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FOR those trying to understand the 'quiet anger' and political alienation in contemporary Australia, Sir Keith Hancock's Australia Uacaranda, 1930, reprinted 1361) is still our best starting point.
For many years, Hancock's little book was widely used in Australian schools, a purpose forced upon it, in large part, by the shortage of quality school texts dealing with Australian history. Unfortunately, this usage largely obscured the central theme of the book: the peculiarity of our indigenous statism. Australia was a nation, Hancock argued, whose prevailing ideology was "the appeal to Government as the instrument of self-realization." The course of our history had run as follows: the state, in Australia, had preceded civil society; a relatively early achievement of self-government and a democratic franchise had generated the belief that the state could be made an instrument of popular will and national development; extensive state enterprises and interventions in turn discounted the necessity for autonomous institutions and stifled the development of civil society; and a political culture had been formed where 'leaning upon the state' was seen as the natural means of individual and social advancement.
From our vantage point in the 1990s, Hancock's insights in 1990 resound with a bold prescience:
"Thus Australian democracy has come to look upon the State as a vast public utility, whose duty it is to provide the greatest happiness for the greatest number...To the Australian, the State means collective power at the service of individualistic 'rights'. Therefore he sees no opposition between his individualism and his reliance upon Government."
But there was a twist. The faith in the state created expectations which could never be delivered.
"Every economic difficulty is generalized as a political issue, with the double result that it becomes more difficult to solve, and more exasperating when it remains unsolved. Exasperation--that is the dominant note in the public life of the Australians, who are, in their private life, exceptionally good-natured and friendly. The Australians are perpetually exasperated because they perpetually pursue a quarry which they can never run to earth."
Hence, then, is the root of our cynicism:
"Government, being constantly overstrained, is constantly discredited. Almost everything is absorbed in politics; but almost everybody believes those knowing fellows who say that politics is a 'dirty business'. This...