Progressive Patriotism? Albo's new crackdown, Vic Libs go rogue, Nick Cater Communist? Fear of a black Planet Janet

[Welcome to a few new subscribers post-election! We don’t usually come out as late as Sunday morning, but your correspondent has been poleaxed by food poisoning, coincidentally after a single day attending the Morwell Beef Wellington trial…]

Albo hegemony, Progressive Patriotism, and the coming crackdown

With the election, and the Liberal Party of Australia, done and dusted, attention has turned to what the Albanese government will actually do. Various left-liberal commentators have urged the government, with its twenty seat majority over all other parties, and thirty seat progressive majority when teals, independents and Green (!) are counted, to really do something, enact a bold programme of social change.

Haha no. The Whitlamite urge dies hard. It will linger as long as the boomers do, I guess, the ghost of possibility. Instead, Albanese has announced that his government will be one of ‘progressive patriotism’. Say what now? Well, God knows to be honest.

The move might seem to be a pre-emptive one to head off the sort of problems Labour has run into in the UK; elected on a low vote, because the Tories vote disappeared, the demands that had given the Tories an 80 vote majority in the previous election had not gone away: for a drastic lowering of immigration numbers, and living up to the Brexit vote, which, in being a rejection of the EU’s freedom of movement was a rejection of large-scale immigration.

Since the anti-immigration movement has gone nowhere in Australia, that seems unlikely. More likely, it is an attempt to extract Labor from such culture wars as remain, and plonk it firmly on the socially conservative side. This would be above all connected with indigenous politics, and the increasing reorientation of what remains of it at the moment, around notions of colonialism, stolen land etc.

‘Progressive patriotism’ is going to be a way of extracting Labor from the messy territory it has been in for decades on these questions: acknowledging, as a social democratic party, the injustice of the original founding and dispossession, but unable to go all the way with the implied illegitimacy of Australia as it is. ‘Progressive Patriotism’ will allow it to back away from the dispossession narrative, as anything much more than a ghastly single event. This is contra to the current dominant philosophy of the movement, settler-colonialism, which argues that such dispossession is an ongoing process, ‘a structure not an event’.

‘Progressive Patriotism’ will provide a bulwark against that, in which the rhetoric of government is increasingly tilted towards the positive celebration of what occurred after 1788. Look at what we have built! Look at what we have achieved! The narrative of our passage from a monocultural anglo society (in all but the north), to a multicultural one, the ingenuity of making a life in a harsh land, the flat white and the stump jump plough twinned in a new coat of arms.

Quite possibly, and especially overseas, the ‘mendicant’ narrative of oppression and reparation will continue to be used to some degree. As I noted in commentary on the culture policy released soon after the 2022 election, it was clear that the government had abandoned the ridiculous ‘Australia is part of Asia’ narrative, and used indigeneity as a substitute. We were a bad white imperial power; now we’re one creating a new relationship between colonisers and colonised. Now mesdames and messieurs, in the atrium of Harry Seidler’s splendidly ghastly Paris Australian embassy, please enjoy the dance stylings of the Great Serpent movement ensemble. But this will all be secondary now, following the defeat of the Voice referendum, which interrupted the narrative somewhat.

Meanwhile, at home, there will be a strong return to some re-centring on the transition from anglo monoculture to multicultural society, in some cod dialectical fashion. Anglo history and culture will be increasingly honoured, but the 1948 moment will be constructed as the necessary ‘other’ that brought its promise to fruition. A society that founded itself on the extension of universal rights to a narrow group - white anglo-celtic workers and their families - then steadily made those rights truly universal. Rather than damn the anglo monoculture period as something not to mention, it will be held that the universalism we now enjoy was always there, in its negated form as partial rights, ie as privileges.

Do I expect this lo-cal Hegelalike discourse to be visible? No, but it will be the general guiding spirit of a new direction, and it will effect the way in which the government talks about society, what it funds, what it favours. One will find that there is a steady, mild discouragement of the dominance of ‘welcome to country’ and acknowledgements etc, a steady retreat from the absolute claims of indigeneity. The truth is, there can really be no other process, when we have run uninterrupted high immigration rates for decades on end.

Demography is destiny, and quantity has a quality all of its own. Any settler-colonial country that truly believed that that was its historical predicament would have had to have a big two-party conversation - settlers and indigenous - about immigration numbers, almost before anything else. If you truly believed that we were two separate peoples and one of us, as the original inhabitants, had a moral claim separate to their numbers as voters, then you would be morally bound to have some sort of Uluru-statement level decision about whether the original inhabitants wanted a heap more non-original ones coming in.

The original ‘patriotic progressivism’ was coined by the sociologist Tim Soutphomassame in the early 2000s, at the time when the Howard government was simultaneously trumpeting the traditions of anglo-celtic Australia and keeping the migration open, and increasingly sourced from Asia then Africa, as a way to permanently undermine the political power of the labour movement.

Tim argued that Labor should try an end run around that with a patriotism based on celebrating Australia as a place of certain values, with an anchoring to distinctive events, which could be universalised. He argued for example that the left should cease to question the history and politics of Gallipoli, and simply celebrate it as an ecstatic event grounded mateship and reciprocity, universalisable to mutual reliance etc.

He would later back away from this Junger-in-earnest approach, but in doing so drained the ‘progressive patriotism’ concept of all content. It was in fact always an elitist, technocratic concept, and part of a family of approaches from non-anglo descended commentators - Tim, George Megalogenis, Nick Dyrenfurth and others - which sought to dispace the dominant anglo narrative with a multicultural one. This was never going to work because patriotism cannot attach to abstractions alone.

It must be grounded in particularities, and any place that has changed its culture as greatly as Australia (in its capital cities) has over the last 70 years has a problem with establishing a single patriotism across the country, or even limiting it to 3 or 4 distinct patriotisms. The approach was taken up by Kevin Rudd in his attempt to create a ‘people’s Australia day’, and proved predictably disastrous, kicking a full culture war into touch.

Tim eventually departed for Oxford (he’s a Balliol graduate) where he has been for some time, and now has some grand role, Master of the King’s Testicles or somesuch. With a complex origin story and childhood, he was always a global subject trying to engineer a form of patriotism that would work for those for whom roots never really put down. Perhaps he will return. Or end up riding to hounds with the Berkshire hunt. Whatever he conceived of as the purpose of progressive patriotism, it has gone far beyond that now.

Now, the purpose of progressive patriotism is to legitimise an extension of state power in the new era, in the name of ‘social cohesion’. To express dissident thoughts of a certain type, thereby encouraging division, will be to attack social cohesion, and therefore unpatriotic, and un-Australian, from a progressive angle. This will be explicitly tied to our distinctive multicultural character.

We are so recently composed of so many peoples, it will be said, that extra measures must be applied to ensure that things do not get out of hand. The British approach to discourse - to heavily police an ever-expanding notion of ‘hate speech’ - will be rolled over to here. The first and most prominent target of such will be the pro-Palestine movement. To argue that the genocide in Gaza is an extraordinary situation that requires extraordinary public measures will be labelled as ‘divisive’, preferring a conflict in another country to social cohesion here.

By filling this state action out with cultural content, the Albanese government will give it the appearance not of state repression on the social, but the enactment of the social will itself, by a consented-to state. Despite all the right-wing guff about how divided we are, it works on the principle that we actually aren’t, and that there is no great dissent to this sort of governance, or the type of managed society that Labor has in mind.

It’s possible they could apply this too heavily, and create a backlash, but what would it come out of? In the major cities, the centrality of anglo-celtic culture is fading very fast, and will be gone in another decade or so. We are rebuilding them for the new millions, and creating a society where the town centre is the Dan Murphy’s carpark, gazed over by a JandB hifi, a Coles, a Woolies, and a Guzman y Gomez.

The challenge of this society will not be the regulation of the passions per se, but the management of a society which, in some sense, will have no culture at all. We are world-leading in that, and an experiment site for the world, heading towards Manning Clark’s ‘other’ possibility. Australia as the ‘kingdom of nothingness’. If, after the brief joy of may 3rd’s stonking victory, you are feeling a sudden and more sustained melancholy, it’s because the people who don’t have much of a problem with that trajectory just won a majority that will allow them to set the agenda for a decade to come.

News

Vic Liberal happy clappies launch inquiry into how Feds screwed up worse

When a major party loses an election, the usual thing is for the surviving or new leadership to call a review, and appoint people who will say nothing that will lay any blame with the surviving or new leadership. But the Liberal shellacking was so great, and has taken it into the zone of existential threat, that some members aren’t satisfied with the proposition that the Federal leadership should get away with the same. Good news for those who want some real change. The bad news is those pushing most strongly for it are the Victorian Branch, who will be conducting their own inquiry. Given the branch’s success of late, this will be like cancer becoming an oncologist. Furthermore, it is a branch now more than ever in control of the happy clappies. With the recent full judgement against John Pesutto - stuck with a $2.3 million cost, really for doing party business against a dissident member - they have blood in their nostrils. Will they be able to conduct a fair and clear-eyed review of what went wrong? Word is, noooooo. They will conclude that the party didn’t go cultural right enough, and find those mythical voters out there, yearning to punish Labor for woke - but somehow not denying Labor their preferences when push comes to shove. The Victorian Liberal Party inquiry into the 2025 Federal election loss, will be delivered just in time for their loss in the 2026 state election. Fun times.

Drive Bys

Nick Cater, revolutionary communist?

Nick Cater, revolutionary communist? Nick Cater, current head of the Menzies something, former executive editor at News Corpse, delivered an article and a podcast on the election to Spiked.com, the successor project to the UK Revolutionary Communist Party (Furedite). Neither had a picture of Australia that bore much relationship to Australia - we were a hopelessly divided society blah blah, when we clearly aren’t in the current European manner - but was very much the line that Spiked wants to go with, after its most recent turn to nationalist pro-borders, pro-unity social policy*. Cater’s take was so dutiful that it raises a question that has hung around for years: was Cater an actual member of the Revolutionary Communist Party in his student days? Nick did sociology at Exeter University in the 80s, when the RCP were in their prime, especially among the new universities. Dubbed the ‘International Socialists with hair-gel’, they appealed to those who thought the International Socialists/SWP had become hopelessly, lugubriously social movementist, green and luddite**. The RCP wanted a pure class politics, ready to meet the workers as the Thatcher era produced class contradiction in extremis. The failure of this - their Red Front campaign of 1987 saw their candidates lose their deposits; most of these candidates would turn up, 30 years later, as candidates for the Brexit party - prompted a dialectical turn. Class politics was in abeyance for quite some time, and so a politics of ‘ideas war’ against a left that had become pro-scarcity, pessimistic, anti-technology, pro-state etc was uppermost.

You would have to say that Cater, if he was a ‘Next Stepper’ (the name of their newspaper) has kept the faith. After stints at the BBC and the Guardian, he emerged into News Corpse, came to Australia and has been a relentless champion of a promethean politics of abundance and acceleration ever since. As always with such Englishmen (cf John Douglas Pringle etc) he projects a fantasy Australia onto the real place, one that cannot shuck its English particularities. Still, if he’s an original RCP, his service his been invaluable. Of course maybe he just became attracted to the ideas. Yet I still hope a grainy photo will turn up of him staffing a trestle table, hair in a quiff, in the neat Joy Divisionesque clobber they favoured at the time, a Next Step in hand, with a headline supporting the Irish revolution.

*many people see Spiked/RCP(F) movements as merely contrarian or opportunistic. They’re nothing of the sort. These are serious Leninists, determined to be in a leadership position with the working class, should class contradictions emerge sufficient for real politics to occur. Their last and most tearful abandonment was internationalism. For years they were running an anti-EU politics, while trying to preserve some sort of no-borders, or borders-critical policy. Eventually, they bit the bullet, and went the full English, a couple of years overdue imho. Lenin did the same before 1917, recognising that nationalism was a stronger force than class, and outraging many Marxists in the process.

** historian Evan Smith is the local interpreter of British post-war far left politics. His take on the RCP is clueless.

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News from Planet Janet: Noel Pearson dropt by the right’s premier nightmare boyfriend haver

Oh noes! It is all over between Planet Janet Albrechtsen and Noel Pearson! The onetime Queen of Mean published an ‘open letter to Noel Pearson’ in the Oz last week, after Pearson published a batshit crazy return to the debate, after long silence. The former sycophant to John Howard cursed the rodent for destroying the possibilities of reconciliation twenty years ago. The former scourge of black victimhood moaned that ‘no’ voters had kicked blacks like dogs, and suggested Peter Dutton would have done a lot better by backing the referendum. Open letter? It was a Dear Noel kiss off

Finally, to both of you [Marcia was included too], rather than blame others for the failure of the Yes case and accusing others of base motives, when will you both take responsibility for that loss? Surely you must both understand it is time to move on, to pass the mantle of reform to a new generation of Indigenous leaders who won’t stoop to denigration - Janet

What a long way down it’s been! In 2009, Janet was hailing Pearson as an Australian Obama, and praising him for being ‘articulate’. Yes, she went there. But it’s not her only crush on right wing bad boys. In 2009, she had a mash on Lord Monckton, the bug eyed loon climate change denier, later chiding him for being a touch conspiratorial. Monckton eventually became an Obama birther-truther. By then, Planet was sure she had found another standard-bearer: Milo Yiannopoulis. The Dorian Gay political grifter had already arranged an Australian tour in 2017, when remarks surfaced, he had made questioning whether adult men having sex with young teenage boys counted as abuse. Albrechtsen waded into the defense of this amoral anarchist as a standard-bearer of ‘conservatism’. When Milo wanted to come back in 2019, he was denied a visa, after the Christchurch massacre, in response to which he had denounced…Muslims, whom he described as following a ‘barbaric, alien religion’. Planet did not drift into Milo’s orbit. She recently endorsed Trump’s political style in an address to the West Australian Liberal Party - two weeks before the election, where they won 7 seats out of 59.

Look, let’s be a little politically incorrect here and say we all know who Albrechtsen is: she’s the one in your group with the nightmare boyfriends, the unerring arsehole radar. You’re always double-dating with her and the black guy who’s going to be the next Diddy (as was), the guy everyone except her knows is gay, and the older interesting dude who starts talking about the Illuminati. Now Noel is on the outs. Cue the Norgen-Vaaz and the romcons until another right saviour comes along.

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Till next week….