When my wife became an Australian citizen several years ago, she was asked to make the following pledge of commitment to Australia:
As an Australian citizen,
I affirm my loyalty to Australia and its people,
whose democratic beliefs I share,
whose rights and liberties I respect,
and whose laws I uphold and obey.
In return she received a black sheoak seedling, a certificate of citizenship, and was free to join in a rendition of the national anthem. No quick quiz about values – is democratic belief a value? Is loyalty, or liberty? Is lawfulness? – no English language test. With an Arabic surname and features, we wonder in the light of the current debate what hoops may have been placed in front of her had she still been waiting to undergo these rites of passage.
In the course of celebrations for the Jesuit sesquicentenary in Australia (1999), Sir Gerard Brennan identified egalitarianism as the pre-eminent Australian value. Consistent with indigenous culture, he argued, and born in Euro-Australians of shared hardship, egalitarianism ‘must cope with differences’: of ethnicity, religion, culture and giftedness. If Brennan is right, would it not be a strange irony to use such a value as a means of insisting upon a certain uniformity?
An Anglican priest, I had to subscribe to the 39 Articles of Religion as part of my own oath-making prior to ordination – which, as far as I could tell at the time, meant acknowledging their existence. Harder, perhaps, to demonstrate the existence of particular Australian values.
Fremantle AFL coach, Chris Connolly, certainly lamented their absence when complaining bitterly about being ‘robbed’ of two premiership points in Round 5 on account of the umpires failing to hear the final siren when his team was in front by one point. (Their opponents, St Kilda, subsequently kicked a point to seemingly draw the match.) ‘It’s the values in sport that matter’, he was quoted as saying in a Melbourne paper the next day. ‘There has to be some honesty and integrity’. A hard sell from someone who wandered onto the playing field (unlawfully) before the umpires had signalled the game was ended to begin four days of demanding that the victory and the full four points be awarded to his team. Of course, he was duly rewarded by the AFL Commission. ‘Winning at all costs’ – now there’s an indisputably Australian value.
Morag Fraser, former editor of this journal, addressing herself to the