Chewing on John Howard’s preferred cultural diet

Opinion columnist Janet Albrechtsen marked John Howard’s 84th birthday today by talking of Australia’s cultural diet — appropriately via the following word salad, which runs for 75 exhausting words without a break.

Even now, nearly 16 years after he lost office, Howard’s ability to take the ­national temperature may have something to do with an enduring divide in this country between a small but loud group of cultural ­dieticians on the one hand, and a much larger group of Australians who don’t want to be lectured to by a group of elites who have fashioned themselves as moral guardians force-feeding ordinary folk their preferred cultural diet.

This continues The Australian‘s grand tradition of portraying the former prime minister as the human expression of mainstream Australia’s pre-political soul. In so doing, the paper offers Howard, and Howard offers the paper, another chance to slam the Indigenous Voice to Parliament.

“Shouldn’t we just be sitting down talking to each other? Not about the Voice, not about reparations, not about treaties, but just talking about how to lift up Aboriginal people, and put them in the mainstream of the community, finding out ways of doing it,” he says, having arguably just listed three possible ways of “lifting up Aboriginal people”.

What really stood out to us in the Crikey bunker was the characterisation of Howard in opposition to those who have “fashioned themselves as moral guardians force-feeding ordinary folk their preferred cultural diet”. You’d never see Howard doing that. Except, of course…

Marriage

In 2004, Howard decided that his preferred cultural diet excluded same-sex couples committing their lives to one another, and amended the Marriage Act to define marriage as “the union of a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others, voluntarily entered into for life”. The act had previously seen no need to offer a definition.

The stated aim was to “protect the institution of marriage”. Further, the government changed the Family Law Act “to ensure that same sex couples … will not be eligible as prospective adoptive parents under any multilateral or bilateral agreement concerning the adoption of children to which Australia is a party”.

Education

At the 50th anniversary bash for influential conservative journal Quadrant, Howard singled it out for praise on one particular topic: “Of the causes that Quadrant has taken up that are close to my heart, none is more important to me than the role it has played as counterforce to the black-armband view of Australian history. Until recent times, it had become almost de rigueur in intellectual circles to regard Australian history as little more than a litany of sexism, racism and class warfare.”

Howard took up with gusto the idea of “black-armband history” and “political correctness” during his time as prime minister. Not content with supporting historians Geoffrey Blainey and Keith Windschuttle, whose work argued that mainstream history had exaggerated the mistreatment of Indigenous Australians in the years after Europeans arrived, Howard went after the school curriculum. In 2007, he launched an Australian history policy amid criticisms that his final scheme was “overly prescriptive” and that he was bullying the states by tying funding arrangements to their adoption of the framework.

Howard has remained clear on his priorities for the cultural diet ever since. In 2012 he said: “The curriculum does not properly reflect the undoubted fact that Australia is part of Western civilisation; in the process it further marginalises the historical influence of the Judeo-Christian ethic in shaping Australian society and virtually purges British history from any meaningful role.”

The intervention

You want to talk about “moral guardians force-feeding ordinary folk their preferred cultural diet”? The Northern Territory intervention, undertaken in Howard’s last year as PM (supported and continued by the Labor Party) was undertaken in great haste and without consultation or engagement with local people and saw the army sent into Indigenous communities.

It implemented, among other things: the prohibition of alcohol in certain areas; the compulsory acquisition of 65 Aboriginal communities held under title provisions of the Native Title Act; the banning of pornography in designated areas; and removing customary law and cultural practice considerations from bail applications and sentencing in criminal trials.