Larvatus Prodeo

There’s already been some comment at Catallaxy and m c gregg about Judith Brett’s new Quarterly Essay - Relaxed and Comfortable: The Liberal Party’s Australia. It’s not my intention to provide a full review here (and I’d very much urge people to grab a copy and read it - the Quarterly Essay series has been a bit disappointing of late but this one is ace) but one passage struck me as very relevant now. Brett develops a general thesis which she has articulated in other work - the way in which the Liberal Party’s narratives and thematics call upon images of Australian unity. The obvious contrast, for the Liberals and their predecessor parties since the emergence of the modern party system in 1910, is with the Labor Party - which is seen as a monstrous deformation of democracy, representing only a narrow class interest. Rather the Liberals perceive themselves as a government of and for the Nation - and the Nation is the only collective identity permissible. Other than that, we are all individuals, free to pursue our own projects, but united vertically with the imagined community of Australian nationality and its collective values. Thus, Brett argues, Howard’s approach to issues such as Indigenous affairs (which she demonstrates by examining the 1987 policy document Future Directions, has been consistent over his career) and his election slogan in 1996 - “For all of us” are both firmly in the Liberal tradition, and also resonant with a particular version of self-understanding within Australian culture.

Brett doesn’t lose sight of the tension between any political leader’s need to include and need to divide. She also suggests that Howard is not unique in his divisiveness - though perhaps particularly mendacious in how he goes about it. Keating, it occurs to me, also tried to present his view of an imagined Australia by excluding the stuffy remnants of British Imperialism - both through his constitutional modernism and through his interpretation of Australian history.

Brett argues, I think convincingly, that though there are aspects of Howard’s rhetoric and agenda which are imported from US models (such as elements of the culture wars), Howard’s critics are wrong to see the imposition of his vision of Australia as somehow foreign to either the history of this country or its petit bourgeois and middle class self image. This lack of vision, if you like, she argues, is the reason that many on the Left and Right express incredulity at Howard’s success. The thing, she suggests, is to understand it. Only by seeing his appeal and his themes as distinctly Australian will it be possible for a viable alternative agenda and thematics to emerge.

This point is made powerfully with regard to nationalism.

Continue reading ‘Lefties Calling Australia Home’