Debates over migration policy risk confusing personal values with the shared civic virtues that underpin citizenship in a liberal democracy.
Leader of the Opposition Angus Taylor’s speech to the Menzies Research Institute on 14 April is an example of poorly-designed public policy. Taylor’s proposed new immigration policy rests on a return to active discrimination ‘based on values’: help those who want to help Australia, and harm those who want to harm Australia. A better-designed immigration policy would comply less on the elastic and often evasive quality of personal ‘values’ and more on the substantive civic virtue of national citizenship.
Most of the opposition to Taylor has been on his favoured ‘national values’, with no critic more pointed than passionate former prime minister Paul Keating on P&I last week. The next step in this debate is to recover the language of civic virtue which featured so prominently during the Keating government’s policy of multicultural immigration. The late ANU academic James Jupp wrote extensively on the civic virtue of citizenship as the core political principle generating social cohesion from multicultural diversity. His Understanding Australian Multiculturalism (1996) is outstanding.
Citizenship is more than a personal value. It is a national civic virtue defining our shared sense of excellence which integrates us while honouring our multicultural identities. Social science tends to describe ‘values’ as deeply personal preferences. By contrast, citizenship is a principled norm about civic virtues or excellencies expected of all, regardless of their personal preferences.
Liberal democracies have their own distinctive virtues of citizenship which emerged well before the contemporary language of values as tokens of personal taste. One useful international expert on the specific virtues of liberalism is the progressive American political theorist William Galston of the Brookings Institution, author of books on Liberal Purposes (1991) and The Practice of Liberal Pluralism (2005).
There is a place for active discrimination in public policy but Taylor is wrong to frame that around a revised version of ‘Australian Values’ already present in Australian immigration practice. As used here, ‘discrimination’ means that government should not be simply neutral in assessing potential immigrants. That makes sense. But it makes less sense for government to discriminate about the range and substance of personal opinion, especially as evident from an immigrant’s social media preferences.
The current official statement about ‘Australian Values’ has evolved from earlier versions by the Howard government overturning the Hawke/Keating government’s focus on multicultural citizenship. Labor’s earlier aim with immigration was to use the equal opportunity of cultural diversity to encourage immigrants to continue to practice cultural diversity while accepting a common creed of Australian citizenship. Multicultural citizenship was not about culturally diverse forms of citizenship but about multicultural forms of acceptance of this core civic virtue of citizenship.
Citizenship is not the focus of Taylor’s recent speech, which is all about defending ‘our way of life’, ‘our core beliefs’ and ‘love for our country’. The current version of the ‘Australian Values Statement’ includes the value of a ‘fair go’ which is more openly tolerant than the version of assimilation promoted by Taylor. The ‘fair go’ principle ‘embraces…mutual respect, tolerance, compassion for those in need, (and) equality of opportunity for all’. In becoming Australian citizens, immigrants know that this civic virtue comes with many civic duties, such as compulsory voting, serving on juries and standing for election to representative assemblies, and employment as a public servant or magistrate or judge.
Taylor’s approach is to move further from the earlier multicultural framework and to solidify the ‘social cohesion’ dimensions of the ‘Australian Values Statement’. However well-meaning that current official statement about ‘Australian Values’ might be, modern liberal democracies like Australia have reason to be wary of a call to values which almost by definition are matters of individual taste. Values vary according to personal preference, so that a wide range of disparate values can spread across the Australian nation.
Governments can tolerate considerable diversity of personal values, so long as citizens know and accept the civic virtues associated with national citizenship. When personal values undermine the virtue of citizenship, government then is right to discriminate against those politically inappropriate values.
The late Brian Galligan of the University of Melbourne was an expert on the virtue of citizenship. Galligan wrote that Australian citizenship is more about the duties of civic virtue than dreams of national values. In his coauthored Becoming Australian book (2014), Galligan noted the link back to Aristotle’s great work of Politics which defined a citizen as ‘one who shared in ruling and being ruled’ – exactly as holds in contemporary Australia. At Federation, the drafters of the Australian Constitution saw Australian citizenship historically, as a new way of being ‘British subjects’. The value of explicitly Australian citizenship came much later. This British background brings with it doctrines of liberal citizenship that are more instructive than the current rhetoric about personal values.
For example, Australia has generally followed the line of that great liberal thinker and member of the British House of Commons, John Stuart Mill, whose classic On Liberty calls for toleration on diversity over values. Yet Mill’s instructive pluralism was quite demanding of the civic virtues required of liberal forms of citizenship. Mill’s later Considerations on Representative Government promoted a scheme of civic virtues well-known to the Australian drafters of the national Constitution at Federation.
Australians can learn from Mill, who used his time in the House of Commons to test his reliance on liberal political theory. As an elected representative, Mill worked progressively to transform the British ‘way of life’. Instead of preserving ‘national values’, Mill promoted new virtues of citizenship based on liberal principle rather than conventional public opinion. Mill’s concept of liberal citizenship broke ranks with conventional practice. His active political support for female suffrage and for proportional representation greatly influenced Australian understandings of the civic virtues appropriate to national citizenship.
It is still not too late for Australian politicians to re-inject the political language of civic virtues into the disappointing debate over national values.
John Uhr
Emeritus Professor Uhr works in the School of Politics and International Relations, Research School of Social Sciences, ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences at ANU. His research interests include Australian politics, political and governmental ethics, parliament, public leadership and democratic theory and practice.