to service individual rights so that the state should be a vast public utility devoted to providing happiness for the greatest possible number of citizens. Accordingly, Australians have developed a talent for bureaucracy. In the city and the country, where individualism is strong, bureaucratic behaviour is deeply ingrained. Understandably, Australians take a dubious pride in this since it appears to contradict the cherished image of antiauthoritarian, ungovernable individualists. Where is the rugged individualist who scorns authority? With many public servants to take care of their needs, Australians sacrificed rugged individualism for a gospel of relaxation.
In his aptly named book, Land of the Long Weekend, Ronald Conway describes Australia in the 1970s as the country where weekdays are days of R&R which help the locals recover from the last weekend and prepare for the next weekend. Symptomatic of the late twentieth-century Australian lifestyle was an obsessive dedication to immature consumerism, mortgaged luxury, brick-veneered suburbia and unearned leisure. As a result of the breakdown of family relationships, Australians turned to a peer-group lifestyle based on superficial and unconvincing mateship. Australia is one of the highest-ranking Western countries in terms of the number of holidays and its administrators have cunningly contrived to have most of them occur on a Monday. The long weekend has thus become a national symbol in a country where pleasure is linked with novelty and ‘getting away from it all’. But what are they getting away from? Surely not a life of hard work since, as every Australian knows, the innumerable underperformers are not confined to blue-collar workers involved in heavy manual labour, but include employees at all levels of work organisations. Australians have always been plagued by vagueness, tardiness, incompetence and vacuous unconcern from public servants and members of the (misnamed) service industry. While it is easy and tempting to attribute this widespread apathy and incompetence to the values of Australian workers, it is positively impious to blame workers for their shortcomings. And the same applies to managers who one might have thought play an important role in ensuring that their colleagues perform effectively. Yet managers have indirectly encouraged incompetence in their colleagues for fear that direct confrontation will not be worth the effort. The workplace is not a place for work: it is a place to prepare for and recover from the far more stimulating activities of the weekend, especially those concerned with sport.
The national obsession with sport carries with it an affirmation of human courage and endurance where physical achievement is the standard by which individuals are assessed. The obsession with sport, however, seems to contradict Australia’s notorious ‘levelling tendency’: a mistrust of excellence and suspicion of celebrities. As everybody knows, Australians have a decidedly ambivalent, if not negative, attitude toward individual eminence and distinction, with the exception of sport. Australians often qualify their comments about leadership with, ‘except in sport’, although that expression is generally further qualified with ‘so long as they are good blokes’: unpretentious, modest, laconic in victory. They should not appear ‘uppity’, arrogant or self-assertive and they should not indulge in American-style self-glorification.
A major weakness of folk history is that commentators abstract popular values from the local literature and apply them to the general population. Are our profound and lovable values – egalitarianism, mateship, tolerance, friendliness, stoicism and sardonic humour – characteristic of suburban Australians?
In Intruders in the Bush, John Carroll argues that there have been three main influences on Australian culture: upper-middle class Victorian values and institutions; working class (especially Irish) egalitarianism; and twentieth-century consumerism. Middle-class Australians settled themselves into British-style suburbs dominated by British-style houses and sent their children to British-style schools where they played cricket and rugby. However, in the late nineteenth century, working-class Irish-Australians staged a cultural take-over of English values. At its heart was an egalitarian ethos with an accompanying intolerance of respectability and manners, hostility to formal authority, a talent for improvisation but also for bureaucracy, and a romantic attitude toward male comradeship.
Carroll argued that the only thing that is typically Australian about the egalitarian-mateship phenomenon is that it is more widespread than in other Western countries. This ethic has been prominent in Australia because of the peculiar nature and strength of the working-class experience, and the fact that the upper-middle class, including senior managers as a class, has not been able to enshrine its values. This failure was due not to lack of strength but to lack of confidence. The values and manners of this class have remained the preserve of a small minority.
Why did the middle class fail to consolidate its culture? Carroll’s thesis is that the formation of Australian society coincided with a general development in the West whereby the middle class came progressively under the influence of an egalitarian bad conscience. He argued that democracies suppress excellence and individuality and encourage disdain for hierarchy, which makes it inevitable that central governments increase their power. But above all, the egalitarian spirit of democracies legitimates the envy of difference and of superiority. So the targets of envy establish disarming strategies by disguising whatever is likely to be coveted. This fear of envy is a contributing factor to the bad conscience of the modern middle class. The pressure to maintain disarming strategies may result in a questioning of the very values once so vigorously defended. The Puritan virtues of hard work, frugal living and responsibility for community require committed belief and action. Living in a country lacking in tradition and born of cultural conflict, Australians do not believe deeply enough, or in sufficient numbers, in these values. Where the authority of an old culture collapses there is a strong tendency for people to identify with the victims. This is what happened in Australia and accounts for its citizens’ empathy with underdogs, the lower classes, the stressed, the deviant and criminal. Carroll noted that this middle-class bad conscience is not new to post-1950 Australia since it was well established in the myth-makers of the 1890s who were significantly urban middle class.
Over the past thirty-five years, Australian characteristics have been changed by feminism, multiculturalism and postmodernism. The traditional ‘true blue’ stereotype is acknowledged by a small minority and less than fifteen percent of Australians identify with the man on the land. The majority do not identify with this easy-going, down-toearth, masculine, anti-intellectual Australian. By contrast, many see themselves as sophisticated, ambitious, hardworking, generous, creative, egalitarian, loyal and tolerant. As a consequence of the increasing feminisation of life in Australia, males have become more willing to express their feelings. One has only to watch popular television programs to see men crying when confronted with a newly improved backyard. However, Australians have also become passive, soft, simplistic, materialistic and obese. They demand that their politicians and bureaucrats work for them, but are cynical about their ability to do so.
If Australians rely so heavily on bureaucracy one might expect them to value leadership. However, their cynical attitude to politicians, bureaucrats and managers militates against leadership, at least from them. So Australians live an exasperating paradox: paradoxical because they depend on politicians, bureaucrats and managers but don’t trust them; exasperating because they pursue a goal that is doomed to failure. Believing that Australian democracy could, as Henry Lawson said, ‘democratise the world’, they are exasperated by the failure of government and business to eliminate hierarchies of power, corruption and inefficiencies. Their exasperation is expressed through strident demands for politicians and managers to work more effectively for the people, even though they know they will not. The result is a constant discrediting of politicians, public servants and managers.
There have been no leaders in the country’s history who have been able to seduce the Australian people for long, or at all. Australians have managed to combine a conditional egalitarianism with a strong sense of their independence and this has been achieved by a strong belief in universalism in law and an associated sense of fair play and support for the underdog. These assertions need to be qualified somewhat, but for now the point can be made that Australians are wary of those in positions of power. This is the most positive aspect of the Australian Tall-Poppy Syndrome, since it has prevented the emergence of leaders, or at least ensured that their status is temporary.
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