Bushman's hat (Image: AAP/Josh Jerga)
(Image: AAP/Josh Jerga)

This is an edited extract from Graeme Turner’s The Shrinking Nation (UQP).

Australia has been experiencing a sustained period of accelerated sociocultural change, accompanied by existential threats from natural disasters and the COVID-19 pandemic, and punctuated by repeated cycles of political upheaval.

A great deal of what has occurred over the last decade and a half has been socially and culturally divisive, fracturing bonds of community and identity while frustrating the aspiration to move towards a positive and informed consensus about the kind of nation and society we wish to create. 

Indeed, it seems at times as if the capacity to adapt, to compromise, to progress or reform, and to rationally address the most urgent issues dividing our communities is simply beyond us. As Laura Tingle has written, our politicians, in particular, appear to have “forgotten how to govern”.

There is no shortage of suggestions about how Australia might address the state of the nation’s political culture and the broader sociocultural malaise Australians face. Contemporary commentators seize upon the daily modulations in the nation’s political culture as triggers for updated diagnoses of the nation’s ills and prescriptions for their treatment. Mostly, however, such prescriptions are to do with the political management of the economy rather than with the waves of sociocultural change Australia has seen in recent years.

These are not only economic issues, though. Australia has contracted a cultural condition that has social consequences — both specific and wide-ranging, immediate and long-term — for the nation. These can’t continue to be ignored, and it is notable that a number of state governments have gradually recognised this fact. While their responses only represent the beginning of what needs to be done, they do at least take on the task of addressing some of the social issues previous federal governments have been slow to acknowledge — by, for instance, increasing subsidies for childcare, exploring new ways of improving the delivery of rural health, funding the construction of more social housing, and committing significant political capital to renewable energy sources.

Australia now faces a substantial rethinking of the role of the state — of what we actually want our governments to do. That, in turn, and as many now argue, will necessitate a reorientation of our political culture to reinstate the centrality of governments, rather than markets, in determining the quality, the character and the social viability of our society. 

During the heyday of neoliberal economic policy, such a proposition would have been dismissed as heresy, but the pandemic has given us a reality check. That is why we are now hearing concerns about, for instance, the running-down of the public sector, the rise in inequality and disadvantage, the social consequences of gender inequity and the need for a public debate about just what kinds of services Australians want their governments to provide. 

Richard Denniss speaks for the mood of the moment when he says that it is time Australians asked this basic question: “What kind of country do we want to build?” The asking of that question, of itself, implies that we can no longer pretend to leave such a decision to the market.

This is a social, cultural and ethical question about what we believe is right, decent and necessary — not just what is “affordable”. However, this question has rarely been asked in recent years. Instead, and although trickle-down economics has been discredited, public debate about political choices has continued to prioritise what might be good for the economy, rather than what might be good for the culture, the society or the nation — or, indeed, for the poor as well as the rich.

Even now, and notwithstanding all we have learnt over the period of the pandemic, the default position for so much of the political debate that occurs in the public sphere still involves the core assumption that what is good for business must always, necessarily, be good for the nation.

We have been provided with repeated demonstrations that this is a false assumption. As I write, an Australia Institute report is attracting widespread attention for its finding that increased corporate profits, not rising wages, are most responsible for driving up Australia’s inflation. Such a finding is explosive, blowing apart years of fiscal policy and government talking points from both sides of politics. Even putting it like that, though, draws some of its teeth, such that this finding may not be understood for what it actually means. 

What it actually means is that ordinary Australians are finding it harder to make ends meet because corporations have been using the disrupted economic environment as cover for their decision to raise prices and supercharge their own profits. This comes as no surprise to government, of course. We know now that successive governments have pursued a deliberate policy of supporting the maximising of profits while suppressing growth in wages, all justified by the claim that this was in line with the orthodox strategies for effectively curbing inflation.

Australians need to seriously examine the social and cultural outcomes of what our economy now does, and to ask if these are the outcomes we desire (and, if they are not, to set about changing what the economy does). We also need to ask ourselves some serious historical questions: just how did Australia get to the point of implicitly regarding the enrichment of an ever-diminishing fraction of the population as the primary purpose of the nation? Why have the rest of us tolerated that? Why have our governments facilitated it? And how do we now turn that around?

The first step is to stop thinking of the nation as reducible to the economy. There is more to it than that. Once we dethrone the economy from its position of political pre-eminence, we can focus our attention on the making of an inclusive culture, a cohesive community and a fair and just society. The neoliberals’ fetishisation of the economy and faith in the market was sustained by the fact that most of the benefits it delivered went to those who were closest to, or had privileged access to, the sources of political power.

From where we sit today, it is reasonable to suggest that the nation would have been better served by improving the conditions of everyday life for all Australians, by establishing a humane and accessible safety net for those who need it, and by properly investing in the services that its citizens expect and need from their government — in health, education and aged care, for instance. If such considerations had framed our experience of the last 20 years, it is likely we would be living in a very different nation from the one we inhabit today.

And we have had such a policy orientation before. It is worth remembering that Australia has a history of believing in the value of the nation-building mission, and in the importance of actively working towards the development of a rich, diverse, equitable and inclusive culture. Classifying the making of the national culture as a second-order issue — one of interest only to an elite, self-interested class fraction — has had regrettable long-term consequences.

To our detriment, the political concentration on the economy failed to enliven the imagination of the national community, serving only to foster the instrumentalism and self-interested individualism which undermined a sense of belonging to the nation. Along the way, it created a downward spiral of deepening inequality and social division, ate away at the capacities of the state and diminished the quality of what many Australians have experienced as their way of life.

That’s a tough diagnosis, perhaps, but we are not at the end of the story yet. Notwithstanding the continuing problems we have examined, there remain grounds for hope of improvement, of making progress in fixing the shrinking nation.

When we look beyond the world of politics and the machinations of the political class, it is not so difficult to find examples of what a better version of our nation looks like.

Australia’s popular culture still regularly turns up reminders of the iconoclasm, invention and ingenuity that have long fed into mythologies of the national character and that continue to deliver many of our popular pleasures. The gleeful outburst of satire produced by our cartoonists, and television shows such as Shaun Micallef ’s Mad as Hell, in response to the Morrison “fistful of ministries” revelations, comes to mind here. Or the experience of listening to “Rampaging” Roy Slaven and HG Nelson riff for close to an hour on radio about the serendipity of the NRL’s Canterbury Bulldogs finding themselves a corporate sponsor with the name Sydney Tools. Or watching the extraordinary response of the nation’s children (and many of their parents) to Bluey.

There are regular signs of progressive change and expanding opportunity within the broader culture, too. We now have successful women’s competitions in all the major football codes, for instance, and in November 2021 the national women’s soccer team, the Matildas, attracted more than 36,000 fans to watch them play at Stadium Australia in Sydney. In cricket, a crowd of 86,000 turned out to watch Australia play India in the final of the Women’s T20 World Cup at the MCG in 2020. Recent choices for Australian of the Year, Grace Tame (2021) and Dylan Alcott (2022), recognised the value of activism on gender issues and the necessity for a genuine commitment to the inclusion of Australians with a disability.

We can see in the popular culture around us that the raw materials for a lively and vibrant culture are still there. The people’s nation may have shrunk but it hasn’t disappeared. It will only flourish to its full potential, however, if all its members are recognised, validated and offered dignity and respect. A community like that can turn the shrinking nation around.