Australian society
Australia – what it is, what it could become
On Late Night Live Phillip Adams interviewed Julianne Schultz on Ideas of Australia.
Schultz is author of The idea of Australia: a search for the soul of the nation.
She goes into the ideas that have shaped Australia, and are still shaping the country. We have our constitution, but it is hardly a statement of who we are: it does not embody the principle of universal suffrage for example.
We have adopted and embraced reform – she notes Hawke’s reforms in particular – but in doing so we have added layers of reform incrementally to what has gone before, without going back to any set of foundation ideas.
A pall of mediocrity has dulled our public life. Phillip Adams quotes from her book:
On almost every international indicator, the country that liked to consider itself a model of fairness and opportunity, has worsened in the twenty-first century. Wealth has become more concentrated, wages have failed to grow, gender equality has not kept pace with the educational attainments of women, business has become less productive, and the economy less complex.
It’s a sad story because there is huge potential for Australia to be so much more than it is. She is critical of our “political leadership”, pointing out that our politicians have generally campaigned on fear rather than vision. She doesn’t mention Morrison and his cronies’ part in degrading our public life. (24 minutes)
Homicide on the rise
ABS data on victims of crime reveals that most categories of crime have been on a downward trend for the last ten years. But a separate data set maintained by the Australian Institute of Criminology reveals that the rates of homicide have been increasing. Writing in The Conversation, Terry Goldsworthy of Bond University – Homicide is on the rise in Australia. Should we be concerned? – goes into detail of the AIC data on homicide.
At an annual rate of 1.02 incidents per 100 000 people, our homicide rate is well below the US rate of 7.8 homicides per 100 000. But our increasing rate of homicide goes against a worldwide trend of falling homicide rates.
Goldsworthy notes that a large and growing proportion of our homicides are in cases where the offender was unknown to the victim. That could cover a number of sub-categories, but he notes that there are inadequacies in the AIC classification. If it is about random and unprovoked attacks, that could have implications for our enjoyment of public spaces, use of public transport, and willingness to help people we don’t know. “Stranger danger” may be overstated, but it has consequences, as we fear to engage in public life, lose a sense of a safe and supportive community, and withdraw to the narrow and selfish retreat of “family values”.
What do these protesters really want? From Wellington to Ottawa to Canberra
Freedom from others telling us what to do, freedom to do what we want to. These are two basic forms of liberty – negative liberty and positive liberty – as distinguished by philosopher Isaiah Berlin.
Andrew Vonasch and Michael-John Turp, of the University of Canterbury, take up this theme in relation to strident demands of New Zealand’s anti-vax protesters: How protesters demanding ‘freedom’ from COVID restrictions ignore the way liberty really works, in The Conversation. The protesters’ slogans – “my body, my choice” for example – are expressions of negative liberty. But we cannot enjoy unfettered negative liberty and unfettered positive liberty: there are trade-offs as Berlin pointed out.
When people know that others with whom they mingle are vaccinated they can enjoy their positive liberty to take part in public life. When we know that speed limits and other road rules are enforced, we can enjoy the mobility offered by public roads.
“A clearer understanding of positive liberty allows us to see that restrictions designed to protect us from COVID-19 actually enhance our overall freedom”, they write.
Are those protesters up to being persuaded by Isaiah Berlin, however? Can their grievances be gelled into simple messages of protest?
Canada-based Politico journalist Andy Blandford writes about the related movement in Canada, and the extent to which it is merging with, or is being manipulated by, far-right pro-Trump movements across the border: How Canada became America’s new culture war.
What would Berlin make of this?
To Trump and his core of supporters, Justin Trudeau is a “monster beyond anything in history”. Such inflammatory rhetoric is coming not just from yahoos on the far-right fringe, but also from mainstream Republicans including Ted Cruz and Ron DeSantis. (Putin isn’t the only thug who believes he has a right to condemn other countries’ democratic choices.) Blandford also describes how Canada’s Conservative Party has moved to the right to gain support from the protesters, and has turfed out its moderate leader Erin O’Toole, as those who want the party to be more confrontationist and anti-elites jockey for position.
In Canberra there was another demonstration last Sunday, much smaller than the 10 000 crowd that turned out in early February, but somewhat more strident. Some had pro-Trump T-shirts and banners, and many were carrying the usual insignia. From the podium came the message that in the police cars on the edge of the demonstration there were powerful ray guns aimed at the protestors. The rays aren’t deadly, but they can make people very sick. As confirmation they can vouch for the fact that after attending these demonstrations many people have become ill with headaches, sore throats, congestion and fatigue.
A pandemic of mistrust
The 2022 Edelman Trust Barometer makes for gloomy reading. For a worldwide view you can download its top 10 findings where it reports on people’s concerns with fake news, their growing mistrust of media and of governments, and a finding that 64 percent of respondents say that “people are incapable of having constructive and civil debates about issues they disagree on”.
Its full report is worth a glance. It reveals a trust gap between the poor and the well-off: if we’re poor we (reasonably) believe the system is not to be trusted, but the well-off know that the system works for them. One significant finding is that while we are more trusting of people in our local communities, we have become less trusting of people from other countries. (Politically the Morrison government is onto something when it stirs up feelings of nationalism and xenophobia.)
Their survey of trust in democracies compared with more authoritarian regimes tells us things we probably don’t want to know. Out of the 27 countries surveyed, China reports the highest trust index. The UAE and Saudi Arabia are not far behind, and are well in the high trust camp. But many democracies are down in the mistrust camp: the US is not far from the bottom. Australia is still mid-range, but we have slipped badly just in the last year, as have the Netherlands and Germany. The only finding that aligns with our general perception is that Russia once again occupies the bottom spot.
Another general finding that distinguishes democracies from other countries is that in most “western” countries surveyed, including Australia, only a minority of people believe that “my family and I will be better off in five years’ time”, while in other countries most people believe that they will be better off. A positive interpretation of this finding is that there are many poor countries in the optimistic camp, including Nigeria, Indonesia, Mexico and Brazil.
Writing in Eureka Street Tim Dunlop comments specifically on Australia’s slide in the Edelman scale, noting that our government and media are seen by most as dividing rather than uniting forces.
His article Is parliament locked in a crisis of representation? considers the health or otherwise of our traditional parties, and the rise of the “Voices of” movement. Commenting on voters’ disillusionment with the main parties he writes:
The overwhelming feeling amongst these voters is not that they have fundamentally changed their values, or that they have left the party they have traditionally supported. The feeling is, rather, that the party has left them, that the Liberal-National Coalition has turned into something they neither recognise nor like and that they will no longer support it in its current form.
Labor is doing a little better at holding on to its supporters, but his general concern about all main parties is the small and unrepresentative composition of party membership.