 BBC on the different kinds of culture wars
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Aug. 13th, 2011 @ 01:08 pm 
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Penny Wong: Australia's Non-Story of the Week, on BBC news.
Our Finance Minister, the really-quite-awesome Penny Wong, and her girlfriend are going to have a baby.
Australia's national reaction more-or-less amounts to: "Hey, congrats." The only public figure to make negative comments is the odious Fred Nile, who's more-or-less a punchline to the vast majority of the country.
And yet, gay marriage is legal exactly nowhere in this country, and IVF for same-sex couples is illegal in South Australia, so Penny Wong and her beloved had to go out-of-state to get it done. Australia is an odd paradox that way; on the kind of social issues that are a really big deal in America, for the most part, we just don't get that worked up about them. You'd struggle to rouse the kind of protest and opposition to gay marriage that America often features, but you'd also struggle to rouse the kind of support America gets.
(Oh, and serving in the Australian army while being openly homosexual has been allowed since 1992. I had to look that up, because it's a non-issue here.)
In Australia, we just sort of talk about these issues, in a general sense, until the tide of General Opinion has shifted, at which point we quietly amend the law, or until it becomes a serious argument, at which point we vote on it. This is why we never had a Revolutionary War - we didn't make a fuss, until a few years ago the question of whether we wanted to abandon the monarchy in favour of a republic became a sufficiently major argument that we had a referendum on it, and we decided against.
This is one of the things I love about Australia, though. We, as a nation, do care about things, but it's just sort of un-Australian to get so violently exercised about it as Americans do.
It has its benefits, too. Our Prime Ministerial assassination tally still sits at zero, and my one close encounter with a Prime Minister is one you couldn't imagine having with an American president: while leaving an event John Howard had also been at, I was standing by the road near the War Memorial, waiting to cross, when a car stopped right in front of me. The man standing a couple of feet away from me got in it, and I realised, with some surprise, that it was in fact John Howard himself.
I can't imagine someone being three feet from Barack Obama in the midst of a dispersing crowd without being aware of his presence, somehow.
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| From: | ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png) aquaeri |
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| Date: |
August 15th, 2011 11:02 pm (UTC) |
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I pretty much agree with everything you say - which in a way is why I'm so shocked the same-sex marriage thing is moving so slowly, because compared to the US, there's no real opposition to it here.
Because I am an Australian republican (as distinct from the US kind), I have to nitpick about the referendum: it was against one very particular model of a republic, because John Howard thought he might "lose" if it had been simply "Monarchy or republic?". (I happen to think it was a perfectly reasonable model for an Australian republic, but as you say, it's quite hard to get a serious national discussion going about what kind of republic would be most acceptable to most people.)
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| From: | sami |
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| Date: |
August 16th, 2011 02:14 am (UTC) |
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Oh, I know it was against that model, and another *might* have succeeded, but it would be a rather substantial digression.
That said, that particular model was a hideous nightmare. I'm in favour of constitutional monarchy, because I like that when our government suffers a total breakdown, like America's recently has, we have a final authority, outside the political process, that has no effective power whatsoever except to dissolve the government and throw it back to the people for a new election. It gives our democracy a resilience even against its own flaws.
But even if I were a republican, I would have voted against that one. The president having the power to sack the prime minister and the prime minister having the power to sack the president? That right there is the recipe for a farcical breakdown of *everything* all by itself...
I think blaming Howard entirely is unfair, mind you. He didn't write the proposed constitution, the constitutional convention did, and it was terrible. And if we're going to be voting on constitutional change to the extent that becoming a republic would involve, I do rather think that we should be voting on the constitution, not on the generic principle of "monarchy or republic". Because what kind of republic is a very important question.
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