New cultural cringe fears the eyes of the world

HOW will Tony Abbott perform on the world stage?

It is a question that has been exercising the minds of The Age's readers of late as they wait, calculators at the ready, to run through Joe Hockey's costings.

One correspondent wrote recently: "Do we really want the rest of the world seeing Tony Abbott as representative of the 'ordinary' Australian? I don't. Urgh!"

The Australian intelligentsia's apprehension of what others might think of them is as strong today as it was in the late 1950s when Arthur Angel Phillips identified the cultural cringe. He described a type of intellectual who was "forever sidling up to the cultivated Englishman, insinuating 'I, of course, am not like these other crude Australians' ".

These days, it is not English eyes that trouble denaturalised sophisticates but "the eyes of the world". Human rights lawyer Greg Barns, for instance, wrote in Hobart's The Mercury recently that the tragedy of our tough border protection policy "is that we are diminishing ourselves in the eyes of the world for no purpose".

One suspects that the eyes Barns and his chums would like to appease are those that turn to The Guardian or The New York Times for moral guidance. Their monotonous outlook is sometimes referred to as "world opinion", and the penalties for offending it can be severe.

Bob Brown, then the Greens leader, warned prime minister John Howard in 2001 that "when mandatory sentencing is judged before an international court, as is inevitable, Mr Howard will have to 'cop' that judgment. He cannot silence world opinion." How right he was. Friday's The Age broke the news that the judgment was in.

"Australia has been found guilty of almost 150 violations of international law over the indefinite detention of 46 refugees," wrote political editor Michael Gordon. "The federal government has been ordered to release the refugees and to provide them with rehabilitation and compensation."

Ben Saul, of the Sydney Centre for International Law, who dobbed his country in to the world prosecuting authorities, described it as "a major embarrassment for Australia, which is a member of the Security Council and often criticises human rights in other countries".

The professor's barb may well have been aimed at Kevin Rudd, who has been quick to point the finger at the Syrian government in recent days for gassing 3000 of its own citizens but slow to address the UN Human Rights Committee's finding against Australia.

To be fair, our colleagues at The Age may have over-egged the story by portraying the committee's findings as a guilty verdict. No law has been broken; the claim is merely that there has been a breach of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The committee is not a court but an eclectic bunch of lawyers and academics from 18 countries. While it would be presumptuous to pass judgment on their expertise, it may be of relevance that it is chaired by a professor from the University of Essex, ranked 31st in The Guardian's league table of British universities.

It may also be of some relevance to mention that the refugees in question, who the UN committee now invites us to compensate, are recipients of adverse ASIO security assessments, a fact not made clear in The Age.

We might have been spared this grief if Gough Whitlam's government had not signed the covenant and Malcolm Fraser had not agreed to ratify it in 1980. There are scant references to these actions in Hansard, since the signing of international treaties requires no parliamentary approval or debate. Perhaps it should.

One can only hope this judgment is parked in the back of a filing cabinet, since however world opinion stands on the matter, Australian opinion would be overwhelmingly against paying compensation to unlawful non-citizens detained under the Migration Act and subject to adverse assessments under the ASIO Act.

The eyes of the world are welcome to their own interpretation, but in the eyes of most Australians the use of an international covenant to trump acts passed by democratically elected parliaments would seem impertinent.

Not all Australian citizens see it that way however. Since World War II, an influential strand of intellectual opinion has sought an alternative to what is quaintly called territorially bound representative democracy. To these thinkers, a popularly elected government introduces the tyranny of majoritarian rule.

The University of Sydney's John Keane offers us a glimpse of the alternative in a 2002 paper entitled Cosmocracy. It is not a world government as such but "a conglomeration of interlocking and overlapping sub-state, state and supra-state institutions and multi-dimensional process".

A cosmocracy would be structured by "macro-governments", supranational institutions that would form the Premier League of world governance, relegating our parochial commonwealth government to the second division and state governments to the third. Keane describes it as a polymerous form of rule, comparing it to a chemical substance composed of many parts.

It is unclear where the UN Human Rights Committee would sit in this cosmocratic dystopia, but it's a fair bet that its unelected experts would have a lot more clout, and greater powers to bring recalcitrant sovereign states such as Australia to heel.

Keane suggests a historical inevitability to this process, that "the passing away of the fiction of the legal sovereignty of territorial states" is only a matter of time.

If the good professor is right, then Tony Abbott's launch speech on Sunday shows a leader living in the past, still under the delusion that a government he might lead, elected under our flatly democratic parliamentary system, will be able to make binding decisions for and on behalf of the Commonwealth of Australia.

Abbott mentioned Australia or Australians 19 times and country 10 times before promising that on day one he would give the directions needed to begin Operation Sovereign Borders.

Yeah? Says who?