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.