A bit of a drag: what Eurovision tells us about the federal budget

Conchita's performance did not just challenge norms, but the politics of norms. There is nothing radically new or startling in drag performance. In a world two decades since the film Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) and the positioning of Sydney's Mardi Gras as a central economic, investor and tourist attraction, the very ideas of a play with gender do little to challenge gender norms today. Rather, the challenge to norms can be seen in the context of Conchita's performance not in 'imitating' cross-gender, but in pointing clearly to that imitation by presenting herself as a woman with a beard.

It is also a subversion made in juxtaposition to the lyrics of her winning song, Rise Like a Phoenix.

Peering from the mirror
No, that isn't me
Stranger getting nearer
Who can this person be?

The person referred to in the lyrics is not Conchita herself but, when heard in the context of the performance as 'bearded lady' is gendered humanity itself. The lyrics point to the future of a humanity that cannot recognise itself within the out-dated norms of a two-gender system. It is a post-gendered humanity that will "Rise like a phoenix, out of the ashes" in such a way that the broad, complex, varied and diverse ways of living, being and performing gender are recognised as legitimate, real, and always acceptable. Beyond categories, human beings in their complexity always resist and exceed categorisation.

The political future that Conchita's performance calls for, and sign-posts as being culturally 'in demand', is a future of embracing and accepting diversity, whether that be around gender, sexuality or difference.

The Politics of Categories versus the Politics of Diversity

In contrast to the demand for diversity that underlies the Eurovision performance, the Australian Commonwealth Treasurer's performance (for being a Treasurer is very surely a kind of drag performance, perhaps involving props such as a cigarette-holder like Audrey Hepburn drag, or even a manly and somewhat disdainful cigar) on Budget night signals a resistance to the politics of diversity.

In the new budget, to be a person is to be assigned a category still. The implications are complex, but most people within the budget are deemed to fall into the categories of low, middle or high income earners. In claiming to spread the budgetary pain, Mr Hockey signals that it will affect all categories, but what remains submerged is not only that it will cause far greater hardship for the lowest earners, but it will actively prevent them from moving from one category of income earning to a higher one. Categories remain the same, and yet the Treasurer's catch-cry concept of opportunity is inequitably distributed across these categories.

The principal of equitable redistribution, a primary role of taxation, is of course to eradicate categories of earning or at least to remove the disparities in opportunity such categories entails.

Within media commentary, one is somewhat differently assigned to the categories of budget winners (medical research, small/medium business owners, school chaplains and, interestingly, ballerinas) or losers (the sick, university students, public servants, pensioners, the young unemployed and Indigenous persons). Barely a glance is needed at these examples to see that the winners are, in general, the already-secure (usually) and the losers are, in general, the most vulnerable in Australian society.

Without wanting to suggest that Europe is necessarily acting in an ethical, considered or politically-progressive way, it is notable that on Sunday night millions celebrated the post-category discourse of Conchita's win for the vulnerable group of those who do not fit narrow gender norms (a win for all gendered persons), while 48 hours later in Australia we bemoan the loss for the vulnerable in a budget that, economically, will fix the status quo.