Event
Date
by His Excellency Lieutenant General John Sanderson, AC, Governor of Western Australia
After Dinner Address at the Holmes a Court Gallery, Friday 1 August 2003.
Firstly, let me begin by saying how much I relish this opportunity to talk to this audience on the subject of moving forward in a time of fear. Let me also congratulate Janet Holmes a Court and her team for bringing us together like this. In my view the frequency of discussions such as these has not adequately reflected the dramatic and changing nature of our world. Too much of the platform has been given over to reactionary and fearful responses to the moral and philosophical issues that are crowding over our horizons.
As recently as last Monday when addressing the Vice-Chancellors of the Australian universities at their annual retreat in Broome, I lamented the lack of intellectual ferment in Australia on this and related issues, and asked them why our tertiary institutions in particular were virtually mute on social and philosophical issues. I suggested that we compared badly with the United Kingdom and America in this regard, even though these countries had been at the forefront of contemporary conservative actions and policies.
I further suggested that the issue of university funding - the bottom line/market forces agenda imposed on education in this country - obscured the real concerns of our times because the debate had centred on social engineering rather than the vital function of generating ideas and building both intellectual and social capital. I think they agreed. They certainly appeared to appreciate what I had to say.
The discussion that followed suggested to me that they, like many others, desire more expansive and embracing leadership on these issues but are too weighed down by the responsibility of operating within tighter and tighter margins to provide this leadership themselves. At the same time, they are puzzled how we have come to be dominated by those fearful and reactionary responses I referred to earlier.
As my contribution to this day of ideas I therefore want to share with you some views on the sources of what I see as a malaise at this time, but which could become a sickness if we fail to address it adequately. Fear has always been the mind destroyer when it comes to creating an open minded and expansive response to change. The societies that have been the most successful throughout human history have been those that have been the most adaptable, rather than those that have resisted change in the interests of some rigid historical and cultural construct.
Of course, one of the most profound sources of fear is the fear of a loss of cultural identity, and a cultural and genetic submersion. It could be argued that by being too flexible and adaptive, you lose faith with your history and cultural memory and are cast adrift in a whirlpool of change. We all know the truth of this in Australia and we are not as sympathetic to it as we should be. We just have to look about us to see examples of it in our Indigenous people and their response to our offer to give them opportunities to be just like us - as though that is a good thing to be in these times.
Strangely, many of the Europeans, particularly the Irish and the Scots, who came to this country and other parts of the New World, did so because of the same cultural submersion pressures in the homelands. My own Grandfather who came here in 1890 and walked to the Eastern goldfields had had a severe run in with the law in the Scottish Highlands over the land enclosures - something that had been going on in the British Isles for a long time. The racist dimension to this, as well as the social inequalities associated with the way in which the law was interpreted, gave those migrants a commitment to more egalitarian ideas of fraternity and justice.
While the sentiments were widespread, the consequences were not universal. Regardless of people's backgrounds, our country still divided along the Free Traders versus the Protectionists lines, depending on where people found themselves in relation to the possession of land or labour. Those divides were not as extreme as they were in the United States however, where the affirmed commitment to the ownership and defence of property was not moderated to the same extent by the commonwealth idea that lies behind the Westminster system of Government in Australia.
As a consequence of this, our two nations, Australia and America, had vastly different histories up to the Second World War, despite the assertion that one often hears about our shared cultural backgrounds, values and belief systems. What we do share of course, is that we both took the land from the traditional owners with little regard for what it would do to them. That might be due to the harsh reality that many immigrants to both countries came from an experience of dispossession. Regardless of its source, it remains something we have to come to terms with.
Apart from that, America's history has been vastly different to ours - far more violent and assertive - ostensibly built on offering the American dream to the dispossessed of the world, but founded in reality on the exploitation of a poorly enfranchised labour force. The gun ownership/prison population equations are well known to us. Two million people in prison, mostly black, four and a half million people disenfranchised for having been in prison and 50,000 killed by guns each year, suggests that there has been and continues to be a high price to pay for their ascendancy as the world's only super power.
The country is of course held together by an idea of itself as the fount of freedom - George Bush uses that sort of phraseology all the time, and it is true that much of the world owes a great deal to American intervention. But it is also a country that has seen itself, right from inception, as being under attack from forces as diverse as Indians to aliens and everything in between, including its own Government - hence the power of the National Rifle Association. It has always been committed to the minimisation of governance, particularly federal governance, let alone international governance.
There are those here in Australia, and in the rest of the world, who have concluded that the road to future prosperity lies in the emulation of this American success story. Since the Second World War when the Americans arrived late, but not too late, to save us all from marauding Asians and totalitarian forces, most of us have been locked in some way with the American struggle for ascendancy between liberal and conservative forces. We have bought the idea of the fight for freedom over the forces of darkness and have rejoiced in the ascendancy of free market democracy over the slavery of planned utopian economies.
Quite recently however, we have accepted the view that society itself should take second place to market forces - the belief that there is no such thing as society, only interests. The major proponents of this neo-mercantilist philosophy, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, set us on this path and it seems that the only thing that can stand in the way of it are those who disrupt or sit on vital resources and refuse to cough them up on terms that are acceptable to the globalised market. Standing in the way of our ability to kick these people into line is the United Nations - an organisation that we created after the horror of the Second World War to give everyone a fair go - provided they organised themselves into nation states - the price of membership.
In the 58 years since the United Nations Charter was first ratified the number of member nation states has grown from 50 to close to 200, ranging from the largest, China, with a population of about 1.3 billion, to the smallest with a population of about 3,000. This quadrupling of the number of nation states has caused us many problems. Many of them are not viable and are therefore in a constant state of stress. Many of them, for one reason or another, hold their people together only by constant abuse of their human rights, which is something of a problem because the UN has worked up an entire body of protocols and conventions on the rights of the individual. The organisation has also lent its weight to a body of conventions on the environment on the basis that we are all on spaceship Earth together, and abuse of the environment is just as much an abuse of human rights as anything else. This applies particularly to the rights of those people who have to sell the soul of their country in order to survive, such as small South Pacific countries and their fishing rights, or South East Asian countries and their forests.
Why did the UN come up with these inconvenient protocols and conventions? Because we, that is, we the member nations, wanted it to. The fact that some of these are now seen, particularly in the United States, to be an impediment to development and free market forces, reinforces the view that we are now in a very dangerous period of exploitative hyper nationalism that exists under the guise of globalisation.
There is a complete linear, rationalist logic that goes with this. It is an extension of the idea of becoming a nation state to join the UN club and have the same rights as all other nation states, big or small. It goes something like this: if you have democratic and consensual government and just flow into the global market place, investment and jobs will accrue to you because your labour will be cheaper and corporations will automatically make their investment where they will gain the greatest return for their shareholders, who will be ordinary people like you. The market forces, so the logic goes, will take care of the burgeoning complexity of the planet in a way that planned economies had patently failed to do. Therefore, the logic goes, get rid of all that hefty apparatus of government and place yourself in the safe hands of the market.
Apart from the fact that the logic is clearly weighted heavily in favour of the minority who already have modern infrastructure, stable systems of government, deep ethical institutions and a highly educated workforce, it would have much more credence if its proponents were putting more money into aid and development and less into their Defence apparatus. This is obviously not the case. It would also have more credibility if we weighted global trade and labour policies in favour of those disadvantaged nation states - a sort of global affirmative action if you like. That's not increasing either, although we do have the World Bank and the IMF that are there to add conviction to the international community's concern about these matters. Is it any wonder then that some nations are having difficulty in making the grade?
Let me observe at this point, that after the coming down of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the end of the Cold War there was much optimism that the barriers to the engagement of the international community to this end were removed. Many things happened to add support to this view. The UN engaged with a will in many parts of the world, providing opportunity for acts of self determination and infrastructure development in the interests of opening up the flow of investment. There was a belief that much of the money that had been absorbed in high readiness war machines during the Cold War would be released for this development - the so called peace dividend.
Where has it gone? Well the Europeans coughed it up in large part. They had to really, because they had to absorb new arrangements and new partners as a result of the collapse of Eastern and Central Europe and the former Soviet Union. That they have chosen to do this instead of building up a new war machine is gratifying, but it has made them the brunt of accusations by the Americans that they are not pulling their weight in global security - unlike Australia.
The Americans haven't coughed it up at all, now pouring something like $400 billion a year into manpower, procurement and the conduct of operations. This is nearly as much as the entire rest of the world put together. One consequence is that no one can challenge them in the aerospace or maritime environments, probably for the next century. The only possible threat to America and Americans therefore, is terrorism at home and abroad, or a weapon of mass destruction delivered by some suicidal maniac. This is really only a threat if you believe that such suicidal maniacs exist. America does believe this, for two reasons: one, it justifies eternal vigilance and the refusal to compromise on multilateralism; and two, some people and some nations want them to believe this because it is the only way of attracting their attention.
In what seems like the twinkling of the eye, fear of these two threats has come to dominate our lives. When you think of it, I suppose we should really wonder why there hasn't been more of it given the fallacious nature of the philosophy that is now driving international relations.
One consequence is that America now has a home defence structure that is putting us all into some category or another and impacting profoundly on the way others see us. In the last 24 hours for example, we have had to ask the Americans to declassify us a launching place for terrorist attacks on American travellers. In our attempts to back-pedal out of this it seems that we might have at last begun to understand where being a member of the Coalition of the Willing might take us. We certainly have found the proposition that we might also get engaged in blockades of East Asian countries such as North Korea fairly salutary.
We have the embryo of a similar home defence structure ourselves, and security procedure fridge magnets in our kitchens - something we have never had before. Our fear of the French and the Russians, and then the Yellow hordes and the communists, has been replaced with fear of refugees and the terrorists. We are finding traces of them everywhere, confirming the conviction of those frightened people who gave Pauline Hanson's party its momentum that their lifestyle was being eroded by all those foreigners and illegal immigrants - many of whom were probably terrorist sleepers anyway. These fearful thoughts have become quite common currency in our nation now - particularly since September the 11th and the Bali bombings last year. They dominate our media and add a visceral dimension to our jaded lives. We fight no battles, have no casualties, but have a constant series of victory parades as we return from carrying our flag with the Coalition of the Willing. Is it any wonder that we see ourselves as being constantly under threat?
What this concern we share with our major ally does is screen or obscure the things that should really cause us to be fearful - social issues that are growing at an exponential rate but are increasingly part of the unfunded liability disguised behind the bottom line in our national balance sheet. I speak here of big strategic issues like our massive urban concentration while much of the continent remains empty, our enormous loss of topsoils and agricultural land to salinity, our atrocious loss of biodiversity, the growth of the urban poor, poor in spirit as well as in material terms, the alienation of our youth, drug dependence and suicide, our growing health problems and the ageing of our community.
I spend much of my time as Governor talking to people about sustainability, which immediately invokes thoughts of environmental or green concerns. While this is vitally important, what I am really talking about is building sustainable communities. In fact I am talking about people coming together, overcoming their fears, building alliances and trust, and generating communities that are capable of taking control of their own destiny. People need to believe they can do this, because unless they do, there is a great chance they will be disenfranchised by other forces, the forces of globalisation included. My message is the same as that of that futurist Charles Handy as expressed in his much quoted book The Empty Raincoat:
The World is up for reinvention in so many ways. Creativity is born in chaos. What we do, what we belong to, why we do it, when we do it, where we do it - these may all be different and they could be better. Our societies, however, are built on case law. Change comes from small initiatives which work, initiatives which initiated, become the fashion. We cannot wait for great visions from great people, for they are in short supply at the end of history. It is up to us to light our own small fires in the darkness.
What Handy is saying to people here is that they should not be mesmerised by fear into believing that all the answers to their confusion and uncertainty will come from above. What answers do come are unlikely to be in their interests at all. Nor should they seek certainty, for it is an illusion, and those who profess to provide it are dangerous people indeed.
For those of you who remember that brilliant BBC series in the early 70s The Ascent of Man, its author, J. Bronowski, spoke about the human condition in all its forms - from its earliest beginnings right through to the then contemporary scientific and industrialised world. He had a view that became known as the 'Principle of Tolerance' in which he challenged our view of knowledge. He asserted, and let me quote him directly, that:
... all knowledge is limited. It is an irony of history that at the very time when this was being worked out there should rise, under Hitler in Germany and other tyrants elsewhere, a counter-conception: a principle of monstrous certainty. When the future looks back on the 1930s it will think of them as a crucial confrontation of culture'the ascent of man, against the throwback to the despots' belief that they have absolute certainty.
This same sentiment rings true today. Here we have both governments and terrorists dealing in 'absolute certainties', certainties about their motives and outcomes, and the methods by which to implement those certainties. We cannot conceive of the far-reaching consequences but we have plenty of evidence to show us that we should put aside our fears and lock together as human beings in order to move us forward and out of the reach of those who would entrap us in hatred.
Bronowski goes on to say that there are two parts to the human dilemma:
One is the belief that the end justifies the means. That push-button philosophy, that deliberate deafness to suffering, has become the monster in the war machine. The other is the betrayal of the human spirit; the assertion of dogma that closes the mind, and turns a nation, a civilization, into a regiment of ghosts - obedient hosts, or tortured ghosts.
Am I suggesting that democratic governance as we have it in Australia will not work? Far from it. What I am saying is that it won't work unless we overcome our fears and make it work. Building community and setting the agenda from the bottom up is what democracy is all about.
It should be an Australian agenda and it should be about our future rather than our past. It should be an inclusive agenda that embraces all our people and generates confidence that we appreciate everyone for their creativity and ability to contribute to the building of society. It should recognise that we are part of the greater human family and that we have a responsibility from our relatively comfortable circumstances to set an example to the rest of the world. In that I believe, ladies and gentlemen, is the path to a happy and enlightened society.