‘Cossie livs’ is the word of the year. I can think of a much better one

The airline traveller in my row had scored the trifecta. They were on their phone, making calls and checking social media during take-off and much of the flight. They had their oversized leather bag sitting proudly on an empty seat. When they weren’t on the phone, they were pulling tissues out of the branded carryall while they sneezed and coughed, blew their nose and tossed the soaked tissues about like confetti.

The flight attendants came by from time to time and told the passenger to turn their phone off and put the bag under the seat. They didn’t mention the infectious disease. The passenger ignored the crew, who moved on. I sat, and stewed.

Illustration by Simon LetchCredit:

I don’t fear flying. But my buried anxiety comes out in other ways, mainly an eye-rolling irritability. (I don’t fear Christmas either, or parking, or technology, or queues, or most other things, but they also bring out my worst.)

So rather than sit and simmer, I tried something easier: to understand what it means, not in my seat row, but in a country of 25 million.

What does this kind of behaviour mean? What does it mean that for all the queuing barriers and taxi lines and boarding systems in airports, many passengers flout them and officials permit them because they don’t want to make a fuss? Are you the arsehole if you’re only out for No. 1, or are you the arsehole if you complain about it? What does this undeclared war of the arseholes say about the fractious, polarised moment we are living in?

I wasn’t going to find understanding in the overhead compartment. It was already filled by the passenger’s other bag, their hard-shelled roll-on. Super-spreading their infection, they had jumped into the business-class line and boarded the aircraft from the wrong end so as to get to our row first, claim our compartment while making a few calls and sneezing on the maximum number of fellow travellers. The staff said nothing.

Disappointed Yes voters after the Voice referendum was defeated on October 14.Credit: Getty

There was no elegant metaphor to explain this. Understand it? We live with it. The COVID pandemic, the Voice referendum, the big issues of climate change and taxation and housing affordability and the rest of it have only clarified what already divides us.

On one side are those who think Australian life is too constricted by rules. On the other side are those who assume most rules have an evidence-based purpose (stopping the spread of disease, keeping planes in the air, protecting cohesion and safety), and believe that freedom can be found by working within those social boundaries. The ornery right versus the sensible centre. Quiet Australians versus noisy elites.

Between them is government, or the airline staff, that satisfies neither side’s wishes. The angry libertarians are already sick of too much authority in their lives (the right has become the side of insurrection).

Macquarie Dictionary’s word of the year.

But progressives are also unhappy with authority because when things get hard, government has no conviction in its own arguments. It doesn’t want a scene. It wants good reviews.

By not enforcing its rules, government undermines confidence in the evidentiary basis for them. Is flight mode really necessary, and would planes really crash if everyone on board was FaceTiming? Is too much unchecked luggage inside the cabin really a risk? Does sneezing really spread infection? Can emissions targets really cap rising temperatures? Would building more homes really help affordability?

Authorities only seem to believe in these ideas up to the point where they become unpopular. Then they back down. So we are left with the worst of both worlds, two unhappy sides separated by a vacuum.

It’s left, then, to the citizens to fight among themselves. But I wasn’t going to confront the cheating over-baggaged COVID-spreading passenger. I knew what would happen. It would entrench them in their outlaw defiance, and they would start aiming their used tissues at me, out of spite. Then the other passengers would blame me for starting it. I would get no support from the crew.

By way of taking the national temperature, the Macquarie Dictionary has just announced its word of the year: “cozzie livs”. No, I hadn’t heard of it either, but you can’t blame the dictionary for trying to be relevant. “Cozzie livs” means “cost of living”. It is a popular word because it stands for the division between those being defeated by inflation and those who are not. Many of 2023’s words also indicated division: “hostile architecture”; “skimpflation”; “AI”.

The real word that reads the room in our country is, then, the umbrella term for all those others: division. Australians do not want persuasion or reason. They want a word for their grievance against other Australians. To put it finely, people just have the shits.

In the referendum, “division” was the winning word, played on endless repeat. A significant majority of Australians ultimately backed a campaign that divided them from other Australians on the basis that they didn’t want division.

I didn’t really understand the logic either, but I did know that whatever the question was, Australia was always going to vote No. (If the question was redesigned to something like “Do you want Indigenous affairs to continue as they are?” then 60-plus per cent would have voted No, and we would have a Voice to Parliament. The answer No was pre-programmed. A shame constitutional change can’t be framed in the negative.)

After the word was repeated often enough, Australians bought it. But division seldom leads to progress, which is blindingly obvious if you are on Victoria Road, Rozelle in peak hour. Australians can’t merge. We don’t want to merge. What we all really want is our own lane.

The Rozelle Interchange is the latest cultural battleground.Credit: Anna Kucera

Christmas, that brief interlude between two brutally competitive shopping sprees, between the end of one divisive year and the start of another, is meant to be a truce. As we approach that one day of the year, we might pause and think about our divided temper (bearing in mind that Christmas is also the peak season for family arguments).

Even if you are not religious, it’s a time to just take a flipping break. Most of Australia’s divisions are pretty small-time. You don’t live in Gaza and you don’t live in Ukraine. You don’t need to start a fight where there is none.

I can’t say I brought too much of the Christmas spirit to that aircraft. I couldn’t tell that passenger we’re all Aussies and give them a big hug. They were still sneezing and throwing tissues. Besides, a hug would be assault. Their phone was now on speaker, and they were getting enough love from their family. But when the plane pulled up, I did get down their hard-shell suitcase. Like the fight going on in my head, it didn’t have much in it.

Malcolm Knox is a journalist, author and regular columnist.

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