Redfern, a map of our diminished vision

I EXPERIENCED a nasty jolt recently as I walked down the main strip of Redfern. Emblazoned on the side of a parked utility I spied a sticker of the Australian flag with the exhortation "Love it or leave it".

I couldn't help but note my location. If there is a suburb in Sydney where many of the residents have good reason to feel ambivalent about Australian nationalism, Redfern is probably it. And if one of the local Aborigines took this sticker to heart, where exactly might he or she go?

I felt even more dejected a few blocks later as I trudged past Redfern Park. Here, in December 1992, Paul Keating gave his famous speech to Redfern's Aboriginal community, with its reappraisal of Australia's troubled racial history. Penned by that formidable wordsmith, Don Watson, the Redfern speech was an elegant expression of white regret, black-white reconciliation, and, crucially, a shared hopefulness.

It was also a paean to the power of empathy, as these few sentences illustrate: "We practised discrimination and exclusion. It was our ignorance and our prejudice. And our failure to imagine these things being done to us. With some noble exceptions, we failed to make the most basic human response and enter into their hearts and minds. We failed to ask: how would I feel if this were done to me? As a consequence, we failed to see that what we were doing degraded us all."

While the distance between the parked utility and the site of Keating's speech is short, the difference between these two expressions of Australian nationalism is huge. Fifteen years on, Keating's aphorism that to change the government is to change the country appears pretty accurate. It is quite possible that a "Love it or leave it" sticker could have been slapped on a car during the Keating years — governments cannot be held responsible for the actions of each citizen — but my hunch is that there is something about the present political culture that makes such strident nationalism more likely, and more acceptable.

I don't want to wallow in left-liberal nostalgia. These past 12 months, the musical Keating! has attracted thousands of political malcontents, who leave the theatre on the imaginary high that their hero actually won the 1996 election.

But when I saw the musical with a good friend (a former wife of a Keating minister, by the way), we were both left cold by its smug and cloying wish-fulfilment. Intermission, my friend confided with a shudder, was like one of the interminable ALP social functions she had been expected to grace.

After more than a decade of populist right-wing government, it is hard not to pine for Keating's big picture of a confident, cosmopolitan and progressive Australia, even if his vision was imposed with an impatient superiority that proved electorally fatal.

What we have now is a political culture that is short on empathy and even shorter on tolerance for ambiguity. George Bush's post-9/11 dictum that, in the war on terror, you are either for America or against it, is simply a stark international summary of our contemporary political climate.

It is a long way from Washington to Redfern, and I doubt that President Bush was whisked down Everleigh Street during APEC, but there was something in that sticker's insistence that reminded me of our national and international leadership. "Love it or leave it" is an extreme injunction — it brooks no dissent, in a manner similar to the nostrums of Bush and our own John Howard.

What is lost in this approach is an appreciation of ambivalence. You see, there are qualities of Australia that I love and others that I don't. In fact, some I admire and distrust at the same time, like our capacity for ruthless pragmatism.

The same could be said of my attitude to the United States. I adore that country's dynamism and the sunny, naive friendliness of many Americans; I loathe the Bush Administration and the oblivious insularity of its acolytes.

Before Tampa and the Twin Towers terror attacks, there was a sentiment afoot that Howard and his Government were mean and tricky. What is meanness but a refusal to enter into the hearts and minds of others?

This lack of empathy has reaped fresh degradations, from children overboard and the incarceration of refugees on a sweltering Pacific island to the striking down of gay marriage and civil unions.

In the final days of the Keating government, our then-alternative prime minister promised us a nation that was relaxed and comfortable; what we got instead was a decade that diminished us all.

Robert Reynolds is a historian and Australian Research Council fellow at the University of New South Wales.

http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/redfern-a-map-of-our-diminished-vision/2007/09/12/1189276805392.html