For all the news features, reporting of opinion polls and well-cast everymen looking forlornly at job sites in the ad breaks between them you could be forgiven for thinking we were one failed mortgage away from joining Greece under the bridge. We aren’t. No hard-working Australian will be forced to occupy anything other than their commodious home. The brilliance of this current brand of political conservatism is that in a lot of ways it is the most “Australian” edition yet produced - and there’s nothing more “Australian” than pirouetting on the precipice of failure.
The key to this is understanding the political capital national narratives provide and the often-underestimated resonance of our own. The “hard-working” Australian, or rather the myth of the hardworking Australian, so key to political rhetoric and national pride alike has been the staple of a cooling national identity for as long as bread has been broken in Australia. More recently this stock character has been co-opted more shamelessly than usual to the delight of liberal pundits the nation over. The hi-vis gilded rictus that is Tony Abbot has run the sycophantic if not profoundly effective angle of telling everyone how hard they have it and how little they have to show for it. It’s an arms race of affluence that makes Australia look frankly ridiculous given the collapse of the Euro Zone and African food drought.
While cadet journalists burnt oil to highlight the contradiction between Swan’s Euromoney stewardship award and the dissatisfaction with government economic policy at home, the Economist took note of this confusing contrast. Hadn’t it heard just how tough we are doing it? This is the pervasive pessimism of one of the worlds most livable, wealthy and safe nations, ‘the next Golden State’. What the Economist failed to capture was just how fragile the esteem of that state is.
From our much-noted linguistic litotes to our sad-face wall sockets Australia is a country with a severe attitude problem – we just refuse to be happy.
Many will admit to the spoils of the twenty-first century “lucky country” but few will be able to separate this from the divisive policies currently ascending the hill. Australia was born on the sheep’s back, not the solar panel, and it was whatever version of Abbot we believe existed then that was doing the shearing, not a legally-savvy red-haired bogan in a pantsuit.
The majority of comfortable Australians have come to believe they are under the threat of those whose identity has existed outside of that which is deemed true blue: progressives. In what appears to be the temporary suspending of logic and reason, the government has spent months educating people about a tax they were sure they didn’t want before they even knew what it was that they were upset about being lied to about. If this seems unreasonable it’s because it is.
The fact is there isn’t yet the narrative that lauds the idealistic political female martyr. There won’t be for twenty years until we retrospectively get to appreciate the spoils of good policy: it seems that progressives cannot be hardworking; they can’t fight with the country in heart like their hard-hat clad peers, presumably because they were too preoccupied milling organic lentils in roo-skin teepees to help build Australia.
What has become clear is the danger in any limited characterizing of the nation, in personifying an entire continent and two hundred years of European and several tens of thousand of indigenous history as a pair of overalls. “Hard-working” should never have been allowed to become a part of National identity at all. Australia hard-working? Show me a country that isn’t. Is it Denmark that only got their gig because of his dad’s mate? Or maybe Norway slept her way to the top? People sweat in the sun, work weeks of overtime and eat at their desks in Australia, but people do this and more the world over without overtime, maternity, holiday or sick-pay, without public holidays, the safety of welfare or the support of retraining and education assistance, without union support and generous pay and more and more without the privilege of job choice. If you oppose the carbon tax you have the democratic right to do so, but you should know that any mention of hardship, “un-Australian-ness” or the failing of democracy is as egoistic as it is a testament to our reliance on this sunny, well-catered pity-party.
It is somewhat poetic that in our rush to reject the carbon tax through the vote at the next election we may actually will into being our very favorite ‘Strane character. If you didn’t get to enjoy the syrupy spoils of being a “hard-working” Australian in your lifetime, you can shake your fist at Bob Green satisfied that under the next Government your kids likely will. According to the ninety-seven percent of scientists who believe in man-made climate change, reviving the largest coral reef system in the world apparently takes an honest eight-hour day’s labor.
