Gregory Clarke (President of Tama University)
The Japanese Times, Monday 13th July 1998
Australian politics is in turmoil, again.
One reason is that its political parties are never quite what they say they are.
The ruling Liberal Party is in fact the Conservative party. Its coalition partner, the National Party, is in fact the farmers party. And the Labor party should have been called the capitalists party having managed during almost two decades in power to throw over 10% of the labour force into unemploymen6t while enriching a motley collection of lawyers, speculators, mining companies and media monopolists.
The same allegedly progressive party had a consistent record of close attachment to the corrupt, regressive Suharto regime in Indonesia.
Now we have the reaction to all this in the form of a party, called One Nation, whose nationalistic, protectionist, anti-Asian immigration platform in fact aims to split the nation in two. And while some of its policies may be haywire, it does not deserve the constant barrage of abuse it now suffers from the intelligentsia and the media.
Let me state my own prejudices up front. As an Australian who has spent most of his life abroad, mostly in Asia, I have a vested interest in internationalism. But as someone brought up on a small farm in Queensland, the conservative heartland of One Nation support, and just a few kilometres from the Ipswich fish-and-chip where the party's founder, Pauline Hanson, made her semi-proletarian start, I think I also know where that party comes from and why it has won such strong popular backing to the point where it is nearly certain to hold the balance of power in Canberra after the next federal Senate (sic) elections.
Not just Queenslanders but most ordinary Australians are highly conservative - gut, instinctive conservative. As such they resemble the Japanese. They are also non-ideological. For over two decades now they have watched patiently while Canberra and its intelligentsia have imposed various ideological based reforms - large scale Asian immigration in the name of multiculturalism, generous concessions to the Aboriginal population, minimal industry protection, a decontrolled, gung ho banking system. Almost without fail, the policies have been botched.
Conservative nations have many things going for them. But an intelligent intelligentsia is not one of them. Would be reformists clutch at the latest ideological fad, or conservative wisdom, often brought in from abroad. Even then they manage to get it wrong. Tokyos' recent inability to work out a sensible solutions to its economic problems is a good example.
But Tokyo cannot stray too far from grassroots common-sense. In Canberra, where I once spent a year as a so-called policy adviser, physical remoteness combined with recent Anglo-Saxon delusions of intellectual and moral genius, to the government and its minions to create policy monsters. Critics are routinely dismissed as stuck0in0the-mud, unreconstructed troglodytes.
Billions of misspent dollars to help Aborigines have done little more than reduce communities to drunken dependence and create a militant leadership determined to get more handouts. Similarly with the experiments in economic "rationalism." A once viable economy has now been reduced to dependence on foreign capital handouts.
Or take the main plank in One Nation's platform - severe cuts in Asian immigration. Anyone who has seen the Vietnamese or Chinese ghettos in the main cities would realise the need for at least some selectivity in immigration policy. But even to say this is to be automatically condemned as racist by the chattering classes based in Canberra and elsewhere.
"Racist" is a badly misused word. All groups, including the nation, have the right to control membership. And many rely on highly subjective criteria. Clubs demand that members fit in with the club ethos. Bricklayers in a close co-operative team do not include brick layers they do not like. Families by definition are almost totally exclusivist.
True, nations with strong identities, like France or the United States, can use acceptance by the foreigner of the national culture as a sort of objective criterion for membership. But what happens with more familiar island-nations like Britain, Australia or Japan, where identity is much more instinctive and nebulous? Cultural symbols such as the royal family, meat pies, sushi and Waltzing Matilda do not cut much ice. Absorbing outsiders into this national ethos is not easy.
In this situation those who decide they do not want large numbers of difficult to assimilate foreigners in their midst are not necessarily racist. They may simply be saying sorry, we'd prefer you to remain in your own nation-group. On the contrary, it may be the progressive intelligentsia who are racist, to the extent they assume that all immigrants, even the uneducated and the mercenary, will be so attracted by the superior culture of the host country they will eagerly want to assimilate to it.
They are also elitist, since they assume the moral right to ignore the views of a large section of their own population on an issue that involves them directly - population.
Pre-war Japan was quite open to fellow Asians, But this was because it believed and Asian exposed to Japan's superior society would be pro-Japan. Post-war Japan, for all its exclusivism, has been more humble. Its demand that we outsiders prove suitability before admission is not unreasonable, even if we do complain.
Australia went the other route, Before World War II, it was notorious for its white Australia policy of refusing virtually all admissions to all Asians. Indeed, some say Japan's Pacific War militarism owed much to Australia's rigid 1919 refusal to have a Versailles Peace Treaty clause recognising racial equality (Canberra claimed Japan would use this to demand the right to send its citizens freely to Australia). Then in the 1970s Canberra about-turned to insist that Australia was an Asian nation, which it clearly was not, and that it welcomed Asian immigrants.
For years Australia was also notorious for its industry protectionism. Then in the 1970s we saw another 180 degree shift, this time to a native laissez-faire backed up by an arrogant belief that "clever, creative" Australians could easily compete with low-labour-cost Asians. The result was massive currency collapse, to the level where much lower cost Australians were just able to compete with clever, creative Asians.
To some, this flip-flopping might make sense. But if quite a few Australians feel that the prosperous, fully employed, stable, relatively crime-free Australia of the past might just possibly have been better than what they see today, do they have to be dismissed as fools and scoundrels?