Balkan Nation: how tribalism divides Australian society
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way. i
Charles Dickens’ opening to A Tale of Two Cities is still an apt description of modern life more than a century and a half after its publication.
Today, as nations struggle to contain the delta variant that is driving a new wave of the COVID19 pandemic, stock markets are at record highs, property prices are soaring and Bitcoin has burst through the $50,000 mark.
Indeed, the ‘best and worst of times’ epithet is writ large everywhere:
There is political inaction on climate change as floods, wildfires and droughts cause untold destruction and death across the world;
Billionaires Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson vie for bragging rights over who took the first joy ride into space;
News reports tell us that pedophile Jeffery Epstein was best pals with a who’s who of the rich and powerful, including Prince Andrew, Bill Gates, Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, and Harvey Weinstein;
A violent mob incited by Donald Trump killed and injured dozens of police officers as they stormed the US Capitol Building in a bid to deny confirmation of the US election result;
More than 1000 Australian aged care residents were infected or died from COVID due to its spread by unvaccinated aged care staff;
A toxic male culture in the Australian parliament was exposed after an avalanche of stories from women concerning sexist comments, unwanted sexual advances, alleged rape, being sidelined, and being criticised for their weight, their looks, and their clothes;
A Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety revealed genocidal abuse of people in Australia’s aged care facilities;
Anti-lockdown protesters marched through Australian capitals, causing mayhem, destruction and further spread of deadly COVID.
What drives these disparities? And why are some enjoying the best of times while others suffer the worst?
Put simply, modern times reflect the tribalism that has been a feature of human society since its inception.
One feature of tribalism is competition between competing mobs and factions, each jostling for dominance, each vying for power, money and resources. And as the headlines show, it is the rich and powerful who get the best end of the contest.
These tribes exist in every sphere of society: in politics, the arts, sport, and business, and in every sociodemographic echelon — sex, age, race, religion, class, career, income level, and geographic aggregation.
Take the Australian example.
Despite a persuasive narrative that Australians are a laid back lot with broadly similar hopes and dreams, there is ample evidence for a counter narrative — that the pursuit of sectarian interests is alive and well and is having a corroding effect on nationhood by attacking the collectivity and mutual respect at its foundation.
The factions and power blocs that pursue sectarian goals use overt and covert means to seek and exert power. The use of political lobbying, for example, is just one tactic that tribes use to exert pressure for their demands.
In Australia, as in other democracies, factional interests lobby politicians to garner support for their proposals and promise their electoral support and cultural endorsement in return. This isn’t a new thing, of course: political lobbying is as old as politics itself.
The usual price to access an MP is to make a political donation, ‘though astute politicians have always sought the ear of business leaders and other important lobbies, like the farmers, doctors, bankers, miners, property developers and the gaming industry, to name a few.
A more overt form of lobbying happens in the news media where opinion leaders and lobby groups push their interests and exert pressure for their demands in return for their political patronage.
News media — be it opinion-making via digital and print articles, free to air tv, streaming tv on digital platforms, old fashioned wireless radio, and podcasts of course — are forums for pushing agendas and manufacturing consent.
Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Youtube are also powerful platforms for professional media and anyone with a big online following to speak to billions.
History shows that influence-peddling, be it through political donations, political patronage, lobbying, news and social media — or a free ski pass and a tee-off with Greg Norman, corrupt the democratic process and damage collective good will — the glue of nationhood. Here’s three brief examples.
The Crown Resorts Inquiry
A recent media story revealed that Helen Coonan, who is Chairman of Crown Resorts, wrote to the Victorian gaming minister in a bid to neutralise the findings of royal commissioner, Ray Finkelstein QC.
Commissioner Finkelstein is holding an inquiry to assess whether Crown is fit to operate its flagship casino in Melbourne.
Ms Coonan’s letter to Minister Melissa Horne sought an “urgent meeting” with her, warning of a “huge problem for the government” if Finkelstein’s inquiry were to makes adverse findings against Crown’s Melbourne licence. The letter alsoc warned of “severe consequences” for Crown shareholders, thousands of employees and Victoria’s state coffers if the casino giant were allowed to fail.
Put simply, Ms Coonan went behind the back of the Royal Commissioner to kill the prospect of adverse findings by the Royal Commission.
After Coonan’s letter was made public by the government, Commissioner Finkelstein said a “plain” English reading of the letter to the gaming minister was that Crown was seeking to interfere.
“It [the letter] seems to have one stated, rather than unstated, purpose, which is to avoid a particular finding that the Commission might make, which will have the consequences that you set out in the letter,” he said.
“And it seems, on its face, plain old ordinary English language meaning, to mean ‘make sure that the commission doesn’t make a particular finding’.
“How the government goes about that I don’t know, [but] it’s that dangerous. That’s what this letter is about, in simple English,” he said.
Ms Coonan was unrepentant, despite her admonishment. In response, she issued a media statement saying, “Crown has an obligation to deal with all of its stakeholders, including the government, and this is in no way intended to be disrespectful to the commission.”
The fallout over the letter came as the commission learned, on its last day of hearings, that there were indications of money laundering through Crown in accounts excluded by an external review commissioned by the casino giant.
Crown Resorts Limited is Australia’s largest gaming and entertainment group. It owns and operates three of Australia’s leading gambling and entertainment complexes, Crown Melbourne, Crown Perth, and Crown Sydney. It makes hundreds of millions of dollars each year off the back of gamblers.
Coonan’s letter to the gaming minister was written just as the commissioner was casting doubt over the casino’s ability to overhaul its toxic corporate culture: a culture marked by a disregard for the law and regulators, despite the company pledging to be on a pathway of reform following a damning NSW inquiry that found Crown was unfit to open its Sydney casino.
Ms Coonan, who was a federal minister in the Howard government, is expected to step down from Crown’s board due to her culpable oversight of the company and her extraordinary attempt to neutralise the findings of the Commission. Hers is just one of several scalps that Crown is likely to offer up given the risk that Crown will be found unfit to operate its flagship Melbourne casino.
What could have motivated Coonan’s extraordinary behaviour? Clearly, she couldn’t have expected the government to interfere in the imminent findings of the Royal Commission, nor could she have expected the government to stay silent about her letter to the minister.
The only plausible answer is that Ms Coonan had decided to ‘take one for the team’ — her mob, her tribe — in the expectation that she would be taken care of in the wash up.
‘States at war over NSW outbreak’
This was the headline over a story in the July 23 edition of The Australian Financial Review describing a breakdown in relations between state and territory leaders following a plea from NSW Premier, Gladys Berejiklian for other states and territories to assist NSW with extra vaccine supplies to aid its losing battle with a coronavirus outbreak.
The story also described how Prime Minister Scott Morrison “vetoed a fallback proposal by Ms Berejiklian to redirect vaccines from COVID-19-free areas in her state.”
Morrison’s veto was a stunning political blow to Berejiklian. Having already declared a state of emergency granting her additional powers, the PM blocked the premier’s ability to redirect vaccine supplies from regional NSW to Sydney.
Following a meeting of national Cabinet comprising the PM and State premiers, Morrison said the Commonwealth would seek extra vaccines for NSW, but not at the expense of the other states and not at the expense of regional NSW.
Morrison’s rationale was that this would leave other areas of the NSW exposed. But his political calculation was evident. Rural NSW is where the PM’s coalition partner, The Nationals, hold a Senate spot and eight federal seats, including seats held by its federal leader, deputy leader and five Ministers. With a federal election to be held early in 2022, the idea of taking vaccines from eight federal MPs, a Senator, and their constituents would have been political suicide.
The was just the latest display of tribalism by the state leaders and the PM since the coronavirus pandemic came to Australian shores early last year. State and territory have been swiping at one another and grandstanding about their successes in taming COVID since the start of the outbreak.
Indeed, it’s fair to say that State of Origin isn’t just a rugby league contest between NSW and Queensland, it’s a full on blood sport between the states and territories dating back to federation.
Black and white Australia
The first schism to surface in Australia was between black and white. It was grounded in the profound racism that British colonisers exhibited to the land’s indigenous people soon after their arrival at Sydney Cove on January 26, 1788.
In his epic account of the early years of Britain’s colonisation of Australia, and the history of its convict transportation system, Robert Hughes describes many non indigenous Australians view Indigenous Australians:
“A static culture, frozen by its immemorial primitivism, unchanged in an unchanging landscape — such until quite recently was, and for many people still is, the common idea of the Australian Aborigines.
“It grows from several roots: myths about the Noble Savage, misreadings of aboriginal technology, traditional racism and ignorance of Australian prehistory. It is, in fact, quite false; but in the experience of white city-dwellers there is little to contradict it.” ii
Britain’s legal right to establish a penal colony at Sydney Cove was based on British navigator James Cook unprecedented claim to the entire eastern coastline of Australia in 1770. iii
The claim to owning the land that would become known as Australia was a unique event in British colonial history.
“In stark contrast to other British colonies,” writes historian Mark Mckenna, “the continent was conquered without negotiation with its Indigenous people.
“As Henry Reynolds explained, ‘the whole venture was premised on the belief … that the Aborigines had no legitimate claim on the land.’ ” iv
Britain’s claim to ownership was based on the idea of terra nullius, meaning the land was unoccupied and that its indigenous people had no claim to the land they had lived on for tens of thousands of years. v
Among the attributes assigned to Australian Aborigines by the British were ideas that they were uncivilised, primitive, ignorant and had no form of political organisation and therefore had no leaders with the authority to sign treaties.
This profouns racism sanctioned a host of policies that were favourable to the colonisers and deeply unfavourable to the indigenous people. vi They included the right to steal the land, to take children from their families, to poison food supplies, to disrupt cultural practices, to prohibit the speaking of native language, and most controversially, to kill and massacre indigenous Australians — a practice that persisted for 150 years from 1788 into the 1930s. Australian historical records have only begun to record these atrocities in the last 50 years or so.
As an example, McKenna’s contemporaries, Henry Reynolds, Lyndall Ryan, and Ray Evans have provided overwhelming evidence of the role that state-sanctioned and privately conducted violence played in Australia’s foundation.
Dr Ryan, is pursuing a long running research project “to create an interactive online map of massacre sites across Australia — places where six or more people were killed in frontier conflict between 1788 and 1960 — has already attracted widespread national and international attention. The first stage, mapping over 150 massacre sites in eastern Australia, was released in June 2017.” vii
By the time the map is completed, Dr Ryan believes that her research team will have verified more than 500 massacre sites nationwide.
Systemic racism has pervaded every aspect of black and white relations in Australia for the past 250 years. Today its effects can be measured by a range of social and health indicators. The Closing the Gap Initiative, for example, reveals that Indigenous Australians are far more likely to be jailed, to die in custody, to be unemployed, to suffer poor mental and physical health, and to live shorter lifespans than white Australians.
White racism and its progeny — discrimination, subjugation, rape, violence, frontier wars — have decimated indigenous Australians.
But Indigenous Australians are pushing back, not with violences towards their white oppressors, but with proposals for “truth telling” that could ultimately help to heal the rift between black and white Australia.
Beginning in 2016 and culminating in the Urulu Statement of the Heart in May 2017, a Referendum Council conducted twelve dialogues with more than a thousand people in Indigenous communities across Australia. These were deliberately termed ‘dialogues’ rather than ‘consultations’, to overcome the cynicism of Indigenous groups who feel they had often been consulted but rarely listened to.
A common message arising from these dialogues was a demand for truth-telling.
The subsequent Uluru Statement from the Heart is a statement of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander desires for substantive reform to the Australian Constitution. It proposes a permanent first nations Voice to Parliament, and a Makarrata Commission to engage in agreement-making and to sponsor truth-telling about the past.
Maybe one day, when the truth is told and acknowledged by all, Australians can become one mob, not a nation divided.
Dan Gaffney is the author of Journey Home: Essays on Living and Dying. His next book is about the factions and tribes that divide Australia and how it might become one nation of the heart.
i Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, p 3 Amazon Classics. Kindle Edition
ii Robert HUghes, The Fatal Shore, Random House 1986
iii James Cook, Journal of the HMS Endeavour, 1768–1771, National Library of Australia, Manuscripts Collection, MS 1, 22 August 1770
iv Quarterly Essay 69: Moment of Truth, Mark McKenna, March 2018, p138
v Terra nullius was eventually overturned in 1992 by the High Court of Australia in the Mabo case №2, which introduced the principle of native title into the Australian legal system. In recognising the traditional rights of the Meriam people to their land, the court also held that native title existed for all Indigenous people.
vi Race is a social construct that divides humans into an “us and them” based on differences in physical, linguistic and social attributes. It is not intrinsic to humans but an identity, often created by a socially dominant group, whereby the dominant group assigns negative qualities to a less dominant group. The assigning of negative attributes to another group is known as racism.
vii Quarterly Essay 69: Moment of Truth, Mark McKenna, March 2018, p155–156.
