Why do we boo Adam Goodes?

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The AFR‘s Fleur Anderson does a good job today on connecting a couple of dots around Adam Goodes:

When Tony Abbott presented Adam Goodes as Australian of The Year in January 2014, he praised the footballer for his leadership in the fight against racism and the personification of the very best of Australia.

“You are what the rest of us might be – if only we kept our new year’s resolutions and heeded our best instincts,” Abbott said at the time.

“You are a living embodiment of our country at its best.”

Eighteen months on, the time is coming for our Prime Minister – not a bullied and despondent football star – to remind us of our best selves, shining a path away from the ugly tribalism emerging on the sidelines of sport, politics and the media.

Good luck. Tony Abbott’s modus operandi is hate, to provoke wildly irrational responses to reasoned policy, to divide and conquer, his regime is partly responsible for the milieu behind the booing of Adam Goodes.

But it is only possible because it is tapping into something broader and deeper. And that is what I wish to discuss today (if you’ll forgive the indulgence on a lazy Friday). The moniker of “racism” that is being applied to booing Goodsey is almost certainly right for some but it’s gained such momentum, I think, for another reason.

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Adam Goodes has become an unAustralian icon. He is tall, proud, (my sister-in-law tells me “sexy”), talented, successful, well-spoken and, most appallingly of all, exudes quiet self-regard. So much so, in fact, that when confronted with racial abuse from any quarter, including 13 year old girls, he neither flinches, laughs nor looks away. He addresses it as any gentleman would.

How can we hate that, you ask?

It’s not that hard to understand. Australians are a nation of outsiders and self-haters. Indeed, to be Australian today means that you are either a displaced immigrant or the progeny of one. Moreover, 200 years of said emigration, born in the conflicted ethnicities of the old world, has birthed a nation that lives precariously at the fringe of an alien continent. Our institutions, psychologies, culture and imagination remain European but our home is not. It is a vastly indifferent continent where the mark of man is absent. And so we live estranged from ourselves protected by a canopy of self-disparaging humour.

That certainly has its upsides. We enjoy a relaxed lifestyle for one, remarkably free of conflict as well, despite our mixed heritages. Multi-culturalism works better in Australia for this very reason. Because estrangment is the heart of the national character, those who arrive estranged fit right in. They need only adopt the laconic self-hate of the Aussie mate to “assimilate”. Black, white, yellow, green, gay, toothless, all can be Aussies of equal standing so long as they’re happy to stare into the dirt, laugh off the slings and arrows of life and labour on in smiling self-contempt.

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That’s quite an achievement, if a little back-handed!

But it comes at a price and that is that we despise the opposite. When someone stands up for a cause we’re suspicious. When someone has passion for a cause we’re downright contemptuous. When someone plonks himself into the centre of our circuses and calls out that he’s not putting up with abuse, especially if that someone is not estranged at all from his land, then he’s poking a nasty, dirty spear right in the hollow heart of Australiana, and he is going to be despised for it.

Is that racism? Sort of. We don’t despise Adam Goodes because he’s black but we do despise him because he belongs and we, proudly, do not, to even ourselves.

About the author
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.