The strange paradox that is modern Australia

How can the same country which voted for marriage equality also tolerate the way we treat asylum seekers?

WITHIN the past seven days, we have witnessed two massive social reforms which place Australia back among the most progressive nations on the planet.

Last Wednesday, the results were announced of the national postal survey on same sex marriage: of the 13 million people who voted, 62 per cent — 133 out of the nation’s 150 electorates — voted yes for marriage equality. It was a resounding defeat for religious conservatives who had warned same sex marriage would open the door to Sodom and Gomorrah, or worse.

A week later, the upper house of the Victorian Parliament voted in favour of voluntary assisted dying — euthanasia for the terminally ill. Again, it was the religious conservatives who had been shown to be out of step with public opinion.

True, federal Parliament still has to pass legislation to make same sex marriage the law of the land, but this is now a mere formality which the Prime Minister has pledged to fast track before Christmas.

And true, also, that the Victorian lower house has to pass the legislation to make euthanasia lawful, and it is only one state — albeit the second largest — of Australia’s seven states and territories. But surely, Victoria’s action will see other states following suit within years.

Both of these are momentous and historic reforms that mark the relentless tide of positive socially progressive change over the decades. But every day, less noticed and often out of the public eye, there are countless other incremental changes that suggest that as time moves on, our society becomes more tolerant and decent.

Neither of these reforms came easily. They are the result of hard work in the face of difficult odds by a lot of committed activists. Along the way, much pain and misery was endured.

But it is at moments like these that my pride in my nation peaks and I bask in the belief that we are truly lucky to be living in a progressive country that is not haunted by the staid conformities and unfathomable century old hatreds of Europe.

And I take pride in the fact that although both our nations were forged at similar times, the path Australia has chosen is far more preferable than that of the United States.

YET both these reforms have come after long periods of despair. They are like weak candles flickering uncertainly in a dark and scary cave.

For how is it that a country that has embraced same sex marriage and euthanasia can at the same time shrug its shoulders as both major political parties adopt a bipartisan approach to asylum seekers that lets men, women and children rot to death in prison camps on far away islands?

How can this also be a nation that refuses to constitutionally recognise its original owners, and allows indigenous people to live in Third World conditions?

How can the same nation both boast the progressive credentials of the Andrews government in Victoria, and the xenophobic bigotry of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, which is tipped to gain the balance of power in this weekend’s Queensland election?

And even amid the joy at the same sex marriage result, how is it that the same nation can also be home to the hurtful homophobia of people like Bob Katter? How can both attitudes co-exist like two spiteful siblings under the same roof?

This is the paradox of modern Australia.

While it is easy to take cheap shots by asserting the differences between urbane inner city Melburnians and redneck rural Queenslanders, the harsh reality that the progressive reforms of the past week only partly hide is that at its core, this is still a very conservative and selfish nation.

A little over two decades ago, it felt like we had turned a corner and there was no looking back. In the euphoria that followed the Mabo decision and his Redfern speech, it seemed as if the progressive social changes encouraged by Paul Keating were unstoppable.

Under Keating, Australia looked set to become a nation that not only acknowledged and made recompense for its genocidal past, but which embraced multiculturalism, the arts, diversity of sexual orientation, and republicanism. Finally, a proud, mature, modern Australia was emerging, with a distinctive national identity.

But the irresistible force came up against the immovable object, and the election of the Howard government in 1996 seemed to be a compelling rejection of Keating’s vision of Australia. Howard won by appealing to the latent conservatism, racism and avarice that is buried deep in the national psyche.

Under Howard, all those things that Keating had sought to change, were halted or even reversed. Let’s not kid ourselves: Howard remained in power for 11 years because he understood the Australian personality better than Keating, and he knew how to appeal to the uglier part of our psyche.

But it was not just Howard. Since his demise in 2007, we have had six years out of the past 10 of Labor government, and the scorecard has barely changed. The rights and economic and social status of indigenous people remain well behind those of white Australians; racism and Islamophobia have trumped multiculturalism; and we cling to the monarchy like a child to its mother’s apron strings.

Perhaps it is because the record has been so bleak for these past 20 years that we celebrated the result of the marriage equality survey so raucously, like a football team breaking a long premiership drought.

It is easy to blame our paucity of political leadership for this state of affairs. Rather than lead, those we elect to parliament have pandered to the mob, reinforcing the values of conservative Australia, rather than taking them on as Keating dared to.

But that’s a cop out, because in a democracy, people get the leaders they deserve, so before we complain about our broken political system, we need to look ourselves in the mirror.

HUNTER S. Thompson once wrote of Richard Nixon’s triumph in the 1972 presidential election:

“This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it — that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.”

I felt much the same way when I watch the online video showing the racist harassment of Iranian-born Muslim Labor Senator Sam Dastyari by a bunch of neo-Nazis in a pub in Melbourne a couple of weeks ago.

The incident burst any misconceptions that ours was becoming a more tolerant country. In fact, thanks to the encouragement of the likes of Pauline Hanson, Peter Dutton and Andrew Bolt, it may be heading in the reverse direction.

Fairfax Media political columnist Jacquelin Maley hit the nail on the head when she wrote of the Dastyari incident:

“As Australians we like to tell ourselves that we are not a racist country, that our multiculturalism is a success . . . that attacks like these are isolated and confined to the extremes . . . [but] when men like this are able to openly hunt a Muslim man in a public bar, the claim that Australia is not racist is clearly rubbish.”

“Actually, the attack on Dastyari was marinating in Australian-ness,” Maley wrote. “The beery, blokey, hostile masculinity of the perpetrators, the fact it happened in a bar, the cool attempts of the victim to order beer while being lambasted, the slack vowels of the bullies as they told the senator to go back to Iran.”

The way sections of the media followed up the story (“we interview the blokes who took on a Senator in a bar”), as if the perpetrators were the heroes, reinforced her point.

But just as the despair was about to get too great, in the background of the video loomed Dastyari’s Labor colleague, Tim Watts, taunting the goons with: “what race is dickhead?”

So there you had it, a snapshot of the frustrating paradox of modern Australia, because for every hate-filled abusive racist, there is always a good-hearted larrikin prepared to stand up for his mate and call a dickhead a dickhead.

And that’s probably why I will never totally give up on this country. Just when you think it can’t get any worse, something comes along to give you hope, whether it be the SSM result, or a politician prepared to confront a group of dickheads.

I LIKE to think there’s nothing more Australian than standing on a hill under the stars, a beer in your hand, screaming at the top of your lungs along with a band on a distant stage. Which is where I found myself on a Monday night a couple of weeks ago.

The band was Midnight Oil, five musicians who achieve world fame and fortune by writing and singing songs that told our nation’s story — including the treatment of indigenous people — in unvarnished and powerful language, and led by a man who in an alternate universe could have been our Prime Minister.

In some ways, the Oils are almost the physical embodiment of the paradox described earlier: their muscular, masculine sound and image emerged from the same blokey, boozy pub and surf club culture that bred the Cronulla race rioters – but their overtly political songs about the environment, inequality, the spectre of war and the plight of the First Nations speak to hopes for a more progressive and decent Australia and planet.

As a politician, Peter Garrett saw both the best and the worst of this nation. And the Oils’ music always celebrated what makes this country special, while never shirking away from the ugliness at its heart.

A true patriot doesn’t believe in my country right or wrong, but says how can I make my country better.

The Oils sing about the reality of the nation as it is, but with an undimmed optimism about the nation it could be. Or, in their own words:

“The real world is not as calm as it appears to be from here/The old world is not as safe with the new world closing in/The great south land can be as great as the one it could have been”.

The best of both worlds.

Perhaps there is a lesson to be learnt there about how to grapple with this frustrating paradox of a nation, at once both life-affirmingly progressive and accepting and depressingly conservative and bigoted: don’t stop dreaming, and get active because real change only comes when you work hard for it.