Matters of value, referring to a country's moral standing and components, are always fraught. They suggest superior understanding, excellent pedigree and a weathered wisdom about what is appropriate for a given society. In Australia and New Zealand, such values are not so much double-edged as sharp, multi-cornered edifices. The moment you start engaging them, you are bound to be wounded by a glance in the mirror.
The horror in Christchurch, with 50 slain individuals across two mosques, was unspeakable, but it was also inflicted by an individual (it is alleged at this point) who showed every feature, characteristic and emotional tendency of a certain type of Australian. His crudely cobbled manifesto — if, indeed, it deserves the gravitas of that term — was filled with rubbery values. The recent apologias for violence against Muslims, notably the various accusations of blame from Australian Senator Fraser Anning, also stem from an obsession with values.
Australian values, in other words, are equally those of the levelling cricket pitch, the anxiety of the White Australia policy (with some residual pangs), and a continual mixture of loathing and confusion over what to do with the Indigenous people of the country. It is also the fabled, mythologised idea of the fair go and hearty egalitarianism, or the notion that Australia's labour movement is as progressive as is thought.
As the debunking efforts of Humphrey McQueen's A New Britannia (1970) showed, racism was 'the most important single component of Australian nationalism'. With that came acquisitiveness and envy. 'It was not accidental', explains McQueen, 'that Australians chose a racehorse and a bushranger as their heroes since both expressed the get-rich quick Tatts syndrome.'
The alleged Christchurch shooter was reared in a certain atmosphere of permissive intolerance. His remarks on invasion and dispossession pit his cause as that of the lost Australian White Man. But such loss would be overcome in New Zealand, where he could demonstrate, in the words of Aurelien Mondon, 'that Muslims weren't safe anywhere'. The alleged perpetrator's views are those of deprivation and emasculation.
His rationale is clear: the followers of Islam had it coming, having generated the basis for extreme reaction. Of similar mind is Anning who, in going on the offensive, declared what he thought self-evident. 'Does anyone still dispute the link between Muslim immigration and violence?' he proposed on Twitter. To claim that the Christchurch killings were the result of poor gun laws or those 'holding nationalist views' was 'cliched nonsense'. Blame immigration, blame Muslim fanaticism.
Such comments need only be slightly tinkered with to be easily slotted alongside those of various European populist parties and various elements of the LNP coalition in Australia. Australian values were very much at crude play when then prime minister John Howard deployed the SAS against the MV Tampa and its 400 desperate souls in violation of maritime law in August 2001.
"Their increasing loss of relevance, their speeches laced with resentment, anxiety and betrayal, hold up the forts of an imperilled White nationalism."
Mainly Muslim refugee and asylum seekers were subsequently demonised as 'un-Australian' in the controlled release of images as part of Operation Rolex. Director-General of Defence Communication Strategies Brian Humphreys was adamant to the Committee on a Certain Maritime Incident: his boss, Defence Minister Peter Reith, had instructed him not to 'humanise the refugees'.
History, to that end, offers much heavy, value-laden baggage. In Bernard Keane's short observation: 'I guess politicians thought — perhaps understandably — there'd never be a price to pay in Australia for their smirking, cynical exploitation of racism.' Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi has been even more direct. 'This is the consequence of the Islamophobic and racist hate.'
But the response against Anning and the Christchurch shooter has also been, on some level, vengeful and deluding. A petition to remove Anning from Parliament, for instance, has at the time of writing reached 1.3 million signatures. 'We call on the Australian government to expel this man who blames victims for their own violent deaths, and uses references to genocide to further his hateful agenda.'
Such an act of distancing can be smug, with its makers refusing to contend with the world view it seeks to repudiate. Shadow Foreign Affairs Minister, Penny Wong, dismissed the Christchurch shooter's views as un-Australian, a potentially dangerous point given that Australian values have been rather flexible in their deployment. 'He', she asserted, 'is not who we are.' The same all-Australian treatment is reserved for Anning. 'I say to the people of New Zealand, I say to all people, Mr Anning does not represent Australia, he does not represent our values, he does not represent who we are.'
The painful truth is that Anning and the alleged Christchuch shooter are representative of an aspect of Australian national identity. For decades, they were entirely representative. Their increasing loss of relevance, their speeches laced with resentment, anxiety and betrayal, hold up the forts of an imperilled White nationalism. Islamic fundamentalism provides the reactionary counter. Ironically both rely on the wonders of the very current and modern internet to disseminate their views.
Such forces are, as Mark Lilla suggests, the shipwrecked minds who catastrophise the world and see the currents of modernity pass them by. In their calamitous pessimism, they nourish each other, furnishing us with grand narratives of deprivation and violent redress. The reactionaries are, he claims, 'just as radical as revolutionaries and just as firmly in the grip of historical imaginings'. It is such imaginings that should dispel shallow talk on values and how easily they become weapons rather than solutions.
Dr Binoy Kampmark is a former Commonwealth Scholar who lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.