I EXPERIENCED a nasty jolt recently as I walked down the
main strip of Redfern. Emblazoned on the side of a parked utility I spied a
sticker of the Australian flag with the exhortation “Love it or leave
it”.
I couldn’t help but note my location. If there is a suburb
in Sydney where
many of the residents have good reason to feel ambivalent about Australian
nationalism, Redfern is probably it. And if one of the local Aborigines took
this sticker to heart, where exactly might he or she go?
I felt even more dejected a few blocks later as I trudged
past Redfern Park. Here, in December 1992, Paul
Keating gave his famous speech to Redfern’s Aboriginal community, with its
reappraisal of Australia’s
troubled racial history. Penned by that formidable wordsmith, Don Watson, the
Redfern speech was an elegant expression of white regret, black-white
reconciliation, and, crucially, a shared hopefulness.
It was also a paean to the power of empathy, as these few
sentences illustrate: “We practised discrimination and exclusion. It was
our ignorance and our prejudice. And our failure to imagine these things being
done to us. With some noble exceptions, we failed to make the most basic human
response and enter into their hearts and minds. We failed to ask: how would I
feel if this were done to me? As a consequence, we failed to see that what we
were doing degraded us all.”
While the distance between the parked utility and the site
of Keating’s speech is short, the difference between these two expressions of
Australian nationalism is huge. Fifteen years on, Keating’s aphorism that to
change the government is to change the country appears pretty accurate. It is
quite possible that a “Love it or leave it” sticker could have been
slapped on a car during the Keating years — governments cannot be held
responsible for the actions of each citizen — but my hunch is that there is
something about the present political culture that makes such strident
nationalism more likely, and more acceptable.
I don’t want to wallow in left-liberal nostalgia. These
past 12 months, the musical Keating! has attracted thousands of political
malcontents, who leave the theatre on the imaginary high that their hero
actually won the 1996 election.
But when I saw the musical with a good friend (a former
wife of a Keating minister, by the way), we were both left cold by its smug and
cloying wish-fulfilment. Intermission, my friend confided with a shudder, was
like one of the interminable ALP social functions she had been expected to
grace.
After more than a decade of populist right-wing
government, it is hard not to pine for Keating’s big picture of a confident,
cosmopolitan and progressive Australia, even if his vision was imposed with an
impatient superiority that proved electorally fatal.
What we have now is a political culture that is short on
empathy and even shorter on tolerance for ambiguity. George Bush’s post-9/11
dictum that, in the war on terror, you are either for America or
against it, is simply a stark international summary of our contemporary
political climate.
It is a long way from Washington to Redfern, and I doubt that
President Bush was whisked down Everleigh Street during APEC, but there was something in that
sticker’s insistence that reminded me of our national and international
leadership. “Love it or leave it” is an extreme injunction — it
brooks no dissent, in a manner similar to the nostrums of Bush and our own John Howard.
What is lost in this approach is an appreciation of
ambivalence. You see, there are qualities of Australia that I love and others
that I don’t. In fact, some I admire and distrust at the same time, like our
capacity for ruthless pragmatism.
The same could be said of my attitude to the United States.
I adore that country’s dynamism and the sunny, naive friendliness of many
Americans; I loathe the Bush Administration and the oblivious insularity of its
acolytes.
Before Tampa and the Twin Towers
terror attacks, there was a sentiment afoot that Howard and his Government were
mean and tricky. What is meanness but a refusal to enter into the hearts and
minds of others?
This lack of empathy has reaped fresh degradations, from
children overboard and the incarceration of refugees on a sweltering Pacific
island to the striking down of gay marriage and civil unions.
In the final days of the Keating government, our
then-alternative prime minister promised us a nation that was relaxed and
comfortable; what we got instead was a decade that diminished us all.
Robert Reynolds is
a historian and Australian Research Council fellow at the University of New South
Wales.