LISTENING TO THE NATION – WHAT DO AUSTRALIANS MOST WANT FROM THEIR GOVERNMENT?

Rebecca Huntley is a social Researcher and author, most recently of the Quarterly Essay Australia Fair. Dr Tanveer Ahmed is a psychiatrist, a regular contributor to the Australian Financial Review and author, most recently, of Fragile Nation. During the 2019 federal election campaign, a majority of Australians believed that there would be a change of government and that what Rebecca Huntley calls the “progressive centre” was a sign that Australians wanted change. While the election result was not as predicted, with the Coalition government retaining office, the observations and research of both Rebecca Huntley and Dr Tanveer Ahmed do suggest that there is a quiet revolution taking place in Australians thinking. Rebecca Huntley and Tanveer Ahmed addressed The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 7 May 2019.

LISTENING TO THE NATION – WHAT DO AUSTRALIANS MOST WANT FROM THEIR GOVERNMENT?

TANVEER AHMED

It is a pleasure speaking to you all this evening and thank you very much for coming. A special thanks to Anne and Gerard who have been long term supporters of mine. We should be grateful for the forum they’ve created. That was especially on display, recently, when I attended The Sydney Institute’s Annual Dinner. There was just a fantastic energy in that room. I also want to thank them for seeing Rebecca and I as something of a double act – given that we spoke together at a previous event here last year. Rebecca’s publication is very recent and I am privileged to be able to comment on it.

I do think there are similarities between our work. I see myself very much as a socially oriented psychiatrist. And for all the biological breakthroughs in better understanding mental illness, the roots of it are primarily social.

 Issue such as family breakdown, a rise in loneliness, and the decline of collective identity, be it through religion or nationalism, the decline of a moral language, withering trust in institutions or unfulfilling jobs. What’s especially interesting about this is that none of these problems have easy left or right political solutions. They’re less about individual rights and more about our institutions, our attachments and the nature of our relationships.

I read Rebecca’s excellent essay and I commend it to you all as something of a pining for a better social democracy. And what that might look like today in quite a different economy and society from the halcyon days of the Labor movement half a century ago. In some respects, Bill Shorten is doing a reasonable job. In the last couple of decades, social democratic parties around the world probably have strayed too far to the right, economically – certainly for their base – and possibly too far to the left socially. As someone who was in Young Labor at university, I would certainly say that social drift was probably a factor in some of my political evolution towards the conservative side.

My observation is that both sides of liberalism, let’s say economic on the right and social on the left, have been tremendously successful.

 The rise in prosperity across the world is historically unprecedented. Likewise, the greater freedoms and opportunities for people of all ilks is extraordinary. I’m a great example. I’m the child of Bangladeshi immigrants. My parents grew up in Bangladeshi villages. And the opportunity, the elite education and the social mobility that I’ve been offered in a country like ours is really quite extraordinary. And it wouldn’t happen in too many countries around the world. This liberalism is a celebration of individual choice and the fulfilment of desire and, arguably, an ambivalence to human association. That points to many of the issues going on today, especially at a social level.

I want to talk about two issues today that illustrate some of the challenges we face and which overlap with my work and interests. Both suicide and white flight touch on some of these issues. Both are linked to the challenge of retaining attachments and belonging.

Mental health is a sort of rational and scientific sounding term that sits atop the sort of swirling psychological and social undercurrents engulfing Western society. Israeli philosopher Yuval Hirari argues that the crisis of Western societies is one of great prosperity sitting alongside a lack of purpose.

We heard Rebecca talking about mental health increasingly becoming a bigger issue. I would argue it’s largely because we’ve increasingly lost a language or other ways of conceptualising the problems of living. That may be a moral language or a metaphysical language. Increasingly, we make sense of our lives through the language of psychology.

“Mental health” is a catch-all or very loose term. In fact, studies in the US that have looked at college students, and have raised moral problems, have found increasingly that young people barely have a language to discuss these sorts of issues. And, arguably, my profession is partly to blame, for how we’ve increasingly “medicalised” a great deal of day-to-day living.

Mental health has wide implications because it informs our view of human nature, especially the limits of our resilience, free will and the nature of responsibility. Its definitions carry great importance, particularly in the disability and legal sectors.

Now suicide, in particular, is never just medical but goes to the heart of human existence. There’s no other species that must make meaning of their lives beyond their biological needs.

 And, medicalisation can help to reduce stigma but risks building future generations inept at discussing their experience in moral or metaphysical terms. Suicide also highlights the limits of liberalism. Suicide statistics are always quite difficult to interpret but certainly in last year’s statistics there was a nine per cent overall increase. And certain demographics, notably men aged 45 to 49, recorded quite a significant increase.

Suicide highlights a limit of our system. It’s something of an endpoint of the prioritisation of individual autonomy. The act highlights the underbelly of a political system that doesn’t necessarily offer any guidance on what should constitute a good life. Nor does it make attempts to provide any strong basis for collective purpose which leaves a gap that tends to get filled by the politics of dignity and identity.

It really doesn’t make much sense that disorders like post-traumatic stress can triple during the most prosperous and peaceful time in human history.

 I’d argue this is because mental health diagnoses are offering new ways to conceptualise suffering. Not always in a helpful way. One of the things I have discussed in my writing is the term called “concept creep” which is the dilution of terms like trauma, bullying, addiction and so on. Often those terms are diluted with good intentions. The view is that more and more people will be brought into the net and they might seek help.

I would argue that it’s increasingly made us more sensitive. Part of the result is that we now have a highly sensitised public life, where increasingly people feel threatened or victimised.

 Not only that, they feel that the source of it is external.

The modern climate is by its nature therapeutic. People yearn for salvation through personal wellbeing, health and psychic security. Most can’t see how politics might contribute in this regard which is why modern political parties, particularly when connecting with affluent groups, often need to speak in a language beyond the economic.

Some of you will be familiar with the most recent Productivity Commission review in Victoria, especially around mental health. One of the focuses of that is the workplace. The workplace has become increasingly a charged environment for transmitting socio-cultural debates. It’s the primary site of self-fulfilment, especially for younger generations. Especially as we are a service economy, increasingly so. As the service sector becomes more dominant, the stakes in the office around self-presentation and interpersonal relations are heightened.

  I do quite a bit of work assessing claims around work. This leaves the feeling that these heightened stakes at work are part of personal wellbeing.

I know tonight’s presentations centre on cultural divides. This also impacts on issues of ethnic groups, refugee groups and working families, what we might call the working class. Some of the divide is noticeable in my social circles of professional, educated classes, who for the most part have progressive views. Meanwhile, my work is amongst immigrant groups, the underclass, and working families. Mainly Sydney’s west where I often do assessments.

I don’t believe our divides are quite as great as, say, in the UK or the US where you’ve essentially had, in Henry Kissinger’s words, “Nonviolent revolutions”.

 In the last decade or two, we have been wealthy, less unequal and sit in the middle of the OECD’s measurement, certainly by the Gini co-efficient. Our skilled migration focus means we have considerably better integrated ethnic communities and that’s a credit to our migration policies.

I often bring up the statistic of mixed marriages. Bob Birrell, the Monash researcher, found that the city of Sydney has one of the highest rates of mixed marriages in the Western world. That’s a great marker of us having a greater deal of cohesiveness; ethnic groups aren’t scattered in so-called ghettos. But some of the elements that have arisen around the world are also here. I am alluding this idea of “white flight”.

Many of you will remember NSW Opposition leader Luke Foley referring to “white flight” and causing a great deal of controversy. I remember it was literally hours before my column dealing with white flight went into The Australian Financial Review, my editors told me they were a bit worried about the sensitivities around that term.

They would not publish it and it went into The Spectator. I was surprised by that. I couldn’t see any sensitivities around the term. But within educated circles it made me realise a white collar/blue collar cultural anxiety.

There’s a word that I discovered during the Brexit debate; it is “Solastalgia”. It means when home no longer feels like home. American researcher Robert Putnam also uses the term “hunkering down” and this overlaps with white flight. Particularly in Britain where increasingly there are communities where the “native” whites are a minority.

Some of you know David Goodhart – former editor of Prospect – who wrote a very influential book The Road to Somewhere. He sees that, instead of left and right, the emerging fault line is between the well-healed internationalists, which he dubs “anywheres”, and others strongly rooted to their place, “the somewheres”. Most of us lie in between. He described the internationalists as those with achieved identities based on educational and career success which makes them comfortable with new places and people. The somewheres tend to be older and less educated – they’re housewives and blue collar workers, farmers for whom modern upheavals are more distressing. Goodhart writes that the latter have lost economically with the decline of well-paid jobs for people without qualifications and culturally too, with the disappearance of a distinct working class culture and the marginalisation of their views.

But, in some ways, growing white flight seems to challenge this view of a proud rootedness. At least in Australia.

 Those groups most rooted to place are more likely to move from where generations of their families have previously lived at a time where communities were forged through work, shared interests. At first glance, this offers hope for economists and policy makers. A challenge affecting industrialised economies is that it’s unrealistic to expect people of all kinds to uproot in order to take jobs in emerging sectors. Especially as industries such as manufacturing decline. But, if they are willing to move, perhaps yesterday’s blue collar worker may be tomorrow’s pink collar worker, in say the caring sector where so much of the growth in jobs is. And I do see a bit of that. I work in Bankstown a couple of days a week and, increasingly, we do get more males working as disability workers.

I would argue, however, it’s less about work and more about recreating a sense of place. Energy Minister Angus Taylor, whose electorate goes through Goulburn to Camden sees a great deal of this. He uses the term “cultural sympathy”. Taylor says people are moving to areas that feel more culturally sympathetic. He has studied electoral rolls and finds that many of the people moving are from areas like Punchbowl, Bankstown and Cabramatta.

Taylor says that working class life has definitely diminished, local jobs are fewer and the economy is essentially getting more centralised. Jobs are more centralised. But, with white fight, that means commutes are longer and this creates a degree of resentment as people move further out to places that they feel are more culturally sympathetic.

Men, in particular, are more likely to move hundreds of kilometres in search of an idealised cultural identity and sense of masculinity than necessarily change sectors in the same suburb.

White flight is in some ways an example of a cultural, almost psychological, anxiety which touches on many of our issues of the day, especially around attachment and belonging.

The reality is that modern societies have a weak moral and political consensus. As a psychiatrist, I also think both sides of liberalism offer incomplete pictures of the human condition. They have strayed too far towards individual rights and to the detriment of human association. And that is the challenge for our societies in the coming decades, at least at a social level.