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eBook details

• Title: Insecure Australia: Anti-Politics for a Passive Federation.
• Author : Arena Journal
• Release Date : January 01, 2001
• Genre: Religion & Spirituality,Books,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 203 KB

Description

How did it come to pass that a public-relations slogan became the oft-repeated 'truth' of the 2001 Australian Federation celebrations --'with a vote, not a war Australia became a nation'? This question goes to the heart of the problem of understanding the meld of official fervour and public passivity. The proponents of the celebrations, we argue, were too insecure about the cultural legitimacy of Federation, let alone the public passion for the institutions of the Commonwealth of Australia, to treat the year as an important period of necessary debate and reflection on core issues. A few public lectures aside, it became a year of parades and dubious slogans. One double-page advertisement in metropolitan weekend magazines asked the self-congratulatory question: 'What kind of country has always known the value of a vote?' The positive answer comes first: Australia, a nation formed not by revolution, but by an evolving democracy. The embarrassment comes later in the small print: 'The 1902 Commonwealth Franchise Act specifically withheld the right to vote in federal elections from Indigenous Australians and people of Asian, African, and Pacific Islander backgrounds'. (1) Thus there was a passing acknowledgement of problems in our past, but it was always overridden by public relations messages. Why is it that most politicians and commentators so fervently defended the 2001 Federation celebrations in Australia against civic apathy? More importantly, why is it that they sought uncritically to gloss the past and embrace a shallow form of civic nationalism? (2) This article explores the strange year of the celebrations, a year of top-down organizational fervour and relatively passive public interest. Public spectacles occasionally drew huge crowds. However, the crowds were mostly there for the pageantry and colour, rather than because of a foundational attachment to the political process. This issue of managing and flattening out the deep tensions of national politics can be put in a larger setting. Before we discuss the Federation celebrations in detail it is worth relating two contextualizing developments. Both have their roots in the decades of the latter part of the twentieth century and earlier, but are being acutely felt now. The first concerns the impact of globalization. In the context of globalization, the modern nation-state faces a series of shearing tensions between state (polity) and nation (community), between the divided polity-community and the economy, and between sections of the 'community'. With globalization has come new kinds of movement of people--mass tourism and systematizing multiculturalism--as well as an accentuation of old kinds of movement--people attempting to escape disintegrating homelands. Moreover, the pressures of the postmodern layer of the economy, with its flows of capital and influence, flows that transcend the old regulatory boundaries of the nation-state, have meant that the government has moved to deregulate the economic sphere while reasserting the connectedness of the nation in the cultural sphere. Taken together, this means that the multicultural community we call 'Australia' is fundamentally different from the Australia of a generation ago, and that sections of that community no longer trust the state to protect their way of life despite the government spending more on self-promotion than any commercial advertiser in Australia, including Coca-cola.

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