Rethinking Neo/liberalism and the Australian Citizenship Test: A History of Regulating Difference

Emma Sarian

doi:10.5130/csr.v24i1.5455

Abstract

While the rise of neoliberal discourse in Australia during the term of the Howard government (1996–2007) has long been recognised, its relationship to changing understandings of citizenship is rarely theorised except in terms of economic ideology. However, neoliberalism can also be conceived as a political rationality whose logics are ultimately concerned with the regulation of human conduct. This article contends that the Australian Citizenship Test can be understood as part of such a process of regulation, and that analysing it in terms of neoliberal and liberal (neo/liberal) political rationalities demonstrates the extent to which the Howard government’s multicultural policy was actually enabled by its predecessor, thereby providing a more nuanced understanding of how the test came to be a meaningful solution to the ‘problem’ of difference.

Highlights

The years spanning the Hawke–Keating government (1983–1996) and Howard government (1996–2007) have often been identified as a transformative period in Australian political culture with the advent of neoliberalism and the subsequent decline of social liberalist logics.[1]
This article has been concerned with both discerning the terms by which a neo/liberal political rationality deals with the problem of difference and how these terms were able to accommodate the implementation of a citizenship test within the rubric of an ‘inclusive’ multicultural Australian citizenship
In order to reconcile this with an increasingly diverse Australian population, the Hawke and Howard governments both deployed the discourses of a neo/liberal political rationality which claimed to be universally inclusive, but which accommodated the assertion of a core Westerncoded Australian identity

Summary

Introduction

The years spanning the Hawke–Keating government (1983–1996) and Howard government (1996–2007) have often been identified as a transformative period in Australian political culture with the advent of neoliberalism and the subsequent decline of social liberalist logics.[1]. It is this article’s contention that the Australian Citizenship Test belongs to such a process of regulation that extends back to the Hawke government and its development of Australia’s first official multicultural policy, and that analysing this process as a product of neo/liberal discourses, with their attendant notions of individual freedom and cultural difference, provides a more nuanced understanding of the political conditions in which the Test came to be a meaningful solution to the ‘problem’ of difference.

Results

Conclusion