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“…and where are we now? Thoughts on the 2004 election” by Robert Manne Presented at the Brotherhood of St Laurence’s Sambell Oration on Wed Oct 20, 2004 at Central Hall, Australian Catholic University, 20 Brunswick St Fitzroy. Shortly after the November 2001 election I gave a talk which I called: “Where are we now?” The “we” here was deliberately ambiguous, referring both to Australia and to the kind of audience I knew would attend on that night—the left-liberal intelligentsia. When I was asked to provide a topic for tonight’s lecture, which I knew would occur shortly after the 2004 election, somewhat mischievously I suggested the title: “…And where are we now?” The “we” here has an identical ambiguity. Of course the title chosen allowed me to speak about a Labor victory if that were to occur. However as I believed it was almost certain that Labor would be defeated, I imagined that I would be speaking about the meaning of the defeat, as unhappily from my point of view I now am. For those who are enthusiastic about the victory of the Howard government I can only offer my apologies in advance. At least what follows will allow them to think about the interpretation of someone who regards the trajectory of Australia since 1996 with undisguised alarm. The talk I gave following the 2001 election began with the following words: “I doubt whether there has been any election in Australia since 1975 more dismaying for the left-of-centre intelligentsia than the one which we have just been through.” These words are even more Brotherhood of St Laurence’s 2004 Sambell Oration Page 1 applicable to the Coalition victory of 2004. One stunning defeat of the hopes of the left-liberal intelligentsia can be regarded as an unhappy accident. Two such defeats in the space of three years cannot be. The election of 2004 represents both an intellectual challenge for the left-liberal intelligentsia and perhaps even more a call to seriousness. Without sentiment or rancour or exaggeration, we need to try to discover what has happened to Australia Only on the basis of getting somewhere with this analysis will it be possible at some later time to approach the most fundamental of all the political questions: what is to be done? I In the quarter century before the election of the Howard government in March 1996, Australians experienced two peaceful social revolutions which, in combination, reshaped profoundly their long-established way of life. Without some general understanding of the nature of these revolutions what happened in the Howard years is, I believe, impossible to grasp. The first revolution, which originated in the early 1970s, involved the repudiation of those settled attitudes to ethnicity and race – concerning the White Australia Policy, indigenous dispossession, and migrant assimilation to the Anglo-Celtic norm – which had basically remained unquestioned since the federation of the British settler colonies and the creation of the Australian nation-state. During the 1980s, before this cultural transformation had time to be fully digested, Australia passed through a second revolution no less threatening to the settled way of life than the first. This revolution was located in the economic rather than the cultural sphere. It involved the unleashing of the neo-liberal principle of the free market. Under its influence, in the Hawke and Keating years, the dollar was floated; the financial system was deregulated; state-owned businesses were progressively privatised; the centralised arbitration system was weakened; and, Brotherhood of St Laurence’s 2004 Sambell Oration Page 2 most fundamentally of all, border protection for manufacturing industry was progressively abandoned. It is extremely significant to my analysis that both revolutions were inspired and supported, initially at least, only by the country’s cultural and economic elites – that is to say the affluent and the well-educated. A chasm opened up between these “elites” and the “ordinary people”. The left-leaning parts of the elites (academics, teachers, public servants, journalists, artists and so on) embraced with enthusiasm the broadening of Australia’s ethnic identity and the transcendance of the old politics of race. The right-leaning parts of the elites (economists, managers, entrepreneurs and so on) welcomed the destruction of the interventionist, regulatory and protectionist aspects of the Australian political economy, along free market lines. By and large, by contrast, very many “ordinary Australians” – in regard to Asian immigration, multiculturalism and Aboriginal rights, on the one hand, and in regard to privatisation, deregulation and free trade, on the other –felt puzzled at best and, at worst, decidedly sour. No political leader in recent times was more committed to both dimensions of the post-Menzies transformation of Australia than Paul Keating. No Prime Minister in Australian history has governed more obviously from the vantage point of the economic and the cultural elites than he. This provides the most vital clue to his landslide electoral defeat of March 1996. Perhaps the most interesting single fact about this election was the discovery that manual workers were scarcely more likely to have voted Labor than non-manual workers in 1996. For my analysis the most consequential aspect of the 1996 election was the story of Pauline Hanson, the Liberal Party candidate in Oxley, Queensland’s safest Labor Party seat. Before the election Hanson had written a letter to a local newspaper complaining about the money being showered on Aborigines and the racist feelings this provoked. When her Labor opponent brought the letter to national attention she was speedily disendorsed by Liberal Party Brotherhood of St Laurence’s 2004 Sambell Oration Page 3 headquarters. Hanson subsequently won Oxley with an anti-Labor swing of 21%, the largest in the land. In September 1996 Hanson delivered her maiden speech. She spoke of the money that was being wasted on Aborigines; of the High Court’s Mabo judgment as promoting “separatism” and the breaking up of Australia. She also called for the abolition of “the policy of multiculturalism”. She warned that Australia was being “swamped” by Asians. Pauline Hanson also attacked the economic rationalist policies of recent years. She claimed to speak on behalf of commonsense and the forgotten “mainstream”. For many Australians Hanson became an instant political heroine. Whenever she visited country towns or suburban shopping malls large numbers turned out to cheer her progress or shake her hand. She seemed to represent “the people” against out-of-touch politicians and “the battlers” against the selfishness and the condescension of “the elites”. There was something in her demeanour that excited both curiosity and sympathy. Her defiance, her sullenness, the fact that when she was interviewed she seemed often on the edge of tears, was somehow felt to be appropriate in a woman who was battling almost single-handedly to defend a threatened way of life. In my view the emergence of Hanson is best explained by reference to the fissure between the viewpoint of the elites and the mainstream, especially in the cultural sphere. For several months the Prime Minister refused to discuss, let alone condemn, either her political impact or her ideas. Howard’s response to a parliamentary speech about Australia being swamped by Asians and about Aboriginals as undeserving recipients of special favours from the state was not to deplore the dangers of new racism. Indeed it was, rather, to welcome the return of an era of free speech. How was Howard’s conspicuous silence on the Hanson front to be explained? Was it, as he claimed, because he did not want to inflate her importance by a Prime Ministerial response? Brotherhood of St Laurence’s 2004 Sambell Oration Page 4 Was it because the battlers’ Prime Minister did not wish to engage in dispute with the battlers’ new champion? Or was it because at least in some of the opinions she voiced – about multiculturalism, the Aboriginal industry, political correctness and the intolerance of the elites - the world views of Pauline Hanson and John Howard overlapped? No-one could be sure. In the Queensland poll of June 13 1998, One Nation gained 23% of the vote and 11 seats. On the days following this election its meaning gradually sank in. Almost one in every four Queenslanders had voted for Pauline Hanson. In the federal election of 1998 One Nation also did extremely well – 930,000 votes for the Representatives (8.4%) and 1,000,000 for the Senate (9%), although with regard to capturing seats it failed. During the Howard second term the implications of the elite-mainstream divide and of Howard’s absorption into his thinking of the meaning of Hansonism gradually became clear. One obvious early instance of the first process was the republic referendum campaign which took place in October and November 1999. The ARM mobilised famous members of the nation’s pro-republic glitterati. Far more cleverly the monarchists decided to play upon the popular distrust of the politicians and the “elites”. In the end, as anticipated, the referendum proposal failed decisively – 45% to 55%. It did not win a majority in a single state. The most reliable indicator of support for the referendum was, probably, levels of education and wealth. Another indicator was distance from the state’s capital city. In the seats of Sydney and Melbourne, the republic referendum enjoyed 70% support. In backwoods New South Wales and Victoria, there were areas of support only a little above 25%. In the republic referendum the existence in Australia of two distinct nations was glimpsed. In Howard’s second term, the “two nations” problem moved to the centre of the political stage. In October 1999 boats of asylum seekers from the Middle East or Central Asia began arriving on Australian territory.

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