Last year the Australian federal government, led by John Howard’s conservative Liberal Party, introduced legislation which tied significant school funding to compliance with certain conditions, including:
- Flying the Australian flag at the school.
- Displaying a poster identifying what the Education minister called “Australian Values” superimposed over a picture of World War I hero Simpson and his donkey.
In fact the values represented on the poster are unobjectionable. Many of them (“honesty”, “compassion”, “fair go”, “freedom”, and “integrity”) would seem to be directly at odds with the values displayed by John Howard’s government over recent years, but clearly they are values to aspire to rather than values to practise. It’s also amusing that Simpson himself was an illegal immigrant and merchant navy deserter, a socialist, a trades unionist and a “scruffy non-conformist.” All of which indicates that he was much closer to the true “Australian values”, now sadly in decline in our materialist culture, of mistrust of authority, identification with the underdog, and a sort of plainspoken earthy socialism represented in the Eureka Stokade and Waltzing Matilda.
What’s more the Liberal’s crude attempt at nationalism is easy to subvert. Both the Quaker high school in my neighbourhood and a small non-sectarian independent school have chosen to fly several flags, the Australian flag; the Koorie (Aboriginal nations) flag; the United Nations flag; and a selection of other flags related in some fashion to the schools or the children. It’s hard to see how the Government can object to this without making the real intention of the legislation embarrassingly obvious.
Because it’s no secret what’s really going on here. John Howard mentioned at the time that he would prefer the Australian anthem to be sung in school. Right wing pundits, and even Government ministers were, and still are, using the concept of a cohesive society to claw back multiculturalism and provide cover for a racist attack on the Muslim community. Before September 11th, John Howard was famously visible at every major sporting event, now he appears at every War memorial.
It’s a xenophobic attempt to appeal to jingoistic nationalism, which is quite foreign to Australia. We’ve never saluted the flag or pledged allegiance. Our heroes are sportswomen and bushrangers rather than warriors. But it’s also clear that this project has been far less controversial than the Liberals expected. When the flag legislation was introduced it was buried, rider style, in a funding bill and accompanied by motherhood requirements that time be spent exercising to combat childhood obesity. The Labour party voiced only token objection and the subtext was never examined – it falls in the “too hard” basket since voicing it sounds unpatriotic and overly intellectual. The Labour party, sadly, never manages to sound the slightest bit intelligent these days; they appear to have learnt all too well the folksy lesson of George Bush following Paul Keating’s demise.
At the same time there are the history wars. As Gideon Polya points out, Australian history has always ignored the black genocide and rewritten the evils of colonialism, but on the other hand it’s a history which is hardly taught. Few students bother with it and the public’s view is that “nothing much happened.” Howard has recently begun moves to increase its prominence in the curriculum.
Australia is governed by a party which happily exploits racism to its advantage, and has made immense political capital out of fear and xenophobia. John Howard is taking advantage of a rise in patriotic militarism by appearing with troops and at war memorials. He is also encouraging the rise of that attitude, by putting flags, posters, and sanitised Australian history in schools. In the current permanent, if phony, state of war, at a time when the world faces real and difficult environmental and human challenges, this sort of blind simplistic intolerant jingoism is a serious impediment to dialogue, cooperation, and constructive solutions.