Australian Exceptionalism

On Monday 12 September 2016, The Sydney Institute held a discussion on a challenging new collection of essays on Australia published by Oxford University Press titled Only in Australia. The discussion was led by contributors to the collection – Professor Henry Ergas, Professor of Infrastructure Economics at the SMART Facility at University of Wollongong and columnist with The Australian and Dr William Coleman, Reader at the Research School of Economics, ANU and contributing editor of Only in Australia: The History, Politics and Economics of Australian Exceptionalism.

AUSTRALIAN EXCEPTIONALISM

HENRY ERGAS

Americans have no doubt that their country is exceptional, a shining beacon of liberty in a world groping for light. The British are equally certain that everyone else is exceptional, and that they are normal, which is how people would want to be. The average Australian, on the other hand, asked whether Australia is exceptional and if so why, would likely tell you he or she has no bloody idea.

That is not because of any lack of pride of place. On the contrary, an almost belligerent sense of national feeling bursts to the surface at the slightest opportunity, while the days of the cultural cringe, if they ever existed, are long gone. But one wonders whether the chants of “Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi, Oi, Oi” don’t hide an almost complete absence of self-understanding – which in turn reflects an equally complete disinterest in how this country came to be as it is and what that means for what it might become.

Now, declinism – the longing for a past, better, age – is as suspect as it is eternal. The reality, however, is that not so long ago, when distances were greater and the rest of the world more remote and at times far more threatening, Australians thought a great deal about Australia: the character of its people and of its culture; the role of geography and of other factors in shaping its institutions; the likely course its development would take.

Although history invariably informed this sort of reflection, it was not history, least of all in the Rankean, academic, sense of saying “what actually happened”; rather, it was an exploration of the many facets of a society, inspired by an intellectual tradition that reached back to Montesquieu’s emphasis on uncovering “the general spirit of a nation” and of “the human passions that move” its laws, its government, its rise or fall.

That tradition showed considerable resilience in Australia; it was certainly strong as recently as the 1960s, which saw Peter Coleman’s masterly collection Australian Civilisation, with remarkable essays by a host of distinguished commentators, including Max Harris, James MacAuley and of course Coleman himself – a fact that makes it all the more fitting that the style of inquiry it pursued has now been resurrected by Peter Coleman’s son William.

For as long as it endured, that tradition grappled with a gnawing question: would whatever it was that made Australia different persist? Nowhere was that question more sharply posed than in W.K. Hancock’s Australia. Published in 1931, Hancock’s great book remains our closest equivalent to Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America—the book that defines the idioms, turns of phrase and commonplace ideas through which the nation thinks. It is still, in my view, the indispensable starting point in exploring Australian exceptionalism.

Hancock was greatly influenced by Tocqueville: indeed, readers familiar with Democracy in America will find its traces on virtually every page of Hancock’s work. Like Tocqueville, Hancock saw many of the features he lamented in Australian democracy as the result of virtues taken to such extremes that they became vices. And like Tocqueville, he thought that phenomenon, of taking virtues to excess, was a characteristic feature of a new country.

In Tocqueville’s case, the virtue taken to excess was the pursuit of equality; in Hancock’s, it was the sense of fairness. Again, the Tocquevillian imprint is clear: Tocqueville had distinguished a “legitimate passion for equality”, which sought to raise social inferiors to the level of their superiors, from a “depraved” form of egalitarianism that aimed at social levelling; it is that depraved form of egalitarianism, which readily mutates into envy, that Hancock saw lurking in the Australian psyche.

Tocquevillian too is the mechanism that brings that about. Paradoxically, Tocqueville argued, envy grows more intense with the advance of equality. “Men’s hatred of privilege increases as privilege become rarer and less important,” he wrote. “The flame of democratic passion apparently blazes the brighter the less there is to feed it… when conditions are unequal, no inequality, however great, offends the eye. But amid general uniformity, the slightest singularity seems shocking and the more complete the uniformity, the more unbearable it seems.”

Moreover, the outcome of that process is an inescapable sense of dissatisfaction, since no amount of progress toward economic and social equality can calm the claim that more could be done: “The desire for equality becomes ever more insatiable as the degree of equality increases,” said Tocqueville, and since that ideal of perfect equality “recedes a bit further every day” as men pursue it, “they struggle, they tire, they grow bitter.”

In Australia, Hancock wrote, echoing Tocqueville, “there are no paupers … and nearly everybody has some property to defend; but the air is rent by the complaints of those who have less against those who have more.” Why was that? Precisely, he answered, because the near equality of conditions, “in a society which has little fixity of family and fortune” and in which “vulgarity is no less frequently observed in men whose incomes are large than in men whose incomes are moderate or small”, meant the better off did not seem to have any natural claim on their advantages.

From that sense of resentment, which came garbed in the rhetoric of fairness, derived the pathologies Hancock diagnosed in Australian democracy: the distrust of tall poppies and the philistine cult of the “middling standard”; the elevation into the central goal of politics of securing “average satisfactions for average people”; the resulting primacy of redistribution over wealth creation; and so the turn to the state, which alone could effect the redistribution that was being sought, with the harshness and strangeness of the natural environment making the resulting dependence of Australians on the state, conceived of as a “vast public utility”, all the more complete.

The combination of the relentless pursuit of fairness with the dependence on the state then produced what Hancock saw as the distinctive tone of Australian politics. In part, it was merely the result of generalised mistrust – the belief, that coexists with “mateship”, that there is always someone trying to take advantage of you. More fundamentally, however, it arose from the fact that the state could never meet the demands which had been placed on it. Assailed by a “swarm of petty interests”, and constrained by the persistent refusal of Australians – whom Hancock regarded as incurable romantics – to having willed the ends, will the means, the state could not but disappoint. There was consequently an incessant tone of exasperation in the political contest, which degenerated into stridency and pugilism.

Yet, for all that, both Tocqueville and Hancock had a fundamental optimism about the countries they studied. Tocqueville – who readily admitted that “in America … I sought an image of democracy itself, its penchants, character, prejudices, and passions” – drew many lessons from his assessment, but by far the most important was that democracy worked: equality did not inevitably degenerate into a bloodbath of terror. And because the progress of democracy was a “providential fact” – “it is universal, it is lasting, it constantly eludes all human interference, and all events as well as all men contribute to its progress”—what he saw in America gave him cause for optimism. As equality spread to the older countries, as it must, America would become less of an exception, instead setting a model for the rest of the world.

Hancock’s optimism took a different form. He did not believe Australia was a harbinger of the future, nor the laboratory incubating the experiments that would reshape society. Rather, he thought Australian democracy’s vices were the signs of its youth, with the childish insistence on fair shares of the cake being an extreme case in point. As it grew up and formed deeper roots, politics too would become more adult – more civil, better informed, more mindful of constraints: in short, more like things ought to be.

Thus was born the maturational theory of Australian democracy – a theory which certainly had many antecedents, but found full flower in Hancock’s Australia. It is easy to see a degree of Whiggery in it; and though none of its adherents were quite as simple-minded as all that, it made the question “Are we there yet?” – have we finally grown up? – into a national intellectual pastime.

From today’s perspective, the rise-to-national-maturity model seems redolent of an earlier era. And far from Australia maturing out of its infantile disorders, a compelling case could be made that our peers have, by one means or another, become more like us. Yes, far-reaching change has occurred; but instead of curing the disease, it may simply have acquired new forms.

.

There is, for example, solid evidence that as the traditional factors, such as social class and religious affiliation, that gave political allegiance a degree of stability, have declined, politics throughout the advanced democracies has become more intensely competitive. As a result, politicians everywhere face greater and more certain punishment when they err – injecting an increased degree of risk aversion into political systems and ensuring our leaders break the sound barrier every day running away from difficult issues. At the same time, oppositions stand a better chance of succeeding – which gives them greater incentives to obstruct when doing so weakens the incumbent. And with rivalry more marked, the shouting becomes all the louder, transforming the angry, exasperated tone Hancock saw as especially Australian into a global phenomenon.

One could readily multiply the examples of the spread of global infantilism. And it is surely true that as the 1960s tee-shirt proudly proclaimed, “You’re only young once, but you can be immature forever.” But despite the fact that our politics seem headed for the ultima thule of hopelessness, I am not convinced that condemns us to the sinking in the slough of despond. Perhaps I am enough of a Marxist – tendence Groucho – to believe that in democracies, the factors that give rise to the crisis also create the conditions for its resolution.

.

Even my sunny disposition, however, sees the darker side. It is not only the immediate circumstances that are of concern. Rather, allow me to close by returning where I started from: not so long ago, Australians thought a great deal, and seriously, about Australia – not so much as now perhaps about individual policies; but much more about national character and purpose, where we had come from and what that meant for where we were going. Now, in my opinion, they don’t.

As evidence, however slight, for that proposition, let me offer this observation. Although every day, a new edition of, or commentary on, Tocqueville reaches my desk, Hancock’s magnificent book – undoubtedly the single most influential work of analysis in our intellectual history – has been out of print for 40 years, and lies, gathering dust, on what is left of our great libraries. So this is my wish for Christmas: that this discussion will help provoke some interest in bringing Australia to a young audience; and that this new collection of essays, which William Coleman has so skilfully edited, will spark a revival of the great tradition of taking ourselves, as a country, seriously.