My Newyear's Resolutions For Australia
Sydney Morning Herald
Thursday January 1, 1998
WHAT a heady thing to be asked to draw up some new year's resolutions for dear old Oz. I shall try to make at least a partial list, to which you, dear reader, can add. In a year whose close finds me still not the sylph I promised to become at year's beginning, and unlikely to achieve sylph-hood in 1998, I have tried to propose objectives which are achievable.
That Australia will punish at the nearest electoral opportunity any minister who uses the sentence, "These are a very nice set of figures".
We have been hearing this cant for two decades now, and it has always preceded another dive in public confidence, another rise in public disorientation. It is a mantra of those who see the economy as an all-subsuming Moloch, a machine to which, if necessary, living flesh must be fed for the sake of those "very good figures indeed".
From Australia to the Baltic Sea, right-wing demagogues flourish on the disorientation and dehumanisation of those who, hearing this smug sentence, feel that the figures have dispensed with them. All of us are reduced by this rhetoric from the exalted rank of citizens with our dignity to the pitiable
status of players, that is, winners or losers in an economy.
That Australia should devise a means of delivering us from our dependence on re-sources which cause global warming.
In all recent debate, no-one in the major parties has advanced such a plan and, though there might have been reasonable grounds for permitting us some slack on this issue, it is very much a temporary remission, and will mean nothing anyhow if our policies,
wilfully incoherent, leave our international credit further diminished and the future of our children appalling.
Too smug a win in Kyoto is a loss if in the end our children choke and fry.
That Australia should communally assert in 1998 for the enlightenment of all parties that politics are meant to drive the polls, not the reverse.
In a craven year it is the Coalition which seems clearer in its intentions, and even though many of us increasingly suspect those intentions we are at least left in a position to judge them. It has been the Labor Party which has most swallowed poll-politics whole. For us, the citizenry, the predominant image of Labor in 1997 was of frontbenchers engaged in a gleefully rancorous binge of proving that there were more minor Coalition Cabinet ministers rorting travel allowances than there were members of the shadow Cabinet.
This issue, important in terms of public respect for institutions, could nonetheless have been solved overnight by referral of the cases of crooked members to the Ethics Committee and by administrative decision. It was all very little comfort even to those who enjoyed it. It did not save us from hearing beyond our increasingly barred and alarmed doors the hoofbeats of larger and more apocalyptic horses: globalisation, global warming, the estrangement of youth from our communal compact.
Of course, Labor dipped its toe in aged-care policy after Mr Moran kindly made it possible for it to do so. Kim Beazley, an urbane, admirable fellow, recently declared himself a leader who could not be considered the equal of great Labor leaders such as Chifley or Curtin.
A few gallant supporters attempted to reassure him that he could be; indeed, he has great talents. But he was right in the first place and this timid, lost, poll-driven year spent waiting for the golden apples to fall off the Coalition's tree is testimony to it.
That Australia should choose to become a republic.
The Constitutional Convention will decide if a republican model should be put to the people. It is quite possible there will still have to be a plebiscite on which of the two possible models within our system we want - indirect or direct election. But, in the process of deciding this significant issue of the kind of institutions we want to represent Australia at the highest level, the Constitutional Convention should seize the opportunity to urge the Government to allow other periodic conventions of this nature throughout the coming century to decide questions that most reasonable opinion-makers, including Sir Anthony Mason and Sir William Deane, consider should at least be raised.
Though the founding fathers - there were no founding mothers - placed the primary responsibility for instituting change in the hands of Parliament, in the past 10 years debate on constitutional change has been driven by members of the public. In fact, throughout this century politicians have played ducks and drakes with the Constitution, and largely hidden it from the people.
One of the things the convention should urge is that the Constitution, both in terms of what it says of Australia and in terms of the institutional realities for which it stands, be taught in the classroom. If it seems difficult to teach such an unglamorous document, Helen Irving's recent To Constitute A Nation shows how remarkable was the culture of the 1890s which produced this document, and what a vibrant people we were then. To ensure we have an informed populace is well within our means of imagination.
That Australia find the strength to express regret and to apologise.
A timid crowd, we have confused apology with weakness, yet we know from our personal relationships that it is a form of strength. Earlier this year, the Anglican Archbishop of Liverpool apologised to the Irish for the Famine of 1847. He had no part in that catastrophe. He felt no personal guilt for it. He was not implying that any Englishman or woman now breathing should feel guilt for it. But he was expressing a re-gret that a political community of which he was a member had once, long before his birth, applied inadequate resources to the tragedy. I recently heard Nobel Peace Prize co-laureate Jose Ramos-Horta point out that Willy Brandt, himself a proscribed person under the Nazis, had knelt in Is-rael in apology for the part of a German regime in the obliteration of European Jewry. This was the act of a great European, not of a weak man.
In the New Year, Australia would like to see a leader strong enough to make an apology for crimes for which he and most of us are not responsible, for which he is not required to feel personal guilt, but which were committed in the recent past in our own Commonwealth. It is a gesture we expect present generations of Japanese to make in relation to the atrocities of World War II in the Pacific. But, apparently, we're too muscular - or too atrophied? - to be required to make apologies ourselves.
That Australia should recognise that East Timor is unavoidably at the top of the
Indonesian-Australian agenda.
Mandela has frankly and robustly raised the issue. Clinton has, making it illegal for the present Indonesian regime to use US arms in East Timor. The British are also taking a firm line with Soeharto. We have been timid for more than two decades with the so-called Asian tiger economy of Indonesia. Now we see the tiger has devoured its own tail.
The regime has plundered the Indonesian economy, has imposed an unchosen and literally breathtaking toll of murk from fires on the whole of its region and, through Byzantine mismanagement, sent the currency into a near-fatal plunge. And we are quite properly paying $1 billion, not for Soeharto's sake but because, for one thing, a total collapse would hurt all of the people of the region, including us. Badly, too. But in these circumstances are we to be still prevented from uttering the two forbidden words - human rights - or a few commonsense ones: Stop wasting money on the East Timor conflict? In bravely stating that no state has a cultural mandate to impose summary imprisonment, torture and execution, we would merely be saying what the Nobel Peace Prize Committee said more than a year ago. We who are paying the piper could at least ask for one little, sweeter tune. By the way, we could be adding to that toll of misery, and that of the past two decades, by keeping 1,400 East Timorese refugees in administrative limbo, with no entitlements or means of support, and torture and imprisonment waiting at home. Could we not, as we wait for the inevitable fall of Soeharto, grant them temporary visas so they can both live with dignity and contribute to our society?
That we recognise Australian wealth no longer generates Australian jobs.
There is no longer a trickledown effect as in the old days, and it will help us to be creative if we acknowledge that the old nexus between jobs and wealth has been broken. Ask the BHP workers in Newcastle about this. BHP will be moving offshore to increase Australian wealth by cutting Australian jobs. In a sense it increased Australian wealth for some of us the day it made the announcement - its shares rose 48 cents. As Donald Horne said in his splendid book, The Avenue of the Fair Go, Adam Smith's Invisible Hand, which ensures that the pursuit of individual wealth generates communal welfare, has ceased to write. A global economy and a re-volution in technology have ensured that.
Knowing this, we must find mechanisms somehow by which the unwillingly unemployed are not treated as losers and non-
persons. The key is somewhere in the myth of the 1950s, that in the future people would have nothing but leisure. Some do, and resent it; some don't, and overwork. But even then we are retired at 65 or earlier and have to face the great opportunity and vacuum of leisure.
Obviously, we can buy more alarms and movement detectors; or we can include in our educational training the skills necessary for leisure; or we could somehow encourage in the corporate sector a sense of responsibility to communities which have served them well; or we could institute job-sharing; or we could insist that governments specify whose wealth they mean when they talk about Australian wealth, or ... well, fill in your own solution - you're probably more qualified.
That Australia returns to estimating the value, not the price, of everything.
Imponderables which have no price but are beyond value: icons, legends, songs, amenities between people, comities, urbanities, the better angels of tolerance. These are never permitted to appear in the "nice figures". They bind us gloriously, but inexpensively. I can see most of you nodding your heads. The only ones who won't be able to understand this paragraph are economic fundamentalists, the priests of the great Moloch! The rest of you knew it before I said it.
That Australia rescue its children.
Two things struck me recently. There is grey power - I'm fast becoming part of it. It recently rapped the Federal Government over the knuckles.
But the other week the Sydney City Mission had a Christmas party for disadvantaged children. There was a little girl, extremely sweet faced, rather like my own daughters when they were that age. She wore angel wings someone had made for her. And it struck me for the first time in Australia, looking at a child's face, that this child was probably doomed. In a user-pays world, she is very much an "under-advantaged" consumer of health and education.
That means in English that under present policies she will receive a shitty education, eat badly and be unlikely to get a job. She will live in a swamp of lawless narcotic possibilities that governments pretend do not exist, and then be blamed and harried when she falls in.
On seeing her face I must say I was overwhelmed to the point of tears - it might be the onset of old age, but it might also be the beginning of wisdom - that there was no potent national advocacy group for this child.
I believe that we need a national body called Our Children or Children Australia, or whatever, founded by someone with organisational and lobbying gifts, to act in effect as an aid body to our children.
But also and above all, to act as muscular advocate for favourable policy for children. I and many others would be happy to serve such a body, but the very fragmentary administrative and organisational skills which are typical of writers prevent me credibly initiating the process.
However, this is not a lightly made proposal. We can ignore the child in angel's wings now, or cringe in fear from her when she reaches an angry maturity.
With this small and, some will no doubt think, pompous list, I confidently turn the discussion and the action over to you. Enjoy the year, Australia.
© 1998 Sydney Morning Herald
Share This