A while ago I posted on the meaninglessness of the description “unAustralian“. Now Hugh Mackay has jumped on the bandwagon, but I must admit he said it better than I did:

Surely it’s “Australian” to do whatever Australians do. It’s Australian to smuggle drugs in and out of the country. It’s Australian to minimise your income tax payments to the point where you’re not actually pulling your weight as a taxpayer. It’s Australian to cheat if you can get away with it - at work (PriceWaterhouseCoopers reports 47 per cent of companies have suffered some form of corporate crime, mostly committed by employees), on the sporting field (the “professional foul”, for instance), or in personal relationships (where, these days, cheating on your partner scarcely counts as cheating at all).

It’s Australian to drink and drive, get hopelessly into debt, lie to secure an advantage - whether political, commercial or personal - and engage in merciless and slanderous gossip. It’s Australian to give vent to our xenophobia through outbreaks of racism, to reserve our nastiest prejudices for indigenous people, and to worship celebrity.

Sound a bit negative? Not at all. It’s Australian to do such things because, however uncivilised they may seem, it’s human to do them. The Dutch do them; so do South Africans, Turks, Indonesians, British, Italians, Brazilians, etc. Like everyone else on the planet, Australians are a mixture of good and bad, noble and shameful, exemplary and slippery

He goes on to say

We’re human, OK? So let’s not get carried away by hubris: Australians are no better than anyone else when it comes to occupation of the moral high ground. After all, this is the country where many people who opened their hearts and wallets to the tsunami relief appeal then grumbled about the ungrateful Indonesians who dared to convict Schapelle Corby of being a drug courier, as if our charity was part of some implicit trade-off: we’ll help your tsunami victims; you let our drug traffickers off lightly.

I agree totally. One of the frustrations about the unAustralian tag is that it is empty of meaning. It equates holding a different view with somehow not being worthy of being a citizen. For some reason I am put in mind of the scene from Buffy the Vampire Slayer when Faith is in Buffy’s body and she is practising being Buffy in front of the mirror by saying “Because it’s wrong! Because it’s naughty! That’s not right!” Words like unAustralian (and for that matter from time to time “immoral”, “are used in such a way that demonstrates that we can use a word, and know that it is supposed to be something bad, but not really understand what it means.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 20th, 2005 at 7:57 pm by dan and is filed under random musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.