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The Lucky Country is perhaps the most iconic of our catalogue of ‘state of the nation’ books. More than any other, it has become a part of the thing it described. Over the years, its opinions and observations have been used both to challenge and to reproduce some of the established assumptions and mythologies about Australia’s national character and values.

Of course, these are terms which have been much contested. Speaking about the national character or Australian values is entirely entangled with the partisan politics of the time. These days, rather than marking points of general recognition and assent, they have generated opportunities for motivated intervention and division. We can’t talk about the national culture so generally or so confidently as Donald Horne did in 1964. We are not that kind of nation any more.

Clearly, much has changed since 1964 — structurally and politically. Australia is less demographically homogeneous, less white, less youthful, less Anglo and perhaps slightly less masculinist. All good, as far as that goes, but there are other changes that are less progressive. Social inequality is greater than it was in the 60s, our politics have become more short-term and tribal, Closing the Gap still hasn’t happened, and the standards of conduct in politics and government have been on a downward slide since at least the early 2000s. Some indicators (such as the Scanlon report on Social Cohesion) suggest our citizens are facing a crisis in belonging, and that we are less of an inclusive, just, and equitable national community than we used to be.

The Lucky Country provided us with an account of something like a common culture. I doubt if we could picture our culture quite like that today. For a whole variety of reasons, many of which simply weren’t around in 1964, I believe there is a question as to what extent, in recent years, the idea of the nation has been able to function as an effective device for calling up an inclusive imagined community to which all Australians can, or indeed might wish to, claim membership or to which they might experience a sense of belonging.

There are numerous places where we might look to find the reasons for this. The two I want to focus on in this presentation are the role of a transformed media landscape and the diminished culture of federal politics. Both are fundamental to the cultural construction of the nation and they have played a crucial part in refashioning the ways we can now imagine the national community. Much of the consequences of that refashioning has been destructive, serving to undermine our citizens’ confidence in, and the legitimacy of, the idea of the nation and its place in our collective imagination.

Let’s start with what was for many years the standard work on the idea of the nation, Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities. There are multiple factors at play in his analysis of the origins and spread of nationalism over the last two centuries, but one that has been often noted is his emphasis on the role of the print media. Anderson claims that the arrival of the novel and the newspaper in the eighteenth century produced ‘two forms of imagining’ which ‘provided the technical means for “re-presenting” the kind of imagined community that is the nation’ (p. 30.). Anderson suggests that the newspaper had a particular resonance partly due to its daily ubiquity — on the newsstand, in the bus, on the train, in the home. The newspaper is a physical as well as a representational means of reassuring its reader that their imagined community is ‘visibly rooted in everyday life’ (pp.39-40). It is the newspaper, with its vernacular languages and quotidian availability, which takes nationalism from the intellectuals to the populace.

Those influenced by Anderson’s history subsequently broadened its focus to include the mass media in general and in particular television, which eventually took over as the medium most customarily implicated in discussions of the mass-mediated socio-cultural construction of the nation. Television was the place where the nation represented itself, and where its conversations about itself most accessibly took place. But, as the power and influence of the mass media has contracted, and as we have entered a globalizing post digital era where the idea of a common or indeed a national culture has lost much of its purchase, things are very different. There are now serious concerns about the social and cultural function of these media systems as they appear to have relinquished their traditional interest in accurately informing our citizens, in holding power to account, or in fostering a sense of belonging to the national community.

There are some obvious issues to point to here. The acceleration in the flow of so-called information has outstripped the citizen’s capacity to assess its legitimacy or validate its sources. At the same time, the rising tide of information has been aggressively polluted by the spread of misinformation and disinformation, the rise of ‘truthiness’, and the failure of strategies such as ‘fact-checking’ to act as an effective corrective. Allowing the online environment to become a virtual Wild West, freed from the corporate and personal responsibilities or social norms that civilise behaviour offline, turns out to have been a serious mistake.

As the balance of power swings away from a nationally regulated mass media towards a transnational unregulated online media, it has supercharged a fundamental shift in the media’s dominant business model — both online and offline. Where once that business model might have depended in varying ways and to varying extents upon the media outlet’s status as a trusted source of information, now it is overwhelmingly dependent upon the ability to, on a good day, entertain, but on many others to provoke, enrage, or alarm. The media’s primary strategic objective today is the attraction of attention. The surest way to achieve that objective is to generate anger, fear, or resentment — what has been called ‘angertainment’.

Of course, this didn’t just start with the digital era. The mass media was already failing us before social media came along. Eric Beecher’s recent history of media moguls, The Men Who Killed the News, presents us with a rogues’ gallery of newspaper proprietors who have abused their power. These men exploited what Beecher describes as ‘the gigantic loophole in democracy that protects the freedom of the press without requiring any ethical, moral, or societal responsibility from its owners’ (p. vii).  His lineup of those who have exploited this loophole includes William Randolph Hearst, Robert Maxwell, Conrad Black, Silvio Berlusconi, and the ‘mogul’s mogul’, Rupert Murdoch. But the digital era has taken this exploitation to another level, driven by the new media moguls, arguably with even less of a moral compass, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk.

Beecher’s loophole has played a major role in the degradation of the culture of politics in Australia. That degradation has been facilitated by a significant erosion in the levels of ethical and social responsibility now observable in the much of the performance of political journalism, in particular. The disinterest in calling out lies and untruths rather than blithely disseminating them, the cynical use of the alibi of objectivity to create what is called false balance, the beating-up of faux controversies generated around the person rather than the investigation of policy, the coverage of politics as a sport or a game: these are damaging and pervasive tendencies in journalism practice that may have long been around at the bottom end of the tabloid print media, but which have become more or less standard practices right across the media landscape in the current era.   

What is particularly notable, and something that is a comparatively recent shift in Australia, is that the behaviour of the political journalist has changed as they have moved closer to the flame. No longer content to act as watchdogs on the behalf of the public, some of today’s most influential political journalists have come to promote themselves as active players in the game of politics. No longer independent observers or analysts, they are participants.

The consequent reduction in the provision of independent scrutiny and analysis has sidelined issues of accountability and the task of holding power to account. It is little wonder, then, that the current standards of national governance have sunk so low, and that the level of trust our citizens have in many of our institutions has followed suit. As a pointer to all that is rotten in this domain, I’ve got just one word: Robodebt.

As the likely resonance of that word would suggest, however, it is our politicians themselves who have done the most to undermine the trust in and the perceived legitimacy of our institutions of government. They have displayed a determined resistance to accepting accountability, political responsibility, or the need for transparency. In search of occasional political advantage, they have been prepared to launch the most cynical attacks on our publicly funded scientific and cultural institutions.  At various points they have chosen to reject the expertise of the CSIRO and other scientific and medical authorities, and they have refused to meet with experts capable of guiding national policy on natural disasters and environmental risk. While waging the long-running culture wars, they have consistently bullied an ever more risk-averse ABC, and pounced on any member of the GLAM sector foolhardy enough to raise their head above the parapet of government cultural policy.

Expertise has been treated as a threat to be extinguished, and individuals or institutions who represent competing sources of authority are recklessly attacked. In what is probably the most significant structural shift, the politicization of the public service, with the inevitable consequences for disinterested advice and effective governance, has now been proceeding for something like three decades.

In one of her Quarterly Essays, Laura Tingle suggested that our governments appear to have forgotten how to govern. My take on this is, actually, that they are just not that interested.  Politics has been repurposed so it is now more about the securing of power than using that power to govern in the national interest. The performance of politics has itself become the central activity for all politicians — for those in power as well as those seeking to displace them. Good policy, well informed legislation, governing in the national interest and for the public good, are all casualties of this brand of politics.

Where does that leave the public good and the national interest, if we can’t rely on the media or our political institutions to place this in the foreground any longer? Underpinning the proper functioning of the imagined community of the nation is the confidence that somewhere there must reside the responsibility for national wellbeing, or at least the scrutiny that would call to account those who fail to meet that responsibility. That confidence, the confidence in the fundamental centrality of the national interest and the public good, is now in short supply.

The lucky country, as a generalizing aphorism, seems to describe another country.  We are in a very different place now. This is a national community that is weary of its fractured political landscape, frustrated at the failure of its political class to act decisively and responsibly on the challenges we face, socially divided by decades of cynically confected culture wars, and beset by the widening gaps in opportunity and resources created by the years of neoliberal policy settings and a bipartisan reluctance to address the longstanding failures in social justice around gender, race, and class.

In addressing our session title, ‘Dream and Discontent’, I guess it is pretty clear that my focus is on the discontent, rather than the dream. This is a nation in need of a re-imagining — politically, socially, and culturally. On current settings, given the account I have just presented, creating the imagined community 2.0 seems as if it will have to be done without the assistance of the media or the political class. Like the resilient and resourceful folk so routinely left by the state to deal with the consequences of our unforeseen natural disasters, we will have to find ways of doing it for ourselves. That is a task for which the humanities, even though we have become collateral damage ourselves, are well equipped and we should embrace the challenge.

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