Howard, Price and Forgetting

It was always going to be the case that an unsuccessful outcome from the proposal to give indigenous Australians recognition in the constitution in the way they requested, the Voice, would be interpreted as if the question was more than just that.

The Guardian tells us that John Howard is the latest. Speaking to a new right-wing group - the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (Arc) - Howard described the no vote as "a stonking endorsement of how united we are". This is, of course, a nonsense...just as the claim that the proposal itself was "divisive". 

The Australian population is not uniform in any way. As libertarians would otherwise be at pains to establish we are all different. We will coalesce around issues or attitudes from time to time. 

But the most egregious of Howard's comments is his confession about his attitude to multiculturalism. He says:

Multiculturalism is a concept that I’ve always had trouble with. I take the view that if people want to emigrate to a country, then they adopt the values and practices of that country. And in return they’re entitled to have the host citizenry respect their culture without trying to create some kind of federation of tribes and culture – you get into terrible trouble with that.

This is unsurprising from Howard; but it is duplicitous on a number of fronts. 

The first, of course, is that the idea of the new arrivals assimilating to the "values and practices" of the country to which they emigrated only applies to people who emigrated some time well after 1788. That clearly delineates the "colonisers" as invaders and conquerors, which invalidates all the rest of the claptrap. 

The second is that Howard, whose credentials on immigration were first founded on opposing further Asian immigration, in government oversaw the greatest increase in Asian immigration in our history.

But the greatest opprobrium has to remain with Senator Nampijinpa Price. She told the conference:

The way forward from here is no more separatism, no more dividing us along the lines of race, no more political correctness, no more identity politics.

And yet, on 17 October she moved in the Senate:

That, in the opinion of the Senate, the following is a matter of urgency:

The need for Prime Minister Albanese to support the Opposition's call for a Royal Commission into child sexual abuse in Indigenous communities, audit spending on Indigenous programs, and support practical policy ideas to improve the lives of Indigenous Australians to help Close the Gap.

How on the one hand you can claim that there is to be no more dividing on race and on the other introduce a motion whose first limb is restricted to race has only one explanation: this is the moral code of the modern right. At its core is the conundrum of wanting less government involvement in our lives and at the same time strong policing presence. The right is horrified about legislation regulating misinformation, but insists on dictating the curriculum in schools exclude issues of genuine concern to youth.

At its extreme the right preaches libertarianism but rails against the "politics of identity". What the right preaches most is forgetting. Forget the inconsistency between the need for migrants to assimilate and the opposite approach taken by the colonisers who set out to extinguish the pre-existing culture. Forget that we just campaigned that the Voice was about division when we ask for practical policy to close the gap. Forget that conservatives are mostly defending the rights and institutions that previous generations of progrssives procured. 

Footnote: I dislike in general the use of the terms "left" and "right" to describe a near homogonous body of political action. I make an exception at times for the right when the messages are being organised through part of the great network of new right "mouthpiece" structures. That includes the conservative congference in Australia and now Arc.

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Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans JWL