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Battlers, Refugees and the Republic: John Howard’s Language of Citizenship

Nick Dyrenfurth

Despite his recent fourth consecutive election victory, John Howard’s greatest legacy for the position of Australian prime minister is unlikely to be viewed in terms of policy development but, rather, the language with which he addressed and sought to influence Australian society. Howard’s policy interventions, or lack thereof, have been the source of continued academic and polemical writing. However, while critics such as Judith Brett have accurately drawn together the assorted threads and inspiration of his language, much analysis has floated free of institutional circumstances. In this article I will explain and contextualise the importance of his discourse in relation to the Australian polity, seeking to avoid the often-reactionary criticism Howard receives, which is frequently removed from a critique of the institutional paradigms that legitimate and indeed encourage his languages. The three disparate themes I will discuss, battlers, refugees and the republic, are instructive in regards to Howard’s sense of citizenship. Australian citizenship is bound up in the nature of Australian institutions and their historical formation. The narrative of whiggish or epochal change within societies and amongst nation- states often obfuscates the longer-term ideological and structural continuities at play within the relations and discourses between individuals, classes and institutions of the state. Language is representative of, and reinforces, such structures and tendencies. Political discourse helps create Benedict Anderson’s notion of ‘imagined community’,1 as well as setting the limits of action, thought and possibility. Citizenship has been linked intimately to the rise of the modern nation-state. At the moment Anderson’s now-famous ‘strangers’ were imagining themselves in abstract community, so too were individuals and the institutions of state beginning to develop a relationship with one another. In the intervening years between Robert Menzies’s prime ministership and the last decade of the twentieth century, it has been argued that Australian society was remade. This is articulated within both admonishing and more celebratory accounts as the undoing of the ‘Australian way’.2 With a sense of crisis and resulting urgency, political economy was transformed amid a period of intensified globalisation. Institutions that had sustained traditional frameworks were either dismantled or interrogated. A previously reassuring cultural homogeneity was both materially and symbolically threatened by diverse migration and notions of multiculturalism. Links to Britain had, for all practical intents and purposes, been severed, resulting in an increasingly anachronistic and monarchical formal head of state. The idea of the British citizen subject carried little meaningful status for Australian citizens. Scholars have documented the legal and administrative ‘ad hoc’ evolutions of Australian citizenship.3 Yet the formal category of Australian citizenship remains contested and the subject of much national debate. In the absence of definitive constitutional or statutory meaning, it was the language of citizenship that filled Dyrenfurth.qxd 22/12/2004 3:54 PM Page 184

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the ‘vacuum’. Australian citizenship has been the (at times uneasy) admixture of ideals and practice, inclusion and exclusion.4 Moreover, it has often been infused with varying degrees of morality, with civic citizenship positioned as a ‘desirable activity’.5 The language of Australian citizenship legitimises and structures discourse, practice and content, and usually claims the interest of the whole in the name of social harmony.6 Mainstream politics has colonised this discursive space; each major party acts within this paradigm, seeking to derive meaning and supremacy, shaping a story of the nation that will create their meanings of past, present and future. For much of its history, Labor privileged its role in socially harmonistic nation-building, interpellating citizens through their primary identity as workers. The term ‘citizen’ was a vexed one for Labourists, its abstraction conflicting with Labor’s idealisation of the practicality of the worker (and politician). For Australian Liberals, the dilemma was less problematic. They explicitly interpelated citizens as individuals and families, arguing for a moral conception of the nation above the fractious ties of class and other fragmentary social groupings, in ‘the language of respectability, deference to Britain and support for the institutions of state’.7 A full account of citizenship must emphasise the highly symbolic, rhetorical and iconographical tools that have defined, and themselves been defined by, public discourse.8 The language of citizenship is never static, being historically contingent and specific. It draws upon and adapts past discourses, as both tradition and present guides to action. How Australians, particularly the nation’s leaders, have ‘imagined’ and ‘argued’ the citizen has framed the boundaries of citizenship. There is an important caveat to such a prioritisation of language: it must act within a certain social reality, rather than necessarily governing social life itself. To understand citizenship more fully, we need to explore its significant intricacies, paying close attention to various constructions of language that have historically utilised (while often simultaneously admonishing) certain peoples within the abstraction and increasing mediation of the public sphere. According to Helen Irving, Australian citizenship developed from the nineteenth century onward as a social construction, rather than a formal political or legal category: [A] concern with citizenship as a particular type of community, imbued with a particular character, has been consistent in Australian history, and the advent of citizenship law has had little impact upon it.9 The early citizen ‘would be a type of person found within the legal category of British subject, but having extra characteristics or qualifications’; thus, ‘the political rights we most readily associate now with citizenship were in this rhetoric not what defined a citizen but what followed from being a citizen’.10 As practice and language demonstrate, the tradition of the imagined type and character has extended (however imperfectly) into the present. In the absence of adequate constitutional or statutory explication, the theoretical notion of a language of Australian citizenship is suggestive, both theoretically and practically. Historically, the language of citizenship has been dominated by the intertwined notions of work and independence, infused with a sense of national identity and moral character.11 For Labor, work was the means by which one could realise independence. In Liberal discourse, it was the mere

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representation of more intrinsic individual character and (male) judgement, supplemented by notions of duty and service. Such contingent constructions have been increasingly crowded by ‘new competing languages’,12 challenging the homogenous identity of Australians through the notions of race, gender and even consumerism. Nevertheless, the mainstream language of citizenship remains important, actively shaping the experiences of our society and its members. John Howard’s language is the focus of a growing body of academic and journalistic literature, which generally seeks to admonish, rather than search for, the intertwining of the structural, ideological and personal dimensions within his contingent discourse.13 As Paul Strangio argues in his recent review of the edited collection The Howard Years,14 such ‘modulated and sustained moral fury’ is unlikely to engage in ‘constructive dialogue’, and merely scratches the surface of Howard’s tactical politicking. By contrast, Brett suggests: Howard’s opponents have been misled by his own description of himself as a social conservative and so missed his takeover of the symbolic repertoire of Australia’s radical nationalist past to reconnect Australian liberalism with ordinary Australian experience.15 Indeed, in her opinion, ‘Howard has emerged as the most creative Australian Liberal since Menzies, as he … reworked the images, themes and arguments of Liberal Party philosophy’. In Brett’s view Howard, like Menzies, draws on but adapts an ‘inherited political language … recreating a language of social unity and cohesion for the Liberals’.16 While this is undoubtedly true, and Howard is clearly a successful practitioner of Australian liberalism, I would argue that Howard is symptomatic of, and bound up within, a larger institutional and ideological problem: the reliance upon a historically exclusivist discourse that structures and contains collective possibilities. We have reached the contingent point of the continued failure and reproduction of a political culture, as expressed through institutional and ideological settings. Howard, as prime minster, has indeed constructed a coherent and ostensibly consensual language.17 Set-piece speeches and ad hoc interviews both demonstrate the growing vitality and confidence of Howard’s language after 1996 and especially from 2001. Howard’s language spoke of ‘battlers’ and ‘elites’, and was eventually wielded against the embodied form of the refugee. Such language fetishises both an ideal type and the institutions that create and sustain such citizens, while objectifying others as either undesirable or threatening to such formations.

Telling stories: Paul Keating and the moment of John Howard John Howard, and his public sense of self and nation, is best considered with reference to the prime ministership and personal style of Labor’s Paul Keating. While mainstream politics of the 1980s and 1990s often saw citizenship ideals supplanted by an abiding faith in the virtues of free-market economics, the leaders of both the Labor and Liberal parties continued to speak the civic language of social harmony and independence despite its contradictions with institutional structure and reality. Keating assertively proclaimed it, seeking to transform ‘the culture and the structure of Australia’.18 Howard lamented its alleged passing. Approaching the 1996 election, which Howard won convincingly, Keating and

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Howard both contended that economic realities — the imperatives of globalisation and domestic competitiveness — required continued economic reform, and an ‘accompanying shift in conviction and attitudes in the political culture’.19 Both also came to realise that such discourse was electorally unattractive without reference to wider notions of national identity and cohesion. An economistic language of citizenship was simply not enough. Keating’s citizen was bound up within the quest for a new Australian identity, his government’s ‘big picture’ message. Keating believed that he was acting within the best Labor tradition, responding as ‘Ben Chifley and John Curtin would have responded’.20 For Keating, the ‘last twenty-five years makes a great story’,21 and citizenship was integrally bound up within his new Australian story and identity. Keating’s was an appropriation of the radical nationalist story of Labor as the vanguard of progress, which resonated with his Irish Catholicism. The Australian citizen was evidently faced with a choice: We can enter the new century a unique country with a unique future … a diverse and tolerant society, trading actively in Asia and the rest of the world; secure in our identity … If we hesitate; if we look back … let us ponder, let us form a committee, let us have a convention, let us listen to what our rump has to say, let us drift — if we do that, we will lose the chance. There really is no limit … So long as we move quickly.22 The important notion in Keating’s language of choice was speed. Australian citizens could either move quickly or risk ossifying. Keating’s story of a socially harmonistic, collective capitalism, a ‘modern Australian social democracy’,23 portrayed a citizen in flux, speeding along the information superhighway toward a modern, free-trading and republican Australia that was comfortable within Asia. In a symbolic response to this economically deterministic language, and in partial explanation of his 1996 election victory, Howard sought to combine the continued neo-liberal reform of Australian political economy with his conservative assumption that political culture, imbued with some ‘essence’ of Australian values, was highly resistant to change.24 For Howard, it was ‘not for governments, or indeed oppositions, to impose their stereotypes on the Australian society’.25 Thus, Keating’s ‘story’ was a politically charged, apologetic and ‘Celtic’-biased affront to Howard’s mainstream cultural continuum of ‘enduring national symbols’.26 As Brett points out: Howard [unlike previous Liberal leaders] was not disabled by Keating’s cultural issues, he disagreed with them profoundly and drew on the party’s traditions to develop a strategy to counter them.27 In response, Howard rationalised in a conservative mode: Modern government is about facing the challenge of very rapid change but also remembering that there are certain stabilisers in society that provide reassurance and support when a society is undergoing great change particularly of an economic character.28 In Howard’s language, citizenship was partially and selectively defined against the conservative and publicly imagined fear of change. A change of an ‘economic character’ is here disconnected from the collective experiences and anxieties of

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society. Howard spoke an older language of idealised independence, emphasising independent families living the egalitarian dream. He invoked an older, moral image of the (Liberal) citizen and political community as a bulwark against the unrelenting, yet still necessary, tide of modernising economic reform. Society and the citizen were organic beings, to be conservatively guided and protected. In this rhetoric Keating became the embodied threat to established political culture and received identity. After Howard’s election in 1996, the attack became more explicit, despite Keating’s demise. As Howard propounded: ‘there is also a mood developing in Australia. Some call it political correctness. Some call it social censorship. Some call it intimidatory attitudes to free speech’.29 Howard’s language of citizenship idealised a mainstream culture and citizen under threat: There is a frustrated mainstream … which sees government decisions increasingly driven by the noisy, self-interested clamour of powerful vested interests … the mainstream feel utterly powerless to compete with such groups … Under us, the views of all particular interests will be assessed against the national interest and the sentiments of mainstream Australia.30 Howard’s quarrel lay with inappropriate, divisive contestations. In rhetorical combat with his imaginary mainstream were ‘the designer forms of discrimination in the 1990s … race, gender and sexual preference’.31 For Howard, these peripheral discourses, devised and encouraged by cosmopolitan new class elites, unnecessarily divided Australians. His task at the 1996 election was ‘the politics of reassurance’,32 but also the politics of ‘praise’ and ‘grievance’.33 However, enacting this politics of reassurance, and a social reality of ‘relaxed and comfortable’ citizens, entailed the deeply contradictory process of emphasising crisis.34 Howard’s thesis implied crisis, a vaguely defined threat to middle-class values and ethics imagined as the monolithic ‘Australian way’. For Howard, these values constituted a ‘social essence’ of which national society is but one expression.35 Constructed within this paradigm were the good citizens: ‘battlers’, similar but not identical to Menzies’s ‘forgotten people’.36 Howard’s battlers were an attempt to express a language of citizenship through cross-class references. Menzies had appealed to his forgotten people so that he too would not be forgotten. Howard appealed to his battlers to identify with him, a political battler: ‘His apparent vulnerability was part of his appeal to a vulnerable nation’.37 After 1996, Howard’s battlers, much like Howard himself, became a more assertive force, focusing around a set of allegedly mainstream values and beliefs. The imagery and rhetoric of the battler is one of the key ways in which Howard sought to appeal to the electorate.

Imagining a constituency: citizens as battlers John Howard returned to the Liberal leadership in January 1995. He turned implicitly to the concept and language of citizenship. In Howard’s opinion: Australia faces fundamentally different challenges to … the Menzies era. But Liberalism faces the ongoing challenge of building an enduring and broad-based constituency across the great mainstream … a new constituency has galvanised

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around new issues and in support of Liberal priorities. It includes many of the ‘battlers’ and families struggling hard to get ahead.38 Howard’s newfound empathy with battlers was predated by the socially conservative policy document Future Directions, which was published by the Liberal and National parties.39 Written in 1988 and not explicitly authored by Howard, it bears his imprint. The language prefigures that of Howard during the 1996 election. His themes of security and threat are precisely anticipated: Insecurity replaced certainty as people came to feel they had lost their way, their security and their sense of direction … many came to fear change even more. Taught to be ashamed of their past, apprehensive about their future, pessimistic about their ability to control their own lives let alone their ability to shape the character of their nation as a whole, many came to see change as being in control of them instead of them being in control of change.40 From 1996 onward, Howard’s rhetoric grew in line with his prime ministerial authority and seeming electoral popularity. It was, however, initially circumscribed by notions of threat and uncertainty. Howard was concerned with the imagined threat posed to his own middle class, but his appeal resonated much more broadly. Cross-class battlers operated in a new three-tier class system, sandwiched between powerful elites, and powerful unionists and welfare dependents.41 Battlers, like the forgotten people before them, imbued with (aspirant) middle-class values, were ‘dominant in numbers but weak in influence [and organisation]; ordinary yet assailed by the “special” and the powerful from either side’.42 In a 1995 speech, Howard claimed that under Keating there had been a ‘major decimation of the middle class’.43 Howard went onto claim that: the great egalitarian innocence, that egalitarian sprit … the birthright of most Australians only a short time ago, had significantly disappeared … it will be his [Keating’s] political epitaph that the Labor man from Bankstown did … betray the battlers of Australian society.44 In this sleight of hand, Australia was, and is, intrinsically egalitarian; but battlers, by want of their shared fears, values and sense of ‘betrayal’, are coded as cross-class: the working class is made obsolete not only due to its material wants but also by its aspiration to middle-class membership. The success of this rhetoric meant that Howard returned the Liberal Party to government on 2 March 1996 in an emphatic fashion. Over the next three years, Howard further developed his thesis of threat, as he struggled to assert himself as genuine prime ministerial material amid taunts from his ‘partisan elites’. Howard’s retributive impulse toward his doubters was transplanted onto the aspirations of the mainstream. Howard’s conceptualisation of citizenship would thus be based upon a vaguely defined threat to the conflated material interests, values and security of his imagined Australian middle classes. He was attempting to weld his conception of culture and identity to the values of those groups reinforced by the positive story of Australian achievement. Howard reflected an ongoing conservative displeasure with the standard interpretation of Australian history. Keating’s Labor, in Howard’s terms, was committed to:

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quite ruthless use of history … to marginalise the contribution of the liberal- conservative side … and entrench the Labor Party as the only true product of Australia’s political soil.45 However, rather than repudiating the radical nationalist account and the mythologising of an Australian type, Howard sought to colonise such meanings. He raided the ‘Australian legend for the Liberal Party’,46 filling its iconography and rhetorical historicity with meaning for the present. As Brett points out, this appropriation is perhaps not entirely unexpected, as the 1980s saw the Australian legend revived in popular culture as a reaction to globalisation, while Labor was increasingly uneasy with the exclusionary aspects of such an ethos.47 Thus, Howard’s citizen would be drawn into this ‘battle for history’, being a historical figure infused with a proper, and what Curran calls a ‘resolved’, sense of national identity: of citizenship as ‘practical mateship’.48 As Howard confidently contended on the fiftieth anniversary of Australian citizenship, ‘the true identity of an Australian citizen … was forged long before 1949’.49 Curran rightly points to the contradictions and sense of finality within Howard’s language, but omits the ideological and practical uses inherent therein. As Stuart Hall reminds us (drawing on Geetz), there exists a ‘mediatory role played by rhetoric and symbolization in the elaboration of ideological formations’.50 The concept of the battler was also linked by Howard to themes of mateship, the family and national identity. Yet Howard’s mateship was a deeply contradictory and highly selective reading, decrying class conflict. It ostensibly railed against his attachment to neo-liberal, individualistic economics and the continued role of a foreign British monarchy. Moreover, mateship was historically the domain of the labour movement and the Australian Labour Party. So, in eulogising the efforts of ‘digger’ Alec Campbell, Howard in fact glossed over his radical trade-unionist background. Howard’s sense of Australian mateship and identity saw its fiery birth in the ANZAC legend (fighting for, not against, the British Empire), rather than in the class conflict of the 1890s. This sense of the legend as forged against an enemy Other in war, rather than internally in the form of class and material conflict, lends itself to conflation with other ‘foreign’ threats. For Howard, disassociation with the monarch would sever one of his links with the imagined past: the service of his own father and grandfather during the first world war. While Howard’s sense of national identity is deeply personal, it is also clearly partisan. Speaking on Australia Day in 1999, he sought to place his citizen in a long historical continuum of independent and autonomous individuals: Australia’s fortune lies not so much with parliaments or business, or political parties or money markets but with individual Australians … All of us accountable to ourselves, to those around us, to the future itself … It has always been so. A century ago, Sir Henry Parkes … knew, as I know now, that self-confidence and self-esteem, that determination and fair play, success itself, can be the characteristics of a nation only while its citizens possess these virtues and hold dear those values.51 In Howard’s view ,‘the great miracle of individual Australian citizenship’ was an ‘immense privilege’.52 The nature of this apparently naturally constituted ‘miracle’ and ‘privilege’ was left open to interpretation. Yet in an earlier context

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Howard had argued that ‘I believe in traditional values of Australia: egalitarianism, strong families, entrepreneurial opportunity, hard work, Protestant work ethic’.53 His privileged citizen, enshrined in a natural form of statis, was an imagined type possessing certain vague traits and values, and Howard placed a premium on this particular type. Howard’s language of battlers immediately conjures images of lower-middle- class suburbia. Despite the allusions toward practicality and anti-theoreticism, such discourse is deeply ideological, enshrining the autonomy of the liberal individual (and political thought) as the ‘natural mental horizon’54 of Australian society. The battler is rewarded not just for his labours but also for effort, commitment and skill; a claim or idealisation of self-reliance is substituted for real independence. Responsible battlers were placed in opposition to welfare- dependent needy and the public choice of welfare payments. As he told the same Australia Day gathering in 1999: The dole system that we inherited sent the worst possible message to young Australians. It told them that dropping out of school, out of their communities, escaping personal responsibility was acceptable and that the taxpayer would foot the bill.55 In practice, Howard’s reciprocity was coloured by a ‘strong personal commitment to mutual obligation’.56 Despite claiming the innate values of family and community, Howard’s meaning of independence contradictorily makes a ‘virtue of the lack of any sustained or necessary social ties or reciprocal social obligations to one’s fellow citizens’.57 Despite rhetorical allusions to rights and responsibilities, Howard, in accordance with his own legalistic convictions, generally avoids a discussion of what these rights, benefits and responsibilities might be. Citizens implicitly hold virtues and values. Rights and responsibilities, in accordance with his abhorrence of a Bill of Rights, are merely commonsense. Liberal independence, often idealised through the battler, remains the central key to unlocking the motivations and ideological base to Howard’s language. Yet an examination of Howard’s speeches shows that the rhetorical device of the battler was skilfully and pragmatically removed or downplayed after 1996 as new sources of threats arrived to justify Howard’s citizenship. At the same time, Howard collapsed all manner of iconic forms of the Australian into his own mythology of mateship, with Alec Campbell and Don Bradman thrown together in perverse solidarity. Howard even enshrined the dutiful citizen-soldier in the best ANZAC spirit. After belated Australian peacekeeping troops arrived in East Timor, contingently embodied in the form of then Lieutenant-General Peter Cosgrove, Howard argued that the citizen-soldier always acted in the ‘national interest’ but also ‘stood for what was right’.58 The Iraq war confirmed Howard’s sense of Australian identity as being most profoundly expressed through military service.59 As a defender of commonsense values and the rule of law, the citizen-soldier, a professionally trained ‘elite’, was an example of the values a good citizen brought to his or her relationship to the state. Howard’s language was a reaction to a series of loosely defined threats posed by a Labor government allegedly captured by elite and special interests. Howard depicted himself as defending middle Australia from the threats posed to a highly resilient ‘Australian way’. The middle class had suffered

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material losses under a Keating Government, but the more serious threat was that posed to their values and beliefs. Howard’s ideal citizen, personified in the ideologically and value-defined battler, was the antithesis of this foreign and culturally imposed liberal-cosmopolitan citizen. This citizen was contingently and reactively developed, first appearing in 1988, and becoming a more specific and partisan figure before and after the 1996 election.

On being Australian: the republic debates As the new millennium approached, a republic was brought to the public’s official consideration. Although Keating proposed the initial model, it was the monarchist Howard who would play a crucial role in its outcome. For Keating, the republic was about national identity and Australia’s reasonable, symbolic desire for an Australian head of state, yet it was also a political opportunity to lambaste the conservatism of the Liberal Party. Keating’s argument was not with the stable traditions of Australian parliamentary representative democracy. Rather, he framed the republic as simply a question of identity. Keating’s minimalist proposals were in fact quite conservative. As Keating argued, ‘it is not a radical undertaking that we propose’.60 Within Keating’s larger story, the republic was central to his rhetoric of leadership, which perceived government as the initiator of change and transformer of culture. Yet, problematically, his republic conflated economic and cultural reform. According to Keating: An Australian head of state can embody our modern aspirations — our cultural diversity, our evolving partnerships with Asia and the Pacific, our quest for reconciliation with Aboriginal Australians …61 The republic was depicted as an intensely partisan issue. Drawing on Manning Clark, Australian politics became the story of ‘enliveners and straighteners’; ‘initiators and resistors’; ‘progressives and conservatives’; ‘Keatings and Howards’. And the republic was the key chapter of Keating’s story of nation- building. Howard ably manipulated the conflation of economic and cultural reform inherent within Keating’s story as another elitist cultural aspiration disconnected from everyday life experience. He linked Keating’s unilateral republicanism to his conception of Australian society as traumatically divided between powerful elites and ordinary battlers, ironically through defending the elite institution of the monarchy. As Howard remarked upon Keating’s announcement of a republican timeline: ‘the question of the constitutional structure … is not something that weighs heavily upon Australians as they go about their daily lives’.62 According to Howard, ordinary citizens were comfortable with the status quo. Real independence was not to be found in cold legal formulas or symbolic changes. Political culture was commonsense, and Australians had a commonsense view of national independence: The independence and the sense of independence of a nation are not measured solely in legal or constitutional terms … the sense of independence, and … national identity, that emerged in the Australian people early this century preceded many of the legal changes …63

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Howard’s 1998 constitutional convention, despite its ostentatious representativeness, successfully played upon the divisions within the broad republican camp. Howard began his defence of the status quo by telling the opening session of the convention that whatever the outcome, Australia ‘will forever be in debt to Britain for her gifts of language, literature, law, and political institutions’.64 Citizenship and its related rights and responsibilities were commonsense developments derived from equally commonsense traditions of Westminsterism and transplanted British political thought. Australians were wary of symbolism, they ‘knew’ that the ‘Governor-General has become Australia’s effective head of state’.65 While the convention produced a resolution supporting a republican referendum, it was a Pyrrhic victory. The referendum’s question was essentially Keating’s proposal. Keating’s allegedly elitist model was a reminder of the insecurity that voters had reacted against at the 1996 election. On 6 November 1999, two questions were put to voters, including one concerning Howard’s preamble. Both questions failed, with a majority succeeding only in the ACT.66 Howard claimed that this rejection was based upon Australians wisely rebuffing a foreign and imposed form of citizenship this time expressed through constitutional arrangements. In this context, Howard’s citizenship became an innate civic identity constituted as possessing certain essential characteristics and resting upon a common-law enunciation of rights and responsibilities. He had constructed the conservative republican model as a threat to deeply held values and vaguely defined rights — ‘the stability and inherent strength of the existing order’67 — imposed by the same new class elites previously alluded to. The more radical direct election model created a ‘rival power centre’ incompatible with ‘Australian political culture’.68 Howard also tried, whether as a diversionary tactic or heartfelt nationalism, to insert his preamble (penned together with poet Les Murray) into the Constitution. This was despite Howard’s earlier argument against the definition and perpetuation of essential Australian ideals supposedly contained within Keating’s attempted remodelling of national identity: I don’t believe in a society where there has to be defined, handed down, for all purposes definition of what is the Australian spirit … the idea that … there should be a received version of the Australian identity or a received version of this or that particular pattern of behaviour …69 In fact it was only Keating’s sense of national identity that was objectionable to Howard. Clearly Howard’s sense of essence was superior to the elitist and divisive Keating: We do hold dear the principle of mateship … believe fundamentally in an egalitarian society … And it needs to be reaffirmed as a cornerstone of the Australian existence, that every man or woman succeeds or fails [note the polar opposites in conjunction] … according to personal dedication or their personal worth.70 The draft preamble met with derision and hostility in some quarters, and was subsequently altered to contain a more active reference to the experiences of Indigenous people and cultures, while offensive references to ‘mateship’ and

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‘fashions of ideology’,71 which the document respectively praised and condemned, were removed. Howard’s amended preamble was still an exclusivist and provocative document enshrining notions of religion and political ideology. It began by assuming the entirely natural existence of the nation: ‘With hope in God, the Commonwealth is constituted by the equal sovereignty of all its citizens’.72 The reference to God and the implication of Australians’ inherent Christianity were controversial enough, but the act of federation was also glossed over. Australian nation-building became a natural process, seemingly detached from either the actions of autonomous individuals or collective agreements. The collective imagining and purpose of federation were expunged. Australian citizens were to ‘hope’ rather than positively act. Those who did not ‘hope’, or were not members of traditional monotheistic religions, were effectively excluded. The citizen’s euphemistic ‘equal sovereignty’ was a vague reference to some sort of egalitarianism and classless thesis, but it actually asserted the passivity (together with the implicit autonomous individuality) of the citizens who ‘constitute[d]’ that federation. Those same citizens were protected by the implied centrality of the common law in ‘upholding freedom, tolerance, individual dignity and the rule of law’. Citizenship might be the lived experience of equality, but it was qualified by the need to be ‘supportive of achievement’ and ‘equality of opportunity for all’. In a similar fashion, the collectivity was qualified by being valued as ‘dearly as the national spirit which binds us together in both adversity and success’.73 Howard’s portrayal of the republican campaign as an elitist threat was bound up within his conception of citizenship as a natural and arguably passive constitutive category. The ‘elite’s republic’ was constituted as a threat to the values and beliefs possessed by citizens and stable political institutions. The citizen was denoted as a practical and commonsense type. Political culture was similarly constructed. A republic, whether minimalist or more radical, threatened these inherently stable identities and structures. Yet at this stage, Howard’s citizen was still less his own conception than a continuing rejection of the Keating model of citizenship. Howard’s defence of the status quo was also an argument about citizen’s rights following his conception of himself as a Burkean conservative. For Howard, rights (and responsibilities) were innate, derived from stable and effective British tradition successfully transported to a (superior) Australian way. Citizen’s rights were closely linked to his own conception of national identity. Howard’s language rhetorically defended the ordinary citizen, passively holding indefinable rights as valued benefits and privileges.

MV Tampa, refugees and the prospective citizen On 29 August 2001, the Norwegian container ship MV Tampa entered Australian waters against government warnings, carrying 433 asylum-seekers it had rescued off Christmas Island. The decision to prevent the Tampa from landing involved many important dimensions of citizenship, particularly as a (moralising) process of exclusion.74 While refugees are not strictly citizens, they represent potential citizens and are often judged as such. The Tampa episode represented Howard’s most explicit use of citizenship defined as threat. Howard argued that the so-called illegal actions of refugees, whom he labelled ‘illegals’, ‘queue-jumpers’ and possible terrorists after September 11, constituted an imminent threat to the

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Australian citizen’s sense of national security and sovereignty in the age of globalisation. Refugees were held up in negative typography as undesirable immigrants. Howard’s position on the so-called issue of border protection had previously been evinced in the lead-up to the 1996 election. Howard had argued ‘the responsibility to provide both external and internal security ought to be accepted as … probably the prime responsibility — without comment or debate’.75 In the previous two case studies I have demonstrated how Howard attempted to define citizenship against variously defined threats. Those threats revolved around Howard, at least rhetorically, providing for the internal or psychological security of his imagined mainstream and its idealised values. The Tampa episode involved Howard implementing his vision of external security, rhetorically and physically, implicitly defining what values the citizen should (or indeed should not) possess. The refugee was objectified as the antithesis of what constitutes Australianess. Indeed, Howard’s rhetoric was as strong as the legislative and physical response. Howard aggressively asserted that it was Australia’s right to decide the manner and circumstances of entry into Australia. Citizenship, though seemingly undefined, was a privilege bestowed by the state on behalf of the polity. Such ‘illegal’ attempts subverted this relationship of trust between the government and people. The 2001 election campaign, which followed the Tampa incident (and September 11 attacks), was dominated by the so-called ‘twin’ themes of border protection and terrorism, as Howard and the Liberal Party continually reminded both the media and public. Howard defined the election around the risk to Australians’ sense of sovereignty and collective value system, conflating refugees with the imminent terrorist threat: This campaign, more than any other … is very much about the future of the Australia we know and … love so much. The one single, irrefutable question … is who is better able to lead Australia … into these difficult, challenging times.76 Howard’s sense of illegal immigration, which itself proved the illegitimacy of a refugee’s claims, was less a matter of numerical position than of strategic and symbolic importance. It involved an attack upon intrinsic Australian values: egalitarianism and the fair go. Howard pragmatically linked his government’s stance on the entry of unauthorised Muslim refugees to the so-called ‘war on terrorism’: When I speak of national security I don’t just speak of the way in which this nation has properly and honourably responded to the terrorist attack of the eleventh of September … National security also importantly includes effective protection of our borders.77 Government ministers, particularly Minister of Defence Peter Reith, openly and disingenuously canvassed the possibility that terrorists might arrive posing as refugees. In their view, the prospective citizen respected these notions of fundamental sovereignty. In any case, the possibility that a refugee might actually be a terrorist confirmed that freedom should be construed as freedom from threat. Howard’s idealised citizen carried an inherent value system and behavioural traits to the field of Australian citizenship, which could be compared to the behaviour

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of others, holding themselves out as potential citizens. Citizenship was defined as the right to individual and national sovereignty. Sovereignty was security. According to Howard, this notion of sovereignty was about: the fundamental right of this country to protect its borders, it’s about this nation saying to the world we are a generous open hearted people … But we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.78 Australian citizenship was an exclusive and moral category to be defended. The benefits of such an exclusive status and the continued orderly conferral of citizenship were clear to Howard: You’re not a refugee under international law until you are assessed ... they are simply illegal arrivals ... There are no Australian citizens on board. It’s a Norwegian vessel, the original vessel that they set sail on was Indonesian, crewed by an Indonesian group so in international law we don’t have an obligation … we’re perfectly happy to go on taking refugees provided people are assessed and don’t jump their place in the queue.79 The question was whether these alleged refugees carried the same traits. Order and decency were the attributes of the ‘real’ refugee, as illustrated by allusions to formal queues and merit. The Labor opposition was caught flat-footed, ‘wedged’, according to the popular media. Then-Leader of the Opposition Kim Beazley attempted to neutralise the issue of security. He was interested in ‘domestic security’, drawing on his experience as defence minister, but would also take a tough line on illegal immigration. Beazley attempted to introduce a moral element through his allusions to the good ‘cop’: ‘People smugglers are criminals who must be hounded out of business … we plan to introduce a proper Coast Guard, a cop on the beat 52 weeks of the year’.80 Refugees were represented on all sides as the physical threat that accompanied old and new threats of a globalising world. The issue of refugees dominated the 2001 campaign. Howard responded to the plight of a foundering Indonesian fishing boat near Christmas Island, the so-called ‘children overboard’ incident, carrying further refugees bound for Australia, as establishing a fundamental opposition between existing holders of citizenship and these potential, though deficient, aspirants: I don’t want in this country people who are prepared … to throw their own children overboard … that kind of emotional blackmail is very distressing … these people know that they are dealing with a humane people. They know that we are not going to allow people … to drown or to be exposed to unacceptable risk … Genuine refugees don’t throw their children overboard.81 These alleged illegitimate actions offended Howard’s sensibility of home- and family-centred citizenship as the foundation of national stability. Yet the implication of an inferior cultural system also lay at the heart of Howard’s claim: There’s something to me incompatible between somebody who claims to be a refugee and somebody who would throw their own child into the sea, it offends the natural instinct of protection and delivering security and safety to your children.82 In responding to the ongoing issue of refugees, John Howard contradictorily and pragmatically used his version of the language of Australian citizenship as

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both the target of threat and a simultaneous source of stability. This involved displaying empathy and discernment for the imagined collection of autonomous actors of middle Australia, but it also lacked compassion for those groups falling outside the domain of that imagining.83 Howard’s language of citizenship rallied against vaguely defined threats to the citizen’s sense of security, sovereignty and values. The Tampa episode represented Howard’s most explicit and, indeed, his most successful use of citizenship defined against change and threat. Moreover, it involved an interpretation of citizenship as an exclusive category privileged in a threatening world of globalising forces; the abstract forces of capital could be safely embraced while the figure of the refugee was portrayed as the physical object of fear. The illegitimate actions of the refugees had excluded them from the application of the moral realm of the Australian citizen. Working within the dominant paradigms of institution and discourse, Howard’s language of citizenship had decided who could not be citizen, but failed, not unexpectedly, to establish what rights and benefits those illegals had ostensibly sought.

Howard, Australian liberalism and the limits of language Language continues to shape the contours of Australian citizenship. As a result, the Australian citizen has been imagined as a particular type imbued with certain values and characteristics, within the particular political (and clearly ideological) project being realised. John Howard presents a good example of the construction of the citizen within a dominant language, but also illustrates the perils of continuing adherence to this paradigm of rhetoric over substance, of legalism over defined rights. Howard’s historic imagining is a version of an appropriate type of citizen(ship) defined against threats that are sometimes real, but are often imagined. Howard’s citizen, encapsulated in his short-term allusion to ‘battlers’, was portrayed as a bulwark against an elitist attempt to impose a foreign political culture; an attempt to reassert older forms of understanding of family and community. Refugees were drawn in negative typography as evidently bereft of the traits of moral citizenship. Howard’s language of battlers, elites and refugees draws on the historic imagining of citizenship by emphasising values. In so doing, it masks ongoing divisions such as class by shrouding issues of equity in the language of homogenous values rather than material conflict. Yet Howard is not detached from the larger problem of Australian citizenship. His language operates within, and at times against, the discourse of Australian liberalism. As evinced by his language of imaginary types and threats, we remain within the intensified crises of political culture and community, a situation that perpetuates and legitimates such institutional and moral poverty.

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Notes to pp 183–186

Battlers, Refugees and the Republic: John Howard’s Language of Citizenship Nick Dyrenfurth 1 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Verso, London, 1991. 2 Paul Kelly details the destruction of the Australian settlement in The End of Certainty: The Story of the 1980s, Allen & Unwin, St Leonards, 1992. A more critical sense of these changes can be found in Bettina Cass and Paul Smyth (eds), Contesting the Australian Way: States, Markets, and Civil Society, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1998. An impressive new addition, arguing for a fluid, wider sense of ‘developmentalism’ is Geoffrey Stokes, ‘The “Australian Settlement” and Australian Political Thought’, Australian Journal of Political Science, vol 1, no 39, 2004, pp 5–22. 3 See John Chesterman and Brian Galligan (eds), Defining Australian Citizenship: Selected Documents, Melbourne University Press, Carlton South, 1999; Alistair Davidson, From Subject to Citizen: Australian Citizenship in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1997; Margaret MacLeod and James Walter, The Citizens’ Bargain: A Documentary History of Australian Views since 1890, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2002, and Kim Rubinstein, ‘Citizenship in Australia: Unscrambling its Meaning’, Melbourne University Law Review, no 20, 1995, pp 503–27. 4 Nick Dyrenfurth, ‘The Language of Australian Citizenship’, forthcoming in Australian Journal of Political Science, March 2005. 5 See Helen Irving, To Constitute a Nation, A Cultural History of Australia’s Constitution, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 1997. 6 Carol Johnson, Governing Change: From Keating to Howard, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2000. 7 Judith Brett, Australian Liberals and the Moral Middle Class: From Alfred Deakin to John Howard, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2003, p 203. 8 Dyrenfurth, op. cit. 9 Helen Irving, ‘Citizenship Before 1949’ in Kim Rubenstein (ed.), Individual, Community, Nation: Fifty Years of Australian Citizenship, Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, 2000, p 10. 10 ibid., pp 157–8. 11 Dyrenfurth, op. cit. 12 Ann Capling et al., Australian Politics in the Global Era, Addison Wesley Longman, Melbourne, 1998. 13 Examples of this polemic genre include Mungo Maccullum, ‘Girt by Sea: Australia, the refuges and the politics of fear’, Quarterly Essay, no 5, Black Inc., 2002; Guy Rundle, ‘The Opportunist: John Howard and the triumph of reaction’, Quarterly Essay, no 3, Black Inc., 2001; Robert Manne, The Barren Years: John Howard and Australian Political Culture, Text Publishing, Melbourne, 2001. There also exists the extraordinarily pre-emptive and sympathetic quasi- biography by David Barnett, John Howard: Prime Minister, Viking, Ringwood, 1997. 14 Robert Manne (ed.), The Howard Years, Black Inc., Melbourne, 2004. 15 Brett, op. cit., p 206. 16 ibid., p 184. 17 One must take account of the differences between Howard and predecessors such as Menzies. Howard’s speeches are professionally prepared, often by so-called spin-doctors, while Menzies allegedly wrote his speeches by hand, though with similar aims in mind. 18 Paul Keating, ‘The story of Australia, National library twenty-fifth anniversary’, 13 August 1993, Canberra, cited in Mark Ryan (ed.), Advancing Australia: The Speeches of Paul Keating, Prime Minister, Big Picture, Sydney, 1995, p 54. 19 Capling, op. cit., p 134. 20 ibid., p 55. 21 ibid., p 51. 22 Paul Keating, ‘Speech At the 1996 ALP Campaign Launch’, 14 February 1996. Cited by Australian Politics website. Accessed 25 March 2003. http://www.australianpolitics.com. keating-launch.shtml

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Notes to pp 186–192

23 Paul Keating, ‘Speech at the 1995 National Social Policy Conference’, 7 July 1995, University of New South Wales, Sydney, cited in Johnson, op. cit., p 27. 24 Capling, op. cit., p 135. 25 John Howard, ‘The Role of Government: A Modern Liberal Approach’, 6 June 1995, Menzies Research Centre Lecture. Cited by Australian Politics website. Accessed 26 March 2003. http://australianpolitics.com/executive/howard/pre-2002/95-06-06role-of-government.shtml 26 ibid. 27 Brett, op. cit., p 184. 28 John Howard, ‘The Inaugural Prime Minister’s on Prime Ministers Lecture’, Old Parliament House, Canberra, 3 September 1997. Cited by the website of the Prime Minister of Australia. Accessed 27 March 2003. http://www.pm.gov.au/news/speeches/1997/pmonpm2.htm 29 John Howard, ‘Address to the Business Council Dinner’, 26 March 1996, cited in Business Council Review, May 1996, p. 9. 30 Howard, ‘The Role of Government’, op. cit. 31 John Howard, ‘Some Thoughts on Liberal Party Philosophy in the 1990s’, Quadrant, July–August 1994, p 22. 32 Johnson, op. cit., p 6. 33 Judith Brett, ‘The Politics of Grievance’, The Australian’s Review of Books, 14 May 1997, pp 12–3, 26. 34 ibid., p 7. 35 Ghassan Hage, ‘The Politics of Australian Fundamentalism: reflections on the rule of Ayatollah Johnny’, Arena Magazine, no 51, February–March 2001, p 27. 36 See Scalmer, op. cit. 37 Johnson, op. cit., p 7. 38 Howard, ‘Some Thoughts on Liberal Party Philosophy in the 1990s’, op. cit. 39 Liberal Party of Australia, Future Directions: it’s time for plain thinking, Liberal and National Parties, Canberra, 1988. 40 ibid., pp 6–7. 41 Scalmer, op. cit., p 9. 42 ibid., p 9. 43 John Howard, ‘Address to the Victorian State Liberal Party’ (Headland Speech), 19 March 1995, Melbourne, cited in Sydney Morning Herald, 20 March 1995, p 5. 44 ibid., p 5. 45 Howard, ‘Some Thoughts on Liberal Party Philosophy in the 1990s’, op. cit., p 21. 46 Brett, op. cit., p 205. 47 ibid., p 203. 48 James Curran, The Power of Speech: Australian Prime Ministers Defining the National Image, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 2004. 49 John Howard, ‘Address at the launch of the 50th Anniversary of Australian Citizenship’, Brisbane City Hall, Brisbane, 25 January 1999, Canberra. Cited by the website of the Prime Minister of Australia. Accessed 26 March 2003. http://www.pm.gov.au/news/speeches/1999/austcitship.htm 50 Stuart Hall, ‘Deviance, Politics and the Media’ in Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale and David M Halperin (eds), The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, Routledge, New York, p 87. 51 John Howard. ‘Federation Address “The Australian Way” Presented to The Queensland Chamber of Commerce and Industry’, Brisbane, 28 January 1999. Cited by the website of the Prime Minister of Australia. Accessed 26 March 2003. http://www.pm.gov.au/news/speeches/1999/speeches.html 52 ibid. 53 Cited in Markus, op. cit., p 83. 54 Hall, op. cit., p 83. 55 Howard, ‘Federation Address: “The Australian Way”’, op. cit. 56 Howard, ‘The Inaugural Prime Minister’s on Prime Ministers Lecture’, op. cit. 57 Capling, op. cit., p 138. 58 John Howard, ‘Address to Australia Day Citizenship Ceremony, Ryde’, 26 January 1999. Cited by the website of the Prime Minister of Australia. Accessed 26 March 2003. http://www.pm.gov.au/news/speeches/1999/speeches.html

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Notes to pp 192–201

59 Mark McKenna, ‘Howard’s Warriors’ in Raymond Gaita (ed.), Why the War was Wrong, Text, Melbourne, 2003, p 193. 60 Paul Keating, ‘An Australian Republic: the way forward’, Speech by the Prime Minister, the Hon. P J Keating MP, 7 June 1995, AGPS, Canberra, 1995, p 3. 61 ibid., pp 3–4. 62 J Howard, Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates (House of Representatives), 8 June 1995. Cited by Australian Politics website. Accessed 25 March 2003. http://www.australianpolitics.com.95-06-08_howard-republic-speech.shtml 63 ibid. 64 John Howard, ‘Address to the Opening Session to the Constitutional Convention’, Canberra, 2 February 1998. Cited by the website of the Prime Minister of Australia. Accessed 26 March 2003. http//www.pm.gov.au/news/speeches/1998/convaddr.html 65 ibid. 66 For a discussion of the referendum and its place in constitutional reform see Helen Irving, ‘The Republic Referendum of 6 November 1999’, Australian Journal of Political Science, vol 35, no 1, 2000, pp 111–15. 67 Howard, ‘Address to the Opening Session’, op. cit. 68 ibid. 69 ibid. 70 Howard, ‘Address to Australia Day Citizenship Ceremony’, op. cit. 71 John Howard, ‘Proposed Preamble’, 11 August 1999. Cited by the website of the Prime Minister of Australia. Accessed 26 March 2003. http://www.pm.gov.au/news/media_releases/1999/preamble1108.htm 72 ibid. 73 ibid. 74 Kim Rubinstein, ‘Citizenship, Sovereignty and Migration: Australia’s Exclusive Approach to Membership of the Community’, Public Law Review, vol 13, no 2, June 2002, p 103. The issue of refugees and the Tampa has been widely published upon. For further details see David Marr and Marian Wilkinson, Dark Victory, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, 2004; Peter Mares, Borderline: Australia’s response to refugees and asylum seekers in the wake of the Tampa, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2002. 75 Howard, ‘The Role of Government’, op. cit. 76 John Howard, ‘Liberal Party Campaign Launch 2001’, 28 October 2001, Sydney. Cited by the website of the Prime Minister of Australia. Accessed 26 March 2003. http://www.pm.gov.au/news/speeches/2001/speech1311.htm 77 ibid. 78 ibid. 79 John Howard, ‘Television interview with Rosemary Church, CNN’, 31 August 2001. Cited by the website of the Prime Minister of Australia. Accessed 26 March 2003. http://www.pm.gov.au/news/interviews/2001/interview1203.htm 80 Kim Beazley, ‘ALP Campaign Launch 2001’, 31 October 2001. Cited by the Australian Financial Review website. Accessed 26 March 2003. http://www.afr.com/election2001/transcripts/2001/12/06/FXFXIPCZYFTC.html 81 John Howard, ‘Radio Interview with Alan Jones, 2UE’, 8 October 2001. Cited by the website of the Prime Minister of Australia. Accessed 26 March 2003. http://www.pm.gov.au/news/interviews/2001/interview1369.htm 82 ibid. 83 A similar point is made by Paul Strangio, ‘Howard, a PM with no regrets’, Age, 21 July 2004.

It’s a Fair Cop, Guv: Australian Fans of The Bill Margaret Rogers 1 Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Routledge, New York, 1992. 2 Sue Williams, ‘Television square eyes’, Sun Herald, 28 September 1997. Accessed 16 June 1993. http://www24.brinkster.com/shchronicle. 3 S Jackson and K Murphy, ‘Crime the cure for reality’, Australian, 19 February 2004, p 15.

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