Disunity,alas,has been the direction of travel for years,and new faultlines have opened up. The housing affordability crisis is often cast in generational terms,as a fight between cashed-up Boomers,with their portfolios of investment properties,and cash-strapped younger Australians burdened with crushing rents. It was brilliantly parodied inthe annual Australian lamb advertisement,“The Generation Gap”,which cast Boomers,Millennials and members of Gen Z as warring tribes. The ad was the brainchild of creative agency The Monkeys,which knows a thing or two about disunion. In the run-up to the referendum,it also produced the “You’re the Voice” advertisement,which showed that not even a singer with the convening power of Farnsie could bring the country together.
In the Voice referendum,voting intentions were heavily influenced by the “four Gs” – gender,generation,graduation and geography – according to researchers at the ANU. The yes vote was obviously strongest in the inner suburbs,and the feeblest among regional and rural voters,reinforcing the longstanding city/country schism. The referendum also exposed an educational divide,although even to whisper of its existence runs the risk of sounding condescending and elitist,and thus widening the rift.
After the ACT became the only territory or state to vote yes,the nation’s bush capital also became easier to stereotype as an outlier:a progressive haven overly populated by left-wing public servants and journalists out of touch with mainstream Australians.
When it comes to national unity,Australia is still suffering from “long COVID”:the persisting effects of Fortress Western Australia,Fortress South Australia and Fortress Queensland. As the country turned into a patchwork of wary jurisdictions,state premiers trumpeted their separatism and sometimes sounded like the heads of splinter movements. “We will be turning Western Australia into its own island,within an island,” pronounced the state’s Labor premier,Mark McGowan. “Our own country.” In a state where secessionist sentiment is as much a part of the bedrock as iron ore,this was gold for many West Australians. After winning the next state election in a landslide,McGowan retired from office a state,if not a national,hero.
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Queensland’s recently departed premier,Annastacia Palaszczuk,benefited from a similar phenomenon. She became Australia’s most electorally successful female party leader partly because of herstate-centric stewardship during COVID-19,and her ability to tap into that sense of Sunshine State exceptionalism.
The pandemic,I suspect,has also had a lasting effect on Australia’s global community,that rolling diaspora of expats who leave and then often return,who were cut off from their homeland because of severe travel restrictions. For many who still call Australia home but who choose to live overseas,that sense of estrangement has clearly been exacerbated by the outcome of the Voice referendum,and the shame they felt afterwards.
The cumulative effect of those two nation-splitting events is striking. In just three years,Australia has been hit by a double-whammy of disunion:a divisive referendum and an isolating pandemic.
Australia is not America. It does not suffer from the same extreme polarisation. Nowhere near. Nor is it post-Brexit Britain,where nationalists in Scotland,Wales and Northern Ireland are agitating for the break-up of the union. To cast an eye over the political map of Australia is to see an entire continent coloured ALP red,with Tasmania the only state without a Labor premier.
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Political dominance,however,is a very different thing from political harmony. Indeed,one-party pre-eminence can fuel the kind of grievance politics that has become Peter Dutton’s political business model,what with his declaration of war on Woolies and flag-waving ahead of Australia Day. It is a politics that seeks deliberately to divide the country in the hope of picking up the election-winning half.
Perhaps in these polarised times a genuine sense of togetherness is unattainable,and something we will only experience in sporadic bursts:during moments of national horror,such as the Black Saturday bushfires in 2009,and national ecstasy,such as the march of the Matildas,whose success during last year’s Women’s World Cup neutered critics who initially bemoaned their demands forequal pay and eyed them as potential cannon fodder in the culture wars. Certainly,on January 26,I never expect to experience the same sense of kinship and cohesion that Sam Kerr and her team inspired,for this is a nation bisected by its national day.
Nick Bryant is the author ofThe Rise and Fall of Australia:How a Great Nation Lost its Way.