The death of symbolism in Australia

The death of symbolism in Australia

This is the second of a two-part essay reflecting on last month's
referendum in Australia by Walter Tonetto.

JAKARTA (JP): After the swaggering bravado of the cattle-thief
on the world stage in East Timor, and despite her intentions to
become a global citizen, Australia has little inclination to
listen to foreign advice. Ironically, this might be just the time
for Australia to resist its hormonal persuasions, and listen to
the parens patriae.

The UK Parliament has recently introduced the Human Rights
Bill, which incorporates into domestic law the rights contained
in the European Convention on Human Rights. Some 30-plus European
nations, including South Africa and Canada, are signatories.
These are not unavailing claims from marginalised minorities but
fundamental human rights for all civilized peoples. These basic
rights are also contained in the International Covenant on Civil
and Political Rights that Australia has signed but routinely
ignores. Australia's astoundingly brusque statesmanship toward
Indonesia on the matter of East Timor's autonomy is one such
instance; its institutionalized abuse of Aboriginals another,
less well-known instance.

In 1992, the garrulous Thomas Kenneally, author of Schindler's
List and much beloved in Hollywood, then head of The Australian
Republican Movement, wrote that "the honest gate" had to open. He
was not speaking of a paradisiacal gate, but of Australia
becoming symbolically independent. The fact that Malcolm Turnbull
(a merchant banker who is more at ease with US Secretary of
Treasury Rubin and in U.S. money circles than he has ever been in
Australia) succeeded Kenneally, made it clear that for the well-
heeled progressives a republic was never a question of making the
democracy more workable and representative.

What of the nation's intellectuals? Professor Donald Horne
predicted some 30 years ago that an attachment to an institution
so distant and so irrelevant as the British monarchy would be
stifling in all of Australia's dealings with the future.
"Australia", he said, "needs sudden shocks of reorientation
within its society that will divorce it from the largely
irrelevant problems of the British, make it possible to speed
necessary changes and to develop some new sense of democracy".
(The Lucky Country).

Leaving aside the matter of the constitutional framework that
showed The Commonwealth (read "Republic") of Australia already as
fully autonomous and independent, Professor Horne is clearly
looking back, not forward; it is somewhat anachronistic to be
developing this argument in the age of super-mergers and rapid
globalization. It may have seemed of spurious relevance in the
early 70s, when there were no supercomputers and factories for
cloning and neural networks, no systems like Echelon, the
invasive U.S. spying system that routinely monitors voice, data
and Internet traffic around the globe.

Yet the spirit is lacking so profoundly that one imagines
little more than a handful of sansculottes in Australia ready
today to shock the nation into sentience. In London's Sunday
Telegraph this March, columnist Andrew Taylor writes of
Australians as simple-minded plebeians. Not that wide of the
mark: the Australian poet A.D. Hope always saw Australians as
"second-hand" Europeans: a barbarous and uncultured race.

Now that the symbolic vestment of republicanism has been torn
from spindly, cruciform shoulders, and the glasses are yawning
with emptiness and ennui, Australia had better look at why it
failed. What is Australia today? It celebrates the annual Sodom
and Gomorrah Festival, the abominable Mardi Gras, wearing the
mantle of tolerance that is a demonic garment. The biographer
David Marr, homosexual too, defends the unspeakable coprophilia
on ABC talkback radio: in an age of political correctness,
perverse fools rule the roost. Whilst in one sense the Mardi Gras
is a road show of scantily clad creatures of both sexes gyrating
on their floats, it also brazenly celebrates homosexual hedonism.

During the 1999 "Sleaze Ball" of the Mardi Gras, the great
Hindu god Ganesha, symbol of the power of purity and innocence,
was depicted as a decrepit profligate, with laser-beams emanating
from his navel to the tune of sexually explicit pop songs. "Heave
the tumblers, and drink the grape of liberalism down!" Leaving
the question of taste aside altogether, to rename the god of
innocence as "Gaynesha" is profoundly insulting to the dimension
of the sacred. "Egalitarianism" means it is alright in Australia
to scandalize and defraud meaningful symbols: after all, there is
nothing sacred, is there?

The pusillanimous spirit behind such abominations has, of
course, no power to create its own profligate imagery: it is
better to tear down established icons, rub some faces in the
dirt: one appears smarter that way! To understand the level of
offense, imagine the Virgin Mary depicted as a whore: national
indignation would know no bounds! Nevertheless, the forms of
symbolism Australia aspires to are hugely defective in other
ways.

Australia at the turn of the millennium has an alarming rate
of teenage suicide, amongst the highest in the world,
particularly among university students. Paying sociologists to
pen their improbable studies will not deal with the problem. It
has to do with the ravages of economic rationalism,
globalization, the removal of the individual's identity and
significance, and with indiscipline. Aside from sporting prowess,
there is very little the youth can look forward to: the
Australian vestiary is almost wholly void of any befitting
garment.

In late 1999, many State governments are poised to open
injection rooms for drug addicts, effectively decriminalizing the
sordid and bestial world of drugs. Crime is okay, the criminal a
victim: the pseudo-symbolical reversal of Ganesha into Gaynesha!
Australia, her lobby of rightists and hedonists, has run out of
ideas and moral bearings of how to deal with an alarming increase
in teenage deaths from hard drugs.

Overall, it shows that Australia is a country that babbles
about rights, but is in effect dehumanizing its own citizenry;
increasingly it is a storm-tossed barge without a rudder. Just as
in the U.S. Justice Clarence Thomas blamed the "rights
revolution" for an increase in black crime, (because rights
reduce human dignity in the process, Chicago Tribune, May 17
1994), we will see an escalation of Australia's problems now that
the mock-compassionate forces are installed.

These forces instead of disciplining those who need
discipline, openly and benignly feed them death. A simple
reversal again: death of the spirit before death of the body. If
symbolism is to realize its meaning, it cannot issue from a
diseased spirit: yet Australia's present spirit is effete and
morbid.

The Brave New World that is Australia does not need to sever
its apron strings; like a wayward child, it needs first to find
and secure its own identity, to retain its humanity amid forces
that only want to please the virulent "rights" lobby for whom God
is dead. It would be altogether too difficult to explain to that
lobby that the meaning of "symbolism" can only be conceived in
the presence of a creed or a faith: the religious impulse. For
that would suppose there is a power greater than the self-serving
rationales of state bureaucrats and university academics.

The writer is founder of the Jakarta-based Tonetto Foundation
which among others offers practical advice on establishing
genuine foundations for future growth and prosperity.