By Andrew Christopher – The Spectator Australia
Larrikin’s or lapdogs
A part of the Australian nationwide character and mythology is the larrikin custom, and the allied notion that Australians have a scepticism for authority and guidelines and can flaunt makes an attempt by the State at coercive management the place it’s unwarranted and defies widespread sense.
This ethos attracts on our colonial convict origins and occasions such because the Rum Rebel, the Eureka stockade, bushrangers, and different archetypes. A contempt for authority and perception that the person can decide what is nice for them, what’s secure, and the right way to take pleasure in oneself with out state intervention runs deep within the collective psyche.
In common tradition and in our nationwide consciousness, the authority-bucking smartarse has been one thing of an historic fixture. Historian Manning Clark’s description is an effective one:
‘Hovering over all of them is the larrikin; …too sensible for his personal good… exceeding limits, bending guidelines and crusing near the wind, avoiding slightly than evading accountability, taking part in to an viewers, mocking pomposity and smugness, taking the piss out of individuals … sceptical, iconoclastic, egalitarian but struggling fools badly, and, above all, defiant.’
Alas, this larrikin custom didn’t manifest in a invoice of rights or any enshrined curtailment on the bounds of State authority, not like the place within the US. Moderately, the concept Australians are sometimes unruly and defiant and can bend the foundations occasionally survives at a subliminal stage and finds expression in motion pictures like Mad Max and Crocodile Dundee and within the recognition of iconoclastic sportspersons just like the late Shane Warne.
There may be additionally a much less well-articulated cross-current that additionally runs by way of our collective consciousness, particularly, a deep sense of insecurity and insecurity and reliance on the State. That is paradoxically additionally a results of our colonial convict origins and produces a duality in our nationwide ethos. This manifests in refined methods, for instance, our obsession with the medal tally on the Olympic video games and within the lack of ambition in our common artwork kinds which frequently concentrate on the quirky, self-deprecating or self-conscious slightly than taking up grander or extra assured themes. It additionally manifests in our obvious willingness, even enthusiasm, to just accept ever-increasing ranges of state intervention and curtailments of freedoms.
Australian society has additionally modified dramatically within the post-war interval and the mythologies produced by our predominantly white and colonial previous and the concepts of bushrangers and swagmen don’t resonate like they did in a technology or two in the past.
In any case, all of that is context for the primary level I want to make right here, which is that Australia has turn out to be one of the crucial compliant, rule-observant, and subservient societies on the planet. We meekly embraced the punitive lockdown of Covid, maybe rivalled solely by New Zealand. We unquestionably settle for creeping ranges of surveillance, incursions into privateness, new site visitors and driving legal guidelines, the necessity for permits and licences to undertake routine pastimes, lockout legal guidelines and late-night curfews, prohibitions on strolling by way of nationwide parks, bans on smoking and ingesting in public, and different restrictions and rules too quite a few to say. Bob Katter summed up this development in his personal inimitable approach in a Senate deal with a number of years in the past when he stated:
‘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 on 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 beneath the guise of what’s good for us.’
Bizarrely, any resistance or questioning of elevated ranges of State management or curtailments on particular person liberties is more and more seen within the mainstream media and public polity as an excessive right-wing response, slightly than as an assertion of particular person freedoms and a democratic proper within the classical liberal custom. This reached its unhappy nadir throughout lockdown with Daniel Andrews authorising draconian policing and sending in police to harass a mom in her kitchen in pyjamas who questioned the necessity for a lockdown on social media.
As soon as liberties are misplaced, they hardly ever return, and a brand new equilibrium is often set. There’s a security narrative and rationale that underpins a lot of the creeping regulation, however that is hardly ever critically evaluated. For instance, late-night lockout legal guidelines and curfews had been aware of a small variety of tragic and horrible however in the end remoted cases. Equally, there’s hardly ever an evaluation of what’s gained is what’s misplaced with primacy given to perceptions of public security and paternalistic notions over public freedoms. Legislative devices corresponding to explanatory memoranda, second readings and the like pay scarce consideration to the price of lack of freedoms.
Creeping incursions into liberties inevitably produce a much less resilient and self-reliant society and open the door to authoritarianism. They’re additionally pricey to manage and implement and sometimes result in unequal and unpredictable ranges of enforcement. Nobody needs a lawless and freewheeling society the place public security and civil order is compromised- however there are limits. The questioning of authority for its personal sake, which underpinned the larrikin custom is wholesome. We have to restore the stability and belief within the innate good sense of people to navigate the hazards of contemporary life and to know what is nice for them and their neighbours.
