What is the problem with Australian history? Australian is one of the world's oldest democracies, with a record of continuous democratic governance few countries can equal. We are a pioneer of democratic governance -- adult suffrage, votes for women, secret ballots, preferential voting.
Australia is a country which, via federation, created itself as a national entity through democratic processes, entirely without bloodshed. Surely a powerful source of national pride.
Yet public pride in the Australian achievement is not a notable feature of Australian public life. Why not?
Part of the problem is our very success. As Greg Craven has pointed out, we have lacked a tyrant. We have never had to fight domestic enemies for our independence and freedom in the process of creating a national democracy. The process of self-government and democratisation flowed naturally, amicably and peacefully from the normal legal processes of British rule.
Eureka Stockade has far more symbolic importance than any real historical role. It had almost nothing whatsoever to do with the processes of building self-government and democracy -- the processes of self-government in Victoria were not notably different from that of any of the other colonies.
A history without major violence is easily seen as boring history (it was certainly my view when studying History at Sydney University). That there was violence on the frontier between those (both black and white) pushing the boundaries of European settlement and those resisting (all black) is certainly true, but compared to the bloodlettings of European, or even American, history, it is pretty minor stuff. (It is pretty minor compared to even the Maori Wars of New Zealand: Aboriginal Australians having lacked the cultural unity and organisational sophistication of the Maori).
It led to us having what is easily seen as a boring, mindless constitution. A "deed of grant of powers" rather than a stirring national document. The obvious contrast is with the United States. The US is an ideocratic state, a society built around a set of ideas. Profound and stirring ideas are built into its constitutional structure -- so much so that US social democrats have ended up calling themselves "liberals" in order to be seen as being within their revolutionary settlement.
What are the ideas in the Australian Constitution? Well, some pretty powerful ones, actually. One is that power is properly divided -- between Federal and State levels of government, between judiciary, executive and legislature, between the Houses of Parliament. This is an idea that does not sit all that well with many people: witness the strong centralism of many Federal politicians and journalists, the resistance to Senate independence, the belief that Parliament should be content to be an electoral college for the Executive, the tensions over judicial activism. The unitary majoritarianism of Westminister still has a powerful pull in Australia -- not least in the ALP. The greatest exemplar of that has been oh-so-very Irish republican Paul Keating. He claimed to be a rejector of an "outdated" British heritage while his actions constantly showed himself to be in thrall to the worst part of it.
Another idea in our Constitution is that constitutional sovereignty ultimately resides in the people, as only they, through referenda, can change the words of the Constitution.
This idea is also widely resisted. The resistance of the electorate to voting "yes" to amendments (only 8, out of 42 -- or less than a fifth -- have passed the hurdle of a majority of electors in a majority of States: 29, or almost 70%, failed to get a national majority) is widely deplored. The feeling is that the Constitution should have been changed rather more often. To view the referendum mechanism as an expression of popular sovereignty rather gets in the way of that line of argument.
Similarly, suggestions that the referendum mechanism be extended are regarded with horror in many quarters. To be an advocated of citizen-initiated referenda (CIR) is to mark one out as a nutcake or crypto-fascist. The asinine nature of this should be supremely obvious -- not merely because jurisdictions of such democratic seriousness as California and Switzerland use CIR, nor that it has proven itself (for example in Italy over divorce law) to be an very useful mechanism for resolving social issues, but because the referendum mechanism is how Australia federated in the first place. Our nation was created out of referenda! But this has no continuing resonance in our public life.
If we had more pride in our history, there would be a greater sense of where our nation came from, why, and the ideas embedded in our founding document. Indeed, we would have far more understanding of, and respect for, the Constitution as the founding document of our nation.
Is the lack of a tyrant, and the lack of violence, sufficient explanation for this lack of public pride?
I would suggest there are other reasons for this cultural gap, for this break in the transmission of values and ideas.
One reason is the lack of any serious historical sense on the non-Labor side of politics. The second is the very tribal sense of history of the ALP. The third is the "progressivist" domination of the Australian academy.
That the non-Labor side of politics lacks any serious sense of history is obvious to any serious observer. The constant institutional reformulation of the main non-Labor Party -- from Fusion-cum-Liberal (1910), to Nationalist (1917), to United Australia (1931) back to Liberal (1944) -- has not helped. That the 1917 and 1931 reformulations resulted from the inflow of Labor emigres exacerbated this further. The failure to make effective reference during the Whitlam years to, for example, the South Australian Labor Government, during the Scullin ALP Government, replacing a deceased Country Party Senator with a Labor Senator is an instance of this lack of a sense of the past and its uses. The Liberal Party could not even manage to come out with a 50th Anniversary history in 1994. Until recently, it could not be bothered to put up pictures of its Federal Leaders who did not become Prime Minister in the entrance foyer of its National office. This lack of a sense of history is a very important reason for the Liberals sustained incompetence in cultural battles. Having Peter McGauran -- a junior Country Party minister not noted for his interest in matters historical and intellectual -- as Minister for the Centenary of Federation does not exactly contradict this feeble tradition.
The tribal sense of history of the ALP also "gets in the way". The ALP very much regards itself as the true guardian of Australian nationalism. There is a major problem with this conceit -- its almost complete irrelevance to the Federating of Australia. That the ALP had effectively nothing to do with the creation of the Constitution, with the founding document of Australia, means the Constitution is a constant problem for it. Labor's antipathy to the Constitution is continuing and deep-seated (a majority, 25 out of 42, amendments have been proposed by ALP Governments, only one, Social Services in 1946, has succeeded) and surely can be traced directly the fact that it completely fails to support the ALP's sense of its own heroic history.
Actually, the notion of the ALP as the true guardian of Australian nationalism has all sorts of problems. It has been in power federally only a third of the time since Federation. The first Asian, woman and black members of the Federal Parliament all came from the non-Labor side of politics. Australia's role as a pioneer of democratic governance essentially pre-dates the ALP. The PM who said Australia "would fight to the last man and the last shilling" for Mother England was Labor (Fisher) as was the only PM to appoint a member of the Royal Family as Governor-General (Curtin). It was the ALP, under the Sainted Curtin, who twice turned down Menzies' offer of a Government of National Unity during the Second World War (an offer that British Labor under Attlee had no problem accepting in the UK) -- Labor's antipathy to coalition government and sense of political advantage being stronger than any concern over national crisis. In power during three successive national crises -- the First World War, the onset of the Depression and the second half of the Second World War -- the ALP proved unable to take the strain in the first two cases, splitting and losing office; while it held together third time around, but it took the decency of Chifley and Curtin to do it, and the strain killed Curtin.
The "progressivist" dominance of Australian academia completes the trifecta for the loss of history. Australian humanities have tended to be dominated by people who "prove" their own moral superiority by sneering at the society around them and its history. The formal content of the sneers change (once upon the time it was Australia's bourgeois and capitalist nature, now it is castigated as colonialist, racist, patriarchal and homophobic) but the modus operandi doesn't. Any sort of positive rendition of Australian history is just too gauche for words in such circles. Such problems are magnified by the difficulties for a "progressivist" rendering of Australian history inherent in the non-Labor domination of Australia's federal creation and political history.
So, with historically gormless Liberals -- who will, on past record, be completely unable to use the immense cultural resource actual history provides them -- historically embarrassed Labor and an alienated academy, one can confidently predict our Federation celebration will be a flop. Lots of black armbands, precious little intelligent celebration and a general public -- who, quite rationally, think Australia has lots going for it -- feeling somewhat at a loss. Welcome to the next millennium.
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