I’ve met them; you’ve met them. You can find them in the corporate world, in academia, in the public service, in publishing, the media, the church … and, of course, in politics. The bullies who get away with it because of their capacity to turn on the charm when required. The barefaced liars who mask their mendacity with a disarming grin. (more…)
Voters’ disillusionment is much deeper than the current crop of leaders. There is something wrong with the system itself. (more…)
Voters’ disillusionment is much deeper than the current crop of leaders. There is something wrong with the system itself.
As we brace ourselves for a looming federal election campaign, it’s likely we’re going to be treated to another unedifying demonstration of why politics should not be treated like the marketing of commercial brands.
When Scott Morrison became prime minister, two dimensions of his persona seemed potentially positive: a Christian faith that might have illuminated his leadership with kindness and compassion, to say nothing of integrity, and a widely-touted marketing background (‘Scotty from Marketing’) that might have lifted the standard of political communication and inspired some brilliance in government advertising. Whatever hopes might thus have been raised have long since been dashed. (more…)
The line between faith and fatalism can be blurry, but it raises an important question for a Pentecostal prime minister leading a nation that is fast becoming a global outlier on the subject of energy policy.
Social isolation is hardly a new problem for us: it has been high on the list of concerns for social scientists and health professionals for many years. But the COVID-19 pandemic is forcing us to confront the potential for loneliness on an unprecedented scale. (more…)
Australia Day is widely regarded as a chance to celebrate what it means to be Australian. Perhaps, this year, we might turn the national day into a time of sombre reflection, and ask: are we the kind of society we want to be? (more…)
We humans are, by nature, social beings who need each other. We need the sense of belonging to communities that sustain, nurture, support and protect us and even give us our sense of personal identity – you can’t make sense of who you are without a social context. (more…)
“The US president is indifferent to human rights.” That was the banner headline on the front page of France’s Le Monde newspaper last week, as if it were news. Donald Trump has amply demonstrated that indifference, and not only in the context of his fantasy wall along the Mexican border. But he is now being joined by the new Italian government and by the growing body of populist and right-wing agitators across Europe. (more…)
Hugh Mackay has spent almost his entire working life asking Australians about what makes us tick, what are our basic concerns, what gives us hope and meaning, why do we do what we do? His acute observation, honed by the skills of solid social research, has illuminated his readers for at least fifty years. His analysis has been unfailingly optimistic, accessible, crystal-clear and frequently provocative.
His latest book, “Australia Reimagined: Towards a more compassionate, less anxious society”, is no exception. It extends his study of who we are and who we may become, challenging the better angels within us to build a more tolerant, compassionate and just society. (more…)
Esteemed social researcher Hugh Mackay’s latest book Australia Reimagined: Towards a more compassionate, less anxious society is exquisitely timed. As the daily headlines tell of bank and church scandals and failures in the health, education and housing systems, many of us are asking what went wrong and are increasingly preoccupied with searching for solutions. We have little faith that governments of either colour will cease their pointless political manoeuvrings, sever their murky allegiances and muster the bottle to come up with solutions. (more…)
Here’s a quick Christmas quiz. (Warning: it’s not a very merry quiz.) (more…)
When the 2016 Census results were released, anti-religionists and anti-theists worked themselves into a lather of excitement about the apparent increase in the number of Australians ticking the ‘No religion’ box. In the five years since 2011, that figure rose from 21.8 to 29.6 percent. Or did it? (more…)
From 1949 to 2007, Australian federal governments were defeated at the polls on only five occasions. Voters’ reluctance to rock the political boat over those six decades was not necessarily a reflection of great satisfaction with politics. Rather it was a symptom of their desire for, at least, stability.
A one-term government was unthinkable then. Governments were generally regarded as committed to nation-building and governing in accordance with a set of transparent political values. Leaders were not embarrassed to talk about their sense of vision and purpose; political idealism was expected. (more…)
Occasionally in a nation’s history, horror over past events triggers a kind of national shame. Germany went through it – is still going through it – in the wake of the Third Reich. South Africa has not yet healed the wounds of apartheid. The US continues to struggle with the evil legacy of white supremacism.
In Australia, we haven’t had a Holocaust. We haven’t institutionalised racial discrimination (though we’ve come close). But there have been periods in our short history that have cast very dark shadows across our national psyche, evoking entirely appropriate feelings of shame. (more…)
Whatever this ill-conceived double-dissolution (double disillusion?) election is about, it is clearly not addressing the issue that, more than any other, is redefining what it means to be Australian. (more…)
We need communities to sustain us, but if those communities are to survive and prosper, we must engage with them and nurture them, writes Hugh Mackay.
Aren’t you tired of being told that the deepest truth about human beings is that we are hopelessly selfish by nature? That even acts of apparent altruism are really just intended to make us feel better about ourselves and to look better in the eyes of others? That we are ruthlessly competitive creatures, so intent on satisfying our own needs that we are capable of aggressive and even violent behaviour towards anyone who gets in our way?
Of course those things are true of some of us, some of the time. But there’s an even deeper truth about us: we are by nature social creatures; co-operative more than competitive. If you doubt it, look at how most of us choose to live – in cities, towns and villages – because, for all our claims to independence, we are not good at surviving in isolation.
We need each other. We need communities to sustain us, but if those communities are to survive and prosper, we must engage with them and nurture them. That’s the beautiful symmetry of human society: to survive, we need communities and if those communities are to survive, they need us.
So here’s the classic human quandary: we are individuals with a strong sense of our independent personal identityand we are members of families, groups and communities with an equally strong sense of social identity, fed by our desire to connect and belong. This tension between our independence and our interdependence explains why we are so often conflicted and confused: we know how best to live, but our internal war distracts us.
It is indeed in our nature to be altruistic, because altruism nurtures the community, but our natural drive to please ourselves sometimes takes over. We know that a civil society depends on us all treating each other with kindness and respect, but sometimes we simply want our own way, regardless of its impact on others. We know the price we must pay for belonging to a community is to curb our self-interest, but our impulses and addictions sometimes get the better of us.
If you want to see the tension between independence and interdependence in action, watch us playing team sports. Team sports are a graphic demonstration of how we must first learn to co-operate with the other members of the team before we can hope to compete successfully.
Most of us find it hard to resolve this tension, which is why we often dream of aplace where it would be possible to live as we think we should – where we could “be ourselves” while still being part of a functioning community. This is what drives the fantasy of “village life”, even in our big cities. (Sydney’s Lord Mayor, for example, is determined to make Sydney a “city of villages” in the manner of New York.)
That word “village” has emotional power because it conjures up the idea of a place where the tension between independence and interdependence can be resolved in a harmonious way; where we can write poetry in solitude but also be part of a caring and supportive community; where the neighbours will strike that perfect balance between friendliness and respect for each other’s privacy.
Inside our heads, the fantasy often involves an idyllic rural setting that magically eliminates flies, snakes, drought, grasshopper plagues, and a higher rate of respiratory disease and mental illness compared with the city – to say nothing of poorer access to educational, medical, administrative and commercial services. And yet, regardless of the tough reality, the concept is appealing because the very word “village” evokes a feeling of physical safety and emotional security; a place where I could say that I belong here”.
The good news is that you can create a village – or at least the life of a village – anywhere at all: it’s not about where you live; it’s about how you live, and the acid test is how you relate to the local neighbourhood. Mostly, our neighbours are accidental – we didn’t choose them, yet we must get along with them. They will become the people who, with or without the extra dimension of friendship, will become part of the fabric of our, and our children’s lives.
Just like any other kind of human relationship, our relationship with a local community requires some effort on our part if it is to work.
In modern Western societies like Australia, many pressures work against community engagement and involvement: our changing patterns of marriage and divorce demand difficult adjustments for many families and social networks; our low birthrate reduces the role children have traditionally played as a social lubricant; the rise of the two-income household means both partners are often too busy to give much time to the local neighbourhood; the mobility of the population (in Australia, like the US, we move, on average, every six years); universal car ownership reducing local footpath traffic; the IT revolution that creates the illusion of connectedness while making it easier than ever for us notto see each other.
Communities are not self-sustaining. We need to respond to our natural “herd instinct” by joining, associating, congregating, volunteering, talking and listening – engaging. Everything from joining a book club or stopping to chat with a neighbour to greeting a stranger helps to build the social capital that makes communities strong.
Part of the magic of communities is that, however imperceptibly, they shape us to fit them. We are the authors of each other’s stories through the influence we have on each other. Each of those stories might be unique, but the sub-text is universal: it is about finding the answer to just one question: where do I belong?
Every community has its differences of opinion, its social divisions and its cultural tensions, which is simply to say that every community is both diverse and, inescapably, human. If you want to master the art of belonging, you’ll need to accept the imperfections, the complexities and the tensions and deal with them. And the best way of dealing with them is to overlook them. There’s a lot of tolerance – a lot of forgiveness – in the art of belonging.
So why would you bother? Let me suggest two reasons why it’s worth the effort.
The French Catholic existentialist Gabriel Marcel claimed that the reality of our personal existence could only be fulfilled through our engagement with communal life. He believed – and who would disagree? – that if we position ourselves (or are forced) outside a community, we tend to become obsessed with ourselves: self-absorption is the sure sign of a person not engaged with a community. After all, we never really know who we are until we know where we belong: ‘finding yourself’ makes no sense outside a social context.
In the end, the reward for having connected with your neighbours is that you will feel physically safer and more emotionally secure in your neighbourhood. (Who wants to feel like a stranger in their own street?)
Hugh Mackay is a social researcher and author. Hugh’s new book, The Art of Belonging, is published by Macmillan.
This article was first published in the November edition of The Good Oil, the e-magazine of the Good Samaritan Sisters www.goodsams.org.au
The political decline of the Abbott government has been remarkable. No other federal government in recent history has fallen from favour so soon after an election, nor languished in the polls so intractably (consistently trailling Labor 47-53 for more than six months).
The question is: why?
There are at least two answers. The obvious one is political incompetence: in particular, the government’s blindness to the reality of its situation. By “its situation” I don’t just mean its challenging relationship with the Senate; I mean the fact that, like many oppositions coming to power, it had less to crow about than it was prepared to admit.
Forgive me if I repeat a well-worn argument: oppositions don’t win elections, governments lose them. If a government is doing reasonably well, we don’t throw it out. (In fact, we are so unwilling to change federal governments, we’ve only done it six times since 1949.) A government must be seen to be terminally incompetent, or worn out, before we replace it.
The Coalition came to power in 2013 courtesy of a deeply divided Labor government with a hopelessly discredited leader. The majority of voters did not want Tony Abbott as their prime minister, but their urge to thump Labor was overwhelming. Put bluntly, they voted for the Coalition because it was not Labor.
A smart leader, newly into office, would respect the implications of that. Be modest in your first-term goals, so you can take the people with you; let the voters learn to trust you; build consensus as a platform for your longer-term policy objectives.
Not this lot. Having promised “no surprises”, having foreshadowed a measured and steady approach, they went berserk: from the lunacy of knights and dames and the assault on welfare support for the young unemployed to Senator Brandis’s disastrous foray into the “bigotry” debate and Christopher Pyne’s unheralded proposals for new university fee-structures, they have kept the surprises coming. Worse, they claim a mandate for whatever they do, as if the electorate had pondered a long list of policy options and decided, on balance, that they preferred the Coalition’s over Labor’s.
All this is read by the voters as arrogance. And arrogance, in Australia, is the cardinal sin.
There’s a less obvious explanation for the government’s woes that runs even deeper than any of that: this is a government that appears to have lost its moral authority.
Moral authority is a subtle, nuanced thing: once lost, it is hard to win back. It’s partly a matter of whether the electorate trusts the leader and cabinet, and partly a question of whether the voters’ nobler nature is being appealed to. But moral authority is also a function of the moral tone of a government’s policies – especially its signature policies – and the way they affect its approach to government.
So which policies set this government’s moral tone?
No one could have failed to notice that “stop the boats” was, and remains, one of the signature policies of the Abbott government – right up there with repealing the carbon tax.
If “stop the boats” only meant “let’s find a way to stop people-smugglers from exploiting refugees as profit-fodder”, we could all sign up to that, though it’s obviously a regional challenge that calls for skilled diplomacy. But the slogan loses all its moral force when it is used as an excuse to brutalise legitimate asylum-seekers who are already here.
And it becomes even less defensible when it is used not only to imprison and abuse refugees seeking asylum in Australia, but to palm them off to countries far less well-equipped to absorb them than we are. (Cambodia? Are we serious?)
One of the most devious aspects of the government’s defence of its treatment of asylum-seekers is that “we are trying to stop people drowning at sea”. (Labor employed precisely the same sophistry.) If this were true, it would have resulted in a vigorous policy of air-and-sea rescue patrols committed to saving any refugees at risk of drowning. So the claim is self-evidently hypocritical.
That piece of silliness aside, “stop the boats” has become such a totemic, mesmeric slogan, it’s tempting to fall for the idea that the legitimacy of the policy has been established by its apparent success. Perhaps the government doesn’t realise that, even though it has persuaded many voters to support the policy, the grim reality of its execution was always bound to set alarm bells ringing in the national conscience. We know that dark deeds are being performed in our name that will eventually come back to bite us.
But the government’s loss of moral authority does not spring from just that one policy: the real problem is that when there is a moral black hole at the very centre of a government’s rationale (“the end justifies the means”), a more general moral laxity becomes possible.
This taps into an ancient issue: if a man betrays his wife, does that make it easier for him to betray his country? Does stealing once make stealing a second time more likely? Does every moral lapse make the next one easier?
Let’s see how the dominoes might fall in this case.
Once you have learnt to live with a policy that hits desperate refugees where it hurts most – denying them identity, dignity, freedom and hope – it becomes easier to be tough on your own poor, elderly, unemployed and marginalised. Thus, the inherent unfairness of the May budget can be traced to this malaise at the core of the government’s philosophy.
Similarly, once you ignore your international obligations regarding the treatment of asylum seekers, it becomes easier to ignore other obligations to the global community – like the need to decarbonise the economy by urgently ramping up our production of clean energy. Thus, the proposed scrapping of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and the scaling back of the emissions target can also be linked to a general reluctance to accept moral responsibility (except when it comes to military support for the US in the Middle East).
In such a relaxed moral climate, it becomes easier to break promises. The long list of broken election promises, from pensions to ABC funding, is extraordinary even by the low standards of contemporary politics.
It’s not only easier to break promises, it’s also easier to be blithe about doing it. Once you’ve enshrined a Big Lie at the heart of your signature policy – insisting that “these people have come here illegally” when they most assuredly have not – other lies are easier, whether it’s the lie about school funding (“We’re on the same page as Labor”) or the lies that deny promises have been broken (“No, we haven’t broken our promise about superannuation …”).
The Abbott government might not yet fully appreciate the cumulative effect of all this on voter sentiment – an effect compounded, of course, by its extravagant pre-election posturing about integrity, probity, promise-keeping and “Labor’s lies”.
Any government can recover from political ineptitude, and the heightened terrorist threat and redeployment of troops in Iraq will probably lift this government’s stocks in the short term. But the loss of moral authority is an underlying problem that won’t go away, because it is a loss that diminishes us all.
Hugh Mackay’s new book ‘The Art of Belonging’ is published by Macmillan on 30 September 2014.
“No boats have arrived for 36 days!” That was the recent proud claim of our immigration minister, Scott Morrison, delivered in a tone that suggested we should all cheer such a wonderful accomplishment.
In fact, given the strategies employed to achieve this result, we should hang our heads in shame. We are living through a dark period in our cultural history where politicians like Morrison are actively encouraging a dulling of our moral sense by appealing to that most dangerous moral principle of all: “The end justifies the means”.
It’s not just this government, of course: the stain on our national conscience has been spreading for years, through the life of several governments from both sides of politics. And an odd things about this situation is that our leaders – normally so timid in the face of the polls – are seriously out of step with the majority of Australians (who, according to two reputable national surveys, favour rapid, onshore processing of asylum-seekers’ claims).
We can tip-toe around this and speak of “human rights abuses”, or a lack of compassion, or a failure to honour our international treaty obligations. But why mince words in the face of the intentional brutality – psychological and physical – being inflicted on asylum-seekers imprisoned on Christmas Island, Nauru and Manus Island, by an elected Australian government? Why not call our asylum-seeker policy what it is: immoral.
It’s immoral because it treats people who have committed no crime as if they were criminals. It’s immoral because it fails to honour that most basic of all moral principles: treat others as we ourselves would wish to be treated. Even if we add the caveat “in the circumstances”, the principle doesn’t go away.
There are many situations in which we are bound to treat people more harshly than we would wish to be treated ourselves: we do it with criminals; we do it with enemies; we do it with people we’re retrenching, or lovers we’re abandoning. But even in situations like those, members of a self-proclaimed civil society are obliged to treat everybody with appropriate dignity and respect – two ingredients glaringly absent from life in an Australian detention centre.
Our asylum-seeker policy is also immoral because it involves bad behaviour in the pursuit of a “good” goal. Given the vast scale of the world’s refugee crisis, it’s arguable whether stopping the boats is, in fact, a morally praiseworthy goal, but let’s accept, for the moment, that it is (and stopping rapacious people-smugglers is undeniably good). Precisely because it is a good goal, everything done in pursuit of that goal must be good. If not – if we fall for the mad idea that we can behave badly in pursuit of a good goal – then we have compromised our own integrity and tarnished the very values we are claiming to uphold.
If you embrace the idea that the end justifies the means, then you’ll be stuck with accepting torture as a legitimate way of extracting useful information. You’ll accept that bribery and corruption are justifiable ways of achieving political or commercial goals. You’ll endorse assassination as a legitimate tool of the political struggle.
Is that us? Is that the moral framework Australians want our governments to adopt when dealing with hapless souls who arrive here, by whatever means, as asylum seekers? Are we so committed to the sloganistic ideal of “stopping the boats” that we think it’s morally okay to incarcerate such people – men, women and children – in conditions deliberately designed to dehumanise them, rob them of hope and destroy their faith in the future (including their faith in Australia as an honourable, civilised, compassionate society). Do we seriously believe this strategy can be justified on the grounds that it might discourage others from trying to come here?
Do we think it’s morally acceptable to condemn authentic refugees to the crushing uncertainty of temporary protection visas, and to deny them the right to work here? (Economic stupidity, as well: fancy deciding it’s better to support them than to encourage them to support themselves and, in the process, make a useful contribution to our economy.)
We have become participants in a tragedy that will attract as much opprobrium in the future as the “stolen generations” and White Australia do now. Having chosen to behave immorally, we are setting ourselves up not only for international condemnation, but also for massive compensation claims in the future and, no doubt, yet another hollow apology to the thousands of people we have abused because we adopted that tacky mantra “whatever it takes”.
If we really want to stop the boats, we should demand that our politicians, diplomats and aid agencies find morally acceptable ways of doing so. To pursue such a difficult goal in a state of moral blindness is hazardous in the extreme.
There’s an ironic little twist to this tale. Many Australians who support the present brutal policy seem to think they are defending “Christian values” against an invasion of infidels. But isn’t the very essence of those values that we should show kindness to strangers, offer support to the weak and disadvantaged, and succour to the poor, the hungry, the dispossessed who come knocking at our door?
Hugh Mackay is a social researcher and author.