Political Corrections

with Mungo MacCallum

Enjoy the peace and goodwill, or else!

So John Howard believes that he has made Australians more self-confident, and that it is a lasting confidence.

He has done this by exorcising political correctness (otherwise defined as concern for others, cultural sensitivity or simply good manners) and replacing it with his own social paradigm, a sort of Up-You-Jack country in which no-one cares much what anyone else thinks.

This, at least, is what he told The Sydney Morning Herald last week. It says much about our Prime Minister that he equates this kind of blustering selfishness with confidence: to a disinterested observer it might smack more of a deep-seated insecurity.

But then, Howard has always avoided the (politically correct) black armband view of anything. Like many of us, he prefers to hear only the good news, the version that reinforces his own prejudices. Unlike most of us, he is in a position to ensure that everything else is screened out.

Revealingly, he confesses that his holiday reading is Keith Windshuttle's The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, that extraordinary work which dismisses all the bad news about the dispossession of indigenous Australians on the preposterous ground that very little of it was recorded in official documents. In a similar vein his own regime may be titled The Fabrication of Australian Confidence.

Howard's entire political career has been spent not in building but in undermining traditional Australian optimism. He has mounted scare after scare after scare: we are about to be swamped by Asians, lose our backyards to Aborigines, succumb to an onslaught of disease-carrying, child-murdering boat people, be blown to bits by Muslim terrorists, be overwhelmed by an economic crisis triggered by Labor's fiscal incompetence. Our only hope is to tie our fortunes irrevocably to the might of Washington, and the only one who can offer us even a chance at security is our own Little Big Brother, John Winston Howard, leader for life.

As with the original Big Brother, who proclaimed that War is Peace and Ignorance is Strength, this requires a certain amount of doublethink on the part of his audience: Confidence is Fear. But Howard's great political strength is that he has no trouble believing it. Even when the rest of us are consumed by self doubt, Howard never blinks.

John Howard is self-confident: thus it must follow that Australia is the same.

If all this smacks of the hubris that Howard is constantly warning his troops against, then what are we to make of Tony Abbott's pontifical assertion: "Almost never before in the history of the world has there been a happier country than contemporary Australia"?

Admittedly he added the proviso that there were still "all sorts of human agony" in pockets around the place, but nonetheless, "notwithstanding the problems we face we are an extraordinarily successful and happy society."

The extra adjective is, of course, the giveaway: like the good capitalist he is, Abbott equates happiness with affluence (or, as Kath and Kim might call it, effluence). The Bible he used to study should have warned him against such error, particularly at a time when the affluence is largely illusory: a growing burden of debt suspended by a fraying thread of low interest rates. Gullible as Australians are, not too many of them were dancing in the streets that day the All Ordinaries Index reached 4000.

It is a cliché to note that the single-minded pursuit of wealth is more likely to induce anxiety than euphoria, but Abbott seems not to have noted it. The studies that have tried to quantify happiness in Australia (notably by social researcher Hugh Mackay) seem to suggest that it is falling rather than rising, both among those who work 80 hours a week to reach the top and among those who are not willing to make the sacrifices and are consequently left behind.

And however Australia may compare to the rest of the world, it is easy enough to recall times in our own past when people were more secure, optimistic and even relaxed and comfortable. Try the boom years of the 50s, when we really seemed to be the lucky country; or the lead up to the 1972 election, with the excitement and anticipation of change; or even the mid 1980s, when it seemed there was no finer thing than to be Australian, a period which even the young Abbott should remember.

Still, he's obviously enjoying life, and at this time of the year it would be churlish not to wish him well. Pity about the rest of us.

For a man who claims not to be interested in symbols, our Prime Minister got himself in a fine old tizz recently about two of them: Eureka Stockade and the national Anthem.

He first he simply closed his eyes to, apparently consigning it to the limbo of political correctness; on the second, he professed to be horrified at the playing of a disco version at Sydney's New Year celebrations, despite the fact that it has previously been adapted by groups as diverse as the Wiggles and the Bushwhackers without the sky falling in.

Let's remember that the turgid work was originally intended not as an anthem, but as an Empire-boosting ditty, and that it was adopted as the anthem a mere 27 years ago, a decision even John Howard opposed at the time. If the Lord's Prayer can survive a dance treatment, so can poor old Girt.

Loosen up, Johnny; put on your socks and sandals and go for a nice long walk on the beach. And see you next year. And the year after, and the year after that, and ... (at this point the writer was carried off sobbing and placed in a darkened room. We hope to hear from him again in 2005 - Editor.)