Pauline Hanson’s senate motion is just one example of a wider campaign to promote a niche ideological agenda
With
all that’s happened in Australian politics in and around the fateful
Wentworth byelection on the weekend, it’s confronting to realise that
Australia’s hanging-by-a-thread parties of government, the conservative
Liberal-National Coalition, voted for a racist 4-Chan meme in the senate only just last week.
Yet the context of that incident bears analysis in the wash-up of Wentworth. It’s signpost to the narrow universe of discourse Australia’s conservative movement has entered and goes some way to explaining how a shocking 18% swing was delivered against the government in one of the Liberals’ formerly safest – ever – seats.
To recap: the Liberals and Nationals insisted their entire senate cohort, including several government ministers, were led to support a motion of a far right, minor party burqa-stuntist, Pauline Hanson, by an “administrative error”. There was an outcry; excuses, disavowals and retractions followed.
But other stories that emerged last week – lost amid the Wentworth flurry – illustrate a shared theme in the behaviour of the organised Australian conservative movement within parliament and beyond.
Hanson may have borrowed the deplorable “it’s OK to be white” from the internet’s grossest neo-Nazi chatrooms, but its insistent defence against “attacks on western civilisation” employs a language code from the radical conservatism that increasingly dominates the public character of Liberal/National ranks.“Civilisation” under siege is an ancient and crude setting for racist allegory. Eternally unsubtle, Hanson conjures pearlescent fantasy castles vulnerable to ruin to demonise equally fantastic foreign hordes.
But “defence of western civilisation” also speaks to the careful, euphemistic discourses employed of the far-more-organised hard right to co-opt or bully social institutions into promoting the values of a “civilisation” formed out of its own niche ideological agendas.
Last week, we were reminded modern university is one such target of their ongoing campaign.
Liberal parliamentarian Craig Kelly has denounced Australian academics as possessed by a “hatred of western civilisation.” And while the inner-city liberals of Wentworth were being pamphleteered by his party, a quarrel continued at the nearby University of Sydney with the implicit involvement of Liberal parliamentarians and their chums.
Academics there continue to protest a lucrative bequest from the conservative Ramsay Centre to establish a degree course in “western civilisation”.
Ramsay’s board is chaired by former Liberal prime minister John Howard and contains present Liberal Warringah MP Tony Abbott. It is the legacy of privatisation billionaire Paul Ramsay, and its stated agenda is to inculcate “generations of young Australians” to “learn and value their own civilisational heritage, and no cost to the taxpayer”.
This website copy perhaps describes an ideologically unambitious project to those whose understanding of the word “civilisation” is its association with social developments around centralisation, built infrastructure, vocational specialisation and the city.
And those who also understand “civilisation” as a term that describes how the common values of cultural products – educational priorities, the law, history, politics, art – define and determine a people, usually do so with a proud cosmopolitanism in mind.
This cosmopolitanism is not within the Hanson definition, nor Ramsay’s, nor Kelly’s or Abbott’s.
Their idealisation of what comprises “the west” hardly bears resemblance to a place shared with the Harlem Renaissance, Angela Carter, Bauhaus architecture, Wendy Carlos, Karl Marx and the KLF - or indeed, any aesthetic system they themselves do not like. I do amuse myself trying to imagine Hanson in a post-show discussion of The Good Person of Szechuan, or Kelly tucked in under a quilt enjoying Giovanni’s Room.
“Civilisation” has a definition that details not merely a state, but a process of cultural coercion. It’s the resonance of this in the efforts of the activist right to which there is an instinctive urban resistance.
When not applied to discussions of city plumbing and poetry readings, the words “western civilisation” denote a racist colonial project to crush, change, enslave, eradicate or genocidally erase other cultures. To “civilise” is a verb that divorces people from the values of their own community and indoctrinates them into another’s. Historical rhetoric polarises the “civilised” westerner as superior to the dehumanised “savages”, “primitives” and “barbarians” of the term’s late 18th-19th century common use.
That Ramsay’s Centre would institutionalise apologia for this worldview was somewhat given away by Abbott back in April. Universities were “pervaded by Asian, Indigenous and sustainability perspectives”, he wrote in Quadrant, promoting the Centre as “not merely about western civilisation but in favour of it”.
Ramsay reps now at Sydney Uni rebadging their course as one in “western tradition” to “win over” dissenting academics suggests camouflage, not cooperation. The ANU walked away from Ramsay’s money in June, citing demands to sit on management committees that determined staffing, curriculum diktats and a desire to conduct creepy “health checks” where reps would physically monitor lecturers and their course material. In a chorus of angry, pro-Ramsay commentary from the media right back then, both Wentworth’s former member and Liberal prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and his education minister Senator Simon Birmingham condemned ANU and not Ramsay.
Turnbull was not long later removed from the prime ministership, not conservative enough for the likes of Abbott and Kelly. Birmingham remains - and was one of the hands raised in defence of “western civilisation” last Monday.
Of course, the government returned to the senate and revoked their vote for Hanson’s motion. The motion had been lost but the symbolism was important; Australia is, conspicuously, a multicultural, cosmopolitan electorate.
The fantasy of this conservative moment worldwide may be to yearn for “western civilisation’s” supremacist past and call it “greatness”. But until such institutions are built that may “civilise” us all into really believing it, results like Wentworth suggest, most clearly, that spruiking it in public may indeed be an error.
• Van Badham is a Guardian Australia columnist
Yet the context of that incident bears analysis in the wash-up of Wentworth. It’s signpost to the narrow universe of discourse Australia’s conservative movement has entered and goes some way to explaining how a shocking 18% swing was delivered against the government in one of the Liberals’ formerly safest – ever – seats.
To recap: the Liberals and Nationals insisted their entire senate cohort, including several government ministers, were led to support a motion of a far right, minor party burqa-stuntist, Pauline Hanson, by an “administrative error”. There was an outcry; excuses, disavowals and retractions followed.
But other stories that emerged last week – lost amid the Wentworth flurry – illustrate a shared theme in the behaviour of the organised Australian conservative movement within parliament and beyond.
Hanson may have borrowed the deplorable “it’s OK to be white” from the internet’s grossest neo-Nazi chatrooms, but its insistent defence against “attacks on western civilisation” employs a language code from the radical conservatism that increasingly dominates the public character of Liberal/National ranks.“Civilisation” under siege is an ancient and crude setting for racist allegory. Eternally unsubtle, Hanson conjures pearlescent fantasy castles vulnerable to ruin to demonise equally fantastic foreign hordes.
But “defence of western civilisation” also speaks to the careful, euphemistic discourses employed of the far-more-organised hard right to co-opt or bully social institutions into promoting the values of a “civilisation” formed out of its own niche ideological agendas.
Last week, we were reminded modern university is one such target of their ongoing campaign.
Liberal parliamentarian Craig Kelly has denounced Australian academics as possessed by a “hatred of western civilisation.” And while the inner-city liberals of Wentworth were being pamphleteered by his party, a quarrel continued at the nearby University of Sydney with the implicit involvement of Liberal parliamentarians and their chums.
Academics there continue to protest a lucrative bequest from the conservative Ramsay Centre to establish a degree course in “western civilisation”.
Ramsay’s board is chaired by former Liberal prime minister John Howard and contains present Liberal Warringah MP Tony Abbott. It is the legacy of privatisation billionaire Paul Ramsay, and its stated agenda is to inculcate “generations of young Australians” to “learn and value their own civilisational heritage, and no cost to the taxpayer”.
This website copy perhaps describes an ideologically unambitious project to those whose understanding of the word “civilisation” is its association with social developments around centralisation, built infrastructure, vocational specialisation and the city.
And those who also understand “civilisation” as a term that describes how the common values of cultural products – educational priorities, the law, history, politics, art – define and determine a people, usually do so with a proud cosmopolitanism in mind.
This cosmopolitanism is not within the Hanson definition, nor Ramsay’s, nor Kelly’s or Abbott’s.
Their idealisation of what comprises “the west” hardly bears resemblance to a place shared with the Harlem Renaissance, Angela Carter, Bauhaus architecture, Wendy Carlos, Karl Marx and the KLF - or indeed, any aesthetic system they themselves do not like. I do amuse myself trying to imagine Hanson in a post-show discussion of The Good Person of Szechuan, or Kelly tucked in under a quilt enjoying Giovanni’s Room.
“Civilisation” has a definition that details not merely a state, but a process of cultural coercion. It’s the resonance of this in the efforts of the activist right to which there is an instinctive urban resistance.
When not applied to discussions of city plumbing and poetry readings, the words “western civilisation” denote a racist colonial project to crush, change, enslave, eradicate or genocidally erase other cultures. To “civilise” is a verb that divorces people from the values of their own community and indoctrinates them into another’s. Historical rhetoric polarises the “civilised” westerner as superior to the dehumanised “savages”, “primitives” and “barbarians” of the term’s late 18th-19th century common use.
That Ramsay’s Centre would institutionalise apologia for this worldview was somewhat given away by Abbott back in April. Universities were “pervaded by Asian, Indigenous and sustainability perspectives”, he wrote in Quadrant, promoting the Centre as “not merely about western civilisation but in favour of it”.
Ramsay reps now at Sydney Uni rebadging their course as one in “western tradition” to “win over” dissenting academics suggests camouflage, not cooperation. The ANU walked away from Ramsay’s money in June, citing demands to sit on management committees that determined staffing, curriculum diktats and a desire to conduct creepy “health checks” where reps would physically monitor lecturers and their course material. In a chorus of angry, pro-Ramsay commentary from the media right back then, both Wentworth’s former member and Liberal prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and his education minister Senator Simon Birmingham condemned ANU and not Ramsay.
Turnbull was not long later removed from the prime ministership, not conservative enough for the likes of Abbott and Kelly. Birmingham remains - and was one of the hands raised in defence of “western civilisation” last Monday.
Of course, the government returned to the senate and revoked their vote for Hanson’s motion. The motion had been lost but the symbolism was important; Australia is, conspicuously, a multicultural, cosmopolitan electorate.
The fantasy of this conservative moment worldwide may be to yearn for “western civilisation’s” supremacist past and call it “greatness”. But until such institutions are built that may “civilise” us all into really believing it, results like Wentworth suggest, most clearly, that spruiking it in public may indeed be an error.
• Van Badham is a Guardian Australia columnist
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