to
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separate different groups according to their willingness to pay’.26
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Just as troubling, there is also the recent militarisation of Australian sport. Sporting prowess has been wilfully conflated with Anzac military skill. Our cricket teams stop off at Gallipoli before heading to England for the Ashes, and Anzac Day AFL football matches feature veterans being paraded around the MCG. Winning football coaches on Anzac Day speak about their teams showing ‘Good Anzac spirit’, while losing coaches talk about their teams ‘letting the Anzacs down’.27 As author Jim Davidson has argued, ‘[i]n becoming more sports-obsessed, the country could also become increasingly
illiberal and increasingly militaristic’.28 The danger is that by enlarging the boundaries of sport little else may be left in the Australian identity and culture to celebrate. Australia may become belittled as no more than a lifestyle enclave with a gift for play, while in the process its democratic and egalitarian traditions are hollowed out by corrupting influences. What does this have to do with a republic? Arguably, the prominence of sport in Australian culture reflects a vacuum in our civic life. Where the Athenians had their agora to congregate and deliberate, Australians have their sporting arenas to play out their civic passions. Where the Romans had their senate for the wisest of their citizens to work out the affairs of the republic, Australians have the board of selectors to work out the complexion of the national Test and one-day teams. We do not have any civic fanfare that is the equivalent of an American presidential inauguration or a French Bastille Day, but we do have ticker-tape street parades for returning Olympians and victorious sporting teams. There is, admittedly, something too easy in blaming it all on our love of sport. If anything, civic deficit also reflects the deficiencies of the Australian political system. If our political culture were more responsive to citizens and engaged their aspirations, Australians might not invest so much meaning in sport and regard the performance of Australian sportsmen and women as the measure of national worth. Our constitutional structure has a lot to do with this. As Hirst explained, in making the conservative case for a republic:
overlooked. Its chief failing is that the Queen in Australia has lost her civic personality. Consider the situation 30 or 40 years ago. The government was carried on in the Queen’s Children pledged allegiance to her at school. Whenever toasts were drunk – at public and private occasions – the
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name. Our national anthem was a prayer for her well being.
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What does not work in the present system must not be
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first toast was to the Queen. All this has gone and no alternative focus of civic loyalty and allegiance has replaced it. Conservatives, who understand the importance or ritual, symbol and habit, will be the last to say that these changes are of no consequence.29 This is the other argument for a revived republican agenda, for progressive republicans as much as conservatives (there is no reason why conservatives should care more than progressives about the health of our political community). Constitutional monarchy has worked for much of Australia’s history because it was for a long time underpinned by a certain patriotism and a readiness on the part of Australians to offer faithful allegiance to the system. This is not to say that our system is broken – not yet anyway – but if we are not careful, it might be. It is already showing signs of decay, which should be reason enough for the patriotic citizen to stand up and agitate for change. Patriotism demands not only pride in past achievements, but also vigilance in ensuring that the legacy of your country can be passed on to future generations.
Citizenship and reconciliation in a new Constitution A genuinely patriotic Australian republicanism must see the establishment of a republic as an opportunity to put in place new symbols
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and institutions of citizenship. This is to return to a theme that has
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been emphasised at various points in this book: citizenship as the bond underpinning a liberal, progressive patriotism. To be a good Australian citizen is necessarily to possess a love of our country, and to be loyal to a historical tradition. There may be some understandable doubts about whether such a civic order is viable. As a historical artefact, Australian citizenship does not appear well equipped to integrate the various dimensions of patriotism for most Australians. Tellingly, the Constitution makes no mention of citizenship. This is not a result of the Australian colonists regarding themselves as mere subjects of the British
monarch rather than citizens. Citizenship was a term of popular usage in the years leading to federation and in the first half of the 20th century. The founding fathers of the Australian federation in the 1890s explicitly rejected a proposal by one of the Constitution’s eventual drafters, John Quick, to insert a clause on citizenship, as they feared that enshrining constitutional rights would impair the realisation of a White Australia policy.30 The exclusionary logic of citizenship has continued to shape its meaning to this day. Hence, the singular official statement of Australian citizenship, the Australian Citizenship Act 2007 (Cth) (the statutory successor to the original Nationality and Citizenship Act 1948 (Cth)) offers no statement about what citizenship means as a value or aspiration but merely states in its subclauses who can become an Australian citizen.31 Australia’s legislative history has, as one scholar put it, involved ‘a transparent use of citizenship as a device of exclusion’. Citizenship is about ‘determining first and foremost whom we want and whom we do not want to be part of the Australian community’.32 A progressive nation-building agenda should rectify the structural weakness of citizenship. In the first place, citizenship represents the standard for collective improvement. Nation-building is nothing if not a means for social justice and raising the capacity of citizens for self-realisation. Moreover, political reform depends on a strong citizenry and a vital political culture for its legitimacy. For the patriot, there is an additional reason for strengthening citizenship. A community has a bulwark against corruption and tyranny their responsibilities. If stronger citizenship and a broader civic renewal are what is required, we should first seek to create better institutional forms in which they can be expressed. There are two steps in particular that recognition of Aboriginal peoples, and inserting a clear statement of the rights and responsibilities of citizenship into the constitutional framework.
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progressive republicans should consider: offering a constitutional
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when its citizens know their rights and are prepared to discharge
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That any movement for an Australian republic should naturally seek a reconciliation with Aboriginal peoples has not always been recognised, but an independent republic would be an incomplete achievement without some formal recognition of Aboriginal peoples in the Constitution as the original occupants and custodians of Australia, namely, in the Preamble to the Constitution. As demonstrated by John Howard’s proposed preamble, put forward in the 1999 referendum, the precise wording of the acknowledgement of Aborigines may be contested. There may be disagreement and discord, but we should not expect, or demand, anything less. It is only right that there should be robust debate about what such a preamble should say. The more important point to be made here is that if a republic must involve ‘the last step in our journey of departure from our colonial origins’, it must also represent ‘the end of the colonial experience for Aboriginal people’.33 Citizenship in a new republic should be an inclusive status, redressing (as much as can be done through constitutional statements) the dispossession and injustice inflicted upon Aborigines during our past. Formal recognition, and an assiduous attempt to ensure that it is of the first order in any move to a republic, would ensure that the voice of a people silenced throughout the last 200-odd years would be heard among the first cries of a new Australia. Some might go further and say that a republican government
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should seek a treaty with Aborigines.34 Far from dismissing such
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calls, pre-empting what a shift to a republic might or might not involve should be avoided. These are precisely the kinds of broader political issues that should be uttered in the same breath as the republic. For too long, the song of the republic has been muted by a cautious minimalism. As for a formal statement of citizenship, this may involve our Constitution incorporating a bill of rights or charter of rights that outlines the substance of citizenship, the actual duties and obligations that accompany membership of the political community. The creation of a republic, as legal scholar Cheryl Saunders has
argued, ‘should be an occasion to present the Australian Constitution as a symbol of independent Australia, proud of its egalitarian, democratic traditions, with a government that explicitly draws its authority from the people themselves’.35 The benefits of taking this step are obvious. Citizenship currently suffers from being a vague idea in the minds of many Australians, even though it is the basic political unit of democracy. To borrow the words of constitutional lawyer George Williams, ‘[r]ather than being engaged and active citizens, many are woefully ignorant of even the most basic aspects of government’.36 Surveys regularly show alarming numbers of Australians do not realise that Australia has a written Constitution, let alone have any awareness of their rights and responsibilities as citizens. At a time when many are inclined to feel estranged from their political institutions and to believe the worst of their politicians, it could only be a good thing to offer a clearer idea of what citizenship means. Again, not everyone will concur, as the current debate about a charter of rights has shown. For opponents of a charter, any formal codification of rights and responsibilities would be superfluous. Australia is already a free society, Australians already enjoy basic rights. A charter would also run counter to the tradition of Westminster parliamentary democracy, in which freedoms are protected through a common law and parliament. And, perhaps most troubling of all, a charter would turn judges into lawmakers: it would be ‘filled with decorous generalities or abstractions’ but only ‘judges [would] determine what the words mean’.37 The fear here is that words of Tocqueville, in which any political question that is not resolved arises into a judicial question. A charter, so it is argued, would lead fundamental questions concerning civil liberties and the like to be adjudicated not by parliament, but by an unelected and
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Australia may turn into a country like the USA, to borrow the
ducted just in Australia. They have also taken place in other
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Western countries following in the Westminster tradition: Canada
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unaccountable judiciary. These are not, by any means, new debates, and are not con-
moved in 1982 to adopt its Charter of Rights and Freedom, New Zealand adopted a statutory Bill of Rights in 1990, and even Britain (the Westminster parliament itself) moved to legislate the Human Rights Act in 1998. Indeed, Australia is now the only Western democracy that remains without an instrument that guarantees the civil and political rights of its citizens (although the Rudd government’s National Human Rights Consultation is due to report its findings at the end of August 2009). The position of a republican view should be clear. A formal statement of the rights and responsibilities of citizenship, even if it is only in the form of a statutory statement, would offer more secure protection against excessive government power, and would promote a more active and virtuous citizenship. Any argument for a republic should seek to make citizenship a more visible and wellarticulated feature of our political system. It should seek to fill the civic vacuum that afflicts Australian political culture.
Conclusion The establishment of a republic would be a potent expression of Australian patriotism and progressive nation-building. To date, the case for a republic has involved a narrow vision of substituting an Australian head of state for the British monarch. A new republican push should seek more wide-ranging political reform, viewing constitutional change as an opportunity for revitalising civic life and for
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establishing distinctive symbols of Australian citizenship. There is a
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rich, native republican tradition that dates back to the 19th century; it encompasses liberal as well as radical elements and is informed by the experience of a crown republic that should serve as inspiration today. Australian republicanism should be a movement based as much on civic continuity as it is on the abolition of monarchy. It needs to become genuinely republican, rather than therapeutically symbolic. A comprehensive liberal patriotism with constitutional ambitions must, in effect, address the troubling civic deficit in our political culture. The architecture of our civic community needs repair.
If a republic is to be an opportunity for a refounding moment, Australians will need to ask themselves fundamental questions about what it means to be an Australian citizen, about the values we want to guide the life of our community. In concrete terms, the creation of a republic should involve an ambitious change of substance in two ways: a formal act of reconciliation with Aborigines and a statement of the rights and responsibilities of citizenship in the form of a constitutional charter. Ultimately, the case for a republic must go beyond paradoxical assurances that nothing will really change. Our constitutional system is in fact at risk of breaking, and a republic is the right fix.
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Chapter 6
Reclaiming patriotism There was no shortage of patriotism on that Australia Day in Sydney. National flags were waved by children and teenagers, and by adults young and old. Flags were proudly on display on T-shirts and caps; some were draped over people’s shoulders. Among the vintage cars lining Macquarie Street, not one car bonnet was without a small flag attached that fluttered in the summer breeze. The air was filled with the tune of patriotism. Periodically, the strains of ‘Waltzing Matilda’ could be heard among the murmuring crowd. At the northern end of Macquarie Street, near the Botanic Gardens, a bagpiper dutifully played away. Walk south into the grounds of Hyde Park and you could hear it being sung by bands on the public stages, and being played on accordions and harmonicas along the walkway that cuts through the length of the park. Strangers crossing paths under the canopy of Hyde Park’s majestic fig trees wished each other ‘Happy Australia Day’. As I walked around, I overheard, on more than one occasion, confessions of patriotic feeling from one friend to another. ‘I feel very patriotic today’, one smiling middle-aged woman said 136
to another, as she brought back a handful of small flags from a stall.
Later in the day, while walking behind a pair of teenagers, I heard one confiding, ‘I guess I just get very emotional whenever I sing the national anthem these days’. I was also in Sydney for Australia Day exactly five years earlier, a few months before I left for England. There was not the same level of patriotic outpouring then. There were certainly fewer Australian flags being waved about, and fewer people wearing shirts splashed with ‘Australia’ or with flesh painted with the Southern Cross. These differences reflect a change in the national psyche. Ten years ago, most Australians cringed when Pauline Hanson wrapped herself in our national flag. Today, draping oneself in the flag seems the fashionable thing for young people to do. Australia has undoubtedly become more patriotic, though this has not always been for the better. Many would say that our resurgent patriotism is cause for regret rather than celebration. Patriotism is not the evil that many believe it to be. Sure, it has its dangers, yet it is no different to other forms of loyalty or love. On balance patriotism is more a virtue than a vice, and a necessary condition for collective self-improvement. Those societies that flourish are those held together by bonds of trust and reciprocity, and guided by a sense of progress and direction. In such places, society represents not an association of aggregated interests, but a collective enterprise in which all members are prepared to act for a common good above their own self-interest. This kind of society is only possible when citizens are prepared to believe in their Australia faces serious domestic and international challenges, and needs a serious nation-building reform agenda, patriotism should not be dismissed as irrelevant or outdated. This book has outlined a model of liberal patriotism. It is liberal
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country – when there is a love of one’s country. At a time when
dismisses all forms of national solidarity. The ethos of such a patri-
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otism remains firmly one of ‘My country, right or wrong’, but not
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insofar as it rejects a conservative nationalism that believes loyalty means one cannot question the national tradition. But it is emphatically patriotic in also rejecting an insouciant cosmopolitanism that
in the absolutist sense people commonly understand it to be. It is instead one of ‘My country, right or wrong: if right, to be kept right; if wrong, to be set right’.1 People should be able to express national pride without being racist, while at the same time being able to criticise parts of the national story without being labelled un-Australian. There remains an orthodox view among Australian progressives that patriotism is nothing more than chauvinism, and its expression cause for self-loathing and despair. Rather than treating a love of country as crass nationalism, progressives should recover patriotism as an inclusive language of shared civic values and as an instrument of progress. But this is only possible with some serious rethinking of left-liberal politics. Progressives should never have surrendered all talk about national identity to conservatives, and they must not
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repeat their mistake. It is time for progressives to reclaim patriotism.
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Notes
Introduction 1
George Megalogenis, Faultlines: Race, Work and the Politics of Changing Australia, Melbourne: Scribe, 2003, in which he referred to this cluster of political issues as ‘the three Rs’: reconciliation, refugees and the republic.
2
See, for example, James Curran, The Power of Speech: Australian Prime Ministers Defining the National Image, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2004.
3
Gordon Brown, Constitutional Reform Statement, Speech in the House of Commons, London, 3 July 2007, accessed at www.number10.gov.uk/Page12274, 31 January 2009.
4
David Goodhart, ‘Too Diverse?’, in D. Goodhart (ed.), Thinking Allowed: The best of prospect 1995–2005, London: Atlantic Books, 2005, p. 188.
5
This comes from Paul Keating’s last speech as prime minister; see Paul Keating, Speech to National Press Club, Canberra, 29 February 1996, in Sally Warhaft (ed.), Well May We Say . . . The Speeches That Made Australia, Melbourne: Black Inc., 2004, pp. 194–201.
6
See, for example, Judith Brett, Relaxed and Comfortable: The Liberal Party’s Australia, Quarterly Essay, vol. 19, Melbourne: Black Inc., 2005.
7
On this point, see James MacGregor Burns’ seminal theory of transforming leadership in his Leadership, New York: Harper Books, 1978.
8
C. M. H. (Manning) Clark, Select Documents in Australian History, 1851–1900, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1955, pp. xii–xiii.
Chapter 1: The dog whistle excuse 1
Kevin Rudd, Apology to Australia’s Indigenous Peoples, Speech in the House of Representatives, Canberra, 13 February 2008, accessed at www.pm.gov.au/media/ speech/2008/speech_0073.cfm, 31 January 2009.
2
For perhaps the best account to date of Howard’s vision of a ‘relaxed and comfortable’ Australia, see Brett, Relaxed and Comfortable.
3
For an account of Howard’s involvement in the Blainey immigration controversy, see, for example, Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clark, The History Wars, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2003, ch. 5.
4
Laurie Oakes, ‘A sly-dog race card’, Bulletin, 13 November 2001.
5
For commentary on Howard’s strategy in the 2001 election, see David Marr and Marian Wilkinson, Dark Victory, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2003.
6
Guy Rundle, ‘Political kitsch’, New Matilda, 31 August 2005.
7
Carmen Lawrence, Fear and Politics, Melbourne: Scribe, 2006, p. 37.
8
Niccolo` Machiavelli, The Prince (Il Principe), trans. Peter Bondanella, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, sect. 18.
9
George Orwell, ‘Notes on Nationalism’, in Essays, London: Penguin, 1984, pp. 312–13.
10
Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998, p. 7.
11
Julia Kristeva, Nations without Nationalism, New York: Columbia University Press, 1993, p. 32.
139
12
Miriam Dixson, The Imaginary Australian: Anglo-Celts and identity – 1788 to the present, Sydney: UNSW Press, 1999, p. 12.
13
Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory, London: HarperCollins, 1995, p. 15.
14
See, for example, W. K. Hancock, Australia, London: Ernest Benn, 1930, ch. 4.
15
Marcus Clarke, Preface to Adam Lindsay Gordon’s Poems (1876), in E. Boehmer (ed.), Empire Writing: An anthology of colonial literature, 1870–1918, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 51–2.
16
Donald Horne, ‘Something Fishy in the Mainstream?’, in Helen Irving (ed.), Unity and Diversity: A National Conversation, Sydney: ABC Books, 2001.
17
For the full lyrics of ‘Advance Australia Fair’, as originally written by Peter McCormick, see John Hirst (ed.), The Australians: Insiders and outsiders on the national character since 1770, Melbourne: Black Inc., 2007, pp. 116–18.
18
Horne, ‘Something Fishy in the Mainstream?’.
19
Pericles’ Funeral Oration, in Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. Richard Crawley, Mineola: Dover Publications, 2004 [1874], Book 2, ch. 43.
20
George Kateb, Patriotism and Other Mistakes, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006, p. 19.
21
The counterculture of the 1960s did not simply lead to a new cosmopolitanism that superseded national expression. As cultural historian Tony Moore documents, this counterculture served as a prelude to a ‘new nationalism’ in which cosmopolitan sensibilities sought a richer and more pluralistic expression of national identity, rather than a postnational identity as such. Nonetheless this more critical attitude towards national expression contributed to the Left becoming more suspicious of a value of patriotism, especially one based on notions of white Australia, promoted by Labor prior to Whitlam. See Tony Moore, Australia’s Bohemian Tradition, PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 2008, to be published as Bohemian Nation by Pier Nine in 2011.
22
Judith Brett and Anthony Moran, Ordinary People’s Politics: Australians talk about life, politics, and the future of their country, Melbourne: Pluto Press, 2006, pp. 316–26.
23
Orwell, ‘Notes on Nationalism’, p. 300.
24
Ghassan Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for hope in a shrinking society, Sydney: Pluto Press, 2003, p. 22.
25
Don Watson, Death Sentence: The decay of public language, Sydney: Random House, 2003, p. 76.
26
Donald Horne, The Lucky Country, Melbourne: Penguin, 2005 [1964], p. 233.
N O T E S
T O
P A G E S
2 6 – 3 8
Chapter 2: Liberal patriotism and an Australian tradition
140
1
Leo Tolstoy, ‘Patriotism, Or Peace?’, in Tolstoy’s Writings on Civil Disobedience and Non-Violence, New York: New American Library, 1968, pp. 106–7.
2
Cited in Stephen Nathanson, Patriotism, Morality, and Peace, Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1993, p. 187.
3
Isaiah Berlin, ‘Nationalism: Past neglect and present power’, in The Proper Study of Mankind: An anthology of essays, London: Pimlico, 1998, p. 587.
4
See Australian Bureau of Statistics, ‘Migration, Australia (2006–07)’, cat. no. 3412.0; see also, Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs, ‘The People of Australia: Statistics from the 2001 Census’, 2003.
5
Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘Is Patriotism a Virtue?’, in I. Primoratz (ed.), Patriotism, New York: Humanity Books, 2002; John Schaar, ‘The Case for a Covenanted Patriotism’, in Patriotism.
6
For philosophical treatments of the idea of special concern or ethical priority for one’s compatriots, see, for example, Nathanson, Patriotism, Morality, and Peace; Samuel Scheffler, Boundaries and Allegiance: Problems of justice and responsibility in liberal thought, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
7
For discussions of the relationship between patriotism and loyalty, see George Fletcher, Loyalty: An Essay on the Morality of Relationships, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993; Simon Keller, The Limits of Loyalty, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
8
For a more detailed statement of the connection between patriotism and citizenship, see Charles Taylor, Philosophical Arguments, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997; and Charles Taylor, ‘Nationalism and Modernity’, in Robert McKim and Jeff McMahan (eds), The Morality of Nationalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
9
See Tim Soutphommasane, ‘Labor’s wild card plays patriot games’, Australian, 13 July 2007.
10
For an account of this distinction, see Maurizio Viroli, For Love of Country: An essay on patriotism and nationalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
11
Alastair Davidson, From Subject to Citizen: Australian citizenship in the twentieth century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
12
W. K. Hancock, Australia, p. 72.
13
Curran, The Power of Speech; John Hirst, ‘Empire, State, Nation’, in D. Schreuder and S. Ward (eds), Australia’s Empire, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008; Neville Heaney, ‘ “In History’s Page”: Identity and myth’, in Australia’s Empire.
14
Laksiri Jayasuriya, David Walker and Jan Gothard, ‘Introduction’, in L. Jayasuriya et al. (eds), Legacies of White Australia: Race, Culture and Nation, Crawley: UWA Press, 2003, p. 1.
15
Charles Taylor, ‘Nationalism and Modernity’, p. 40.
16
Jurgen Habermas, ‘Appendix II: Citizenship and National Identity’, in Between Facts and ¨ Norms: Contributions to a discourse theory of law and democracy, trans. William Rehg, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996, pp. 491–515; Justine Lacroix, ‘For a European constitutional patriotism’, Political Studies, vol. 50, no. 5, 2002, pp. 944–58; Jan-Werner Muller, Constitutional Patriotism, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. ¨
17
I borrow this distinction from David Miller, On Nationality, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. ‘In Search of British Values’, Prospect, vol. 139, October 2007. Veit Bader, ‘The Cultural Conditions of Transnational Citizenship: On the interpenetration of political and ethnic cultures’, Political Theory, vol. 25, no. 6, 1997, pp. 771–813.
20
Russel Ward, The Australian Legend, Oxford and Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1958, p. 1.
21
John Hirst, Sense and Nonsense in Australian History, Melbourne: Black Inc., 2006, p. 230.
Cited in Ward, The Australian Legend, p. 230. Hirst, Sense and Nonsense in Australian History, pp. 149–73.
26
Paul Kelly, The End of Certainty: The story of the 1980s, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1992, p. 9.
27
See Stephen Bell, Ungoverning the Economy: The political economy of Australian economic policy, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1997.
3 8 – 5 0
24 25
P A G E S
Cited in Ward, The Australian Legend, p. 229. See Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.
T O
22 23
N O T E S
18 19
141
28
Joseph Chamberlain, Speech on the introduction of the Constitution Bill in the House of Commons, London, 14 May 1900, cited in Well May We Say . . . , p. 17.
29
Alfred Deakin, Speech at Australian Natives’ Association conference, Bendigo, 15 March 1898, cited in Well May We Say . . . , p. 12.
30
Ernest Renan, ‘What is a Nation?’ (‘Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?’), in H. Bhabha (ed.), Nation and Narration, London: Routledge, 1990, p. 19.
31
Ibid., p. 11.
32
W. E. H. Stanner, ‘After the Dreaming’, Boyer Lectures, 1968.
33
Geoffrey Blainey, ‘Drawing up a Balance Sheet of our History’, Quadrant, vol. 37, 1993, pp. 11–15.
34
Karl Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt, trans. E. B. Ashton, New York: The Dial Press, 1947.
35
Paul Keating, Speech at Redfern Park, in M. Ryan (ed.), Advancing Australia: The speeches of Paul Keating, Prime Minister, Sydney: Big Picture Publications, 1995.
36
Kevin Rudd, Apology to Australia’s Indigenous Peoples.
37
David Miller, National Responsibility and Global Justice, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
38
Hirst, Sense and Nonsense in Australian History, p. 80.
39
Noel Pearson, ‘White guilt, victimhood and the quest for a radical centre’, Griffith Review, vol. 16, 2006, p. 31.
40
Isaiah Berlin, ‘The Counter-Enlightenment’, in The Proper Study of Mankind, p. 262.
41
For discussion of this point, see, for example, Paul Gomberg, ‘Patriotism Is Like Racism’, in Patriotism; see also, Marcia Baron, ‘Patriotism and “Liberal” Morality’, in Patriotism.
42
See Scheffler, Boundaries and Allegiances; see also, Nathanson, Patriotism, Morality, and Peace.
43
Bernard Zuel, ‘He ain’t pretty, he’s my brother – the rise and rise of dancing neo-patriots’, Sydney Morning Herald, 23 January 2007.
44
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty and Other Essays, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991, p. 65.
45
Macintyre, ‘Is Patriotism a Virtue?’, p. 52.
46
Michael Walzer calls this ‘immanent critique’; see his Interpretation and Social Criticism, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987, and The Company of Critics: Social criticism and political commitment in the twentieth century, New York: Basic Books, 2002.
1
In Curran, The Power of Speech, Ch. 6.
2
For a discussion of the roots of this in Australian literary culture, see, for example, R. M. Crawford, ‘The Birth of a Culture’, in Chris Wallace-Crabbe (ed.), The Australian Nationalists: Modern critical essays, Oxford and Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1971.
3
Eamonn Callan, Creating Citizens: Political education and liberal democracy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
4
Ibid., p. 119.
5
Ward, The Australian Legend, p. 181.
6
Not everyone would agree with this ambivalent presentation of our British inheritance; see, for example, David Malouf, Made in England: Australia’s British inheritance,
N O T E S
T O
P A G E S
5 1 – 6 7
Chapter 3: Citizenship and multiculturalism
142
Quarterly Essay, vol. 12, Melbourne: Black Inc., 2003, for what might be described as a conservative defence of Australia’s debt to Britain. 7
Bob Carr, ‘The day that tells nation’s story’, Australian, 27 January 2009.
8
Ann Curthoys, ‘Liberalism and Exclusionism: A prehistory of the White Australia Policy’, in Legacies of White Australia.
9
Alfred Deakin, cited in Stuart Macintyre, A Concise History of Australia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 142.
Charles Pearson, National Life and Character: A forecast, London: Macmillan, 1894, p. 89.
13
For a highly illuminating study of how Asia has been represented throughout Australian history, see Alison Broinowski, The Yellow Lady: Australian impressions of Asia, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.
14
David Walker, Anxious Nation: Australia and the rise and fall of Asia 1850–1939, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1999, p. 4.
15
John Marsden, Tomorrow, When the War Began, Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 1993.
16
See Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, ‘Productive Diversity’, in James Jupp (ed.), The Australian People, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
17
See Philippe Legrain, Immigrants: Your country needs them, London: Little, Brown, 2007.
18
James Jupp, ‘The Making of the Anglo-Australian’, in J. Jupp (ed.), The Australian People: An encyclopedia of the nation, its people and their origins, 2nd edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 796–802.
19
Australian Bureau of Statistics, ‘2006 Census of Population and Housing: 2006 Census Tables – Language’, cat. no. 2068.0.
20
Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence: The illusion of destiny, London: Allen Lane, 2006.
21
Charles Taylor, ‘The Politics of Recognition’, in Amy Gutmann (ed.), Multiculturalism: Examining the politics of recognition, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992, p. 25.
22
Brian Barry, Culture and Equality, Cambridge: Polity, 2001, pp. 22–3.
23
Christian Joppke, ‘The retreat of multiculturalism in the liberal state: theory and policy’, British Journal of Sociology, vol. 55, no. 2, 2004, pp. 237–57.
24
Peter Costello, ‘Worth Promoting, Worth Defending: Australian citizenship, what it means and how to nurture it’, address to the Sydney Institute, Sydney, 23 February 2006, accessed at www.treasurer.gov.au/DisplayDocs.aspx?pageID=&doc=speeches/ 2006/004.htm&min=phc, 26 March 2009.
25
For further discussion of the liberal qualities of multiculturalism, see, for example, Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995; see also Tim Soutphommasane, ‘An Ideology of Multiculturalism?’, in J. Connolly, M. Leach and L. Walsh (eds), Recognition in Politics: Theory, policy and practice, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007.
26
See, for example, Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain, The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain: The Parekh Report, London: Profile Books, 2001.
27
See, for example, Nathan Glazer, We Are All Multiculturalists Now, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.
28
Stephen Castles, ‘Multicultural Citizenship: A response to the dilemma of globalisation and national identity?’, Journal of Intercultural Studies, vol. 18, no. 1, 1997, pp. 5–22;
6 7 – 7 9
12
P A G E S
Ien Ang, ‘From White Australia to Fortress Australia: The anxious nation in the new century’, in Legacies of White Australia, p. 53.
T O
Curthoys, ‘Liberalism and Exclusionism’, p. 31.
11
N O T E S
10
143
Tim Soutphommasane, ‘Grounding Multicultural Citizenship: From minority rights to civic pluralism, Journal of Intercultural Studies, vol. 26, no. 4, 2005, pp. 401–16. 29
Frank Galbally, Migrant Services and Programs: Report of the review of post-arrival programs and services for migrants, Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1978, p. 10.
30
Australian Council on Population and Ethnic Affairs, Multiculturalism for all Australians: Our developing nationhood, Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1982.
31
Office of Multicultural Affairs, National Agenda for a Multicultural Australia, Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1989.
32
E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Cultural Literacy: What EVERY American needs to know, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.
33
See Peter H. Schuck and Rogers M. Smith, Citizenship without Consent: Illegal aliens in the American polity, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.
34
Hirsch, Cultural Literacy, p. 22.
35
For a discussion of multiculturalism as involving a two-way process, see Bhikhu Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural diversity and political theory, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, ch. 9.
36
Bonnie Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001, p. 75.
37
Peter Spiro, ‘Embracing Dual Nationality’, in R. Hansen and P. Weil (eds), Dual Nationality, Social Rights and Federal Citizenship in the U.S. and Europe: The reinvention of citizenship, Oxford and New York: Berghan Books, 2002.
38
Samuel Huntington, Who Are We? The challenges to America’s national identity, New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004, p. 212.
N O T E S
T O
P A G E S
7 9 – 9 5
Chapter 4: Australian progressives and nation-building 1
Ronald Dworkin, Is Democracy Possible Here? Principles for a new political debate, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006; Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement: Why moral conflict cannot be avoided in politics, and what should be done about it, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.
2
Hugh Collins, ‘Political Ideology in Australia: The distinctiveness of a Benthamite Society’, Daedalus, vol. 114, no. 1, 1985, pp. 147–69.
3
See, for example, Charles Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
4
Cecile Laborde, Critical Republicanism: The hijab controversy and political philosophy, ´ Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, in particular ch. 8.
5
Edmund Burke, ‘Present Discontents’, in his Select Works, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1881, p. 86.
6
Judith Brett, Australian Liberals and the Moral Middle Class: From Alfred Deakin to John Howard, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 11.
7
Wayne Norman, Negotiating Nationalism: Nation-building, federalism, and secession in the multinational state, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 250.
8
John Butcher, ‘The Unfinished Business of Nation-building’, in John Butcher (ed.), Australia under Construction: Nation-building past, present and future, Canberra: ANU Press, 2008, p. 10.
9 10
144
Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 2nd edn, Oxford: Blackwell, 2006, ch. 1. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship.
11
John Wanna, ‘Nation-building in Australia: A discourse, iconic project or tradition of resonance?’, in Australia Under Construction, p. 3.
12
Eugen Weber, Peasants Into Frenchmen: The modernization of rural France, 1880–1914, Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1976.
13
Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation, New York: Harper Row, 1968.
14
Wanna, ‘Nation-building in Australia’, pp. 3–4.
15
Michael Pusey, Economic Rationalism in Canberra: A nation-building state changes its mind, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
16
Michael Pusey, ‘In the Wake of Economic Reform . . . New Prospects for Nation-building?’, in Australia Under Construction, pp. 21–2. Pusey, Economic Rationalism in Canberra, p. 1. Stuart White, ‘The Ambiguities of the Third Way’, in S. White (ed.), New Labour: The progressive future?, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.
19
Robin Gollan, Radical and Working Class Politics: A study of eastern Australia 1850–1910, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1960, p. 112.
20
Cited in Brett, Australian Liberals and the Moral Middle Class, p. 22.
21
Ben Chifley, address to the State Conference of the Australian Labor Party, New South Wales, 12 June 1949, in Well May We Say . . . , p. 169.
22
As cited in Graham Freudenberg, A Certain Grandeur: Gough Whitlam in politics, Melbourne: Penguin, 1977, pp. 75–6.
23
Martin Ferguson, ‘Infrastructure Investment: Building future productivity and saving for retirement’, speech to Australian Labor Party National Conference, Sydney, 27 April 2007, accessed at www.martinferguson.com.au/templates/martin_ferguson.aspx? pageID=3273, 31 January 2009.
24
Kevin Rudd, ‘Nation-Building for Australia’s Future’, address to Australian Davos Connection Infrastructure 21 Summit, Sofitel Hotel, Brisbane, 7 October 2008, accessed at www.pm.gov.au/media/Speech/2008/speech_0524.cfm, 31 January 2009.
25
Kevin Rudd, Joint Prime Ministerial Press Conference with the Treasurer, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Infrastructure, Canberra, 12 December 2008, accessed at www.pm.gov.au/media/Interview/2008/interview_0691.cfm>, 31 January 2009.
26
Kevin Rudd, ‘The Reforming Centre of Australian Politics’, Gough Whitlam Lecture, University of Sydney, 11 September 2008, accessed at www.pm.gov.au/ media/Speech/2008/speech_0472.cfm, 31 January 2009.
27
Lenore Taylor, ‘Nation-building back in vogue for Kevin Rudd’s Labor’, Australian, 16 May 2008.
28
Mark Latham, ‘Rewarding bad behaviour’, Australian Financial Review, 15 May 2008.
29
Richard Evans, ‘A Passion for White Elephants: Some lessons from Australia’s experience of nation-building’, in Australia Under Construction, p. 51.
32
Mark Davis, The Land of Plenty: Australian in the 2000s, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2008, p. 100.
33
Tim Flannery, Now or Never: A sustainable future for Australia?, Quarterly Essay, vol. 31, Melbourne, Black Inc., 2008, pp. 16–25.
34
Michael Archer and Bob Beale, Going Native: Living in the Australian environment, Sydney: Hachette, 2004.
35
Ibid., p. 4.
9 5 – 1 1 1
Kevin Rudd, ‘The Global Financial Crisis’, The Monthly, vol. 42, February 2009, p. 29.
P A G E S
Rudd, ‘The Reforming Centre of Australian Politics’.
31
T O
30
N O T E S
17 18
145
36
UNEP Sustainable Energy Finance Initiative, ‘Global Trends in Sustainable Energy Investment 2008’, July 2008, accessed at http://sefi.unep.org/english/globaltrends.html, 31 January 2009.
37
Andrew Simms et al., A Green New Deal: Joined-up policies to solve the triple crunch of the credit crisis, climate change and high oil prices, London: New Economics Foundation, 2008.
38
Flannery, Now or Never, p. 32.
39
See Ross Garnaut, The Garnaut Climate Change Review, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Chapter 5: Republican renewal 1
Horne, The Lucky Country, pp. 101–2.
2
See Meaney, ‘In History’s Page’.
3
‘There is Nothing Majestic in a Republic’ (editorial), Sydney Morning Herald, 5 September 1853, in M. Kenna and W. Hudson (eds), Australian Republicanism: A reader, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2003, p. 54.
4
As cited in Meaney, ‘In History’s Page’, p. 53.
5
Robert Menzies, speech to the Empire Parliamentary Association, Westminster Hall, London, as cited in John Hirst, ‘From British Rights to Human Rights’, Quadrant, vol. 48, no. 3, 2004.
6
James Madison, ‘Federalist No. 10’, in Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay, The Federalist with Letters of “Brutus”, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 44.
7
W. M. Hamilton, ‘A Plea for an Australian Republic by a Republican’, Australian Radical, 9 March 1889, in Australian Republicanism, p. 101.
8
In Australian Republicanism, p. 194.
N O T E S
146
McKenna and Hudson, Australian Republicanism, p. 1. Henry Lawson, ‘United Division’, Republican, January 1888, in Australian Republicanism, p. 94.
11
Henry Lawson, ‘A Neglected History’, Republican, April 1888, in Australian Republicanism, p. 97.
12
Paul Keating, Parliamentary Debates (Hansard), House of Representatives, 27 February 1992, in Australian Republicanism, p. 202.
13
McKenna and Hudson, Australian Republicanism, pp. 1–2, 274.
14
Greg Barns and Anna Krawec-Wheaton, An Australian Republic, Melbourne: Scribe, 2006, p. 85.
15
Mark McKenna, The Captive Republic: A history of republicanism in Australia 1788–1996, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 264.
16
Henry Parkes, in Empire, 19 November 1853, in Australian Republicanism, p. 53.
17
Alfred Deakin, National Australasian Convention Debates, Sydney 1891, in Australian Republicanism, p. 126.
18
Edmund Barton, National Australasian Convention Debates, Sydney 1891, in Australian Republicanism, p. 128.
19
Inga Clendinnen, ‘Pilgrims, Saints and Sacred Places’, The Boyer Lectures, 1999.
20
A phrase reputedly of Patrick White’s, but used more recently by Paul Keating; see Philip Derriman, ‘Boonanza for these fans, but sport too fleeting for former PM’, Sydney Morning Herald, 10 December 2005.
21
Malouf, Made in England, p. 61.
T O
P A G E S
1 1 3 – 1 2 7
9 10
22
Mark Twain, Following the Equator, cited in The Australians, p. 108.
23
Peter Conrad, ‘Tales of Two Hemispheres’, The Boyer Lectures, 2004.
24
Horne, The Lucky Country, p. 6.
25
Waleed Aly, ‘This rich sporting life’, Age, 20 January 2007.
26
Davis, The Land of Plenty, p. 7.
27
See Patrick Smith, ‘Blurring the line between football and war offensive to Anzac spirit’, Australian, 28 April 2009.
28
Jim Davidson, ‘A nation of barrackers’, Age, 27 January 2007.
29
John Hirst, ‘The Conservative Case for an Australian Republic’, Quadrant, vol. 35, no. 9, 1991, pp. 9–10.
30
See Kim Rubenstein, ‘An Unequal Membership: The Constitution’s score on citizenship’, in Legacies of White Australia.
31
Namely, those born in Australia with at least one parent who is a permanent resident, those adopted by a citizen, those with at least one parent who is an Australian citizen and those who are granted citizenship through naturalisation.
32
Rubenstein, ‘An Unequal Membership’, p. 153. For a philosophical discussion of the exclusionary dimensions of liberal citizenship, see Phillip Cole, Philosophies of Exclusion: Liberal political theory and immigration, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000.
33
Mark McKenna, ‘Towards a republican future’, Diplomat, vol. 2, no. 1, 2003, p. 41.
34
See George Williams, ‘Thawing the frozen continent’, in Griffith Review, 19, Autumn 2008.
35
Cheryl Saunders, ‘Insights from the Experience of the Constitutional Centenary Foundation’, in J. Warhurst and M. Mackerras, Constitutional Politics, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2002, p. 159.
36
Williams, ‘Thawing the frozen continent’, p. 32.
37
Bob Carr, ‘Bill of rights is the wrong call’, Australian, 9 May 2009. For what remains a very good overview of the issues implicated in the creation of a bill of rights, see Anthony Mason, ‘A Bill of Rights for Australia?’, Australian Bar Review, vol. 5, pp. 79–90; see also Andrew Byrnes, Hilary Charlesworth and Gabrielle McKinnon, Bills of Rights in Australia: History, politics and law, Sydney: UNSW Press, 2009.
Chapter 6: Reclaiming patriotism 1
N O T E S
This quote comes from Carl Schurz, US Senator for Missouri, in 1872. Born in Germany, Schurz was accused in the Senate by political opponents of a lack of patriotism and for placing his sympathies for Germany before his loyalty to America; see Hans Trefousse, Carl Schurz: A biography, 2nd edn, New York: Fordham University Press, 1998, ch. 11.
T O P A G E S 1 2 7 – 1 3 8
147
Index
Aboriginal Australians See Indigenous Australians Aly, Waleed, 128 Ang, Ien, 70 Anzac Anzac Day, 16, 25, 128 and clash with cultural diversity, 63–5 and egalitarianism and mateship, 47 legend, 46–8, 62, 96 limits of, 48 status as myth, 47, 65–6 and sport, 128 apology to Stolen Generations See Stolen Generations Archer, Mike, 111 Archibald, J. F., 48 Aristotle, 119 Asians exclusion of, 66, 69 and immigration, 17 and threat of, in Australian historical self-understanding, 70–2, 80, 106 assimilation, 15, 77 Australia (film), 65 Australia Day, 1, 2, 67, 85, 136, 137 Australian Labor Party, 10, 93, 100, 102 and 2007 election campaign, 11, 50, 89, 103 and political ideology, 93–4 Australian political culture and British race patriotism, 41 and citizenship, 40 and utilitarianism, 40–1, 91–3 Australian Republican Movement See republic Australian Settlement, 49–50, 96, 100 Barton, Edmund, 41, 71, 125 Beale, Bob, 111 Bean, C. E. W., 47, 48 Beazley, Kim, 104 Berlin, Isaiah, 35 Bishop, Bronwyn, 18 Bismarck, Otto von, 97 Blainey, Geoffrey, 17, 54
Bradman, Don, 81 Brett, Judith, 30, 94 Britishness See patriotism Bulletin, 26, 48 Burke, Edmund, 94 bush legend, 26, 48, 64, 65 Bush, George W., 23 Carr, Bob, 10, 67 Chamberlain, Joseph, 51 Charter of Rights and Responsibilities See citizenship Chifley, Ben, 101, 102, 103, 114 Cicero, 92 citizenship, 130, 131 and Charter of Rights and Responsibilities, 132–4 and citizenship test, 6, 81, 82 and civic renewal, 130–4 and connection to patriotism, 38 and dual nationality, 85 history of Australian, 40 and naturalisation, 1, 84–7 and republicanism, 120 civic renewal, 117, 126, 131 civic virtue See patriotism Clarke, Marcus, 26 Clendinnen, Inga, 126 climate change, 9, 108–14 and clean energy, 114 and Copenhagen conference, 110 and economic adjustment, 110–13 and emissions trading scheme, 109–12 environmental consequences of, 109 common good See patriotism Conrad, Peter, 127 Constitution, the, 37, 40, 122, 130, 132 constitutional reform See civic renewal Coombs, Herbert ‘Nugget’, 98 cosmopolitanism, 28, 29 Costello, Peter, 77 Cronulla riot, 11, 36, 58 See also racism crowned republic, 122, 125
149
cultural diversity, 74 See also multiculturalism and economic efficiency, 73–4 and equal citizenship, 75–6 and plural monoculturalism, 75 cultural literacy, 80, 82–4 culture wars, 7, 21 Curthoys, Ann, 69 Davidson, Jim, 128 Davis, Mark, 108 Deakin, Alfred, 51, 69, 80, 82, 93, 100–1, 102, 114, 125 deliberation, 33, 91, 92, 120 democracy Australian achievement of, 50–1, 118 Dibbs, George, 122 Dixson, Miriam, 26 dog whistle, 3, 15, 19, 20–4, 34 and progressives, 22 dual nationality See citizenship economic rationalism See nation-building Edmondson, John Hurst, 62 egalitarianism, 47, 48, 67, 100, 118 as part of national public tradition, 50 social mores and informality, 48 Einstein, Albert, 35 emissions trading scheme See climate change environmental sustainability, 110, 112 Evans, Richard, 106 Evatt, H. V. ‘Doc’, 82
I N D E X
Federation, 41, 66, 67, 80, 118 Ferguson, Martin, 104 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 97 Fisher, Andrew, 47, 82, 101, 102, 114 Flannery, Tim, 113 Fraser, Dawn, 81 Fraser, Malcolm, 16, 102
150
Gallipoli, 16, 46, 47, 63 Gellner, Ernest, 95 global economic and financial crisis, 5, 9, 106, 112 Goodhart, David, 6 green New Deal, 112 greenhouse gas emissions See climate change Hage, Ghassan, 31 Hancock, W. K., 40, 92 Hanson, Pauline, 18, 72, 137
Hansonism, 32, 36, 58 Harvester Judgement, 49 Hawke, Bob, 16, 17, 102, 107, 114 and reforms of 1980s and 1990s, 50 Higgins, Henry Bournes, 49 Hirsch, E. D. Jnr, 82 Hirst, John, 46, 48, 56, 129 Holt, Harold, 102 Honig, Bonnie, 85 Horace, 28, 29 Horne, Donald, 33, 118, 127 civic faith, 26–7 Howard, John, 7, 8, 16, 39, 132 and cultural conservatism, 8, 11, 22, 64 and dog whistle, 19, 23 and immigration, 17, 19 and multiculturalism, 77 and national identity, 8, 16, 63–4 and opportunism, 21 and reforms as prime minister, 50 and WorkChoices, 50 Hu Jintao, 89 Hudson, Wayne, 124 immigration, 68, 73 and cultural literacy, 82 post-Second World War, 36, 106 and White Australia policy, 68–9 Indigenous Australians, 131 and apology to Stolen Generations, 55 mistreatment of, 15, 53–4, 56, 67 reconciliation with, 54–6 integration See multiculturalism Jaspers, Karl, 54 Kateb, George, 28 Keating, Paul, 7, 16, 22, 29, 39, 90, 102, 104, 107, 114, 121 patriotism versus nationalism, 39–40, 42 radical nationalism and republic, 123 Redfern Speech, 54–5 and reforms of 1980s and 1990s, 50 Kelly, Paul, 49 King, Martin Luther, Jnr., 82 Kipling, Rudyard, 56 Kristeva, Julia, 25 Kyoto Protocol See climate change Lane, William, 122 Lang, John Dunmore, 122 larrikinism See national character Latham, Mark, 106
Lawrence, Carmen, 20 Lawson, Henry, 48, 49, 122, 123 leadership 8, 9 See also progressive politics: and leadership left-liberal See progressive politics Liberal Party of Australia, 93 Lincoln, Abraham, 37, 43 love of country See patriotism Luhrmann, Baz, 65 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 21, 30 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 60 Mackellar, Dorothea, 26 Malouf, David, 127 Marsden, John, 72 mateship, 47, 48, 66, 67, 100 McKenna, Mark, 124 Menzies, Robert, 41, 119 Mill, John Stuart, 59 monarchy, 118, 120, 131 and national identity, 8 and Queen Elizabeth II, 116 Moran, Anthony, 30 multiculturalism, 17, 29, 102, 119 as citizenship policy, 76–9 and civic values, 79 and cultural relativism, 78 misrepresentations of, 78–9 recognition of cultural identity, 76 tension with patriotism, 17
Oakes, Laurie, 18 Obama, Barack, 3, 113 Orwell, George, 24, 25, 31 Oxford, 10, 14 Pacific Solution, 7 Parkes, Henry, 41, 80, 118, 124 Paterson, Banjo, 47, 48 patriotic minimalism See republic patriotism, 2–4, 15, 114, 130, 131, 134, 137 in American political culture, 37 and Anzac legend, 16 and an Australian republic, 117–21 and being ‘un-Australian’, 60, 68 British race patriotism, 5, 27, 41, 96, 102, 118–19 and citizenship, 38, 42, 91
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nation-building, 11, 114, 131, 134 as applied patriotism, 91 and economic rationalism, 98–100 excesses of, 106 Hawke–Keating legacy of reform, 107–8 history of nation-building in Australia, 95–103 ideological elements of, 96–7 meaning of, 94–5 and physical infrastructure, 95–6, 104, 114 re-emergence of, 103–6 and role of the state, 107, 108 and Kevin Rudd, 104–5 national character and egalitarianism, 48 and larrikinism, 47, 48, 100 and patriotism, 25 national education, 96 national history, 97 black armband view of, 8, 54 and responsibility, 54
national identity, 9 and authenticity, 64 as a basis of citizenship, 93 content of an Australian, 64 and cultural diversity, 74 and landscape, 26 and patriotism, 32 and stereotypes, 64 national myth See also national tradition truth and metaphor, 65–6 national pride See racism; nationalism national tradition, 119 content of an Australian, 46–52 criticism of, 59–60 democracy, 48, 50, 51 and myth, 53, 65–6 national values, 20 See also citizenship ambivalence of, 66–7 British debate about, 45 difference with generic liberal values, 45 and generic liberal values, 45 and private culture, 44 and public culture, 44–6 relationship with national character, 44 nationalism as a cultural sentiment, 40, 42 and jingoism, 2, 39, 58 radical nationalism, 29, 100, 125 relationship with patriotism, 42 natural resources, 111 naturalisation See citizenship New Protection, 96
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patriotism (cont.) and civic solidarity, 40, 91–4 compatibility with liberal values, 35, 39, 57–61, 118 constitutional patriotism, 42 and criticism of one’s own country, 60 and cultural conservatism, 8, 63 defensive versus aggressive, 31 definition of, 37–9 and deliberation, 33 and emotional generosity, 66–7 and historical memory, 52–6 and landscape, 26, 110 and loyalty, 38 meaning of, 3 and mistreatment of Indigenous Australians, 53 and morality, 38, 58 and nation-building, 91 and national character, 25 and national identity, 30, 42, 93 and national tradition, 52, 118 and national values, 43–6 and pluralism, 58, 68, 72 and racism, 26, 31, 58 and reason, 28, 57 relationship with nationalism, 39–43 requirement of democracy, 30 as vice, 2 as virtue, 2, 3 and war, 27, 35 Pearson, Charles, 71 Pearson, Noel, 56 Pericles, 28, 29 pledge of loyalty See citizenship political community See solidarity political membership See citizenship progressive politics, 8, 27, 114 and cosmopolitanism, 28 demoralisation during the Howard years, 22–3 and dog whistle, 19, 20–4 and leadership, 90 meaning of, 4–5 and nation-building, 100–3 and need for patriotism, 8 and radical nationalism, 29 and reform, 9, 11 and role of the state, 5, 99 and suspicion of patriotism, 24–9
public culture See national values Pusey, Michael, 98–9, 108 Quick, John, 131 race and cultural anxiety, 70, 71 and dog whistle, 19, 22 and national identity, 31 racism, 17, 27, 36 White Australia policy, 69 radical nationalism See nationalism reform, 8 and nation-building, 91 Reid, George, 80, 93 Renan, Ernest, 52 republic, 116, 120, 134 Australian Republican Movement, 117 civic renewal, 126 crowned republic, 120 Indigenous Australians, 132 liberal republican tradition in Australia, 124 and patriotic minimalism, 117, 122, 123–4, 132 and radical nationalism, 122–4, 125 referendum, 117 republican tradition of government, 119–20 Roberts, Tom, 48 Rorty, Richard, 24, 25 Rudd, Kevin, 3, 10, 14, 89, 104, 106, 109, 112, 113, 114, 116 apology to Stolen Generations, 14, 55 leadership style, 90 and neoliberalism, 107 policies as prime minister, 7 Ruddock, Phillip, 18 Rundle, Guy, 20 Saunders, Cheryl, 132 Sen, Amartya, 74 social democracy See progressive politics social justice, 4 solidarity, 5–7, 40, 92 and globalisation, 32 and multiculturalism, 88 and nation-building, 103 overlap of civic and national aspects of, 42 republican versus national, 93 and trust, 33
sport and Australian national character, 126–9 militarisation of, 128 Stanner, W. E. H., 53 Stolen Generations, 3, 7, 14 moral responsibility for, 54, 55 Swan, Wayne, 105 Tampa, 18, 69 Taylor, Charles, 42, 76 Taylor, Lenore, 105 Thucydides, 28 Tolstoy, Leo, 35 Turnbull, Malcolm, 117 Twain, Mark, 60, 127
Walker, David, 71 Ward, Russel, 46 Washington, George, 82 Watson, Don, 33 Waugh, Steve, 47 White Australia, 5, 26, 36, 67 and civic order, 69, 118 and fortress Australia, 70, 106 as ideology, 69–72 policy, 49, 63, 102 Whitlam, Gough, 16, 51, 101, 103, 114 Williams, George, 133 xenophobia, 27
utilitarianism See Australian political culture
Zuel, Bernard, 58
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Australian Encounters series Cambridge University Press Australia, in partnership with the National Centre for Australian Studies at Monash University, presents the provocative new series Australian Encounters. Combining original scholarly research and elegant, accessible prose, this series engages with important Australian issues that span current society, politics, culture, economics and historical debates. The essence of the series is to bring new thinking and fresh perspectives to these issues that are so vital to Australian society.
Series Editor Dr Tony Moore is Lecturer in Media and Communications at the National Centre for Australian Studies, Monash University. He has a distinguished list of publications, including academic journals, research monographs, books and book chapters, and has researched, produced and directed several social and historical documentaries for ABC television. Dr Moore’s career has spanned policy research in the community and public sectors, current affairs journalism, documentary making and book publishing, as well as teaching history at the University of Sydney.
Forthcoming titles in the Australian Encounters series Downfall: The self-destruction of a NSW state government Rodney Cavalier Historian and former Education Minister examines the recent collapse of the Iemma government in New South Wales over electricity privatisation.
Curtin’s Empire James Curran Senior Lecturer in history at the University of Sydney argues for a revision of the popular myth of wartime Prime Minister John Curtin as an opponent of the British Empire.
Watch this Space: The future of Australian journalism Milissa Deitz Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Western Sydney questions the purported demise of quality journalism at the hands of the internet and commercialisation.
The Importance of Being Innocent Joanne Faulkner UNSW philosopher Joanne Faulkner critiques the construction of children as innocent and asks what it means for children who fail to meet these idealistic criteria.
