Foreign Secretary: In the old days we’d have sent in a gunboat.
Sir Humphrey Appleby: Yes.
James Hacker: I suppose … that is absolutely out of the question?
Yes, Minister
Australia’s interests — indeed, its dignity — are being affronted throughout the region. Stern Hu remains in Chinese detention, beyond consular access. An Australian tragically has been shot dead in West Papua.
And up goes the cry for the Government to do something. Quite what it should do isn’t clear, but the demand for action is insistent. The Government’s insistence on following established procedures is taken as a sign of weakness.
Australians’ obsessive need for government action to address each and every problem used to be confined to domestic politics. Now Australians appear to want Government responsiveness to extend to each and every Australian overseas. In non-anglophone countries only, of course.
There’s an air of colonialism about this attitude, a “don’t they know who we are” tone that suggests foreigners are out of line when messing with Australians. We’re white, we’re friends with the Americans, and we play sport well. Don’t get uppity with us, we’re serious — world — players.
Of course, we’re not. We’re a well-endowed quarry, a first rate source of actors and sportsmen and little else. That doesn’t mean there isn’t much to be proud in Australia’s successful democracy and high standard of living, but our apparent insistence on carrying on like we’re deputy sheriff and accordingly owed respect by the rest of the world is a peculiar leftover of the cultural cringe. We’re a minor player. There’s only 22 million of us. Deal with it. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.
I think its because our media experience of life is so Americanised that we have adopted their expectations in place of our former cringe. We’re a nation of people who will die calling 911.
It has always been my hypothesis that Australians went from idolizing ‘Home’ as they so quaintly called England, and as quickly as one can say WWII they jumped onto America as the true beacon of light.
We are a servile lot willing to go on all fours for her royal Maj, LBJ, JFK, George W Bush et al. It has to be our convict beginnings. I imagine the poor dear convicts, when they got to be a little bit trusted in the penal hell they probably did some work for their colonial masters and the squatocracy in their vast acres and huge homesteads. The plebs would have committed murder to live like their overlords. But it wouldn’t have done to have said so.
Clustered around the major towns the new urban-dwelling suburbanites, cowed by the vast hinterland felt a special need to cling together. And in order to maintain this acceptance into the social levels of each strata it was vital to like/dislike whatever the majority believed. Thus did Oz in one rapid jump go from felon to fawning upon one’s betters.
Another way to become accepted as being one of the boys, was to worship royalty.
Only a nation of grovelers would willingly wish to remain an heredity monarchy. In this the year two thousand and ten.
No wonder so many of our great thinkers go to live overseas. Anything to escape the tyranny of mediocrity.
Thank goodness for that quarry or we would have been in economic trouble a long time ago. We are an incredibly lucky nation.