looking away

In the past couple of days I’ve noticed that many of you here in Australia are wondering how you can look your “fellow Australians” in the eye after they returned our pack of lying, slimy leaders to government. I’m struck by this recurring motif of the averted look between citizens in the space of the nation.

I’ve felt this way too, but not recently; the last time I was explicitly uneasy about “looking fellow Australians in the eye” was in the aftermath of the 1996 Federal Election, during the rise of Hansonism. As a wave of protofascist rhetoric swept the national stage, I felt trapped in my home, unwilling to venture outside — not because racism was somehow new to me and therefore so shocking, but because its rhetorical overload in the public sphere was a constant reminder of what everyone was thinking about us. We didn’t want to be reminded. During this period, in their polite and leafy suburb, my parents had dogshit very purposefully left on their front doorstep to remind them of their place in this country. Truth be told, we always knew what people were thinking. The cultural and economic machinations that had been churning underneath the national stage. We just didn’t want to be reminded.

It’s not as if I should have had many illusions about what had been going on — that’s how reminders work. 1996 is a useful marker in this regard. That was the election in which the Greens ran racist television commercials about how “the Japs are chopping down our forests”. Yes, the Greens, whose reactionary, nationalist policies on population control left the rules of the game unquestioned, and which brought them into contact with crackpot, ultra-right-wing groups. Nice one.

1996 was the election Labor lost after more than a decade of government — years in which they used their mafioso-relationship with the labour movement to better discipline their constituencies: freezing wage rises and calling in the fucking armed forces to break up strikes. Oh, and and the big one that’s disappeared down the memory hole: Labor were the ones who introduced mandatory detention for asylum seekers in 1992. (And the Immigration Ministers responsible for its implementation were in the Left of the party, at that. Do the words “not to be trusted” mean anything to you?) It was all for the “national good”, a nicely paradoxical and sickening modulation of the increasingly global logics of capital.

My horror at hearing such a setup being given a clearer, more blatant ideological expression in the form of Howard’s agenda and Hanson’s rhetoric provided an opportunity that I never took. It was a chance to face things more squarely, to push the urge to avert my eyes from “fellow citizens” into another territory, into a more practical critique of citizenship and the mystificatory national theatre of politics itself, those unquestioned contexts that underpinned all the machinations that had preceded that moment. Instead, my disgust at my “fellow Australians” actually left our relationship as “citizens of the nation” intact, papering over the real forces at work, and leading me into a spiral of depression and political disengagement that’ll take me the rest of my life to come to terms with.

So in the face of this latest public manifestation of cancerous politics, we have an opportunity to take our disgust into more politically enabling territory, to question the rules of the game. We need to remember what this election is a reminder of, rather than let it sink us. We can pick up this horrible sign and see it as a manifestation of how things actually work in the world rather than a cataclysmic mystification, and run with it, right out of the park, with its neatly circumscribed zones and prescribed playing positions for our “fellow citizens”, and cause a ruckus — play outside the rules, with no respect for boundaries. Soccer riot!