Australia Day Obituary

It is difficult for historians to fix a date for the death of the Roman Republic. Was it when Julius Caesar was named dictator for life, the assassination of the last true republican Cicero, the battle of Actium that removed all opposition to Octavian, Octavian’s artful assumption of the titles Princeps and Augustus, or when the Praetorian Guard handed the purple to Claudius? Regardless of your preference, the power of elected senators was dead and buried, while the key symbol of the republic, SPQR (the Senate and People of Rome), decorated the standards of the imperial legions in hollow fashion for centuries to follow.

So too, it is easy to recognize the death of the Commonwealth of Australia, the Westminster traditions of ministerial responsibility, the separation of powers, the universal presumption of innocence and protection of habeas corpus drawing on the Magna Carta, let alone Australia Felix, the happy and fortunate land of the fair go, and the country that gave the world democratic innovations such as the secret ballot and preferential voting, introduced the eight-hour day, an early adopter of voting rights for women, and a steadfast supporter of the United Nations.

Once a true ideal of parliament and people, the “Commonwealth of Australia” is now but an empty phrase decorating our statutes. No more do departmental failures cause ministers to stand aside: ministerial accountability has lost to ministerial authority. Parliamentary staffers, partisan think tanks and co-dependent journalists, the new Praetorians, protect their anointed leader not from knives, but from equally dangerous truths, not in a citadel of marble and concrete, but an equally robust fortress of spin and deniability. The negative gearing of investment properties is the new bread, the cricket pitch a new circus.

After bloody conflict with the security forces at Eureka, the rebels were given fair and open trials, then elevated to Parliament by the electorate, and feted as true patriots for more than a century. Anzac Day mourned lives sacrificed to the ambitions of dying empires. In World War Two we fought against regimes that instilled rampant nationalism, encouraged racist bigotry and stifled dissent. Later, we learnt compassion for the victims of Vietnam, whether veteran or napalmed civilian, just as we developed remorse for the prosecution of that war and an understanding of the dangers of uncritical subservience to powerful friends.

Now the accusation of the security forces, or even the inhumane institutionalized negligence of “Human Services“, combined with a population too ready to accept either the demonization of ethnic groups, or the practicality of looking askance when the traditional values of western justice and governance are clearly eroded, is enough to render a lawful resident or even a citizen beyond the protections of the traditional Australian legal system, and the attention by doctors motivated by the needs of the suffering rather than the convenience of politicized departments and the profits of privatized detention facilities.

The 1967 referendum addressed, how indiginous Australians were covered by the Census and Commonwealth Law. With bipartisan politicians, an unprecedented (almost unanimous) majority voted to remedy the classification of an ethnic subgroup as fauna under archaic rules long fallen into disuse and forgotten. As a nation we rejected an idea that made little, if any, practical difference to the interaction of the state and its citizens. We demonstrated to each other, and the world at large, that we were offended by even a theoretical injustice as soon as it was drawn to our attention.

I doubt such attempts at noble gestures would be considered by today’s executive. I suspect there would be a significant number of voters opposed to such a proposition, viewing it at best an inconvenience imposed on them by the latte-drinking intellectual elite and bleeding-heart liberals.

Instead, regressive thinking and hardened hearts abandon the notion of a common wealth and shared progress for competition against each other and thus mutually assured impoverishment. Right-wing apologists might disagree with my interpretation and assumptions, and might welcome the changes to the nation’s soul and psyche, but cannot deny their extent.

Vale Australia Felix I take pride from our past, lament the present, and fear the future.

Vale Australia Felix. You were loved, and will be greatly missed.