Insecure Australia: anti-politics for a passive federation.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Wellings, Ben
• Date: 01 January 2001

How did it come to pass that a public-relations slogan became the oft-repeated 'truth' of the 2001 Australian Federation celebrations --'with a vote, not a war Australia became a nation'? This question goes to the heart of the problem of understanding the meld of official fervour and public passivity. The proponents of the celebrations, we argue, were too insecure about the cultural legitimacy of Federation, let alone the public passion for the institutions of the Commonwealth of Australia, to treat the year as an important period of necessary debate and reflection on core issues. A few public lectures aside, it became a year of parades and dubious slogans. One double-page advertisement in metropolitan weekend magazines asked the self-congratulatory question: 'What kind of country has always known the value of a vote?' The positive answer comes first: Australia, a nation formed not by revolution, but by an evolving democracy. The embarrassment comes later in the small print: 'The 1902 Commonwealth Franchise Act specifically withheld the right to vote in federal elections from Indigenous Australians and people of Asian, African, and Pacific Islander backgrounds'. (1) Thus there was a passing acknowledgement of problems in our past, but it was always overridden by public relations messages. Why is it that most politicians and commentators so fervently defended the 2001 Federation celebrations in Australia against civic apathy? More importantly, why is it that they sought uncritically to gloss the past and embrace a shallow form of civic nationalism? (2) This article explores the strange year of the celebrations, a year of top-down organizational fervour and relatively passive public interest. Public spectacles occasionally drew huge crowds. However, the crowds were mostly there for the pageantry and colour, rather than because of a foundational attachment to the political process.

This issue of managing and flattening out the deep tensions of national politics can be put in a larger setting. Before we discuss the Federation celebrations in detail it is worth relating two contextualizing developments. Both have their roots in the decades of the latter part of the twentieth century and earlier, but are being acutely felt now. The first concerns the impact of globalization. In the context of globalization, the modern nation-state faces a series of shearing tensions between state (polity) and nation (community), between the divided polity-community and the economy, and between sections of the 'community'. With globalization has come new kinds of movement of people--mass tourism and systematizing multiculturalism--as well as an accentuation of old kinds of movement--people attempting to escape disintegrating homelands. Moreover, the pressures of the postmodern layer of the economy, with its flows of capital and influence, flows that transcend the old regulatory boundaries of the nation-state, have meant that the government has moved to deregulate the economic sphere while reasserting the connectedness of the nation in the cultural sphere. Taken together, this means that the multicultural community we call 'Australia' is fundamentally different from the Australia of a generation ago, and that sections of that community no longer trust the state to protect their way of life despite the government spending more on self-promotion than any commercial advertiser in Australia, including Coca-cola.

The second contextualizing development that helps us understand the Federation celebrations concerns the slow crisis of liberal governance. Despite the naturalization of liberal democracy as the dominant form of governance across the western capitalist world, politics has taken a further turn of the screw. In countries as diverse as the United Kingdom, Japan, Italy and Australia, an unnamed crisis now pierces deep into the variable formations of political life. It affects political cultures ranging from those of archaic stability and paternal authority to those of predicable volatility or civic passivity. In short, the realm of politics is increasingly treated with cynical suspicion. More and more, the standing of politicians has become dependent on two sources: the day-by-day routinized tidings from the stock exchange and occasional good cheer through massive public spectacles. In the United Kingdom, Tony Blair had a brief moment of return to public confidence with the birth of his son, but it only took a couple of weeks for political life to return to the slough of staged passion and, as it did, it even became common public sentiment that, in Blair's Britain, politicians and their spin-doctors were intent on colonizing public-private moments such as births, weddings and deaths. Voters still vote for him as, in other places, they vote for an Italian media-magnate indicted for mafia connections, or an American millionaire with a born-to-rule vacancy of mind. However, increasingly electoral choice is based on the feeling that the alternative candidate is worse, and electoral activity on the feeling that one should at least participate minimally in the political process. Yes, the liberal-democratic state continues to be sustained by an unassailable shadow-legitimacy. It survives in part, however, because nobody can think of anything better. In other words, even though the neo-liberal state continues to be afforded a passive legitimacy, we face a legitimation crisis of governance.

In Australia, despite the 'success' of the Bicentenary celebrations, faltering glory on the cricket field, and a couple of spectacular weeks during the 2000 Sydney Olympics, the loss of faith in conventional governance has been evident in the bathetic celebrations of the centennial of Federation. Of all the liberal-democratic states, perhaps only in the United States--paradoxically, since Watergate, a country used to the chronic crises of state legitimacy--has the nation remained firmly tied to the constitution. Back in Australia, by contrast, we neither trust the documents that hold us together, nor have we the courage to enact constitutional change. This was beginning to be picked up by commentators nearly a decade ago. As Hugh MacKay writes, 'The cynicism of the mid-1990s, however, is much more than a simple extension of what has gone before. Today Australians are trying to come to terms with the fact that the nature of politics itself has been redefined'. (3) In the cultural sphere it no longer even causes us comfort to know that it was the former hero of Gallipoli, Mel Gibson, who patriotically starred on the battlefields of North Carolina as the new Patriot. It is easy to see then how inadequate is the mainstream cultural-political response to this disenchantment. In the centenary year of Federation, the film industry has given us reruns of Crocodile Dundee and the state has been featuring all-new advertisements for our black-and-white past.

This article sets out to examine the selling of the spectacle of Australian federation as part of an attempt to legitimize a nation-state that is increasingly perceived to have lost its way. The internal loss of faith in liberal governance and scepticism about the effects of the projected 'inevitable' rush to globalism is now being addressed, we argue, through an enhanced reflexivity about how to deliver civic education to national citizens. We are not suggesting that there is something essentially wrong with the renewed emphasis on civics or civic nationalism in itself--that is, apart from the blinding superficiality of this particular version. Be that as it may, we are arguing that the mainstream proponents of the celebration have entered a different and much more dangerous territory. First, they have allowed it to be associated with a defensive 'white-blindfold' attitude towards the darker side of Federation and a history of instrumental nation-building. Secondly, this pressure to re-legitimate the nation is not far removed from an associated market-driven imperative to sell the national image as an attractive brand name, both locally and globally. Thirdly, under conditions of scepticism about the state, civic learning is now being used as a form of civic management without putting in place the accompanying reform that would make that civic learning meaningful. Such reform would have to go far beyond tinkering with the Constitution, and it would have to eschew the current public-relations style approach. As we will argue, there are a number of conflicting themes that permeate this turn to civic management: the desire in a globalizing world to give the impression that we are reconciling multicultural diversity with a national identity; the pragmatic need to comfort the non-immigrant, older, white population and other potential One Nation supporters with the thought that they are important; and the vainglorious hope of addressing with mere words the sensibility of those who hold to the high ideal of reconciliation with Australia's Indigenous population. These themes are being addressed in the language of 'banal nationalism'--a nationalism that is reluctant to proclaim itself as nationalistic. (4) In the United States this issue is handled by slipping sideways to use the term 'patriotism'. In Australia, the official languages of 'multiculturalism' and 'nation-building' mix uneasily together, smoothing over real issues that divide Australia. The article begins by addressing the themes of civic management and ends by looking at the politics of the white blindfold.

Managing Civic Education

The slow crisis of politics in Australia became especially clear during the 1999 referendum on the republic. Most pro-republic campaigners were so concerned about being uncontroversial--and taking advantage of the continuing shadow-legitimacy of the state--that their proposals for constitutional 'change' sought to maintain the current system without more than a change of symbolic wording. In response, voters not...