Brian Galligan, Winsome Roberts and Gabriella Trifletti - Australians and Globalisation
Brian Galligan, Winsome Roberts and Gabriella Trifletti
Australians and Globalisation: The Experience of Two Centuries.
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001,
pp. vi + 217, ISBN 0-521-81199-6 hardback, 0-521-01089-6 paperback.
As a historian, I have two problems with political scientists. First, they refine and define until they create a three-legged parrot of an idea, with beautiful plumage but impossible parentage. Secondly, too often they write about the past without a true historical sense, using it as a quarry for contemporary polemics. Here three political scientists from the University of Melbourne offer a sweeping reappraisal of the essence of Australian citizenship. Am I forced to abandon my prejudices?
On the conceptual front, Brian Galligan, Winsome Roberts and Gabriella Trifiletti are admirably clear. There is nothing new, they say, about globalisation, although they acknowledge that events now operate in 'instant time', whereas early Australia was left to its own devices for months - a crucial point not prominent in the subsequent analysis. They insist that there has been no clear review of the nature of Australian citizenship in the light of the demise of Empire, attacking the anodyne conclusion of the country's Citizenship Council in 2000 that the country has no distinctive political culture. They argue that Australian history has too often been interpreted through a simplistic colony-to-nation model, in which sovereign independence is equated with living happily ever after. Since there is no such thing as complete independence in the era of globalisation, such mythology implies that citizenship itself is devalued by the erosion of sovereignty. Rejecting this as a bogus yardstick, they emphasise that Australian citizenship predated political independence and has always been multi-layered, with supra-national (imperial/British Commonwealth) elements alongside sub-national (state and local) patriotisms. They are untroubled by the technical objection that there was no such beast as Australian citizenship until 1949, regarding the older term 'British subject' as merely a convenient survival born of the need to write the federal constitution into a Westminster Act. In any case, they insist upon a 'small-c' concept of citizenship, one of general social activity rather than of formal participation in the political process. In short, the future in which Microsoft rules the wires looks very like a re-run of the past in which Britannia ruled the waves. 'Post-modern globalism is reminiscent of Australia's past history.'
How well do the authors handle that history? They argue, persuasively, that the Australian colonies developed a vigorous culture of citizen participation leading to, and further encouraged by, self-government - well before Australia either united as a 'nation' or became an independent state. The movement for federation generated an additional level of citizenship, supplementing a still larger-scale identification with the British Empire. In the first half of the twentieth century, Australia passed from Imperial Dominion to Pacific Nation, so that its notions of citizenship were already complex before the encounter with globalised challenges to the nation-state. There is some shaky history, but most of the glitches do not matter. The 1926 Balfour Report on Dominion status is best distinguished from the 1917 Balfour Declaration on Palestine. Ireland was not a Dominion in 1907. More serious is the statement that the 1898 New South Wales referendum on federation failed because the 'Yes' vote did not achieve 'the special majority of 10,000 that had been prescribed'. In fact, support for federation fell short of the required threshold of 80,000 votes. The error bears upon the implied purpose of the authors' portrayal of federation as a popular upsurge of pan-continental sentiment in favour of a new level of citizenship. It is possible to assemble any number of newspaper quotations about the inevitable triumph of the federal spirit in the hearts and minds of the people (the authors give one from 1874). These alone do not explain why federation happened, nor do they tell us why the process took so long. There is the standard allusion to the Australian Natives' Association, a friendly society of the locally-born who were commendably firm about their apostrophe. Certainly, the ANA provided the organisational backbone for the campaign in Victoria but, far from being the precursor of pan-Australian identity, it hardly existed in the other colonies.
As British subjects, Australians, then, enjoyed the reality of citizenship without articulating the concept. A rare example of the terminology came from a group of German-Australians interned during the First War, who asked if they were 'still citizens of Australia'. The authorities assured them that they were indeed, and that since citizenship involved obeying the law, they would remain locked up. This poignant example highlights an issue of the balance between responsibilities and benefits in citizenship. As 'citizens' of the Empire, Australians gained in security - but they paid no taxes to London, endured few restrictions and, if they fought in imperial wars, they did so as volunteers.
By 1999, Australia was a signatory to almost 3,000 international agreements, few of them scrutinised by legislators, a development that seemingly strengthened the executive and the judiciary rather than the individual. The 1995 Teoh case blocked an attempt to deport a non-national whose children had been born in Australia. The High Court ruled that in ratifying the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, Canberra had created a 'legitimate expectation' that its provisions would be incorporated into law, even though Parliament had not done so. Here globalisation appeared to circumvent citizen participation in the framing of laws. But the authors also adduce the 1994 Toonen case, in which campaigners hauled Tasmania's ban on homosexuality before a UN Committee. Sadly, few citizens will have the determination to take a case to the United Nations, although in former times hardly any Australians ever appealed cases to the Privy Council. The difference lies in another aspect of citizenship, that of identification. Independent Australian Britons took pride in the Union Jack. I doubt if gays will take to the streets of Hobart wearing blue berets. Nobody will wish to denigrate any text that boosts the notion of citizen empowerment in a frightening world, and I am personally keen on reminding Australians of their imperial past. In this case, the conceptualisation has been uncharacteristically broad and the history over-optimistic.