By the end of his life, Donald Horne was not as damning of Australia as he’d been in his most celebrated work. His 1964 book, The Lucky Country, was one of the most stinging critiques of Australia ever written. Its most famous line: “Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second-rate people who share its luck.”
In his last year among us, 2005, he concluded that Australia had started to make its own luck. The reforms of the Hawke-Keating and Howard-Costello years had made the country more vibrant, more prosperous. But in his final interview, two things still agitated him enormously.
Illustration: John Shakespeare Credit:
One was that a gathering mining boom was reviving Australian complacency. “It’s quite appalling to discover people saying today that Australia is still the lucky country because we have all these minerals. There’s still a bloody lucky-country mentality!”
The other was a persistent “derivativeness” in the way Australia conducted itself, too much imitation of other countries and not enough initiative of our own, too much societal plagiarism and not enough bold originality.
“The essential thing in the writing of The Lucky Country was derivativeness,” he told me. It was “a derivative-society thesis”. And this still held true four decades later.
This was undeniably true of Australian democracy and politics. Our system was consciously founded on the British model, with many US features adopted along the way.
Today, derivativeness offers Australia only a dead end. The British and American political systems now offer object lessons in what to avoid, not what to emulate. Destructive populism plunged both nations into bitter division over national identity.
Britain self-harmed with its years of Brexit neurosis and ended up with Boris Johnson as its reward. In the US, the very survival of democracy has been thrown into question. And one of the vogue topics in America today is whether it is fated to return to murderous civil war.
With Australia’s traditional models lost in democratic dementia, we need to move from imitation to invention. Fortunately, we have been shown the way. Noel Pearson has given Australia the gift of a compelling vision of the nation’s unique identity and unified future.
The intellectual, activist and chairman of Cape York Partnership offers us the prospect of “a more complete commonwealth”. In a conception he first delivered in 2014, Pearson said: “Our nation is in three parts. There is our ancient heritage, written in the continent and original culture painted on its land and seascapes.
“There is its British inheritance, the structures of government and society transported from the UK fixing its foundations in the ancient soil. There is its multicultural achievement: a triumph of immigration that brought together the gifts of peoples and cultures from all over the globe – forming one indissoluble commonwealth.”
“We stand on the cusp of bringing these three parts of our national story together,” Pearson said, “with constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australians. This reconciliation will make a more complete commonwealth.”
Of course, other nations have the same three elements – Indigenous peoples, British-born democracy and immigrant influxes. Australian uniqueness should flow from some distinguishing features. One is that Indigenous Australians represent the oldest continuing civilisation on earth. Another must be found in the manner of our reconciliation.
Seven years on, how’s Pearson’s vision looking? After the annual and escalating clash of Australia Day celebrations with Invasion Day protests, is the nation any closer to reconciliation? Is Australia able to construct its unique, more complete identity? Or are we doomed mindlessly to mimic the disintegration of American politics – racism on the right and identity politics on the left, each side demanding greater rights than the other?
I asked Noel Pearson. “For as long as we have been waiting for it to happen, we have been fraying, the country has been fraying,” he says. “It’s not good that it go on much longer. My anxiety is about the need for leadership. Otherwise we risk this kind of narrative of separatism and we go down the American road because we haven’t found some kind of resolution.
“Young people want this, young people across the board, and by ‘young’ I mean people in their 40s down. Young white Australians are familiar with these issues and they stand in solidarity with the protesters. They are not happy with the situation. This is why I think recognition is so imperative.
“We have to tie the nation together rather than let it fray. I don’t want protest separatism to continue – it’s not good for our [Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander] people and it’s not good for our country. Protest separatism is getting more and more pronounced.”
So it may be surprising to hear that Pearson thinks that the elements are falling into place to realise his vision. Of course, any lasting reform must be bipartisan. Unless both sides of politics agree, any referendum will fail, any legislation will be vulnerable to repeal.
So it may be even more surprising to hear that Pearson thinks that, among the Labor, Liberal and Nationals parties, the Nationals are most supportive:
“National Party people are the best because they have blackfellas in their electorates, they went to school with them, they played footy with them, they know them by name. Blackfellas aren’t abstract to them, they’re not scared of them.”
There has been bipartisan support for constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australia since John Howard proposed the idea shortly before the 2007 election. He committed to a referendum within 18 months to achieve it but, of course, lost the election. Kevin Rudd had immediately agreed with Howard, though, once in power, he postponed any referendum to a second term. Which, of course, he didn’t get, except for a few fleeting months in 2013.
“For the last 14 years, every government has gone into an election on a platform of constitutional recognition, we’ve had two parliamentary inquiries and three public policy processes,” laments Pearson. “It’s been the longest bloody process in history and blackfellas have stuck with it through every twist and turn.”
But while it may have been excruciatingly slow, the delays allowed time for an idea with more substance than just constitutional recognition alone. The Uluru Statement from the Heart in 2017 inspired the idea of an Indigenous Voice to Parliament.
Malcolm Turnbull dismissed this idea as a “third chamber of Parliament”. This was a deliberate mischaracterisation to excuse his government from acting on it. The Voice has only ever been proposed as an advisory body, not an executive or legislative one. It wouldn’t make policy or law; it would offer advice and suggestions on policy and law affecting Indigenous Australia.
A parliamentary committee led by the Liberals’ Julian Leeser and Labor’s Pat Dodson produced a report on how to create a Voice and Scott Morrison committed his government to starting work on it.
The 2019 budget allocated $7 million to “co-design” with Aboriginal communities the institutional shape of the Voice. And last month the Minister for Indigenous Australians, Ken Wyatt, responded by announcing a process to create 35 local and regional Voice bodies to improve grassroots decision-making. A national Voice is supposed to follow later.
Noel Pearson gives Morrison credit for “a step-by-step process, not setting the hares running, not getting ahead of themselves”. And Morrison has allocated $160 million to run a referendum on constitutional recognition. But there’s a catch.
Pearson and other Indigenous leaders want to change the constitution to create a constitutional place for the Voice. Any such proposed amendment would not specify the design of the Voice – that would be up to the Parliament. But Morrison has not supported this idea. He’s so far supported a referendum for recognition of Indigenous Australians, but without any reference to a Voice.
Pearson isn’t perturbed; the next steps will have to wait till after the election due by May. “What the government hasn’t done is rule it out. Everything is heading towards resolution. It just requires that the person who’s leading the country in the next term of Parliament take this to a bipartisan conclusion. It’s gotta be substantive, it’s gotta be real.”
Australia is fortunate that its Indigenous leaders have been conciliatory and patient. Very patient. Over two and a quarter centuries since the British colonised the country and 14 years since John Howard proposed constitutional recognition, Pearson thinks reconciliation is approaching. “I see it mate, we are on track, we are on track.”
And he can take some satisfaction from the Prime Minister’s words this week as Morrison gave thanks for “a history that spans 65,000 years; a continent of unmatched beauty and wonder; a democratic tradition that is the foundation of our freedom; and our kaleidoscope of multicultural and multi-faith communities”.
Morrison embraced the three parts of Pearson’s vision, and added a fourth, the land, the continent itself. If we habitually start thinking of ourselves as not only a former colony, and not just a derivative country but an entire continent, the only continent on earth that is united as a single nation, Australia’s dreaming could evolve to another level of national potential. But that’s a story for another Australia Day.
Peter Hartcher is political editor.
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