Having adopted a banal imitation of American exceptionalism, Australia is at risk of following the US into decline.
Claiming exceptionality is not uncommon across the world’s nations, and America’s claim to exceptionalism increasingly seems like nostalgic whimsy as authoritarian plutocrats work to hollow out its democratic processes. Australia too likes to see itself as exceptional; this is a dangerous delusion.
William Coleman’s collections of essays finds our particular exceptionalism in our distinctive systems, our combination of corporatism with a feigned subversive egalitarianism. But this work was published in 2016, when the alarms signalling the fragile future of the West were only just beginning to sound.
Since that year of Trump and Brexit, Australian systems are now also showing signs of democratic decay. like those unmaking the US.
Bruce Haigh sees Australian exceptionalism as just a pathetic echo of the US version, calling it “shrill, shallow, showy and superficial”. He defines it as a pathetic echo of the US version, an immature conservative politician’s idolatry of the US.
For Americans, their exceptionalism — banged about by the Trump years — suggests a superiority that makes it a world leader. It boasts of a government and economic system that ought to be a model for the world’s governments and commercial interactions. It provokes a sense (depending on the historic moment’s degree of isolationism) that America must intervene to impose freedom and peace.
The fact that it often involves the imposition or support of brutal authoritarian leaders is an inconvenience usually brushed aside. The fact that other nations’ people often suffer to free American business interests to make unimaginable profits is a subversive assertion.
Stating that America has become what we imagine a “third world nation” to be is unpopular. Its own people struggle to afford medical care. Of those laid off due to the pandemic in 2020, 75 per cent did not have $500 saved to protect themselves. The pandemic exposed quite how gargantuan the inequalities that riddle the nation. Its infrastructure is dire; the many states boasting low tax and stripped-back regulations dictate that more Americans will do without. In Texas the power collapses when the climate crisis storms hit. More Americans will die as their bridges and buildings collapse.
Most Americans diligently hide this knowledge from themselves. They wrap themselves in flags and distract themselves with fireworks. America is the ultimate “good guy” and if any bad happens, it was unfortunate but in the pursuit of the greater good.
And it’s this banal brand of exceptionalism that Australia boasts. We too like to numb ourselves with the idea that we are one of the “good guys”. If Australia makes hard decisions then they must have needed making. In this simplistic and self-congratulatory conception of essential goodness, we cannot do bad.
Exceptionality is not problematic in itself, but becomes so when it is used to justify actions which are wrong, aggressive or illegal. It is not just that Australia soothes itself with narcotic myths but that we use them to hide from our own crimes. There are a number of cases where Australia is not one of the “good guys”, and this fantasy prevents us from reckoning with the harm.
When Tony Abbott’s government took over from Labor, our treatment of asylum seekers immediately became more brutal. Instead of controversial administrative detention being a process, it became a torturous dead end. As immigration ministers, Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton embraced publicity about our grotesque treatment of our fellow humans rather than being embarrassed by it. The worse the stories, the more effective the deterrence.
“Hoffman knives” are a particular design intended to cut down suicides. They were a standard part of the uniform in our offshore detention camps where innocent people kept trying to die since they couldn’t return to the hell they fled, and were dying incrementally under Australia’s remorseless system of petty persecutions. In onshore detention, the knives stay in the office, since it’s slightly harder to commit suicide here.
Even now, some of the men who were evacuated from offshore detention because of their dire health issues have stayed locked in the hotel that sparked Melbourne’s biggest Covid crisis, rather than in the community. (This continuing imprisonment has been Home Affairs’ vengeance for being forced to give them appropriate healthcare in Australia; even then they barely received it unless they were at risk of dying, and embarrassing the government.) When the inevitable Covid outbreak came, the men could barely get the meted out paracetamol they desperately needed.
Four of those men trapped by us still, one on dead-end Nauru and three here, were all roughly 15 years old, and alone, when we locked them away. They, like so many other children in detention “left” it by turning 18. Eight years later, they still are not free.
Secrecy continues to be deployed, however, to conceal our shocking betrayal of our Timorese neighbours in 2004. Rather than admit to the fact we used ASIS to cheat in the negotiations over resources, the attorney-general’s office continues to pursue the lawyer for Timor-Leste and the whistleblower who revealed that we had robbed the struggling new nation while so many of its children starved. It is estimated that Bernard Collaery’s trial won’t take place until 2023 as the government continues to keep his persecution secret. His lawyers act pro bono, but the government’s efforts have killed his career. Meanwhile this government has spent many millions on this persecution.
We are also prosecuting the whistle-blower who brought the news of Australian soldiers’ ghastly abuse of locals in Afghanistan. We were there to stop a “murderous ideology being exported around the world” or to try to rebuild a failed nation, Morrison told us. The fact that we helped reinforce the Taliban at huge cost in local lives, with Australian deaths and wealth seeping into that distant soil is unpatriotic to assert. Meanwhile Australia has not yet issued even one of the meagre 3000 asylum visas the government allocated to our Afghan allies.
Our First Nations people continue to die disproportionately young, disproportionately imprisoned and disproportionately persecuted by law enforcement around the country. Our healthcare system fails them, with unrecognised biases denying them the needed care. This same Coalition brushed aside the long-deliberated Uluru Statement from the Heart with the most glib of disdainful apathy.
The Robodebt program was known to be illegal when it was established. Regardless, the Coalition government pursued fabricated debts to reclaim pennies from those hardest hit by society’s challenges. People were driven to despair and even suicide. Meanwhile JobKeeper, corporate welfare like so many other similar programs, continues to pour into the profit margins and bonuses of the wealthy. No doubt the donors reciprocate, as the Coalition is our largest recipient of political donations by far.
Our Pacific Island neighbours have begged us to pursue strong climate action in the hope of preventing the submersion of their homes. No doubt their leaders have the laughter of Morrison and Abbott at Dutton’s quip about “water lapping at your door” in 2015 burnt into their nightmares. We continue to push their panic roughly aside in our haste to sign up new and disastrous fossil fuel projects.
The public in Australia is hard to rouse. Our distorted media make-up is amplified by social media disruption. Too many people don’t see it as their civic responsibility to search for the news, rather than accepting the odd headline they scroll past. Because we’re one of the “good guys,” we won’t do anything too bad. We won’t let our democracy decay beyond retrieval. It can’t happen here.
It can, however, and it is. Many of us have struggled for the last decade working out how to convey to the electorate that Australia is no longer Gareth Evans’s “good international citizen” and that this matters.
Behrouz Boochani, now NZ-based writer and survivor of Australia’s refugee policies, recently wrote of the paradox of Australia. Ordinary citizens have contributed $3.8 million to send people persecuted by our refugee policies to freedom in Canada, at the same time as the government wastes $4.3 million per person per annum to keep 107 refugees on Nauru. These same Australians are shamed by our current international role as villain.
The Coalition knows that for many marginal seats these comfortable narratives about good Australia (only ever threatened by “woke” fools and do-gooders, apparently a term of abuse) will win them votes. Even the cruelty is embraced as necessary by those who bother to think about it. Ethical Australians push back in any way we can, but are there enough of us to win in 2022?
America is on the brink of losing that which it could argue made it Madeleine Albright’s “indispensable country”. No matter how cruel the impact was for so many in the nations suffering America’s regime change “help”, its democratic processes have stood as a strong role model for many people’s aspirations around the world.
As the extreme and authoritarian right internationally is emboldened by America’s looming failure, Australia too is at risk. We must look honestly at what we have become and not allow another summer holiday to numb us to the struggle for redemption ahead.
Lucy Hamilton is a Melbourne writer with degrees from the University of Melbourne and Monash University.
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