Hard Shell and Soft Centre: Australia as a Truly Modern Nation

Abstract

When PM Howard referred to Australia early in 2002 as a 'truly modern nation', he was alluding to a conflation of culture, technology, economic organisation and social ideology. Yet lying just below the surface were a series of policy and social initiatives that were giving concrete form to this presentation. Modernity has been presented as either a purely western structure of thought and practice to be adopted (either positively or negatively) by other cultures, or a mode of economic organisation susceptible to many cultural manifestations. Australian modernity - the form of the nation state 100 years after its creation - reflects the intersections of history and geography, the effect of the multiple imperialisms in which its has been implicated, and the reformulations of the modernist project undertaken by neo-liberalism over the past decade. Australian modernity at the national level is thus being tested by resurgent social values of Christian conservatism, active government priorities of disengagement, and a rapidly expanding culture of surveillance and obedience. Yet in the states social democratic governments seem to be in the ascendancy; while heavily influenced by neo-liberalism, they have moved into the more consensual space of the British Third Way (itself influenced by post-Marxist sociology and its reflections on the contradictions of modernity). How are these trends being experienced? What sorts of transformations are occuring? How is the social fabric being re-constituted? Three dimensions of analysis are used to explore the tensions that are apparent. These are: a. de-communalisation of social relations b. de-secularisation of social programs c. de-legitimation of social diversity. Each of these dimensions encompasses an interlinked range of action, reaction and resistance. The central dynamic of change is analysed through an eight point model of orientations to change - instigation, advocacy, support, acceptance, adaptation, avoidance, resistance, and evasion. The case studies involved will include: a. De-communalisation of social relations through the development of social policy in regard to Indigenous people, people with disabilities b. De-secularisation and the influence of Christian world views in immigration and social policy De-legitimation of moral diversity through developments in security legislation, immigration control, and attacks on alternative cultural world views.