The closer we get to the Voice vote, the more the No-urging right leans back into the power of the politics of nostalgia, with a promise that the past — their version of it anyway — offers some shelter against the uncertainty of the future.
It’s what this year’s International Booker Prize-winning author Georgi Gospodinov tags as “chronostalgia” — the lure of a mass-marketed ersatz past that drives out our shared memories of what actually happened, or what could happen next.
In Australia, at least, it’s seen in traditional media’s adoption of “look at me” sham news, driven by their commercial imperative to hang on to enough of their mass to get them through the next quarter (or, in the case of the ABC, the next Senate estimates hearing).
We saw it again over the weekend, with The Australian front-paging a LARP of the politics of the 2007 Northern Territory intervention by once-were PMs Howard and Abbott, while inside the paper, former High Court chief justice Sir Harry Gibbs was exhumed to refight the undead culture wars of the 1992 Mabo decision.
A Bulgarian writer, Gospodinov’s novelistic rumination on history and memory Time Shelter describes a Europe where, offered a choice by referendum, each country opts to live in their own favoured pre-fabricated narrative of the past.
British writers assume he’s writing about Brexit. Ukrainian writers assume he’s writing about a revanchist Russia. Australians? Maybe he’s writing about the referendum we find ourselves facing.
Politically, the right is offering a replay of the time bracketed by the Mabo decision and the intervention, when reconciliation between settler and First Nations peoples was still nothing to say sorry about.
It’s a double dose of chronostalgia: the Howard project was itself a throwback to the easy-going sunny 1960s when jobs were easy to come by and people knew their place — in terms of race and gender, at least. A time when Australia’s troubling racist history could be discreetly magicked away with the repeal of the law (if not the practice) of the White Australia immigration policy and the self-congratulation of the 1967 referendum that offered the recognition-lite of counting First Nations peoples in the census.
The results in Gospodinov’s fictional referendums give a clue as to why the narrative appeals: in his book (spoiler alert!) much of Western Europe opts for the 1980s, while much of the former Communist Central and Eastern Europe takes the 1990s; in both cases, the moments in their respective national narratives when life was comfortable and the future seemed bright.
As with Brexit and Trump, Gospodinov’s older voting majorities yearn to live in the time when they were young — and, in the process, condemn their children to endure it with them. Sounds more and more like the Howard times.
The traditional media’s failure to grasp the opportunity of the promise of the Uluru statement is already being well canvassed (including, of course, here in Crikey).
They’ve embraced the No case’s daily stunt to drive the news cycle, turned the No leaders into celebrities, hanging breathlessly on their daily pronouncements, and amplified in a shocked-not-shocked style the most fake of news ginned-up by the opponents of the Voice.
Sure, there’s now an all-too-late recognition of the sham-news problem with, for example, Nine’s press gallery leader David Crowe noting Peter Dutton’s response to the immigration debate as “an example of the casual mistruth he has been uttering too often”. It’ll be interesting to see how that insight endures past Saturday.
It has highlighted too just how noxious the News Corp domination of traditional media is. It’s not just because of the narrative it promotes within its own pages. A combination of hard paywalls and social media’s withdrawal from news distribution (as the Substack Unmade highlighted on the weekend) means News’ “news” is safely sequestered into its own declining demographic.
It’s because the rest of the traditional media — and particularly the ABC — have been irretrievably reshaped by the US company’s definition of news, coupled with an unquestioning acceptance of its hand-waving of what makes reporting “fair and balanced”, even at the expense of legitimising racism and misogyny.
The audience-led economics of old media has seen it shed its role of building the future-leaning, modernising national narrative of the imagined communities that underpinned the rise of nation-states (as identified by Benedict Anderson).
Instead, as Gospodinov’s chronostalgia alerts us, the media have picked up (again, largely courtesy of News Corp) a backwards-looking, good-old-days counterfeit of a past. Maybe it’s the Howard aughts, maybe (for the left) the Hawke ’80s, or maybe (for the more ruminating conservative) even the colonial constitutional settlement of the 1890s.
These sorts of synthetic pasts, says Gospodinov, have one thing in common: they assume a dispiriting “future deficit” that denies the most important bit of history — the part that’s yet to come.
As Murdoch found, there is a profitable group of nostalgic viewers- MAGA in the USA, Brexiteers in the UK who are wedded to the legacy media. This wave of nostalgia is global- Erdogan wants to make Turkey neo-Ottoman, Modi looks back to pre-Mughal glories.
Authoritarian conservatives hate change which upsets the lazy comfort they get from traditional structures and deprives them of status superiority of those below them. Remember the baying mob who couldn’t stand Adam Goodes talking out of turn and offering a rebuke?
Of course their leaders are only too keen to initiate economic change on their terms, but there’s nothing like a bit of scapegoating and downward envy to distract the fools from who real source of their problems.
Agree, very strategic via pollsters, focus groups, think tanks, RW MSM and influencers targeting the mass of ageing (locally baby boomers & oldies), less educated & less diverse above median age voters where most vote for the right, based on old culture and nostalgia.
However, it masks that they are involved in sabotage of the future for younger generations whether climate science denial, nativism and authoritarianism aka anti-EU Brexit, Trump, parts of Europe and elsewhere fueled by ‘pensioner populism’ and ‘collective narcissism’; too easy, but there is a ‘use by date’.
Howard never left 1939 with its jingoism, xenophobia, racism, smugness and complacency. Same for Abbott, Dutton and Morrison.
Referring to the accompanying photo ( VOTE NO PAMPHLETS FOR THE INDIGENOUS VOICE TO PARLIAMENT), I’m having a quiet chuckle that the campaigners (both NO and YES) think that someone entering the polling booth needs an instruction on how to write either NO or YES on a piece of paper. Does the card include instruction on how to hold the pencil, which way up to write, and on which side of the ballot paper?
Perhaps saying “Why you should vote YES (or NO) might make a bit more sense, assuming that voters are still to make up their minds before entering the building.
Guy, I’m surprised (and I dislike) that the editors of Crikey are allowing you to post comments quite rudely slagging off the opinions (and your perceived motivations for those opinions) of other Crikey contributors. I thought I saw you disagreed with one of Bernard’s pieces the other day. I figured it was an aberration. But apparently not. And BTW it is my understanding that, of course, the ‘yes’ proposition didn’t have “unanimous” support. But the referendum question certainly reflects the Uluru statement’s request for a voice which, as I understand it, did have majority support, including, importantly, among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. I’m afraid I agree, with Chris and other Crikey commentators, that support for the referendum question has been spectacularly undermined as a direct result of the behaviour of the Murdoch media particularly, which has well and truly elevated and amplified the ‘no’ voices and never mind the veracity of what they are saying. This is purely because of the outrage/conflict $$$ click potential associated with their utterances and the Murdoch media’s blind devotion to the increasingly far Right. The ABC and other traditional media are almost as bad, having been sucked into distorting the news and information they disseminate with this faux (complete distortion of) balance. Most recent example is Guardian Australia today giving immediate oxygen and headlines to Lyle Shelton’s claim on the Christians for Equality (yet another deliberately misleadingly named far Right group) Facebook page that the voice will be a “lever for anti-Christian ideology” that the voice will “embed Indigenous spirituality in the constitution”. I mean, for Dog’s sake.
Instead of being able to focus on the positives associated with the referendum question, the ‘yes’ camp’s time and limited press and air space is almost all taken up with objecting to, disputing and disproving all the mis and disinformation being continuously pumped out by the LNP and the ‘no’ groups.
“…the Howard project was itself a throwback to the easy-going sunny 1960s when jobs were easy to come by and people knew their place…”
R U Kidding? The Howard project was anything but a throwback to the 1960s. Maybe the 1860s or in some way a pinch of the 1950s and 1970s but never the 1960s. Howard’s reign or Project, whatever that was, had the anti-union rhetoric of the Fraseresque 1970s. It had the conservativism and wowserism of the 1950s – witness the banning of same sex marriage and the outlawing of RU486. It had the occasional hardships of the 1950s, with its inflation spike of 1950-51 courtesy of the Korean War when inflation hit over 20% in one year measured – no rags went to town on that yet they howled Gough down when inflation hit 17% courtesy of the quadrupling of oil prices from 1973/74. Of course there were the post-war hardships and adjustments associated with growth, urbanisation and dislocation. Howard had that with his hands-off approach to urban planning. Jobs were not easy to come by under Howard’s Way. Unemployment remained at or above 6% for most of the time. I don’t know why some people feel a certain nostalgia for Howard. For sure, he was nowhere near as bad as Abbot, Morrison and Turnbull but he wasn’t allowed to have it all his own way courtesy of a non-compliant Senate and State Labor Governments. If it wasn’t for WorkChoices he would have had a much less tarnished legacy. Certainly, immigration increased under Howard’s tenure in similar rates of measurement to the boom in immigration of the 1960s but the circumstances were entirely different. Full employment for one which never existed even remotely under Howard.