By Andrew Christopher – The Spectator Australia
Larrikin’s or lapdogs
Part of the Australian national character and mythology is the larrikin tradition, and the allied notion that Australians have a scepticism for authority and rules and will flaunt attempts by the State at coercive control where it’s unwarranted and defies common sense.
This ethos draws on our colonial convict origins and events such as the Rum Rebellion, the Eureka stockade, bushrangers, and other archetypes. A contempt for authority and belief that the individual can determine what is good for them, what is safe, and how to enjoy oneself without state intervention runs deep in the collective psyche.
In popular culture and in our national consciousness, the authority-bucking smartarse has been something of an historical fixture. Historian Manning Clark’s description is a good one:
‘Soaring over them all is the larrikin; …too smart for his own good… exceeding limits, bending rules and sailing close to the wind, avoiding rather than evading responsibility, playing to an audience, mocking pomposity and smugness, taking the piss out of people … sceptical, iconoclastic, egalitarian yet suffering fools badly, and, above all, defiant.’
Alas, this larrikin tradition did not manifest in a bill of rights or any enshrined curtailment on the limits of State authority, unlike the position in the US. Rather, the idea that Australians are often unruly and defiant and will bend the rules from time to time survives at a subliminal level and finds expression in movies like Mad Max and Crocodile Dundee and in the popularity of iconoclastic sportspersons like the late Shane Warne.
There is also a less well-articulated cross-current that also runs through our collective consciousness, namely, a deep sense of insecurity and lack of confidence and reliance on the State. This is paradoxically also a result of our colonial convict origins and produces a duality in our national ethos. This manifests in subtle ways, for example, our obsession with the medal tally at the Olympic games and in the lack of ambition in our popular art forms which often focus on the quirky, self-deprecating or self-conscious rather than taking on grander or more confident themes. It also manifests in our apparent willingness, even enthusiasm, to accept ever-increasing levels of state intervention and curtailments of freedoms.
Australian society has also changed dramatically in the post-war period and the mythologies produced by our predominantly white and colonial past and the ideas of bushrangers and swagmen don’t resonate like they did in a generation or two ago.
In any case, all of this is context for the main point I wish to make here, which is that Australia has become one of the most compliant, rule-observant, and subservient societies on the planet. We meekly embraced the punitive lockdown of Covid, perhaps rivalled only by New Zealand. We unquestionably accept creeping levels of surveillance, incursions into privacy, new traffic and driving laws, the need for permits and licences to undertake routine pastimes, lockout laws and late-night curfews, prohibitions on walking through national parks, bans on smoking and drinking in public, and other restrictions and regulations too numerous to mention. Bob Katter summed up this trend in his own inimitable way in a Senate address a few years ago when he said:
‘There’s a locomotive driving this anti-freedom machine … a bloke can’t boil a billy over a campfire. He can’t have a drink at the pub anymore. He can’t have a smoke … he can’t fish, he can’t hunt; he can’t shoot … they’ve taken all this off us under the guise of what is good for us.’
Bizarrely, any resistance or questioning of increased levels of State control or curtailments on individual liberties is increasingly seen in the mainstream media and public polity as an extreme right-wing response, rather than as an assertion of individual freedoms and a democratic right in the classical liberal tradition. This reached its sad nadir during lockdown with Daniel Andrews authorising draconian policing and sending in police to harass a mother in her kitchen in pyjamas who questioned the need for a lockdown on social media.
Once liberties are lost, they rarely return, and a new equilibrium is usually set. There is a safety narrative and rationale that underpins much of the creeping regulation, but this is rarely critically evaluated. For example, late-night lockout laws and curfews were responsive to a small number of tragic and terrible but ultimately isolated instances. Equally, there is rarely an assessment of what is gained is what is lost with primacy given to perceptions of public safety and paternalistic notions over public freedoms. Legislative instruments such as explanatory memoranda, second readings and the like pay scarce attention to the cost of loss of freedoms.
Creeping incursions into liberties inevitably produce a less resilient and self-reliant society and open the door to authoritarianism. They are also costly to administer and enforce and often lead to unequal and unpredictable levels of enforcement. No one wants a lawless and freewheeling society where public safety and civil order is compromised- but there are limits. The questioning of authority for its own sake, which underpinned the larrikin tradition is healthy. We need to restore the balance and trust in the innate good sense of individuals to navigate the hazards of modern life and to know what is good for them and their neighbours.
