Reflections on the History Wars: The political battle for Australia's future

I have never understood why the Howards and the Blaineys et al are so defensive, so resistant to novelty and to progress. They are more than conservatives, they're reactionaries.

Conservatives gradually, if somewhat reluctantly, accept change. Reactionaries not only resist change, they seek to reverse it. Understanding and acknowledging the past and moving on to bigger and better things is anathema to them.

They absolutely insist on their view and the lessons they see in our history. Yet in their insistence, their "proprietorialness" their "derivativeness" and their rancour, they reduce the flame and energy within the nation to a smouldering incandescence. What they effectively do is crimp and cripple our destiny. It's like suffering from some sort of anaemia; robbing the political blood of its energy.

The problem for the Howards and the Blaineys is that their story is simply not big enough for Australia.

No great transformation can come from their tiny view of us and their limited faith in us.

Their failure is not simply one of crabbiness or rancour; it's a failure of imagination, a failure to read our historical coordinates correctly but usefully to move to a bigger construct, a bigger picture as to who we are and what we can be. That's the real job of political leadership.

Their timidity not only diminishes their own horizon, it is a drag on the rest of us. The country always has to make its progress despite them. They never help. They have always to be dragged along and they will only accept a new norm when someone else has struggled to put it into place.

But the fact is, their view will not prevail. They cannot win because they have no policy framework to win with. And deep in their tiny, timorous hearts they know it.

The undertaking is simply too big for them.

This is why you get all this thrashing about in the press and why we are drenched in the babble of the lickspittles and tintookies around them. And it's just that, babble. It's babble because at the heart of their wrong-headed campaign is an attempt to contain and censor the human spirit, to muffle, muzzle and vitiate it.

Their exclusiveness, whether we are talking about White Australia in the past or boat people now, relies on constructing arbitrary and parochial distinctions between the civic and the human community. Who is in and who is out. Who is owed possession. Who has rights.

If you ask what is the common policy between the Le Pens, the Terrablanches, Hansons and the Howards of this world, in a word, it is "citizenship". And it has always been. Who is in and who is out. Who is approved of.