With all the renovations going on I have only just got around to reading the weekend newspapers. In the Weeked Review of The Australian I encountered Nicolas Rothwell's, 'Fear and Loathing in Broken Hill', which is an extract from his Wings of the Kit-Hawke (Picador).
Nicolas is travelling the Outback with a photographer companion Johnson, tracing the steps of the pioneer explorers (Charles Sturt) looking for enlightenment and trying to give it. They come across Pauline Hanson campaigning in Broken Hill with her two advisors David Oldfield and David Etteridge. Being journalists from The Australian Nicolas and Johnson get to talking and hanging out with the politicians as they move around the town. They end up in the pub with a jukebox, put on Suicide Blonde and have a bit of conversation.
This fragment is interesting.
Pauline Hanson says:
"Its a genuine Outback scene, this, isn't it? Warm and soft, and nothing ever changing. The real Australia."
"If this is the real Australia", muttered Johnson ,in a state whisper, then we're all dead."
"Maybe we are," I ventured....Maybe we're all just drifting through an after-life and this world is dead ---and that explains the sense of emptiness the Outback gives."
"Its not dead in an interesting way" said Johnson. Its just dead. Devoid of culture----inactive.
"If its not cultural enough for you down here, chirped Hanson, "why don't you come up with the TV crews, both of you, and have a tea with Pro [Hart]?"
Two visions of the Outback. Hanson's image of an unchanging real Australia when politically she sees rural and regional Australia changing all around her due to the actions of the bureaucracies and markets that coexist to satisfy material gratification and ensure efficiency. The other image is that of the metropolitan Johnson: the Outback is the dead world, only emptimness exists, even though this individualist is surrounded by traditions and conventions of people living in Broken Hill.
There is a way of life there with a whole constellation of habits, attitudes, and beliefs supported by things like family arrangements, religious commitments, and standards of respectable conduct in civil society.
What is not seen by the characters is the way that tradition in regional and rural Australia is palced in opposition to the actions of the Weberian rationalist administrators. The latter are guided by material efficiency and they justify their economic reforms to open Australai up to the global market in the name of claims of scientific administration, control over society and social engineering.
What we ended up with is the jerry-built markets of national comeptition policy. What is not seen or understoodby Hanson and the journalists is that bureaucracies and markets can only function properly if they infused with certain attitudes and habits--- diligence, social restraint, trust, recognition and public-spiritedness.
These conventions, traditions and values about what is good and right are a part of the specific relations and historical context of Broken Hill and regional Australia. This ethos is socially anchored in a way of life structured around socisala and political authority and it functions as prejudices or habitual moral sentiments of a common life. Populism is contra economic liberalism.
The tragedy of the 1990s was that this populist tradition did not have the resources to resist the free market economic reforms of the neo-liberal administrators let along engage in some form of moral, social and political fightback. Populism was only able to throw a bit of sand in the political machinery before it was incorporated by the Howard Coalition and made safe. That is the tragedy of populism.
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Posted by: dvs on May 6, 2003 01:17 AM