The phenomenon Arthur Phillips famously described as the "Australian cultural cringe" is alive and well. It was on display during the G20 meeting. The ALP, the Greens and much of the media treated the G20 as an opportunity to have foreign leaders talk about how bad Australia was, in particular the Abbott government's climate change policies. Barack Obama's cheap and cynical speech in Brisbane was greeted with acclaim because it supposedly represented the opinion the rest of the world has about Australia. The fact Obama is a discredited lame-duck president was conveniently ignored.
The cultural cringe manifests whenever anything done by an Australian or our government is judged not according to what Australians think of it, but according to what people in other countries think of it. The cringe is a particular kind of inferiority complex suffered by a particular class of people. Many ABC journalists are afflicted by it. Last week in the wake of the US-China climate change "deal", the ABC's Lateline program enthusiastically quoted the Greens claiming Tony Abbott was now an "international pariah'". The trouble with terms like international pariah, outcast or embarrassment is that they're never defined. It's as if those who use the term assume that just saying it somehow proves the perfidy of the Abbott government.
Arthur Phillips was a schoolteacher and literary critic. He taught at Melbourne's Wesley College for 46 years and was a book reviewer for The Age. Geoffrey Blainey, who delivered the eulogy at Phillips' funeral in 1985, was one of his students.
Phillips championed Australian writers, such as Henry Lawson, and Joseph Furphy the author of Such is Life. In 1950 in the literary journal Meanjin, Phillips published a seven-page essay entitled The Cultural Cringe. His argument was that Australian writers and artists had nothing to apologise for and shouldn't feel inferior to their foreign counterparts. Australians shouldn't cringe and they shouldn't constantly compare themselves to others. Australians had to overcome the tendency to ask themselves "Yes, but what would a cultivated Englishman think of this?" Phillips put it nicely: "It is absurd to feel apologetic about Such is Life or Coonardoo or Melbourne Odes because they would not seem quite right to an English reader; it is part of their distinctive virtue that no Englishman can fully understand them."
TENDENCY LINGERS
Phillips' essay was concerned with the arts and how artists regarded themselves. But the tendency he identified in the Australian humanities in the 1950s lingers, particularly in politics and public policy. Today, the test of any Australian domestic policy is increasingly, "Yes, but what would the United Nations/European Union/World Bank/OECD think of this?" When the International Monetary Fund's Christine Lagarde recently endorsed an increase in Australia's GST rate, the response wasn't "Who cares what she thinks? A French bureaucrat is the last person we should be taking advice from." Instead her opinion was treated as if it actually mattered.
It is because of the cultural cringe that Australians allow themselves to be lectured to by a United Nations Human Rights Council whose members include China, Cuba and Saudi Arabia.
The cringe of the 1950s was born from a genuine feeling of embarrassment. The cringe of politics in this country today is the product of a distrust of, as Phillips puts it, "the Australian common man". Or, put another way, the cringe is the product of a distrust and in some cases even a dislike of Australian democracy. For those who believe this country should have a carbon tax, the preaching of a foreign president carries more weight than the wishes of the electorate as expressed in the result of the 2013 federal election. The appeal to international opinion comes in handy for those who don't get the result they want at the ballot box. Appealing to the authority of something that doesn't exist, ie international opinion, is easier than getting someone to vote for you.
Phillips said Australians would overcome our cultural cringe when we mastered "the art of being unselfconsciously ourselves". Few people in Australian politics are as unselfconsciously Australian as Tony Abbott. Which perhaps explains why those who suffer from the cultural cringe dislike him so much.
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