The unfinished business of nation-building

Abstract

The rhetoric, mythology and practical consequences of nation-building are inextricably bound in the Australian story. Iconic infrastructure projects such as the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme are embedded in the collective national memory because of their audacity, scale and impact upon the shaping of the nation. However, it can be argued that other national institutions, from the ABC, to the CSIRO to the Australian Parliament also had nation-building as a primary raison d’etre. In a decidedly post-Keynesian age, however, the ascendancy of economic rationalism as the dominant public policy framework appeared to have consigned nation-building to an historical footnote. It has for some time been out of fashion to expect governments to intervene to correct market failure, other than through the reduction of regulatory or policy barriers to market participation. The nation was largely ‘finished’: the market largely ‘mature’ and the private sector could be leveraged to fill any gaps in the national patchwork using a mixture of deregulation and public private partnerships. This chapter asks the following questions: Has nation-building really been abandoned as a policy frame, or has it simply gone underground? Are today’s major infrastructure projects the natural descendents of Keynesian era nation-building? What are the new frontiers of nation-building in the information age? Why ‘Nation-Building’? In the months leading to the 2007 Australian general election, ‘nation-building’ re-entered the national political debate in spectacular fashion. The major political parties vied with one another to prove their nation-building credentials. The then Opposition Leader, Kevin Rudd, former Opposition Leader, Kim Beasley, then Prime Minister John Howard and then Deputy Prime Minister and Leader of the National Party, Mark Vaile — among others — invoked the term at various times during the federal election campaign. Even State Premiers like the former Premier of Queensland, Peter Beattie, weighed in on the nation-building angle. In so doing, each evoked a paradigm of nation-building as a policy framework for meeting the long term social and economic obligations of government. The election campaign embedded the term in the consciousness of politicians, the electorate and the media. ‘Industry welcomes nation-building Budget’, or