Commentaries

Rights exist behind the wire

In 2004 the ACT Legislative Assembly enacted the Human Rights Act, the first Bill of Rights to be passed into law in Australia.

In essence the Act provides that no one may be treated or punished in a cruel, inhumane or degrading way: that even the worst among us have human rights that should be respected even if we have been convicted of the most heinous crimes.

In 2009 the Alexander Maconochie Centre, the ACT’s first prison, became operational. The Government was motivated, when taking the decision to build the prison, by the opportunity to learn from the experience of other prisons in operation in Australia and to avoid the temptation, as politically enticing as it is, to employ the practice and language of retribution, punishment and demonisation.

The prison was the first in Australia to be built and operated in accordance with human rights legislation and principles. The most recent Productivity Commission Report on Government Services, released on 31 January, gives a first glimpse of some of the outcomes of the operational approach employed at the Alexander Maconochie Centre.

It reveals that the percentage of eligible prisoners employed at the AMC was 92.3 percent against a national average of 76.1 percent; the number of AMC prisoners enrolled in education and training is 92.0 percent as opposed to 34.8 percent nationally; and AMC prisoners spend an average of 14.1 hours out of cells while nationally prisoners are out of cells for 11.4 hours a day. Prisoners at AMC may also receive visitors six days a week including up until 8 pm and the crude imprisonment rate in the ACT is 68 per 100,000 while nationally it is 169 per 100,000.

These early results are very encouraging, particularly when considered in conjunction with the range and nature of programs in place at the prison. The Government, corrections and other staff have every right to be confident that the operating philosophy in place at AMC will improve opportunites for successful prisoner rehabilitation and re-integration and will reduce recidivism.

But prisoners are perhaps the last discrete group of human beings who are, in a general way, publically vilified, dehumanised and demonised within Australia without fear of censure or opprobrium.

As a nation, we have over time and at different times discriminated against or villified certain classes of people, openly and without public censure or any legal consequence. These have included Chinese and all other mainly Asian peoples (through the White Australia Policy), as well as Aboriginals, the post World War Two migrants (particularly the Greeks and Italians), people with a disability, single mothers, the Vietnamese, Muslims, boat people, gays and lesbians, and Catholics and Jews.

It is, however, not currently politically, socially or legally acceptable to openly disparage or discriminate against any person in Australia on the basis of any such personal characteristic.

The same cannot be said of prisoners. They remain as a group, and without any consideration of the personal history or background of any individual prisoner, fair game not only for poll driven law and order political campaigns but more generally. I will use one current topical example: the proposal to introduce a needle and syringe service into the Alexander Maconochie Centre. The idea is simple. Illicit drugs regularly find their way into the prison, as they do in all prisons. Clean needles are not available in the prison. So the prisoners share dirty needles. Most prisoners have a pre-existing drug addiction. Many, up to 65%, have Hepatitis C and it would not be unusual for some of them to have AIDS.

The evidence is incontrovertible that clean needles prevent the spread of these major life threatening diseases. It is not alarmist to suggest that at some time a prisoner at the Alexander Maconochie Centre will contract, from a dirty needle, a major blood borne disease and die from it.

Clean needles are, of course, available throughout Canberra to prevent this occurring and to protect the general community. Surveys of community attitudes suggest that well over 70% of Canberrans support the needle exchange program.

The ACT Government is considering expanding the needle exchange program to include the prison.

The Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU), the largest union in the ACT, represents not only prison officers and those employed at the prison but indeed all clerical staff in the Territory’s public service. It is almost certain that up to 75% of the CPSU membership, which is highly reflective of the Canberra population, supports the needle exchange program. The union, however, does not believe that prisoners, the most at-risk drug users in society, should be provided with clean needles, a generally available, life saving, health service.

The CPSU is the largest union affiliated to the ACT ALP and now dominates the Left faction. It is probable that in excess of 75% of the ACT’s ALP membership supports the needle exchange program and I had always taken it as a given that the whole of the Left faction supported the program.

Yet at this stage it appears that the CPSU veto will succeed, disappointingly and perhaps tragically, despite three quarters of its own membership, of its faction, and of the ACT Branch of the ALP, to which it is affiliated, not agreeing with it, and thus a supposedly progressive union will succumb to a base, historic national characteristic that I had hoped we had outgrown.

Commentaries

Are women really such poor leaders?

I am a new woman and I know it. I mean, an awakened woman, awakened to a sense of capacity and responsibility, not merely to the family and the household, but to the state.

Catherine Spence, 1899.

 

At a time when Australia appears blessed with women of substance as Prime Minister and Governor General it remains a disturbing anomaly that so few are making it to SES positions in the Australian public service (APS). So what explains this inequity? Let’s review the evidence.

An inconvenient truth
Gender equity has been reported on in the APSC’s State of the Service report (SOTS) for many years. It regularly reports that more than half of employees in the APS are women but that the ratio of women to men declines as level increases. The 2011 SOTS reports that at all levels below EL1, females out-number males, but by the EL1 level, males exceed 50%. By the SES Band 2, females constitute just 35% of the cohort and at the levels of Associate and Deputy Secretary, less than 30% are female. At the Departmental Secretary level, just 4 of 22 (or 18%) are female.

What remarkable individuals these four women must be! Given the data, it is evident that reaching the top of the APS (and we are yet to see a female head up the APS) cannot be an expectation of women entering the APS, and only a few exceptional females can aspire to leading their agency.

Several recent reports also go to the heart of this issue. In the last few months we have seen enquiries on Employment Pathways for APS Women in the Department of Defence (undertaken, but not yet released by Deputy Public Service Commissioner, Carmel McGregor), a companion report into females in the Defence Forces (released last year as the Broderick Report) and the Australian submission to the OECD Survey into public sector employment. To its credit, Treasury has recently undertaken a review of female progression and placed its report on its website along with the declaration that increasing the proportion of female SES officers to 40% is a strategic goal for the organisation. It is noteworthy that agencies with female secretaries have higher achievements - for example, 58% women in Health and Aging and 56% in DEEWR at the SES level.

The facts speak an inconvenient truth for a service which makes claims to be a non-discriminatory, merit-based, values-lead service – the APS is not ‘ahead of the game’ on issues of gender equity.

Debunking the Myths
So how can we explain the gap between intention and achievement? Many attempts have been made to shed light on why we have witnessed declining proportions of women in higher level leadership positions. Some of these are worthy of debunking.

“Women don’t possess key leadership qualities”
This observation suggests wrongly that there is a narrow range of leadership qualities acceptable in the APS and that few women “have” these characteristics. Presumably some male, values-based, non-discriminatory APS officers actually agree with this view enough to suggest it as a plausible explanation for their success and women’s failure! Bain and Company recently observed in What Stops Women from Reaching the Top, a report on practices in private sector companies, that many women were perceived as either being strong and therefore ‘too aggressive’ or ‘too consultative’, and therefore ‘soft or weak’ – a no win situation! A major conclusion of this report (and of Treasury’s) was that ‘valuing diverse types of leadership is key to improving gender equality in Australian companies’.

“Women’s careers are prone to damaging interruptions due to having children”
Given that most public servants have careers spanning periods of at least 25 years (and this is a conservative estimate), five years of “career interruption” due to family responsibilities should hardly be a disqualifying penalty or one that that should lead women to abandon hope that they might be able to lead an agency.

A real difficulty experienced by returning women is the negative attitudes they experience to taking leave. Moreover, on returning from leave they often find that their professional networks (managers and peers) have moved on; so re-establishing one’s professional standing with new colleagues and potential gatekeepers to advancement presents a significant challenge.

The Bain and Company study found that while the majority of men believed it was family responsibilities that hindered progression, less than a quarter of women held the same view; the latter predominantly put it down to having a different style of leadership. Treasury’s review showed staff held similarly divergent views. Would an APS-wide survey yield the same result?

“Women simply lack ambition”
The argument goes that in a service of over 96,000 females, only four have sufficient ambition to lead, and the rest are obviously content with lesser roles in the service of male “role models”! Given that the appointment of Secretaries is more of a matter of “having greatness thrust upon one” than competitive recruitment, the disproportionate number of males must be more a reflection of antiquated recruitment methods than of the poverty of potential female candidates.

There is plenty of evidence at other levels of the service to show no lack of feminine ambition for higher office. The Bain and Company survey found that men and women did ‘not have materially different levels of ambition’ but that nevertheless, only 15 per cent of women believed that they had equal opportunity.

Critical dilemmas
The academic literature identifies two major causes of lower female representation which are worthy of further examination. One is “unconscious bias” (where perceptions of individuals affect their behaviour without their conscious knowledge). It is understood that this is an issue that the McGregor investigation in Defence has identified. Furthermore, Treasury noted an “underlying and unrecognized bias which was impacting on management judgements and leadership styles”.

Not to address issues of unconscious bias and instead, continuing to rely on explanations that blame the female workforce for their lack of advancement (they don’t possess key leadership qualities, are prone to damaging career interruptions and simply lack ambition) is tantamount to conspiracy in the act of prejudice. Clearly, if there was no evidence of unconscious bias in the decisions of senior appointments, all departments would look more like Health and Education where over half of the SES is female. Does it require the presence of a female secretary to change the perceptions of bias in interview panels? And would it take the appointment of a woman to head the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C) to change dominant perceptions across the APS?

Concerted action is needed to combat processes of unconscious bias in the APS. The Public Service Commissioner should become more visible in his scrutiny of SES appointments, and question Selection Panel Chairs personally and directly where there appear to be good female applicants who do not get recommended for a position. Perhaps an index of panel members and their “appointment rate” of females could be established to identify chronic “male” favouring by panel members. The APS could also adopt progressive practices found in several private sector firms where experiential training in combating unconscious bias has been introduced; Treasury intends to do this. Indeed, leadership development activities service-wide, should embed experiential training in gendered inclusion as a core component for not only building a world class public service that attracts the best and the brightest in a highly competitive labour market but achieves basic integrity in public administration.

The second main factor identified in the academic literature for low female representation in the public management elite is the persistent reporting by women themselves of their lack of self confidence or self belief. According to Deborah May who has undertaken extensive interview work on the barriers to women’s career advancement in the APS, lack of self-confidence is the single greatest barrier identified by most senior women. Treasury found this to be the case amongst its own staff, supported by data showing lower application rates for promotion by women relative to their male colleagues. Women are less likely to put themselves forward for posts where they do not meet every detail of the job description. In short, men will wing it and be more economical with the actualité. The low esteem in which women in the APS hold themselves is hard to explain and needs unpacking. The answer could well turn on the dominant process of socialisation occurring within the APS, a lack of appreciation of the value of female leadership qualities and biased role definition processes within the public sector. What is certain from the evidence is that women continue to undersell their experiences and capabilities.

To the extent that our education system is failing in ensuring that women enter the workforce confident in their ability to succeed and lead an organisation, it falls to the APS not to squander the talents and capabilities of its workforce. So again, a more proactive approach is warranted, and a series of gendered inclusion strategies should be developed and implemented across the APS as a matter of urgency.

Parting shots
The existence of strong women role models at the forefront of public discourse can mask entrenched obstacles to gender equality from public view. The APS should take advantage of the present opportunity with a woman Prime Minister and a woman Governor General to win the war of ideas within the ancien régime and create greater opportunity structures for women to realise their aspirations. For one fact remains constant in the academic literature on gendered exclusion – women excel where merit systems and networks of support flourish.

The Governor General gracefully agreed to open the ANZSOG Institute for Governance luncheon last year on Celebrating the Contribution of Women to Public Sector Excellence. In a powerful address she commented that times in the public administration had changed from when openly sexist material was issued as recruitment directives, and a marriage bar existed. Nonetheless, clearly times have not changed enough to ensure that there is in fact gender equity in the APS.

As part of its ongoing project on Celebrating the Contribution of Women to Public Sector Excellence, the Institute intends to survey senior public servants across agencies to compare the perceptions of men and women on the barriers to progression of women to senior positions. Some of the issues to be canvassed will include: are perceptions different between agencies where women are well represented in SES positions, such as Education and Health, compared with agencies where they are considerably less, such as Treasury and Defence? What are the views of male and females about the business case for gender parity in the SES? What do women see as the main cause of their lack of confidence – is it to do with work policies and practices or more to do with cultural factors such as structures of patronage, beliefs and stereotyping or some other set of factors?

Professor Mark Evans ( Director)
Emeritus Professor Meredith Edwards
Professorial Fellow Bill Burmester
ANZSOG Institute for Governance, University of Canberra

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Commentaries

Professor Jon Stanhope's Australia Day speech at the Southern Cross Club, Canberra

President and members of the Board
Distinguished guests
Members and guests of the SCC

I acknowledge too the Nugunnawal people, the traditional owners of the land on which we are gathered this evening. I acknowledge them, as we gather here to celebrate Australia Day, as the first Australians. I pay to them my respects as the first and only custodians of this land, in the case of Canberra , for in excess of 25,000 years and of Australia for up to 50,000 years and I acknowledge their continuing contribution to Canberra, this region and Australia.

Happy Australia Day everyone.

Thank you to the Southern Cross Club for the invitation to speak tonight . I am very happy to do so.

I am a first generation Australian. My parents and four siblings migrated to Australia from England They arrived in Australia exactly 62 years ago, by boat, the MV Georgic, their fare was ten pounds, they disembarked on 8 February 1950 at Circular Quay, in Sydney. At the same place but exactly 162 years after the First Fleet.

My wife Robyn, who I am pleased is here tonight, is an eighth generation Australian. She is a descendant of Rebecca Chipperham , the first member of her family to come to Australia who also arrived by boat from England, the Neptune, a ship of the Second Fleet, she disembarked at Circular Quay on 28 June 1790, 2 years after the First Fleet. Her passage was free, even if she wasn't. Robyn and now our children can thus proudly claim descent from the earliest of the non- indigenous settlers of this nation. Pioneers, albeit convicts, who took the first steps in the development and creation of modern day Australia.

All of us here this evening have much in common, all of us perhaps with the exception of those of us who have an indigenous heritage, share for example, somewhere in our family history, a stock of experiences common to all migrants.

I have for instance, I think for the whole of my life been conscious that I come from a migrant family, that we were newly arriveds, johnny come latelys and we were, when I was a child, reminded often subtely and not so subtely, that our right to be regarded as “ real “ Aussies had not been granted and was not recognised.

Much of my experience in growing up in rural NSW was affected by that. My parents were English, they spoke with pronounced accents which of course emphasised our difference. My parents highlighted our difference, and I often think they did so deliberately and perversely, my father, for instance, very publicly supported the English when they played Australia in the cricket, and without a hint of embarrassment my mother and father not only derided rugby league but followed soccer, known in those years by all my school friends as wog ball. As confirmation of our un Australianness, in addition to the universal assumption that we never washed ( I see with dismay that Teresa Gambaro has had that particular dog whistle out again recently) my father refused to ever drink beer ( not even on Anzac Day after the march) but would drink wine instead.

I have no doubt that the settlement experience of the more recently arrived English migrants to Australia is more benign than that of perhaps any other nationality and while we nevertheless were still made to feel that there were major question marks about the legitimacy of our claim or right to citizenship our intergration was generally welcoming and positive. My experience, has nevertheless given me an insight to the stories that others, Greeks, Italians, Lebanese, Vietnamese, Chinese, Iranians and Afghanies and the other two hundred nationalities that make up Australia must have to tell.

That there are occasions, some quite outrageous-such as the Cronulla riots- others more insidious-where the legitimacy of the citizenship of some Australians is questioned or challenged or explicitly opposed by other Australians is of course, to say the least, odd when one acknowledges that in the 224 years since the arrival of the First Fleet and the annexation of Australia by Great Britain there have only been eight generations of us and of course every single one of us is either a migrant or a descendant of a migrant. We are all, in fact either migrants or refugees. I was born in Australia 60 years ago, at Gundagai a quintessentially if not the quintessential Australian town, and as a resident of Australia for sixty years I have now lived here for more that a quarter of the time that Australia has been occupied by Europeans.

That European settlement of Australia occurred only so recently adds I think to the lack of any sense of self awareness in those who claim the role of guardians of our shores, arbiters of the right to citizenship or indeed the right to decide or define what it is to be Australian.
These are questions that are raised by the celebration of Australia Day.

Australia Day is a very symbolic day for our nation. Its symbolism is all the more important because the date and the day carry quite different meanings for members of the very diverse Australian community.

On this day, the 25th of January, 224 years ago, a now famed fleet of eleven ships, under the command of Captain Arthur Phillip sailed into Port Jackson, the natural harbour of Sydney and anchored offshore from Sydney Cove, now Circular Quay. They went ashore the next day and there established the first non- aboriginal settlement on the Australian continent. A land which was then defined as and treated as “terra nullius” or as land that was empty and unoccupied.
Australia was of course occupied. It is now believed in fact that in 1788 Australia was inhabited by approximately 300,000 aborigines and had been occupied by them for somewhere in the order of 46,000 to 50,000 years.

Australians, just like each of us here tonight have had much time to reflect since 1788 about the meaning and significance of that very significant January 26th at Sydney Cove. Australia Day will be regarded and celebrated, or not, by each of us in different ways depending most likely on a whole array of personal, life time, experiences.

I am aware for instance that many Aboriginal Australians refer to Australia Day as Invasion Day or Occupation Day. Indeed my observation is that as each year passes more and more, not less indigenous members of our communities are inclined to characterise Australia Day in these terms.

This is obviously to be regretted. It would surely be desirable for this particular conflict to be resolved. That we could find some way of achieving a reconciliation between indigenous and non- indigenous Australians in the celebration of this day.

It is moot I think that this issue has been a subject of public discussion in Australia since the time of that first settlement. The famous French explorer and navigator Nicolas Baudin wrote to Governor Phillip Gidley King in 1802 about the fairness, a concept encapsulated by generations of Australians as the greatest of Australian values as “the fair go , of the annexation of Australia. He said, and I quote:

“I have never been able to conceive that there was justice or even fairness on the part of Europeans in seizing, in the name of their governments, a land seen for the first time…”

He went on to question how it could ever be considered right to claim the soil of a people who belonged to the land, just as the land belonged to them and saw their birth.

At the time that Australia was “claimed” by Britain in 1788 it had been continuously occupied by a people for in the order of 50,000 years. I am proud to be Australian. A first generation Australian. My wife Robyn and her extended Australian family are rightly proud of their long and significant history as pioneers of European settlement. They have been here for all eight generations since the arrival of the First Fleet. There are people in Australia whose family has not one not eight but thousands of generations of uninterrupted occupation of Australia.

If you were a member of one of those families what would your reaction be to a national celebration based on the day that your people, your family, were dispossessed of all and any rights to their land and home?

The answer to that question has for many indigenous people led them to suggest that it is not a day which they feel they can celebrate. I think most of us have no difficulty in accepting why they would feel that. Even if we accept that it is not their dispossession that we are celebrating. There are, nevertheless, regular calls to change the date we celebrate Australia Day. I am not convinced that that is feasible or realistic. I certainly do think that this is a serious piece of unfinished business between indigenous and non indigenous Australia that will continue to inhibit full reconciliation.

I don’t know what the answer is but it is an important issue that I think we have tended to gloss over perhaps in our enthusiasm to express our love of Australia and to celebrate the great things about our communities and our country.

And It is indeed a magnificent land we live upon, and a strong community in which we choose to live to work and play. We have much to celebrate but I think it is a good thing to maintain a debate or a conversation over what the 26th of January really means, and how we should celebrate it, or indeed, what it is we are celebrating and even whether the date is in fact the appropriate one to celebrate our national day.

The debate itself does allow us to acknowledge some historic falsehoods and it does explore the deep question of reconciliation.

For example, in the words of Hugh Mackay, social commentator, and I quote:
“Aborigines are one of the smallest cultural and ethnic minorities in our society. If we can’t find a pathway to reconciliation between the 98 per cent and the 2 per cent, there is no hope for us. The way we define that pathway, and the speed with which we move along it, will be the measure of our civilization.

All we have to remember is that each of us wants to be taken seriously. Each of us wants to be heard. Each of us wants our needs, our values, our points of view, to be taken into account. That is all that reconciliation has ever been about. The challenge is actually tiny, and it has little to do with ‘past generations” : it is a matter of insisting that the values we hold up as being characteristic of our society should be extended to embrace all Australians.”

I agree, and I hope all Australians will embrace those sentiments during the national debate, just commenced, about the amendment of our Constitution to remove provisions that are racially based.

The proposed Constitutional amendments represent a significant milestone along the road we have travelled since 1788 in relation to the recognition of Indigenous Australian.

I discovered just this week, in fact while doing some reading in preparation for this speech, a very personal, and certainly confronting, anecdote of just where we were on that path in the early days of colonisation. It is from memoirs written by a member of my family. It relates to Robyn’s great grand- father ( 7 times removed ) William Gray ( born in 1805,the first Australian born member of the family, the son of Elizabeth and John Gray, both convicts ) and was written by his son William John Best Gray. This extract was published in the Warwick Daily News on 17 June 1903 . I quote

“At this time (1838) my father was employed by Mr Howe as a stockman on Carroll Station and saw his cattle ( in charge of three white men and a black boy)…move off to newly acquired pastures on the Mcintyre. The stockman in charge of Mr Howe’s cattle was Thomas Crompton who had become a free man. He was the first white man to form a cattle camp on this side of the Mcintyre River….

The blacks were very numerous and were killing cattle every day, and it was no unusual thing to see the stockmen come home with two or three spears in his horse, and he could consider himself lucky to get home at that.

Crompton was an extremely cruel man who treated the aborigines without mercy. He is reported on one occasion to have killed twenty of them on one day.

On another occasion he was going up the river to Yetman and he did not take any firearms with him, and on the plain near Tucker Tucker he saw a whole tribe crossing. They were shifting over towards the Severn. As they had all their women and children with them, he knew they were not on the warpath and he charged them with no other arms but a stockwhip and drove one of them like he would drive a bullock and secured him for the night, and the next day he drove him about thirty five miles to a station named Crageen. My father was living there at the time as a stockman where he chained the black up for the night. He was going to take him and deliver him to Mr Commissioner Meehan at the Peel River. Before he left our place the next morning, my father persuaded Crompton to secure the black in some way, so they placed a rope round his neck and round the horses neck that Crompton was riding and tied his hands together with some strips of hide.

In these early days, when all this new country was being taken, there were very few men on any of the holdings but were convicts, and good trustworthy servants they were. It would be a good thing for the squatters and farmers if they could get as good men today, but such servants as they were are a thing of the past, like many other things that have passed from us. Whatever property is entrusted to them was safe in their hands, and there was little crime committed in those days. A murder was a thing you never heard of, that is one white man killing one of his own colour. “

Hugh Mackay refers as I quoted earlier to “values we hold up as being characteristic of our society”. There are of course many values that we, as a group , believe embody the true Australian spirit or our values. Values do, thankfully, change over time. There would be some disagreement, I presume, among us about what values might be on such a list today and there would certainly be strong disagreement among us about the extent to which we individually and collectively maintain or respect,or should retain, those values.

On this Australia Day we should , however, be proud that we live in a great democracy where these national conversations about our past and future are able to take place. I think our democracy and the institutions that support it are probably the strongest in the world. And we should celebrate that, and our diversity and rejoice in the strength and honesty of our institutions, including the press.

Australians value justice and we respect the law. We work hard. We have a sense of humour and a love of fun. Yet there are many things we take very seriously, some such as sport we perhaps take too seriously.

We are grateful for the fact we live in a community in which most people are confident they can do and achieve anything they want. I have had occasion to reflect on whether in my own case, had I been born in England and my parents not migrated to Australia I would ever had the opportunity to lead a Government. I have also wondered if I would have had the opportunity to attend University .

In similar vein, it is, I think inspiring that migrants are significantly represented in all our Parliaments and in leadership positions in all our major institutions. In which other country in the world would the Prime Minister and the Chief of the Defence Force and of a number of other Governments have, at the same time, all been migrants. I would be surprised if it is something that has ever occurred elsewhere.

In Australia we are also able to cherish the fact that we can express our views and enjoy our freedom.

Australians have also traditionally believed in a” fair go for all”. We have a strong tradition of egalitarianism and we have a proud history of defending and protecting the vulnerable and those weaker than ourselves.

And throughout our history-with notable exceptions-we have actively promoted tolerance and embraced diversity.

It is with this proud heritage in mind that we need to ensure we have the courage and the determination, as occasion demands, to acknowledge the erosion of these values and to defend them .

I have always been, and always will be, proud to be Australian. My love of Australia is strong and unconditional. It is because of that pride and the depth of my love for my country – of what it has been and what it might yet become- that I feel so passionately that we must not just protect the legacy we have inherited from the service of all those Australians that have preceded us but that we must be determined to improve on, expand and enhance it as our legacy to future generations.

Is Australia Day then an appropriate day on which to also dwell on any current or contemporary behaviour, or Government policy or national or local action. that may cause us disquiet or which we think not reflective of the values that we think of as “characteristic of our society”. Could or should Australia Day become a day rather like New Years Day’ on which we resolve, not to change those aspects of our private lives or character that we decide we feel we might change or improve, but a day on which we individually and as members of our different communities go further and reflect on the values inherent in our communal, national and public personality and resolve to engage, with all the processes available to us, to change those that we believe are not consistent with our history or our traditions.

The blunt at times unpalatable fact is that each of us at different time feels disappointed, even shame at behaviour or actions that are anathema to our personal sense of justice or fairness or to the values we ascribe to and believe that Australia stands for.

I have for instance consistently expressed my deep opposition to certain policies pursued by Australian and State Governments on issues like the invasion of Iraq, the treatment of refugees, discrimination against gays and lesbians, prisoners rights, abortion and indigenous disadvantage. I do not believe that aspects of our respose on each of these issues is consistent with our broad understanding as Australians of what it is we stand for. It may be that some of you would disagree with me about some of these issues and vice versa. That is not the point. Having said it is not the point, is it really possible that turning a boat full of refugees around in the middle of the ocean can ever be characteristic of Australian values?

My point is that as we reflect together, on Australia Day, on what it means to be Australian I believe we should ensure we look ourselves collectively in the eye ,and do a quick and honest appraisal of what we see, and if there are things that do not respect our history and traditions that we commit to seek to restore the values in which we take great pride.

It strikes me that failure to do so risks, for us as a nation, being characterised by other harsher and sinister values.

Or is Australia Day a day on which we agree, so as not to detract from a valuable and justified celebration, to ignore the elephants in the room- at least until another day.

Let me conclude on what is I think a lighter note. Even if not, it is, unlike my turgid prose, a beautiful piece of writing.

Henry Lawson , while living in London, and obviously home sick, wrote a short essay about, of all things, the swag. It is published under the title The Romance of the Swag. It is in reality an essay about Australia. It was written about one hundred years ago. He talks about Australia and Australian values in a way to bring a tear to your eye. I love Henry Lawson and his descriptions of Australia and his image of Australians. I think I keep hoping that they are true. That that is who we are. I can’t bear to think that if he were alive today he would write anything different.

This is a tiny bit from the Romance of the Swag.

“The Australian swag was born of Australia and no other land-of the Great Lone Land of magnificent distances and bright heat; the land of self reliance, and never give in, and help your mates. The grave of many of the world’s tradegies and comedies-royal and otherwise. The land where a man out of employment might shoulder his swag in Adelaide and take the track, and years later walk into a hut on the gulf, or never be heard of any more, or a body be found in the bush and buried by the mounted police, or never found and never buried-what does it matter?

The land I love above all other not because I was born on Australian soil, and because of the foreign father who died at his work in the ranks of Australian pioneers, and because of many things. Australia! My country! Her very name is music to me. God bless Australia! For the sake of the great hearts of the heart of her! God keep her clear of the old world shams and social lies and mockery, and callous commercialism, and sordid shame! And heaven send that if ever in my time her sons are called upon to fight for her young life and honour, I die with the first rank of them, and be buried in Australian ground.

But this will be probably called false, forced or maudlin sentiment here in England, where the mawkish sentiment of the music halls, and the popular applause it receives, is enough to make a healthy man sick. And is only equalled by music hall vulgarity. So I’ll get along.”

Happy Australia Day

 

 

Professor John Stanhope