Public iodeas
Australia has changed but we may not have noticed
Two public intellectuals cover big changes that have crept up on us.
When we think of political and social shocks dramatic events such as the 9/11 terrorist attacks come to mind, but there is another kind of shock that comes unannounced. These shocks involve a realization that the world around us, particularly the country in which we have grown up, has changed as a result of developments that have been quietly building up for a long time.
Two public intellectuals, George Megalogenis and Malcolm Turnbull talk about these shocks in different forums in different ways, but with strongly complementary messages about how Australia has changed in ways that our political establishment, particularly those on the right, have not fully grasped.
Megalogenis has a 26-minute segment on Saturday Extra, in which he outlines, in conversation with Nick Bryant, three shocks that have reshaped the Australian electorate, and that have redefined our national identity. The interview draws on his book Three shocks: who we are becoming in the 21 st century.
The first shock is about our ethnic mix. We have once again become a country of immigrants, as we were in most of the nineteenth century. One half of our population now are either immigrants, or have at least one immigrant parent. In our big cities, Melbourne and Sydney, the immigrant portion is even higher. This distribution raises issues around cultural identity, and a widening urban-rural division.
The second is about the composition of our workforce. For a long time the archetypal Australian worker was a man – a drover, a miner, a construction worker. It is now a woman in the care economy – a GP, an age care worker. That change is yet to register with most of our politicians, who still pitch their messages to the “tradie in a ute” to use the stereotype. The “teal” independents understand this in a way other politicians don’t.
The third is about the increasing unreliability of our trading and security partners. China has become our major trading partner, but unlike earlier dominant trading partners, it is a country with which we have few shared interests. More significant is the unreliability of our relationship with the US, and here is where Turnbull complements Megalogenis’ work.
Turnbull appears on The Atlantic’s David Frum Show podcast, in a session titled How Trump Lost Asia. The podcast is bracketed with Frum’s comments on Trump’s corruption and a brief political history of modern China – both revealing in their own right – and you can find the interview as an Atlantic article with the same title: How Trump lost Asia.
Turnbull’s summary statement in the podcast provides his view not only from an Australian or Asian perspective, but also from those who once saw the US as a security partner:
The United States, not by accident or circumstance, but by design, has become a less dependable ally.
Neither Trump nor Turnbull expect America, in some future post-Trump era, to revert to the America of earlier times. Its security concerns will involve its economic and military rivalry with China, and they are unlikely to align with Australia’s concerns. The discussion goes into the way middle-sized powers are adapting to this environment, particularly Canada. (Spoiler – AUKUS is a lousy deal for Australia.)
Without downplaying the cultural similarities between Australia and the USA, Turnbull stresses some basic differences, including the comparative urban-rural mixes of the two countries, and particular Australian political institutions such as compulsory and preferential voting, that make for different political forces and outcomes between the two countries. MAGA does not fit Australia.