Cater, as a veritable new chum, makes
any number of sharp and insightful observations about his adopted homeland. He
loves the sheer physicality of the place, the generosity of the people and the
warmth of the climate, and that the promise of “wealth for toil” is not just a
throwaway line in the national anthem. He welcomes the fact that the old
cultural cringe has mostly gone because Australians have “shaken the minatory
Englishman from their shoulder”. The Great Southern Land, economically robust
and blessed in the most part with “lifters, not leaners”, is ready to find its own
unique destiny in the world.
The marvel of Cater’s The Lucky
Culture is the
author’s determination to confront the darkness in paradise. Australia’s ‘new
class’ might not be beholden to the opinions of the Mother Country, but this
clique of post-nationalist sophisticates has embraced the “doctrine of the
self-declared world citizen”
and declared war on everything from traditional patriotism to the nation’s very
sovereignty. The heroes in Cater’s narrative, on the other hand, are “true blue”
Aussies, low-key versions of Mick in Crocodile Dundee, unceremonious and unaffected but
never to be underestimated.
There is a degree of romanticisation
in all this. While Manning Clark’s neo-Marxian rendering of Australia’s history
has more in common with fiction than actuality, Cater’s assertion of an
Australian golden age in which there were “no institutional barriers to success”
and the only impediments to achievement were “personal deficits of imagination,
energy and courage” is also partly myth. Sitting “next to, not behind” an
Australian taxi-driver says something about egalitarianism in the Land of Oz,
but not nearly as much as a visitor might assume.
Cater, along these same lines, writes
favourably of “the tall poppy syndrome”, the long-established tendency of
Australians to cut down to size people who excel in their field of endeavour,
sport excluded, of course. In many ways, The Lucky Culture is intended as a replacement or even
critique of Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country: Australia in the 60s (1964), a lament by the granddaddy of
“the bunyip alumini” on the unimaginative and suffocating provincialism of his
fellow citizens. The difference between the two perspectives is that where
Horne saw mediocrity and insularity in Australian suburbia, Cater now discovers
common sense and pragmatism.
Cater claims that salt-of-the-earth
suburbians are being increasingly subjugated by a tertiary-educated, inner
city, culturally attuned bunyip alumini. The latter do not “simply feel better
off but better than their fellow Australians”. The
social research figures tend to confirm the idea that those who live in
fashionable inner city suburbs and are tertiary educated will more likely
classify themselves as “open minded”. According to Cater, the worldview of this
elite is not so much a political ideology – “only the freakish few are
genuinely driven by ideology” – but a consequence of their shared sense of
moral, aesthetic, financial and intellectual superiority over outer-suburban
vulgarians.
One problem with this is the
mechanistic, almost Marxian, matching of left-liberal voting intentions with
life-style. It is, after all, possible to be vegetarian, own an apartment in
the city, appreciate fine art, enjoy organic coffee, travel the world and not buy into Catastrophic Anthropogenic
Global Warming (CAGW) theory. Similarly, there are those who live modestly
enough in Australia’s outer suburbs or remote towns but see the merits of CAGW
theory, the anti-Israeli Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, the
United Nations and so on ad infinitum. For this we can thank the PC cant promulgated by
progressive journalists, the Australian Labor Party (ALP) spin-meisters,
cultural institutions, enviro-activists, the education system, American
television, religious ministers, academics in the media, and one branch or
other of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).
The contention of The Lucky Country that a great divide has opened up in
Australia seems incontrovertible, but his portrayal of the split as primarily
sociological rather than ideological might not tell the full story. Cater
correctly notes that the ALP was lost by the Old Left as far back as 1967 when
Whitlam and his co-conspirators hijacked the organisation for their own
purposes. It is undeniable that the Whitlamites were tertiary-educated and middle-class
and, to some degree, fit Cater’s “knowledge owning nobility” categorization. As
he says: “They were doctors, attorneys, architects and teachers; if perchance
they worked for a bank, they were more likely to be poverty consultants than
tellers.” However, not all professionals – teachers aside, perhaps – were
attracted to Whitlam’s cause. It was the siren call of cultural Leftism, as
much as a taste for an inner city domicile and a four-wheel drive, that drove “progressives”
into the arms of the ALP, and later the Greens.
One cause for confusion is that many
of those on the modern-day Left in Australia do not consider their views – weak
on border security, soft on Muslim Brotherhood types, and so on – as “leftist”
but as “open minded”. What latter-day leftists fail to appreciate is that
although their “open mindedness” – which long ago metastasised into political
correctness – might not involve the nationalisation of the means of production,
their socialisation of the whole nation is nevertheless a form of
totalitarianism.
In The Lucky Culture’s best chapter, “The Culture Producers”,
Cater documents the brazen manner that smug progressives appropriated the
national broadcaster in the 1960s for their own purposes. The staff at the ABC
– Cater describes them in the first instance as “salaried bohemians” – abused
their charter and ran the place as the propaganda wing of the Labor Left. With
a few notable exceptions, none of the culprits today express even the slightest
contrition. One of the old dinosaurs still haunting us, Phillip Adams, shrugs
off the politicisation of the ABC in the 1960s as “social evolution”.
For five decades, the ABC has promoted
one radical cause after another in the guise of so-called “open-mindedness”.
Predictably, the ABC’s advocacy for “diversity” does not go as far as giving
conservatives a “fair go” in their media juggernaut. Cater might be right to
depict the staff who run the ABC as tertiary-educated, middle-class, inner city
types who share the same tribal sensibilities, but what they pursue in their
tax-funded activity is less the expression of a form of sociological solidarity
than the relentless dissemination of a particular political ideology. Moreover,
their propaganda has had its effect not just on latte-sipping trendies but also
credulous suburbians.
Cater, on occasion, seems mindful of
the possible inadequacy of explaining the phenomenon tearing apart the fabric
of Australian society in strict sociological terms. In the chapter titled “godless”,
he posits the idea that although “progressivism” might not be an ideology, it
perhaps has something “in common with a religious creed or dogma”. Thus, Cater
explains the brutal treatment meted out by the leftist-liberal establishment to
brilliant Australian independent thinkers such as Keith Windschuttle, Roger
Sandall, Geoffrey Blainey, Helen Hughes and Peter Sutton as akin the Exclusive
Brethren’s practice of purging dissenters in a ceremony known as “putting out”.
This is fine as far as it goes, but
the nub of the problem transcends totemic solidarity or groupthink. The crisis
Australia faces, along with the rest of the Western world, is first and foremost
political. The fact is, a political ideology – call it cultural Marxism or
anti-bourgeois bohemian socialism – has a firm grip on the hearts and minds on
far too many Westerners. In their topsy-turvy parallel universe, Israelis are
modern-day Nazis, the planet is frying, Western civilisation a scandal, female
circumcision a culturally sensitive procedure, the Muslim Brotherhood a social
justice outfit, patriotism hateful and border security a crime against
humanity.
Nick Cater’s The Lucky Country almost – but not quite – persuades
the reader to believe Winston Smith’s epiphany: “If there was hope, it must lie
in the proles.” The trouble with that, of course, is Orwell’s
proles were revolting but not in the right sense. I was born in a provincial
Australian city with factories at one end of street and council houses at the
other, and so do not completely share Cater’s very positive depiction of
working class Australians and the Old Left. But nor do I reject out of hand his
insinuation that a football-loving fellow who has never read a book without
pictures, let alone gone to university and absorbed the nihilism of cultural
relativism, is less likely to be a dangerous fool than his tertiary-educated,
bicycle-riding, greenie counterpart.
This article appears in the Autumn 2013 edition of The Salisbury Review.
This article appears in the Autumn 2013 edition of The Salisbury Review.
