We shall be a renewable energy superpower!
The financialisaton of national and personal identity
In a recent post, I made a connection between the economic reforms of the 1980s and our changing ways of celebrating Australia Day. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while, without really going into it deeply, though I did give it some consideration in Voices of Us.
As any writer will tell you, there is this thing that happens surprisingly frequently, where the thing/s you are writing about—fiction or non-fiction—find resonances in the world around you. Because your brain is there anyway, your subject material will tend to frame everything else that comes into your field of view so that suddenly it can feel like everything is about what you are writing about. It is serendipity turned up to eleven, and I suspect it is fundamental to all creativity.
Anyway, sometimes the connections you come across are much more direct—it is simply the timing that seems otherworldly—and I had that experience the day after I published the Australia Day post. I came across this interview with Indian historian Ravinder Kaur talking about how India, under Prime Minister Norendra Modi, is using a rejigged, Hindu-dominated sense of national identity to underpin the neoliberal reforms his government is seeking to implement or has implemented.1
Actually, what Kaur speaks about is more subtle than that, the idea (that I was trying to get at) that a nation’s economic settlement affects the way it thinks about itself and that the neoliberal mindset we have all been subject to—in Australia since the late 1970s—has coopted notions of national identity in particular ways.
The argument Kaur makes about India is fascinating, and it had obvious resonances with Australia. Talking about her recent book, Brand New Nation, she says:
I [argue] that the last three decades of economic reforms basically transformed the nation into a commodity. I traced the ways in which India, the post colony, turned itself into an “emerging market.” Contrary to the understanding of globalization as a process imposed from the outside and resisted by local groups, I argue that economic “LPG” reforms—liberalization, privatization, globalization—were embraced by the policy elite in India. Initially, there was some political pushback against it, both within the BJP and Congress, but by the turn of the century, any resistance to them had disappeared.
This great transformation activated a seemingly unlikely alliance between global capitalism and hypernationalism, a foundation on which twenty-first century Hindu nationalism would begin taking shape.
We could make the same argument here, that neoliberalism was, in a sense, native not imposed, “embraced by a policy elite”, including—perhaps especially—on the Labor side of politics, a process set out in full in Elizabeth Humphrys’ excellent book, How Labor Built Neoliberalism.
Keating clearly saw the 1980 reforms as something that went beyond the mere economic and were part of a plan to reshape the way the nation saw itself. He seamlessly attached the economic reforms of the Hawke Government to a changed, and to him, enlarged sense of national identity, a way of economically and spiritually integrating us with “the region” of “opening up”. Here he is, for instance, addressing the Asia-Australia Institute in Brisbane in 1994:
In the past, it was possible for Australian governments and business people
dealing with Asia to take the policy equivalent of a five-day package tour to
Bali. But dabbling in Asia is no longer an option for Australia. Our engagement
with the region has to be uncompromising, unfailing, tenacious.
The task ahead requires a Government with a creative policy sense, a sharp
awareness of the national interest and, indeed the national identity.
As I have often said, there is a cultural element at work in this confidence,
creativity an appropriate sense of national purpose and appropriate symbols
for it these are all part of the effort.
My emphasis.
Keating’s “banana republic” warning of 1996 played heavily on tying economic reform to national pride. Fear of loss of prosperity was at play too, but the not very sub subtext was saying, we are not like those other countries. There were warnings about us becoming the poor, white trash of Asia too, and reminders about the importance to national prosperity of foreign investment.
Keating was a storyteller and his big idea framed everything he spoke about.
Michael Pusey, one the most prominent early critics of “economic rationalism” pointed out in a speech at Parliament House in 2003 that we have always tied economic development with national pride, and he cites the obvious examples of the Snowy Mountains Scheme (the gleaming success) and the Ord River Scheme (the dismal failure).
He argued that “Economic reform, especially now in its new packaging as globalisation, is going to sour because it is more likely to be construed as a loss to national solidarity and even as a betrayal of the older unifying history-making promise of national economic development.”
My point in the earlier post was that Howard’s reinscribing of national identity in more overtly jingoistic terms was precisely aimed at countering the global, diverse vision that Keating was trying to deploy and that Howard’s approach had to be much pushier because he recognised on some level that his own economic reforms undermined social solidarity.
Indeed, central to the Howard project was atomisation, particularly of the working class, undermining work-based identity and cohesion—being especially hostile to unions, obviously, thus targeting the union-Labor-labour nexus. We saw the reorganisation of many trades around the idea of such workers being individual “entrepreneurs”—changing tax and employment law—and developing what I have previously called the ABN class (of which I am part).
Kaur asks, “What is a nation in the twenty-first century?” and comes up with the idea of an “‘identity economy,’ in which a national identity is put to work in the domain of the economy, and harnessed to boost the self-image, self-identity, and prestige of the nation…ways the economic and the non-economic work together to produce a particular kind of nation form.”
Identity economy entails reimagining the nation as a commercial enclosure that can be put at the disposal of investors—its territory as a vast reservoir of untapped natural resources, its population as a “demographic dividend” that provides both labor and consumer markets to sustain growth, and its cultural essence to be turned into a corporate brand identity. Thus, the emergent nation form—the brand new nation—is erected not just upon the scaffolding of economic growth, but also the promise of civilizational glory and rejuvenation.
I’m not sure Keating was ever this ambitious, or at least, his message was inflected in a different way, an example of no matter how “universal” something is, it is will ultimately be coloured by local circumstances, something that gets lost in many current discussions about universalism versus identity politics. The call for “workers of the world” to unite is always going to come up against the need for roots.2
As the arguments about changes to the Stage 3 tax cuts unfold over the next year, you can expect to hear (you can already hear) a lot about the notion of aspiration, and this concept has been part of a long-term effort to harness economic reform to national—and individual—pride. Mark Latham just about ran his disastrous election campaign on the notion of aspiration, and you can see the attraction of such a concept to Labor politicians: it centres local economic ambition without abandoning itself completely to the vagaries of rapacious, global capitalism.
One thing people often get wrong about the small business sector is motivation: while it is full of people who, certainly, are seeking economic advancement, I don’t think it is full of people who want to get rich. Higher on the small businessperson’s agenda than wealth for wealth’s sake is independence. They “aspire” to be left alone, to have as much control over their own destiny as possible. Small business can be deeply communal and even find a place for government—such people do not want to be left alone like some libertarian prepper—but in taking the plunge into self-employment, they are generally looking for as much control over their own circumstances as possible and will actually sacrifice financial reward for that sort of independence.
It is not for nothing that the labour literature is full of references to “wage slavery”, people horrified at the notion of working for others, and that politicians deeply mythologise the small-business sector with invocations of them being the “back bone of the country”, something to be protected against the centralising tendency of “big business” and its concomitant creation of wage slaves.
Robert Menzies made such people central to his political reinvention after the War and his Forgotten People speech (whose significance is nearly entirely imposed in hindsight) sets it out, saying, “what really happens to us will depend on how many people we have who are of the great and sober and dynamic middle-class - the strivers, the planners, the ambitious ones. We shall destroy them at our peril.”
As in the US and the UK—that nation of shopkeepers3—this is not this class that is looking to build empires, just those looking for—to keep quoting Menzies— “a stake in the country”, people who are seeking “homes material, homes human, and homes spiritual.” It was this fabric that was undermined by the neoliberal reforms of the eighties and nineties and why I have always seen Howard as the illegitimate child of that tradition, no matter how much lip-service he paid to the wonderfulness of the Menzies’ era.
It leads to the sort of sensibility where the entire idea of a home has been superseded by the idea of real estate, as an investment, (the exact point I was making in the previous article) and we end up with incoherent columns like this in our “leading” newspapers:
Think about it like this: if you start life with nothing but brains and brawn, the income you can earn is your key to eventually joining the comfortable classes. With hustle, a clever kid might eventually make enough to put a deposit on a home. That home represents physical security, but more importantly, it is a source of wealth accumulation. Over time, as property values rise, it becomes a nest egg. (Emphasis added.)
The conservative trope of hard work being rewarded is there, while it completely ignores the fact that that same “conservatism” has actively sought to supress wages—the alleged key to the “comfortable classes”—made work more insecure, while financialising housing into a spiral that takes it ever-further from those trying to save for somewhere to live. Or “more importantly”, invest.
It is obvious that there is always a strong connection between economic prosperity and national identity: I realise there is nothing new in the basic idea. But the Ravinder Kaur interview is worth reading in full, as is her book, as she repositions the argument in a useful way. (And given Anthony Albanese’s apparent admiration of Modi, Kaur’s work may provide insight into our future politics.)
In Australia, the most recent and ambitious expression of what I am talking about is the idea that the country can become a “green energy superpower”, a notion set out in full in this document amongst others.4 It is an idea that has ignited some excitement, even if it feels too much like new clothes for the same old extractavism and Labor’s lingering dream of reinvigorating local manufacturing.5 It’s efficacy as an imagined community is being tested at the moment, and it may yet be the ground on which neoliberal Labor and blue-ribbon independents find common cause in a future parliament, bringing together ideas of climate change, green economic development, economic prosperity, and a squaring of the circle of social progressivism and economic conservatism.
We’ll see, but “green energy superpower” is a note-perfect example of Kaur’s “identity economy”, where “reimagining the nation as a commercial enclosure…can be put at the disposal of investors…and its cultural essence…turned into a corporate brand identity.”
Another piece that floated into view was Rundle’s overview of Leninism, where he writes, “By the time of his approaching death in 1924, Lenin’s final writings suggest that he was haunted by the possibility that what he had created was a vast bureaucratic enterprise — one that was increasingly drawing on a “great Russian” nationalism to fill the void of meaning in a “rationalised” social life, and that Marxists have never had a sufficiently robust theory and explanation of.” The whole article really.
I am using the language of Simone Weil, who wrestles in her weird way with all these questions of individuality, the state, the nation, and work in her treatise, The Need For Roots (which—and I don’t care how sophisticated you are—is always a tricky title for an Australian to digest).
“To found a great empire for the sole purpose of raising up a people of customers may at first sight appear a project fit only for a nation of shopkeepers. It is, however, a project altogether unfit for a nation of shopkeepers; but extremely fit for a nation whose government is influenced by shopkeepers.”
— Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
I presume the notion originates in Ross Garnaut’s book, Superpower: Australia's Low-Carbon Opportunity.
I see Rishi Sunak is making the same claim the for the UK.
I have no idea why Nine continues to employ the 'incoherent' McGuinness. I started laughing at tax cuts being described as 'their own money back into their pockets' and the laughs kept up the whole way through her article.
Please stop using AI art. I understand the attraction of it, but the quality of it is often distractingly childish and undermines the seriousness of what you have to say. Perhaps you could substitute free or public domain photos from Creative Commons instead if you feel that you must illustrate your columns.