Keep us simple, keep us safe: The post-9/11 comeback of the Average Australian Bloke

Abstract

Long before 9/11, the conservative shift in Australian politics that was marked by John Howard’s first election to Prime Minister in 1996, as well as the rise, during the same period, of the extreme-right party One Nation, signalled the triumph of a culture of masculinist and xenophobic whiteness, of anti-intellectualism, of petty-bourgeois gender roles and social conservatism that had been historically ingrained into Australia’s collective psyche. By the time 9/11 happened, half of the post-9/11 political damage had, in fact, already been done. That said, 9/11, along with asylum seeker crises, gave Howard the xenophobic “security” agenda, based on a politics of fear, that he needed in the face of a mounting domestic campaign against unpopular cutbacks to a range of public services, notably health and education His government managed to turn probable defeat into certain victory in November 2001, with one of the largest swings to an incumbent government in Australian history. Howard remained in power almost 12 years, and in the second half of that period, 9/11 became mobilised in purely local ways, around local conversations, in which asylum and refugee and indigenous rights, and the rights of Muslim minorities, loomed large−the rights of women also. Howard increasingly couched government discourse in the language of “protection” and “our” (Australian-US) shared values. Even though Howard was voted out in 2007. Yet, Howardism profoundly influenced the Australian psyche: the country has become yet more pro-US and much more timid, about practically everything and rights−and public funding for health, education and welfare−removed in the Howard years have not been restored.