A few years back, in the build-up to the last general election in 1999, I found myself sitting at a workshop lunch next to the then head of the Independent Electoral Commission, Judge Johann Kriegler. Apart from the various disputes relating to the electoral law, or lack of one — most particularly the controversy raging about the electoral roll that culminated in a divided Constitutional Court judgement — the chief political story of the week concerned emigration.
Certain Sunday newspapers that should remain nameless because of the pitiful carelessness in their reporting of the story were proclaiming a massive brain drain from South Africa (the Human Sciences Research Council study on which the reports were based was methodologically negligent and the figures therefore horribly inflated).
Australia, of course, was the apparent preferred destination for many. Perth, in particular. Judge Kriegler, in his inimitable style and distinctive accent, turned to me and said ‘you know, it’s not that these people want to emigrate to Perth, it’s that they want to emigrate to the Old South Africa!”
How very, very true, I now know. Australia, I discovered in recent weeks, has become appallingly conservative: with a rule for everything and everyone, the perfect bolt-hole for those in search of stability, security, and above all, racial homogeneity.
I found myself in the Sydney suburb of Mosman, which a proud Mosmanian informed me had recently been voted the second-best suburb in the world . If you like coordinated robots, which if you follow the strictly enforced speed limits of 40kph like everyone else will permit you to drive back from the centre of the city in about 10 minutes, then it’s the place for you. Oh, the thrill of it, green light after green light, row upon row of neat shops and squeeky-clean pavements gently sailing by.
It’s pretty obvious why so many of the white South African émigrés want to live in Mosman. There are absolutely no black people. In two weeks, I saw one Asian bus driver and the workers at the Thai restaurant in the high street.
Yet Australia has its own unresolved race issues. An increasingly acrimonious debate between historians is gathering pace. At its heart is the history of the Aboriginal people and the failure to deliver justice to them.
On the one side is the principal revisionist, Keith Windschutte, who sees myth and invention where orthodox historians saw war and genocide. Windshutte has recently published the first of a three-volume dissent, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History.
In response, leading historian Henry Reynolds was reported as saying that Windschutte’s work would have little value beyond pandering to the conservatives: ‘You can probably see them there at lunch in the Melbourne Club dribbling into their consommé in delight.” Described by the Australian media as the ‘first full-scale intellectual war of 21st century Australia — [which] is about one word: genocide”.
Central to this war is another historian, Robert Manne, a leading intellectual and commentator. His 2001 book In Denial: The Stolen Generations and the Right stoked the flames of the now raging debate by likening his targets to the British Holocaust denier David Irving. Manne’s analysis is interesting because it ranges beyond the small world of the academy, and powerfully accuses Australian Prime Minister John Howard of reshaping the nation’s culture and politics. Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald on December 30, Manne charts Howard’s journey. He has used the issue of asylum seekers to recast Australians’ attitude to ‘others” and to human rights. To me, Howard appears like a mimic of Margaret Thatcher’s distaste for intellectuals and what both of them like to disparage as ‘elites”.
In Manne’s analysis, Howard was able to ‘appeal directly to popular instinct and bypass the kind of fussy moral arguments advanced by the educated, left-leaning section of society his government called ‘the elites’”. How very Thatcheresque. Howard’s decision to use military force to repel all boat refugees is a ploy typical of this sort of politics. It appealed to the worst instincts of human nature, and encouraged them to prevail.
This is the ultimate test of good political leadership because great leaders do the opposite: they take positions that encourage, whatever the difficulty of persuasion, people to follow the best sides of their human nature. If you are an island people, like the Australians and the British, it is far easier to promote a sense of island isolation, in which people from ‘another place and another culture”, who look and seem different, are repelled.
This is not the only contemporary similarity between Australia and its former colonial master. Both now stand accused of following the United States in lamb-like fashion over Iraq. Howard seems determined to do all he can to show his complete support for US President George W Bush, even to the extent of speaking of his preparedness to conduct a pre-emptive strike, causing substantial alarm and disquiet among his Muslim neighbours in South-East Asia.
While it is not hard to understand why Australia might want to turn its head away from Britain and Europe as it builds its own collective identity, what is so baffling is that it should be turning towards the US rather than Asia, its natural commercial and political partner for the long term.
Howard’s disparagement of ‘political correctness” and his encouragement to revisionists contradicts his desire to ape America. The US, for all its other obvious faults, is built on a magnificent tapestry of multi-ethnicity. The new brand of conservatism that Howard has persuaded Australia to embrace threatens his vision as much as it does his nation’s future.
Australian governance has many fine features, such as the excellence of its administrative law and institutions, but its prime minister’s apparent desire to bury intellectual and historical truth is not an example to follow.
Like the US, Howard appears unconcerned about the United Nations, whose savage condemnation of his government’s decision to allow hundreds of asylum seekers to rot in detention camps, he has ignored. Howard can do so because his people have become indifferent to the asylum issue. Cosseted in the comfort zone of a highly developed society, Australians have allowed themselves to be led by Howard to the point where, intellectually dumbed down, they care little about others.
Moral indifference follows fast. This is the danger that faces us all, in Cape Town and Johannesburg as well as Sydney, London and Washington DC. Caring about the cause and needs of others less fortunate is easy to put aside when leaders permit a political culture that discourages it and eshews intellectualism.
At the African National Congress national conference in December President Thabo Mbeki paid great attention to South Africa’s growing middle class. As material benefits follow naturally from the path that accompanies political emancipation, so the danger is that wealth and its accoutrements become more important than intellectual integrity.
South Africans in general seem to care little about the plight of Zimbabweans to their north, far less about the doomsday that now seems certain to face those Iraqis caught in the crossfire of the most expedient war in modern history.
If your daily struggle is about finding shelter, feeding your children, and avoiding disease, indifference to the suffering of others is understandable. The rest of us have a choice. The challenge for intellectuals is to be more energetic, strategic and effective in the fight against the anti-intellectualism that glibly and blindly threatens any prospect of a more civilised and just world.
Archive: Previous columns by Richard Calland