Keeping government honest is up to all of us

Two weeks ago, a number of people in the Australian community, myself included, raised doubts about a proposal from the federal government to force school children to take part in daily flag raising and National Anthem singing ceremonies.

The point made by me, and others, was that this smacked of reactive sugar-coated US-style patriotism in the wake of the Bali tragedy, and that one can never force another to be patriotic. The point has also been made that the Australian Flag, for many, symbolises Australia as Terra Nullius –a fiction that the High Court laid to rest with its Mabo decision in 1992.

This contrarian view was all too much for those whom the English commentator Christopher Hitchens describes, as "the voices of piety". On 3AW I was interviewed by Neil Mitchell who accused me of "irresponsibility" and "elitism"! The Australian newspaper wrote a pompous editorial questioning the right of those of us who dissent from this example of patriotic fervour to raise the issue of whether or not we need to change our Flag.

And when some of us questioned the way in which our Nation has conducted itself in the past 12 months on the matter of asylum seekers and indicated that if we are going to talk about patriotism then this might be a relevant matter to deal with – as is the running sore of our past treatment of indigenous Australia – we were told that these matters have nothing to do with flag waving.

Well, actually they do have something to do with it!

If any nation is to be serious about what it stands for, then there must be a national dialectic. We must always hear the dissentient voices, listen to the oppressed, and ask – could these voices be right after all? Is the language that these people and groups use a language of utility or merely decorative, as the Canadian writer John Ralston Saul would put it?

And who is to listen to these voices if our government and other political actors will not? If so many elements of our media are prepared to sell copy on the basis of slamming dissent, raising fears, demonising individuals and groups, and accepting without question, the spin doctors of governments (the Children Overboard scandal being the most frightening example of this!), then who is left to listen and seek to influence the forces of bleakness and uniformity?

Might I suggest: it is all of us. It is incumbent on all of us to heed the call of Socrates, and remember that, again as John Ralston Saul notes: "doubt is central to a citizen-based society; that is, to democracy."

And with this sense of doubt must come the capacity to remain aloof from the daily flurry of activity. Alfred Deakin, writing in November 1910, near the end of a remarkable life, noted that although he lived "at the heart of things…with pulses oftener at fever heat than those of the most confirmed gambler or speculator, I feel and have always felt ‘aloof’…"

This aloofness, coupled with a capacity for reflective doubt, is what so many leaders in Australia lack today. The voices of dissent, about which I spoke earlier, are not being listened to by our leaders, because they have little capacity of time for insight, no capacity to be as Deakin was, aloof.

Too many in public life today are driven by a dangerous and corrosive cocktail of pollsters’ focus groups and segments of the media who want to see the world in terms of black and white.

I say dangerous and corrosive because the liberal democratic values that have traditionally underpinned our society are today under threat from within.

While there is understandable attention on the region and the capacity of terrorism to influence events, the doubter and the aloof among us, will hear the dissentient voices within our own country.

They will hear the asylum seekers locked in inhumane conditions on the stony ground out of Port Augusta. They will hear those who speak out against the government’s attempts at blackmailing legislators who doubt the wisdom of draconian anti-terrorist legislation being passed into law, because they know that once we head down the road of intolerance and repression, the terrorists have won.

They will hear the voices of those who are fined exorbitant sums of money by Centrelink for being five minutes late for an interview, under the judgemental mutual-obligation welfare policies that are now the favourite tool for government to further divide our social cohesion by creating the deserving versus the non-deserving poor.

They will listen to the thousands of decent Muslims who live in our community, who share our values, and who as appalled at the acts of terror committed in the name of that religion as we are – and they will understand that the slaughter of millions, the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, and the removal of young Indigenous people from their families was all done in the name of another religion, Christianity.

They will question the relevance of symbols in 21^st century Australia such as a Queen as Head of State or a flag that reflects only 200 years of a nation’s history.

They will see headlines like ‘Courts soft on rapists’ and question whether the ritual of an election-time law and order auction by political parties and the tabloid media serves any purpose whatsoever in dealing with the societal structures and conditions that lead to the commission of crime.

And I could go on.

The point is that we have an obligation at times like the present, to refuse to succumb to the majority simply for the sake of surrendering to what Emile Zola called, "this sombre obstinacy of public opinion".

When we are confronted by others who tell us that 'now is not the time' to raise an issue, or that all you are doing is being divisive, then we should reach again to into Hitchens’ marvellous Letters to a Young Contrarian. He rightly urges a "long and risky life" where "only an open conflict of ideas and principles can produce any clarity". Conflict may be painful, but the painless solution does not exist and the pursuit of it leads to the painful outcome of mindlessness and pointlessness.