The inaugural Edmund Barton Lecture delivered last month by the defence minister and current Member for Hunter Joel Fitzgibbon was as rhetorically radical as any made by the first representative of the Hunter electorate and Australia’s first prime minister.
Barton was the first to represent the electorate and the first prime minister, and he was a key figure in the formation of an Australian federation.
No easy task.
Former deputy prime minister Tim Fischer is a railway fanatic. He frequently tells of colonial Australia’s attempts to create their rail networks.
We finished with 17 gauge widths, including one dubbed “mistake gauge”.
That Barton and others could overcome the egos, philosophies, perks and ambitions of colonial governments to create a federation is a task well represented in that railway gauge anecdote.
Little attention is paid to what might have been the alternative if federation had failed. What we now know as Australia would exist as a continent, but it would be an association of sovereign nations much as Africa or South America are today.
Imagine needing a passport to go to Queensland.
But back to Mr Fitzgibbon’s address: he asked why so many Australians could name America’s first president (and many subsequent) but were ignorant about our own first national leader.
Leaving America’s retelling of history through popular movies and TV shows aside, my theory is that in part we did not truly become a nation until World War II and we did not widely perceive or understand it until a decade or two after that.
A war of independence would have alloyed our separate states into a national identity, if federation had formed in the way it did in the USA.
There’s nothing like the heat of battle to force a position in the “with us or against us” debate, unlike reform, which many choose to stay ignorant of, or uncommitted to.
Travel and communications have shrunk the country as well as the globe, so we now see ourselves as a complete and coherent unit – a nation – with social and cultural homogeneity.
Mr Fitzgibbon says our education system may be partly responsible for our political conservatism.
I’d up the ante on that to say I think it has been almost conspiratorial the way in which education has been happy for the public ignorance about our governance, especially in a country where, as the minister pointed out in his speech, we are the most governed nation on the face of the earth with 14 houses of parliament for 22 million people.
He stated the “duplication, the inefficiencies, the buck passing and blame shifting costs our economy billions”, and adds the Business Council of Australia calculates it at $9 billion.
His remedy? Abolish the states, but he admits the obstacle will be the same one as always; the fundamental conservatism (his word) or apathy (my word) of the Australian electorate that says “if it ain’t broke, why fix it?”
Part of it, I suspect, is because of the nature of political allegiance in this country. It seems a greater act of treachery to betray your party than your nation.
Some of it is in the practice of governments and oppositions; governments propose, oppositions oppose. And that’s without regard for the merits of the cause or reform.
When was the last time you saw a government and opposition in agreement, let alone co-operatively working for the same national gain?
The best we get is a bit of “yes, but . . .” on such matters as troop deployments.
To revisit the American experience, voters there frequently switch their party allegiances according to the merit of their argument.
So, I thank the minister for opening the debate but I don’t see his colleagues taking up the cause to continue and expand it.
Reforming the constitution to eliminate waste and duplication will depend on a new kind of political debate in this country, and new kinds of politicians to have the debate, a debate that will inevitably stretch across several parliamentary terms.
And it will be driven by voters. Ooops! Maybe I’ve found the flaw that will dash my aspirations for reform.
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