As nationalism is weaponised, Australia desperately needs to embrace inclusive patriotism

Extract from The Guardian

Katharine Murphy

Malcolm Turnbull cannot claim Australia is the greatest multicultural nation and ignore Dutton’s attack on Lebanese Muslim migrants at the same time

Poster boards showing a photograph of Jo Cox during a memorial event for the murdered British Labour MP in London. Photograph: Matt Cardy/Getty Images

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@murpharoo

Friday 25 November 2016 18.00 AEDT 

This week I’ve found myself thinking frequently about a woman, a wife, a mother and a politician I’ve never met.

Jo Cox was the British Labour MP slain on the street in the shadow of the Brexit vote in the UK. This week, her killer, a person obsessed with the Nazis and white supremacy, who had shouted “keep Britain independent” and “Britain first” as he shot her three times and stabbed her 15 times, was sent to prison for life.

If you’ve followed this case, you’ll know the fortitude of the Cox family has been something to behold over what must have been terrible months.

Brendan Cox, husband of Jo, was interviewed in October by the BBC and was asked by his interviewer about the anger, coarseness and aggression that had surfaced in the national conversation in the UK in the past couple of years.

Cox thought politics had become fixated on the things that divide people rather than the things which brought people together.

In the October interview, Cox issued a call to arms for people intent on occupying the centre ground. “There is something that is stirring that I think the political centre is too complacent about,” he said.

Cox thought there was a need to articulate a narrative about patriotism.

“I think we’ve ceded that narrative to the extreme right,” he said. “I think we need to regain that narrative and define Britain in an inclusive way, that brings us together, rather than blaming the migrant, the refugee, or the Muslim for what is going on in our country.”

He said centrists had been far too complacent, which was dangerous, given “a willingness to weaponise on the other side”.

I had Brendan Cox’s inclusive patriotism in my head as I watched the immigration minister, Peter Dutton, casually poke a stick in a hornets’ nest this week – putting a question mark over whether Malcolm Fraser should have allowed Lebanese Muslims to come to Australia in the 1970s.

The Coxes were also in my head as the Egyptian-born deradicalisation expert and now Labor parliamentarian Anne Aly reported death threats to the police. “Pack your bags and piss off to where you came from and take all of your terrorist faith with you,” one correspondent emailed to Aly. Lest the catalyst for the correspondence be unclear, the sender was emphatic. “Peter Dutton was right.”

The Coxes hovered as I watched Patrick Dodson rise in the Senate to point out that words can be weapons.

Dodson borrowed from the Northern Irish politician David Ervine, who once observed of sectarianism that it didn’t grow wild as a flower in the field, it bloomed in window boxes, nurtured and handed on through generations. During a contribution in private senator’s time, the Yawuru man substituted racism for sectarianism. Racism was being tended “in flower boxes in flats and houses” in Australia, Dodson said, charting a slow creep back to bigotry.

In that same debate, Pauline Hanson declared she was sick of being called a racist. Hanson lauded the days when migrants, the people once termed “wogs”, would just cop a bit of lip from Aussies as part of their assimilation ritual rather than the preciousness that persisted now.

Watching Hanson declare she was “up to here” with tolerance, I recalled a conversation I’d had in September with the race discrimination commissioner, Tim Soutphommasane, who said Australia was approaching a tipping point in race relations. The conversation with Soutphommasane took place just after Hanson used her maiden speech to say Australia was in danger of being swamped by Muslims and a poll suggested 49% of the country would be happy to ban Muslim immigration.

There has been so much written in recent times about the backlash to globalisation, to trade liberalisation, to integration.

Open markets and globalisation, combined with freer people movements across borders, has created a kind of mass nostalgia for sovereignty, particularly in nations where politicians haven’t done nearly enough to distribute the economic benefits fairly within their populations.

Politicians can’t ignore these trends. Political tsunamis have happened in the United Kingdom and in the United States, and smaller waves are lapping Australia’s shores.

In the political centre in Australia, we’ve managed to have a nascent conversation about inclusive growth. Labor campaigned on that platform during the last federal election and Malcolm Turnbull also now uses the term.

The prime minister has said several times since he almost lost the election that distributional equity has to be part of the conversation if politicians are to rebuild community confidence in the open model.

We have not begun a conversation about inclusive patriotism, and it’s becoming increasingly obvious that we need one, and we need one urgently.

Australia does have a choice.

Donald Trump gave the world a case study of a politician prepared to cynically deploy nativism and xenophobia as a response to the anti-globalisation backlash. Trump harvested anger and fear and alienation, gave it a compelling political language in an America fretful about the decline of its exceptionalism, and was rewarded with the White House.

We’ve all watched the case study of a demagogue. We know what it looks like. We know it will spawn little cynical mini mes, as I said this week, politicians pretending to be faux every men and women in order to embark on an unconscionable manipulation of people looking for answers.

Brendan Cox offers us another model, and he reminds us that patriotism requires an active commitment.

Rather than seeing a love of country as a vestige of the past, a quaint pre-internet anachronism, or the slightly embarrassing province of rednecks and the new reactionaries, patriotism is a centrist concept if the centre is prepared to define it and nurture it, and make it meaningful in contemporary life.

It is possible to be a fully subscribed citizen of the world and to carry the love of country in your heart.

Cox is absolutely right. If patriotism is to be weaponised in contemporary politics, the centre can’t opt out of the fight and, perhaps if we lower our collective sights from the world to the neighbourhood, we can again find time to bond with people and with places, which might just be the beginning of finding a common language for contemporary challenges.

To do this, politicians will have to lead.

If Malcolm Turnbull wants to be a man of the centre it is actually a profoundly unconscionable act to play dead when his immigration minister idly pulls a thread of Australia’s non-discriminatory immigration policy just to gratify Andrew Bolt, or hold out One Nation’s surge in Queensland, or whatever he thought he was doing.

If Turnbull thinks Australia is the greatest multicultural nation on earth, which is the line he trots out when wanting to sound Churchillian, he needs to walk the walk, consistently, and make the case for social inclusion – not because it’s politically correct but because of compelling logic. Social inclusion in a diverse population makes Australia safer, more harmonious and more prosperous.

Bill Shorten also needs to have a think about where he wants to line up. Right now he’s having a bob each way, dabbling with foreign worker bashing and chest-thumping economic nationalism while sounding like a progressive globalist when it comes to tolerance and diversity.We also need to recognise that it’s not all down to politicians.

To understand the nature of individual responsibility, we need only carry around Jo Cox in our souls for an hour or two – a 41-year-old woman who stood up to serve her country in its parliament and was killed in the street for being a beacon of tolerance.

Perhaps with that visceral event in our heads, we can think of the qualities that unite us, countenance ways we can stitch ourselves to others, to our neighbours, to our communities, to burst the dreadful self-reinforcing bubbles many of us reside in and find a moment to hear the views of people who feel differently to us.

Inclusive patriotism is a very simple concept.

It is about acceptance, it is about the power of the many, it’s an embrace of difference and it’s the courage to keep reaching out in hope, rather than recoiling in fear and distrust.