The rise and rise of Australian cowardice may seem like a strange topic for a macroeconomics website but it’s not. It is a very important social phenomenon with all kinds of implications.
Back in the late 1990s, Professor Allan Patience wrote a seminal critique of Australiana:
Cultural influences shape every facet of our daily lives: our politics, the way we educate young people in schools and beyond, the ways we relate to each other, the ways in which our society rewards and punishes people, the ways we articulate our consciousness through language, customs and rituals, the ways we relate to “outsiders”, and the ways we produce and exchange goods and services. But the all-pervasive nature of these cultural influences means that we take them for granted. Their complex and embedded subtlety makes them invisible, especially it seems to most economists today.
Australia is particularly noteworthy for its hard culture. A hard culture is inflexible, resistant to change, it rigidly defines roles and identities (especially in relation to gender), and it is morally backward. It is especially cruel to those within its ranks who dare criticise it.
The historical development of Australia’s hard culture has been moulded by four signal elements: racism, secularism, populism, and masculinism. The marginalisation of First Australians is the most glaring evidence of the toxic thread of racism binding it all together. A cynical intolerance of religious belief points to a deep-seated ontological insecurity at its heart. Its cultural obsession with sports celebrities, for example (cricketers, footballers, golfers, swimmers, tennis players) is symptomatic of its much more complicated and deranged populism. Its narrowly defined masculinism is painfully evident in the gendered structuring of the Australian economy.
The hyper-masculinised culture of the economy is the greatest single factor constraining Australia’s productivity and creativity, while contributing more than anything else to the destructive levels of inequality spreading down into the ranks of middle and working class Australians, like a virulent cancer.
There was something to this. Australia’s hard culture was not well-suited to the times of globalisation, post-modernism and rising social mobility. It needed some softening.
So we did it. Through several decades of concerted effort, Australia softened its blokey culture and prospered in the new world. It was partly the influence of the very forces listed above. Partly the result of our own efforts to boost participation of the marginalised and the narratives that surrounded that. Partly the result of changing economic connections that lifted our exposure to Asian cultures and immigration.
But, today, I wish to ask the opposite question. Has the softening of Australia gone too far for the emerging times? Gone are the happy days of seamless multicultural outlooks. Gone are the happy days of the end of history and triumph of liberalism. Gone are the happy days of opening economies and cultures.
What is coming down the pipe today is not opening and softening, it is contest and hardening. It may spill over into conflict as well. Is the newer, softer Australia ready to take that on?
The early evidence is not encouraging. Three examples come to mind that underlines how soft that we have become.
COVID-19 is the first. Australian debate and responses have failed completely to keep pace with reality. At MB we strongly supported lockdowns. But those days have passed. Vaccines not border closures are the future. Yet we cheer every time a state closes. Nobody is stepping forward to insist upon, or volunteer for that matter, to immunise our most vulnerable communities. The nanny state is now automatic recourse with atomised lobbies as usual supporting every self-styled victim cohort.
The second example is the US and Trumpism. Australian public discussion on both was comprehensively hysterical from beginning to end. Every US error was exaggerated. Every failing beaten up. Every move misinterpreted. Every good outcome panned. The US has its problems, for sure, but the coverage and tenor of debate about it in Australia made it sound like a failed state. The US is still the most robust functioning liberal democracy on earth, which doesn’t say much for the rest of us when we can’t even observe it with open eyes. This has prevented us from addressing the hard economic issues of class and inequality that created the social schisms that have hurt the US and ourselves.
The third and most salient example is China. It is most important because it is both the largest existential threat to our way of life and the most likely to benefit from our softness. How so?
I have been astonished at the naivety, corruption and willingness of many prominent Australians to sell out our freedoms. Sure, many of these are bribed by the CCP to do so. But many are not.
At the political level, egged on by CCP-softened greybeards, the Australian Labor Party has created a safe space for all kinds of treasonous ideas and policies. Thankfully, these have been contested by other strident voices of reason, but the balance of debate is not obviously in favour of supporting Australian democracy.
Which is extraordinary, is it not? The irony of the debate being the obvious point that it is about either ending or sustaining itself. Freedom of speech, freedom to manage our borders and freedom to self-determination are not assets to be traded away for a few yuan more.
The debate is nowhere near as clear cut as it should be. The national narrative and debate is ignoring all manner of “hard” questions for no reason other than softness. For instance:
- How can we resume Chinese immigration? The Chinese diaspora is claimed, bullied and propagandised by Bejing. This is NOT to impugn the loyalty of individual ethnic Chinese. But we must implement a comprehensive plan to protect the local ethnic Chinese community from this malign influence.
- Where is the university royal commission to mercilessly expose the CCP sell-outs in that sector? The universities are unrepentant CCP bribees. They must be dramatically restructured if they are to produce the winning ideas and educated Australians that drive the economy of the future.
- What is Australia’s future if Labor takes government? If it concedes to CCP demands, is civil strife possible?
- How can a national broadcaster overrun with kids that are consumed by racial, sexual and weather sensitivities defend the national interest against the most imminent great power threat since Imperial Japan?
- What are the necessary steps to shifting Australia beyond the CCP’s influence? What’s the plan? ScoMo’s “strategic patience” is a nothing burger. Where is the reform to boost competitiveness and shift us beyond the easy China money addiction with autocratic strings attached?
We’re not hard enough to ask any of these questions. Not even in the Murdoch press, which supports sovereignty but does nothing to push back the encroachments or hold the Coalition to account in its planning failures.
If the Murdoch press has also gone soft that hints at how far back the pendulum must swing from today’s cowardly culture to yesteryear’s hard nuts if our way of life is going to survive.
