by Donald Horne
Who do we blame for intolerance? The prejudiced Australian people? The second revealing Australian quality emerges in answering that question.
One of the most useful ideas in The Lucky Country, and a key to Australia’s future as well as its past, is that one should be very careful before reproaching ‘the people’ for what goes wrong in Australia. We’ve had a long history of this – we even invented a phrase, ‘the tall poppy syndrome’, as a way of suggesting that somehow it was the envy of ordinary people that inhibited good leadership, whereas what really inhibited good leadership was the mediocrity of the leaders themselves. As I put it then: ‘This habit conceals the fact that, while ordinary Australians have many fine and some quite exceptional characteristics, the present elites in Australia are mostly second-rate.’ (Many elites in Australia are now not second-rate, but we haven’t had much of a run in talented political leaders.) In any society there are xenophobes, racists and other forms of hate-bags. There is absolutely no evidence that ordinary Australians are high on the list of prejudiced peoples. (Just take a look at ethnic cleansing in Europe or Le Pen’s National Front in France.) What happened in the mid-1990s was a breakdown in the performance of the political elites, especially following the Mabo case in which, interpreting the common law, the High Court determined, amongst other things, that the indigenous people were in possession of Australia at the time the British arrived. It might have been more prudent if those who supported the High Court decision had used cooler language and spoken in a mundane way of common law and property rights rather than, or as well as, high principles; on the other side those who attacked it were gasping out what one hopes are amongst the last expressions of white racist superiority in Australia. (They were in shock: the High Court had denied the myth of a white supremacy dreamtime.) In the case of Pauline Hanson all the political elites knew how to behave – with one remarkable exception: John Howard, as prime minister. Perhaps if he had read The Lucky Country carefully he might not have had the illusion that it was possible for a 1990s government to take seriously any of the imposed certitudes of the decade in which he had spent his adolescence.
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The long misuse of the phrase ‘the lucky country’, as if it were praise for Australia rather than a warning, has been a tribute to the empty-mindedness of a mob of assorted public wafflers. When the book first came out people had no doubt the phrase was ironic. Twisting it around over the years to mean the opposite of what was intended has silenced the three loud warnings sounded in the book about the future of Australia. These were that it was essential to accept the challenges of where Australia is on the map, the need for a revolution in economic priorities, and the need for a bold redefinition of what the whole place adds up to now. These three warnings can now simply be replayed, with the amplifying knobs turned up.
The first need has been met by many Australians: greater engagement with some of the countries in ‘Asia’ has helped Australia move into the second chapter of its history. Whether as tourists, or professionals, or members of special agencies, or bureaucrats, or artists, or educators, or, sometimes, business leaders, they have taken up some of the new ways of looking at the world and at Australia that The Lucky Country suggested.
But superficial pragmatism – seeing Asia as little more than an economic machine out of which we can make a buck – has tarnished creative awakening. In The Lucky Country I told people with big hearts not to idealize what they saw as the moral superiority of non-aligned ‘Asian’ leaders; now I would tell the people with hard heads not to idealize the economic leaps of Asian tigers. Comparing GDPs doesn’t tell us everything: we should never forget that our society is more fair, more liberal, more democratic and more tolerant than that of any Asian tiger (especially those whose governments have invented instant ‘Asian values’ to justify autocratic rule). The basic trouble is that the word ‘Asia’ has become too big and empty in meaning. There was a warning in the The Lucky Country not to assume one great lump of a thing called ‘Asia’ exists, when there is in reality only a whole lot of different countries with different histories and different cultures. That warning seems to have less effect now than when I made it. Almost unbelievably, one prime minister in the 1990s acted as if he alone had discovered ‘Asia’ for Australians (an ‘Asia’, incidentally, that did not seem to include the Indian subcontinent); he was followed by another prime minister who could announce at a state banquet in Jakarta that ‘Australia is not part of Asia’. This kind of political ineptitude can not only puzzle, or even divide, Australians: it can also lead to a replay of the fear I derided in The Lucky Country of ‘the faceless hordes’. If you imagine that Asians are all the same you can imagine that there is one single immigrant bloc called ‘Asians’, festering away in ‘ghettoes’ and threatening to break out and corrupt the rest of us with hepatitis B.
The second need – for an absolute revolution in economic priorities to meet new technologies – is now not even talked about much. I said in The Lucky Country that Australia would not be able to maintain its prosperity in the new technological age without profound change. The scores are now on the board and they show that our business–political–bureaucratic complex has responded less to the new trends of post-industrial societies than have its equivalents in almost any other similar country. Bob Hawke’s reference to a ‘clever country’ in his election speech in 1990 might have been a start, but he ran away from the phrase (inserted by a speechwriter) as soon as he had finished reading the speech and it wasn’t heard of again.
From time to time the phrase ‘information society’ falls on the air as a kind of magic charm, but what do the politicians do about it? Education policies, science policies, research and development policies, all part of The Lucky Country programme, have been turned into exercises in budget-reduction and profit-making: the idea that they are essential investment programmes doesn’t impress the bookkeepers. There are constant quick-fix calls to make education more ‘vocational’, but these also miss the point: in the new kind of constantly changing society the most practical basis for training is a good general education that leads to a lifetime interest and skill in learning. Meanwhile (almost beyond belief) there has been a continued prime emphasis on sending off food, fibres and minerals to the ‘tiger economies’; then they can develop more of the smart stuff. Why is this?
The answer lies in the essential part of my ‘lucky country’ thesis – that our tradition is of a colonial-minded and derivative business culture, especially in manufacturing and banking; and that this has left us with little understanding that ideas are one of the factors of production. In our colonial days innovations in farming and mining were recognised as essential: farming and mining were our job as a colony. But in manufacturing, when it got going, our goal was to replace imports by setting up protected industries that relied almost entirely on the innovations of others: there was scarcely one Australian who saw it as likely that we could export manufactured goods. That wasn’t the business of a colony. And we had a banking system that was equally colonial-minded. So the two great engines of the industrial revolution – manufacturing and banking – didn’t build up steam in Australia. Of course, things have improved – but not compared with the improvement rate of other countries. From the early 1980s, with the messianic appearance of Paul Keating among the clouds of a new economic rhetoric, there was relentless propaganda about economic ‘reform’ – but the reform was concerned mainly with undoing some of the old controls and supports, not with thinking about the conditions of producing something new. Reform may have been necessary, or very largely necessary. But it wasn’t sufficient. It was a diversion from what fundamentally mattered. And that was, as I put it in The Lucky Country, that if we didn’t take up, quickly and intelligently, the opportunities of the new technologies ‘the nation may become rundown, old-fashioned, puzzled, and resentful’.
Almost everyone seemed to see it as ‘radical’ in 1964 when I announced in The Lucky Country that Australia would, and should, b
ecome a republic. In fact it was through The Lucky Country that the republican idea was unveiled in the public arena. But I didn’t do this from overall republican principles (admirable though those principles may be). That Australia should have its own head of state, representing the sovereignty of the Australian people, seemed merely one part of what I had announced as the third great need for Australia – a new and relevant sense of reorientation and self-definition, a final casting off.
The republican idea was just one go at what was essential: ‘to develop some new sense of identity, some public feeling of being a people who can be described – even if incorrectly – as such-and-such a kind of nation, and act at times as if this were so’. This has already happened in creative life. Just look over the sections of The Lucky Country called ‘Cultural Breakthrough’ and ‘Images of Life’ and contemplate where we have come since the 1950s, when there was no Australian film industry, little Australian drama, only a few writers, not many historians, and scarcely any quality media.
Yet this has not been matched by equal creative activity in economic life or political life. In contemplating our present leaders we come face to face with a paradox that became a leitmotiv of The Lucky Country: there are times when the only pragmatic course is to be visionary. But combining a pragmatic style with a workable vision of the future now escapes our political leaders even more direly than it did at the end of the Age of Menzies – and this at a time when the luck has at last run out.
This edition
The epilogue, ‘Seven Years Later’, added to The Lucky Country in 1971, has been omitted from this edition.
NOTES TO THE FOURTH EDITION
As The Lucky Country was revised in 1965, 1967 and 1971, notes were added at the end of ‘Preface to the Second Edition’, explaining the changes. The following notes appeared in the third revised edition (fourth edition).
Revised edition
The first revised edition was revised throughout and also enlarged to include some new, or partly new sections. In Chapter 3, ‘Women’, ‘Migrants’, ‘The Underprivileged’ and ‘Catholics’ were either new or expanded. In Chapter 4, ‘Provincial Australia’ was new and ‘A Republic?’ was slightly expanded. In Chapter 6, ‘Men of Business’ was new. In Chapters 7 and 8 more than half the material was new. Chapter 10 was slightly expanded. An index was added.
Second revised edition
The second edition was revised factually throughout to take into account developments in 1966 and 1967, particularly those that followed the departure from power of Sir Robert Menzies, Mr Arthur Calwell and Dr Soekarno.
Third revised edition
There is a new chapter at the end of this edition, summarizing the main changes in Australia since The Lucky Country was first written. The rest of the book has also been revised.
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
Writing on the run
‘I have no doubt that Horne’s little outburst will have been forgotten by the end of the summer’, said one reviewer of the first edition of The Lucky Country in December 1964. This prediction did not prove to be true. The Lucky Country has already sold more copies than any other book of its type and now this revised edition has been prepared, with revisions and a number of supplementary sections. Why have so many Australians bought it? Perhaps what attracted a lot of people to it was that the tensions of Australia in the 1960s seemed to take it over as it was being written (perhaps making it a better book than the one first planned); it brought together most of the present frustrations and conflicts of Australians; and people can disagree with some of the views of events given in it and nevertheless agree that the right problems have been set.
To write a book on the run, trying to describe a society as it moves, can be more demanding than to write as if a society were all of a piece, standing still and unchanging: but since the static approach is bound to be wrong, one must plunge into the mess of conflicting social trends and hope for the best. It is the privilege of historians – not contemporary commentators – to know how things ended, and therefore what they were. The Lucky Country’s concern with topicality – with what it’s like to be now – may give some wrong emphases. To take one example: in writing about the tensions in Australia between puritanism and paganism I did not know what tenses to use. Past? Present? Future? All three (not to mention some of the more ambiguous tenses) would be accurate if related to different regions, different activities, different kinds of people. But this fine work is not necessary. (Probably it is not possible.) The main thing is to describe Australian paganism and Australian puritanism as two conflicting trends and to suggest that paganism is now having more victories than puritanism. There are the same kind of uncertainties in describing conflicting trends in Australian attitudes towards the British, towards technological style and towards ‘Asia’ (three themes taken up in the book). One cannot get the tenses and emphases right because the whole thing is changing shape. However, Australia – more exactly, the younger generations in Australia – seems to be moving towards less provincial, more talent-oriented, more Asia-conscious attitudes. One recognizes that unpredictable events can intervene that could make Australia move towards these attitudes at a smarter pace, or move away from them, or move off on another tack altogether. One prediction in the first edition – that we are also moving towards a comparatively less prosperous Australia – has already received some confirmation. What effect will that have?
Even if some social survey of supernatural scale and efficacy could fix an exact description of a society for one day of the year there would be even greater confusion than we now enjoy. We would have the whole mess in front of us and we could probably make nothing of it. Societies, like people, are always in a state of ambivalence, even in prevailing behaviour and attitudes: everyone of us holds beliefs and attitudes that contradict each other; our behaviour, in turn, often contradicts our beliefs – and itself. People change their ‘natures’ from one situation to the next. I have not bothered to argue this point in The Lucky Country. It seemed obvious that one could say, for example, that Australia is an egalitarian country and also say that there are differences within it: that there are economic injustices, inequalities of opportunity, snobberies. It can be both true that Australia is an egalitarian country and true that it has snobberies. I have bothered to make this point here because there is now a vogue amongst some Australians for suggesting that, because there are inequalities in Australia, it is not an unusually egalitarian country. On the contrary, despite a decline in egalitarian rhetoric, in some of the things that Australians really care about – in the general tone of people’s relations to each other (at work, for example) and in access to pleasure – there is evidence that Australia is becoming more egalitarian than it used to be. And anyone who cannot, with his own sensitivity, detect the differences in tone between deferential societies such as those of Britain and Japan and that of Australia must be suffering from atrophy of the senses.
In writing about one’s own country – with a sense of its present tensions – one is likely, by inference, to be unfair to it, in that one exposes situations in it that are also common to other countries, or to the general human condition. The Lucky Country is probably unfair in this way. However, every time one makes a point about Australia one can’t have a roll-call of nations to see how Australia scores by comparison. This question of fairness must at times be left to the good sense and experience of the reader. From his own knowledge he can make his own comparisons. (One visitor suggested that Israel was the most illuminating place to compare Australia with!) In one sense no country except New Zealand can be compared with Australia: these are the only two ‘Western’ nations that, strategically, are part of Asia. (What happens to Australia cooks New Zealand’s hash too.) It is this special characteristic of Australia – that it is a dependent, second-hand, second-rate ‘Western’ nation, that happens, strategically, to be part of Asia – that makes one unfair to it: Australia may have to be ‘better’ than other countries (for e
xample, Belgium or Canada) that are also dependent, second-hand and second-rate. And since Australia is one of the world’s most prosperous and stable smaller nations and dedicated to its material well-being there seems little point in self-congratulatory comparisons of it with – in this sense – unluckier countries of roughly the same population. Australians can scarcely congratulate themselves that they make up a more prosperous and stable nation than South Vietnam, Afghanistan, Sudan, or Peru. Here the relevant comparisons are with countries like Sweden and Switzerland; and, according to the rules, Australia comes off increasingly badly in these comparisons, so far as its economic climate is concerned.
Excluding expatriates, the further away from Australia The Lucky Country is sold, the more people seem to think it praises Australia; an American wrote to me to say that he had finally decided to migrate to Australia after reading The Lucky Country. Australians, however, take it to be highly critical of their own country. And so it is. But not of ordinary Australians; it is the elites of Australia who are criticized: in revising the book I have added to this criticism, not modified it. That the people who run things in Australia are not much good is not news to anyone who reads books about Australia (although it may be one of the special features of The Lucky Country that it has gone into such terrible detail on this question). However, what will not be found in this book is the stock defence of Australian elites: that they cannot help being what they are because in an egalitarian country the elites are necessarily second-rate and necessarily reflect what is taken to be the mediocrity of the people. This fashionable view gives a fashionably gloomy cast to predictions about the societies of the future. However, the Australian experience does not necessarily give support to it. It would seem more likely that it is the provincial nature of Australian elites that is the main reason why they are so second-rate, rather than the general egalitarian tone of Australians’ relations with each other.