Lower the standard, turn up the outrage

The reaction to Adam Bandt and Lidia Thorpe over the Australian flag shows the left and right have much in common.

Lidia Thorpe shows the black power fist before being sworn in as the new Greens senator for Victoria, at Parliament House in Canberra. Thorpe replaces Richard Di Natale. Picture by Sean Davey.

Greens leader Adam Bandt has sparked a furore with his decision to remove the Australian flag from view when doing a media conference. Here I was thinking we lived in a free country.

“For many Australians, this flag represents dispossession and the lingering pains of colonisation,” he said. Critics smelled a rat: he was doing this only for cheap publicity.

Greens senator Lidia Thorpe backed up her leader, using a radio interview to say: “The Australian flag represents a colonial invasion, which massacred and murdered thousands of Aboriginal women, men and children.”

The Indigenous senator went on to make the point that “for First Nations people that flag is absurd. It’s an obscenity. The Australian flag does not represent me, it does not represent my family and it does not represent many clans and nations around this country.”

Cue the inevitable outrage on the right. I won’t quote it all here, but I’m sure most readers can imagine. Many perhaps feel the same way. Some idiots on social media even suggested the senator leave Australia if that was how she felt, no doubt failing to appreciate why such commentary was so stupid.

My Network Ten colleague Waleed Aly, in a television interview with Thorpe, challenged her in the context of her remarks for having pledged an oath to the Queen as a senator. The implication was that she ceded her sovereignty by pledging such an allegiance.

Cue the inevitable outrage on the left this time. Aly instantly became the sum of all evil on social media for simply asking a question, as deemed by the self-appointed arbiters of what’s acceptable and what’s not. Never mind that asking the question gave the senator the chance to answer it, which she did very well by the way.

The Project won Popular Panel or Current Affairs Program at the Logies with Waleed Aly, Peter Helliar and Lisa Wilkinson, Waleed Aly and Peter Helliar accepting the award.

The always outraged left and the always outraged right have more in common than either would like to admit, certainly more than either would ever recognise. Self-delusion prevents such self-reflection.

In short, they are every bit as outrageous as each other, prepared to trample all over basic rights when it suits them – the same rights they claim are so important when defending their own cause, if doing so suits them.

That Voltairean principle – I disapprove of what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it – has been lost from the increasingly polarised polemical debates we are forced to endure between people in public life who probably wouldn’t pass a first-year university philosophy unit.

No wonder more and more Australians are simply turning off their TVs, not bothering to read newspapers and withdrawing from the debates that should matter.

The problem with this approach is that these debates matter now more than they have in a long time. And if you’re turning away from the mainstream media only to consume your news via social media instead, you’re trading a broken system for a thoroughly busted one.

You’re going down the proverbial rabbit hole.

There is nothing wrong with Bandt choosing to do what he did, and his claims of virtuous decision-making behind the action taken may even be true. But there is also nothing wrong with disagreeing with his choice.

It’s an interesting debate to have if frothing at the mouth can be avoided. Anger is replacing reason in too many debates of national importance, to a point where ends are sometimes justifying means – a terrifying turn of events. We’ve seen the damage such an approach does throughout history, right around the world; the intolerance it can breed and the sometimes horrific consequences of that.

At a micro level we’ve seen it closer to home, too, when outcomes are assumed to be the case before evidence has been accumulated; where guilt is ascribed and assumed before due process has been had.

Doling out vigilante justice was once something the left and the right could unite to condemn in the name of defending the rules of the game of life. These days an activism that prejudges outcomes is pervading public life. Too few are prepared to stand up against it. The few who do get run down.

It’s terrifying but it’s also anti-intellectual. If you believe in the basic safeguards a working civil society gives us as human beings from the laws of nature, the growing anti-intellectual attitudes among many politicians and media personalities are concerning. Tolerance of alternative views should be the minimum that educated societies embrace. Acceptance of the other would be better; embracing difference, even better than that.

The irony of how similar the loud and angry right and left now are is sharp. They just use different platforms to spread their intolerance and talk to their people, safely ensconced in their silos and echo chambers, convinced of their righteousness, oblivious to their ignorance.

When the right gets upset at a leftie such as Bandt choosing to rid himself of the Australian flag at media conferences, don’t they realise he has the same right to do that as former prime minister Scott Morrison had to hold media conferences without the Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander flags?

The left bristled at Morrison’s exclusionary decision-making on this score while he was prime minister, accusing him of divisiveness. I wonder if they are prepared to call out the divisiveness on the part of Bandt now.

An Australian flag is moved to the side of the room prior to Greens leader Adam Bandt conducting a press conference where he did not want to have the Australian flag and what it symbolises in the camera frame as he spoke.

Responding to Bandt’s comments that kickstarted this debate, Anthony Albanese stuck to the middle ground, pointing out he would rather see unity, not division, and suggesting that excluding the Australian flag was more likely to lead to the latter than the former. And of course he’s right.

The Prime Minister wants to win support across the political spectrum. That’s what major-party politicians need to do, for better or worse. The Greens aren’t burdened by such needs. The minor party can succeed with a fraction of the support Labor needs to win elections, even accounting for the sagging major party vote and the surge in Greens support at the federal election last month.

However, I do wonder if Bandt’s comments risk the enlarged Greens vote by playing to his base, not the party’s expanded supporters.

Thank god (so says the agnostic) for compulsory voting. It helps ensure that to govern you need to avoid lurching towards the fringes on the right or the left – a place where intolerance abounds.

Peter van Onselen is a professor
of politics and public policy at the University of Western Australia and Griffith University.