Team Australia

At the beginning of the 21^st century approximately a million Australians and their families lived and worked overseas. Virtually all of them have high-level and desirable skills, and in the most diverse fashion. So there are technicians in Saudi Arabia, musicians and professors in Europe, engineers in Japan, journalists in London, actors in Hollywood, chefs in Hong Kong and Los Angeles, designers in Canada.

They have not gone away in disgust or because there is no work. Far from it - they are simply in demand. Those encountered are proud of their nationality and intend to come back, especially to raise a family. In London Australians seeking temporary work are assisted by a general reputation that Australians have a high work ethic and a pleasant manner, quite apart from high skill and educational levels.

This is something of a contrast from the 1970s, let alone the 1950s, when Australians overseas, especially in England, were seen frequently as noisy uncultured louts.

One estimate is that there are 6 million Americans living and working overseas, or about 2 per cent of the population. If that is correct the Australian proportion is about twice as high, being close to 5 per cent.

The world of the 21^st century, we are constantly told, is to be a global world. On the evidence Australians seem to able to prosper in it, and there are enough of them for it to be suggested that they deserve a special seat in Parliament.

For every Australian abroad there is almost one foreign national in Australia. Not all immigrants want to become citizens. Australia has 900,000 permanent residents who are yet to seek naturalisation. But it also has about the same number of citizens who live and work in other countries, but who don’t, so far as we know, seek to become citizens of those countries.

From time to time ‘Australia’ looks like the team you belong to or the team you support, rather than an easily defined political society of which you are a citizen or a potential citizen.

It is plain that the world is becoming more global in the sense that people from all countries who have portable and precious skills find that they can move around the world and work. International travel is a way of life for millions around the world; many Australians now are affluent enough to consider the annual overseas holiday as simply part of their ordinary expenditure. The skilled young find they can move around the world improving their history and geography while earning a decent living.

Citizenship is, nonetheless, a nagging matter for the Australian government. Over the past twenty years a good deal of money has been spent in endeavouring to explain to adults and to school pupils why being a citizen is simply better and more honourable than just being a resident. The website of the Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs proclaims, in the language of a car salesman, ‘There has never been a better time to become an Australian citizen’.

Yet if citizenship involves taking an active interest in the affairs of the nation, then it is uncomfortably true that Australian citizens seem to have opted out of a lot of that. Less then 2 per cent belong to political parties; in the 1970s the comparable figure was closer to 4 per cent. Australian party membership figures are lower than those ruling in other democracies, mostly because compulsory voting removes the need for large teams of party workers to get the reluctant out of their houses on polling day.

It is worth noting, at the same time, that of the 17 countries considered in How Australia Compares, all but Japan showed the same decline over time: on average party membership has halved over thirty years. Active citizenship everywhere is much less obvious than it used to be.

The negotiation of a free trade agreement with the USA in 2004 exemplified the issue. Given that the American population is fifteen times larger than the Australian, and the disparity between the economies is even greater, a complete free trade agreement between the two countries might be thought to be something that could raise issues of nationhood for the smaller country. And indeed it appeared to, right up to the elections in October, when exit polls suggest that it finally didn’t matter at all.

In any case the terms of the agreement were complex, transparency was dim, and the issue was one that a reasonable and interested citizen might think was simply too hard. Ultimately both sides of politics were in favour, and that reduced the likelihood of partisan dispute. Yet the indifference of the bulk of the electorate before and after the election was marked.

Citizenship comes with responsibilities as well as rights. Perhaps this is not a time when externally derived responsibilities are attractive to most people. Perhaps, as our society grows more technologically and socially complex, the important issues in public policy simply become too difficult for people to comprehend unless they are prepared to devote a very great deal of time to them.

But it is as though for many people, perhaps the majority, living and working in Australia has become disconnected from the notion of the country itself and its future, disconnected from the notion of nation-building.

There is certainly an urge to understand about Australia and its history. The rediscovery of Anzac day, especially by the young, says something about a felt need to find valid symbols of nationhood and belonging. Something like 10,000 people (some of them New Zealanders) gather each year at the Gallipoli battlefield itself to remember the landing and its aftermath. The celebration of the 150^th anniversary of the Eureka Stockade at the end of 2004, the controversy over what ought to be the themes of the displays in the new National Museum of Australia, the widespread interest in local history throughout regional Australia - these are all indications that a new sense of being Australian is developing.

Australians may still not know who they are, but they now know a great deal about who they were and how they have changed. As has been argued already, from the 1960s publishers have discovered a book-buying public anxious to know about Australia in every way. Tens of thousands of books have been published, and the flow continues.

Indeed, the most powerful outcome of the research conducted by academics in Australia, more powerful by far than anything done in medicine, technology or the sciences, has been the transformation of the knowledge of Australians, their society and their environment. What was initially academic work has been transmuted into school syllabus material, into newspaper stories, into radio and television series, into films, into more books still. Australians are today vastly better educated about themselves than was the case in 1951.

Defining ourselves positively is a problem, because comparisons are automatically involved. It is still much easier to say who we are not, and then to emphasise what we were for. If Australia is to be more than just the place we live in, it needs a future as well as a present and a past. The Australian project has always been straightforwardly comparative: to build a better society than the one the immigrant left.