Australians need to start fighting over ideas, not allegiances

NOT only is Australian politics hopelessly broken, civil society’s also in trouble. Why? Because we’re too busy picking sides to debate actual ideas, writes James Morrow.

Instead of choosing what colour ideological jersey you wear — Red or Blue, Orange or Green — try to actually engage with principles and ideas. (Pic: Kym Smith)

AUSTRALIAN politics is hopelessly broken.

It’s a narrative that’s becoming as much a part of our collective national identity as mateship and meat pies.

It’s not just because of Canberra’s revolving door leaderships or the fractious Senate crossbenches either.

Civil society — that space outside Parliament House in the real world where most of us dwell and discuss and negotiate what our nation looks like by millions of little exchanges every day — is also in trouble.

Rather than a space where individuals from all sides can mix it up and push for their ideas and beliefs, the public square is becoming increasingly dangerous. Particularly as having the “wrong” view according to your opponents is now seen as a legitimate reason to try and have you fired, as the recent cases of IBM’s Mark Allaby and Macquarie University’s Steve Chavura demonstrate.

This is not a healthy situation, by any stretch of the imagination. And it is why, to fix Australia’s politics and public discourse, we need to start fighting over ideas, not allegiances.

That means getting away from identifying people (including ourselves) as to what team they play for or what colour ideological jersey they wear — Red or Blue, Orange or Green — and actually engaging with what principles they hold.

Picking Team Orange does not mean you have to vehemently agree with everything One Nation says. (Pic: Richard Hatherly)

Because once you start identifying yourself and others as members of a team, you don’t have to think. And if the whistle blows halftime and everyone swaps ends, who cares? So long as you’re laying the boot in against the other team.

Gay marriage, a perfectly defensible issue that should not require threats to get over the line, provides endless examples of what happens when point scoring trumps principle.

Recall it wasn’t long ago that the atheist Julia Gillard and the gay, partnered Penny Wong were defending marriage as something to be enjoyed exclusively between a man and woman. No one really believed they believed this, but understood that’s what their team colours demanded at the time.

Ex-Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Labor Senator Penny Wong toed the party line when it came to same-sex marriage. (Pic: News Corp)

And now the same stance when held by an academic or executive is enough for activists from the left to push to have them fired, with activists directing tweets at employers containing words as threatening as any mafioso’s: “Not a good look.”

This phenomenon plays out over longer time frames, too. Consider free speech.

Within living memory, it was the Left — and yes, these are simplistic, reductionist terms — that thrilled to the rich possibilities of giving offence, while it was the Right that stood for morality, decency and order.

As late as 1965, the Menzies Government was enforcing a ban on the more-schlock-than-shock DH Lawrence novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Around the same time the publishers of Oz, an unapologetically left-wing satirical magazine, were being hauled before a judge on obscenity charges.

Fast-forward to the present and it was forces from the Left who pursued cartoonist Bill Leak through the Human Rights Commission and in social media sewers like Twitter danced on his grave because he drew pictures that they found offensive.

If one needed any further illustration of just how much the Left has now become the cultural establishment, note how many people defend today’s pinch-nosed censoriousness with words that could have been lifted from the quarterly newsletter of a small town ladies’ gardening club newsletter.

Political correctness, they say, is just another term for manners.

And so too with religion, something which the Left — yes, we will get to the other side soon enough — long ago abandoned as the domain of the slow and the superstitious. Except, oddly, when it comes to Islam, which despite the documented misogyny and homophobia and everything else illiberal that seems to come with it wherever it is the law of the land, is wholly romanticised and celebrated and defended against all comers.

Which is why the impending Australian speaking tour of a female atheist refugee from Somalia, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, rather than ticking a trifecta of boxes for the Left, has become a cause for suspicion and outrage.

In an online petition, titled ‘Ayaan Hirsi Ali does not speak for us’, a group of Muslim women expressed their disappointment in the author’s Australian tour. (Pic: News Corp)

In recent weeks writers at SBS and Melbourne’s Age have penned approving features of protests against Hirsi Ali’s visit, in one case openly wondering why there haven’t been more of them.

So much for standing up for refugees, for women, for secularism.

The Right has its blind spots, too.

To go back to the whole debacle around Coopers beer promotion of an online discussion about the pros and cons of same-sex marriage between Liberal MPs Tim Wilson and Andrew Hastie, we saw many who would otherwise be nervous about a halal certification be completely cool with a Bible verse showing up on their special commemorative Coopers Light.

(Pro tip: Neither matters. And who drinks light beer anyway?)

And it was the supposedly arch-conservative Tony Abbott who saddled high-earning Australians with the deficit levy.

And so on.

The point is, everyone has their blind spots, but letting other people think for you will only make them larger — and more dangerous.

James Morrow is Opinion Editor of the Daily Telegraph