by Nick Bryant
For all that, much of what would be identified in other countries as racial intolerance could more accurately be characterised in Australia as racial insensitivity. It was a product not necessarily of dark-hearted malevolence but flippancy, tactlessness and the occasionally misdirected Aussie sense of humour. A patronising ignorance, if you like, rather than a sinister xenophobia. But whereas in other countries much of this kind of racial playfulness would be deemed politically incorrect, socially unacceptable or plain insulting, in Australia it was commonly brushed away with a laugh or a friendly punch to the upper arm.
Racism here often came with a built-in ‘it was only meant as a joke’ defence that simply would not cut it elsewhere. The Melbourne academic Waleed Aly put it well in observing that Australia had a high level of low-level racism. To borrow two unlovely terms from the world of economics, the macro story was encouraging but the micro side was a lot more ugly.
That helps explain why a controversy like the Hey Hey It’s Saturday blackface skit, at which the US singer Harry Connick Jnr expressed such horror, caused such a storm abroad and such befuddlement here at the international response. Visiting Washington at the time, the then deputy prime minister Julia Gillard was unapologetic. Indeed, she explained that the skit where five men ‘blacked up’ as minstrels was ‘meant to be humorous and would be taken in that spirit by most Australians’. What she had inadvertently admitted, however, was that Australia has a higher tolerance for intolerance than most other Western countries.
Perhaps you could call it political incorrectness gone mad. During the blackface controversy, I found myself in almost-agreement with Bill O’Reilly of Fox News, who commented on his show that the skit ‘is not representative of Australia. This is just a bad decision by stupid producers.’ Then again, it was aired here, and it would have stirred relatively little controversy, I suspect, had not an American been on the judging panel.
Contrast this to the US and Britain, where the skit, and its antediluvian humour, would likely never have made it past the first production meeting, much less been broadcast on a mainstream channel. In Australia, it got through, not because the producers were racist or malevolent, but because they thought it was within the bounds of the funny and the acceptable. Perhaps nobody sounded the alarm beforehand because they feared being labelled a wowser or someone who took themselves too seriously, which is arguably considered a graver national misdemeanour than some flippant, old-fashioned racial stereotyping.
On immigration, I understood the social compact whereby Australians were prepared to countenance large waves of authorised immigration so long as the country’s borders were stoutly defended against unauthorised offshore arrivals. But, again, how could one report on the boat-people debate without reference to the paranoiac media reaction of the tabloids and current-affairs shows to the arrival of each new boat, or the cynicism of the nation’s political leaders, with their xenophobic insinuations? The asylum-seeker debate was conducted as if the refugees heading for Australia’s shores were an abstraction, with the term ‘boat people’ almost shorn of its human meaning.
‘INVASION’ was the front-page headline of Sydney’s Daily Telegraph midway through 2010, in response to a surge in the number of boat arrivals, which was arrant nonsense. There had been a rise in the numbers for sure, but, according to the UNHCR, Australia ranks 47th in the global list of refugee-hosting countries, which is 68th on a per-capita basis or 91st in terms of national wealth.
How could the legacy of John Howard be assessed without reference to his refusal to condemn Pauline Hanson at the height of her popularity, or the dog-whistle excesses of the Tampa 2001 election? How could one cover the first major speech of the new prime minister Julia Gillard, in July 2010, which tellingly was devoted to the question of asylum seekers, without reporting its most quotable line: that the debate ‘should not be constrained by self-censorship or political correctness’, which read like a barely coded invitation to the redneck fringe?
That speech, delivered at the Lowy Institute in Sydney, in which Gillard also tried to elucidate the boat-people question and to appeal to Australia’s better angels, served as a useful historical text. She was attempting to elevate the immigration debate while at the same time recognising that baser instincts often prevailed, to which she also wanted to appeal. It was a schizophrenic speech for a schizophrenic nation. The Liberal politician Scott Morrison also personified this strained dichotomy. Tough on immigration, prior to entering politics he had been the head of Tourism Australia.
Just as I struggled to fully describe the true character of Australian xenophobia and racism, I found it hard to make complete sense of its politics, and, in particular, the startling popularity of Kevin Rudd. A few weeks after arriving in Australia in 2006, I had met Rudd in Canberra, where I was chairing a panel discussion. He was then the shadow foreign-affairs spokesman and, from first handshake to parting thanks, I found him to be the most singularly charmless of men: unpleasant, intellectually superior and seemingly devoid of lightness or humour.
New to Australian politics, I rhapsodised afterwards about Rudd’s fellow panellist that afternoon, Lindsay Tanner, the then shadow finance minister, and asked if great things were expected of him. But everyone thought I must have been a complete dunce, since Rudd was so obviously the coming man.
Three months later, when Rudd became the leader of the Labor Party, after his predecessor Kim Beazley had mixed up the television presenter Rove McManus with our old friend Karl Rove, I did not even bother breaking off from watching the second Test in Adelaide to file a report back to London.
In late 2006, so complete was John Howard’s domination of Australian politics, and so robust the Australian economy, that a fifth term beckoned. Certainly, on the basis of our first meeting, I did not think that Rudd posed a major threat; and, in any case, on that fourth day at the Adelaide Oval England had Australia reeling and looked poised to level the series, 1–1. In the cricket, the turnaround was instantaneous, with Shane Warne performing his usual fifth-day party trick of making England’s middle order disappear. In Canberra, Kevin Rudd, another kind of spin king, was about to do much the same to John Winston Howard.
What made Rudd’s rise all the more riveting and relevant to a global audience was the extent to which it showed how the politics of 9/11 had shifted. In the November 2001 federal election, John Howard had, of course, benefited enormously from the attacks of 11 September. As Australia signed up to the Bush administration’s war on terror, he appeared before the electorate as a strong national leader and tapped – and heightened – fears about outsiders during the Tampa crisis. It helped, too, that he had been in Washington that morning and seen the smoke billow from the Pentagon.
By 2007, however, the politics of 9/11 had boomeranged, with Howard receiving much the same clobbering as Tony Blair, who was about to leave Downing Street, and George W. Bush, as he limped to the end of his lame-duck second term. Whether it was Iraq, his ‘deputy sheriff’ tag, David Hicks or his refusal to ratify Kyoto, Howard’s closeness to Bush had contaminated his prime ministership with a lethal virus. What made Howard even more vulnerable was that, unlike his great heroine Margaret Thatcher, he had not managed after ten years in power to tame the labour movement. Now, the unions mobilised against him over unpopular workplace laws that, in the eyes of many, had violated Australia’s unwritten fairness doctrine.
To see this, and to film it, we headed to the annual Granny Smith Apple Festival held in John Howard’s suburban Sydney constituency, Bennelong, in the run-up to election day. From a viewing stand that he shared with a man dressed as a fruit, Howard had to endure a rowdy parade that appeared before him like a cavalcade of disgruntled ghosts. A middle-aged man with military medals hanging from his chest heckled the prime minister for sending diggers to Iraq. A placard-waving member of the Australian Greens protested the Howard government’s refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. There was a group of gay-rights activists, spinning rainbow-coloured umbrellas bet
ween their fingers, and Indigenous-rights campaigners holding aloft the gold, black and red colours of the Aboriginal flag.
Even the marchers who did not directly assail Mr Howard confronted him with reminders of his troubles. The Chinese dragons swerving from one side of the road to the other brought to mind the ethnic changes that had overtaken this corner of suburban Sydney. So, too, did the Korean marching bands parading in stricter formation. For many of the 33 years that he had represented the seat, Bennelong was a largely white-bread constituency, but nowadays its polyglot population made it as colourful and multiracial as the procession passing before him.
Making by far the most noise was a group of trade unionists brandishing specially manufactured placards inspired by the Granny Smith theme: ‘Your rights at work: the core issue’. And, helpfully, a local funeral director had even despatched two of his vehicles to spruik his services, which provided the metaphorical image of the day: Howard standing behind a hearse. Politically, he was a dead man power-walking, and he knew it.
On election night itself, I found myself a few metres away from Howard when he conceded defeat at his once-lucky hotel, the Wentworth in Sydney. Afterwards, as he mingled with crestfallen supporters in the ballroom lobby, with half-drunk champagne flutes already littering the floor, I decided that I should tell him why the election had been life-changing for us both.
A few weeks earlier, in the constituency of Denison in Tasmania, I had proposed to the ‘Aussie knicker lady’, and she had given me her first preference. Thinking it might buck him up a bit on a night of such obvious pain, I decided to share this news. This was not quite as ridiculous as it sounds. My new fiancée’s parents were not only Liberal Party stalwarts but also near neighbours of the Howards. In her early teenage years, my wife-to-be had even served cocktails at party fund-raisers for John and Janette. Thinking that there might at least be a slither of common conversational ground, and expecting her name to register immediately, I reported that my future mother-in-law would be almost inconsolable, but at least she had a wedding to plan.
‘What?’ barked Mr Howard, with a look of startled puzzlement. I tried again, this time in his better ear, explaining that his former neighbour and diehard fan was about to become my mother-in-law. This time, Howard scrunched up his face and shook his head agitatedly from side to side. I tried again, but still with the same results. Wondering quite what had possessed me, I decided it was probably best to keep news of my forthcoming matrimony for another day, when the outgoing prime minister would be in a better frame of mind and unencumbered by so much extraneous noise.
Minutes later, after receiving more consolations, genuflections and ‘We love you, John’ shouts from his despairing supporters, he stepped out into the night and into his white Holden, his prime-ministerial aura already fading away.
That night in Brisbane, Rudd delivered a typically flat victory address, which nonetheless delighted hundreds of jubilant Labor supporters dressed in their ‘Kevin 07’ T-shirts – all of which offered further proof that the Rudd phenomenon was a personality cult without a personality. As for his political style, it brought to mind what Mark Twain had once said of the music of Richard Wagner: it was much better than it sounded. All those nerdy acronyms, faux larrikinisms and lifeless set-piece speeches, and yet his approval ratings continued to soar.
To the international eye, he came across as highly intelligent, thorough and well briefed but with the personality we associate normally with Nordic prime ministers or EU agriculture commissioners. When we thought of Australian prime ministers, we preferred to imagine them as rougher around the edges, with prodigious drinking capabilities, and a penchant for giving the entire country a day off at times of national celebration. I suppose we expected the prime minister not only to govern Australia but also to personify Australia. Or, put simply, we expected Bob Hawke. However, the prime-ministerial archetype was just as misleading as the national stereotype.
From a purely professional viewpoint, Rudd definitely had his uses. Like John Howard, he raised Australia’s global profile, though, noticeably, his prolific ‘Kevin 747’ travel produced a backlash at home. He also came to enjoy a very close working relationship with Barack Obama, although that probably had the effect of lowering the president’s esteem among Australians rather than enhancing their own prime minister’s. By elevating the role of the G20, he also went some way to giving Australia’s famed diplomatic punch some permanent heft, and it came as little surprise when he was invited to become a friend of the chair ahead of the Copenhagen climate-change summit in 2009.
Before jetting off for Denmark, Rudd granted us a 30-minute interview that was rich in acronyms, big ideas, wonk-speak, a global view, blokeish affectations and various Ruddisms – he insisted on calling the BBC ‘the Beeeeeeb’, for example, which he delivered in a bizarre, weedy voice. He even offered up a neat reworking of his famed ‘I’m from Queensland’ line from the Labor conference in 2007: ‘We are from Australia. We are here to help.’ In other words, it was Rudd at his best and worst.
Unknowingly at the time, we had interviewed him at his moment of maximum global interest – in the final days of the BC phase of his prime ministership, or ‘Before Copenhagen’ – and within a few short months Kevin 747 would be grounded. Failure at Copenhagen meant the geopolitics and domestic politics of climate change altered radically, and Rudd responded by downgrading the ‘greatest moral and economic challenge’ of our times.
In doing so uncomplainingly, he failed the Great Australian Ticker Test. After all, Australian prime ministers are not expected to be charismatic, telegenic, inspiring or oratorical – they are memorialised in Canberra with suburbs rather than stone – but they are expected to have the courage of their convictions. Soon, he was being spoken of in the past tense.
If at times of great national drama book titles could be requisitioned and redeployed, like merchant ships on the eve of war, The Australian Ugliness offered the neatest summation of his brutal demise. With the elevation of the country’s first female prime minister, the 40th anniversary of Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch became the literary touchstone, but it was Robin Boyd’s opus, then celebrating its golden jubilee, that provided a timely epithet, if not an entirely accurate thesis. Ruminating on the schizophrenic streak in the national character, Boyd described his fellow countrymen and women as ‘cruel but kind’.
When applied to Australian politics, however, his analysis was two words too long. Because he resigned on the morning of the leadership spill to save himself the embarrassment of a lopsided defeat, Kevin Rudd’s removal came to be described as a bloodless coup. But it was bloodless in the same way that waterboarding is bloodless – a process that simulates drowning, and thus near death, which leaves the body unblemished but the mind riven with scars. When Kevin Rudd appeared before the cameras a few hours later, to tearfully bullet-point his legacy, its effects were plain to see.
Afterwards, any audit of Australian politics took on the feel and stench of a triage, a sifting of the wounded and slain. The bush capital had become a killing field. In the space of just 40 months, Australia had got through four Liberal leaders and three from Labor. In New South Wales, the spiritual home of the Australian political ugliness, there had been four different Labor premiers in the past five years, with just one election. Of Louisiana, it is frequently said that a politician can survive anything apart from being found in bed with a dead woman or a live boy. All it took in Australia, as Rudd so viciously learnt, was to wake up on four consecutive Monday mornings with a lacklustre poll.
For a country jadedly stereotyped as chauvinistic, the supreme irony was that much of the watching world interpreted Julia Gillard’s rise as a sign of political progress. Those who read the international headlines – ‘Strewth, There’s a Sheila Running Oz’ was how my former paper, the Daily Mail, described her rise – would have been unaware of the macho, factional chieftains lurking in the background, or that the backrooms of Australian politics were choked n
ot so much with smoke as with testosterone. Australia still awaited its true political gender test: the day when its chieftains were women.
Julia Gillard had risen to power in a year cluttered with literary anniversaries. As well as being the 40th anniversary of The Female Eunuch and the 50th of The Australian Ugliness, it was also 60 years since A. A. Phillips first noticed that listeners of an ABC program called Incognito tended to pick the outsider when asked to adjudicate between the performance of a foreigner and a home-grown musician. Nowadays, few vestiges remained of the cultural cringe, and the country could proudly reflect on its global cultural creep, with figures of Australian loveliness such as Cate Blanchett in the fore. Instead, it had been replaced by Australia’s political cringe.
Damning proof came from the 2010 election, the most insular, visionless and low-calibre campaign I have ever covered in any mature democracy on any continent. Mired in the marginal constituencies of the suburban fringe, it rarely broadened its gaze. Struck by this parochialism, the visiting British academic Niall Ferguson likened the campaign to Strathclyde local politics, but, if anything, that seemed unkind to Strathclyde. The boat-people question once again became the campaign’s emblematic issue, and an outsider arriving midway through would have been forgiven for thinking that an armada of asylum seekers had besieged Australia.
The 2010 election made a mockery of the Australia I had spent the last three years describing: smart, sophisticated, warm, generous-spirited and, above all, consequential. It was not that Australians had voted for irrelevance and mediocrity. By choosing Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott over Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull, the two major parties had made the decision for them. It brought us back to the point of departure for so much of the discussion on post-war Australia: Donald Horne’s scorching polemic. Australia was his Lucky Country anew: blessed by an abundance of resources and cursed by second-rate politicians. I know I run the risk of speaking with an imperial voice, but for the first time during my tenure in Australia I really felt I was slumming it.
