Chapter Three - Australian Values and Their Public Culture(s)

Summary

In Australia there is something of that past, you know, the fear that might have been justified at one time – ‘this thing will fall apart’ – it will fall apart unless you insist on a few concrete, easily innumerable values. And it becomes a part of your culture and mentality even though the situation has changed.

Interview with Ashis Nandy, 7 December 2007

In this chapter, we turn to survey the content of Australian civil society through a discussion of its public culture and sphere, identifying salient and predominant themes and issues. What we argue is that Australia is an unfinished project characterised by Enlightenment values that have become instrumental of pathologies of power. Contemporary Australian values have been and continue to be sustained through a matrix of power relations that were established through the installation of Enlightenment. Values that underpin national discourse have become pathologies in the way they have been invoked and applied through the dominant template: the rationalisation of tolerance, justice and equality for all, for example – as bedrock Australian values – has frequently produced its very antithesis.

The complexity of these power relations is expressed through a variety of social, political and cultural effects that are produced in the way Australian civil society organises, interprets and understands itself. This occurs in significant symmetrical and asymmetrical conversations located within narratives, both formal and informal, of Australian belonging. What characterises the substance of these conversations are contests and struggles about how Australia is defined, by and for whom.