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The language of Australian citizenshipNick Dyrenfurth aa Monash UniversityPublished online: 19 Aug 2006.

To cite this article: Nick Dyrenfurth (2005) The language of Australian citizenship, AustralianJournal of Political Science, 40:1, 87-109, DOI: 10.1080/10361140500049313

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The Language of Australian Citizenship

NICK DYRENFURTH

Monash University

The study of Australian citizenship could no longer be referred to as neglected.

Empirical and theoretical studies have shown the development of both the idea

and practice to be incremental and ad hoc: a source of inclusion and exclusion.

Historians and political scientists have shown how citizenship was developed

through studying legislative documents, constitutional devices, common law

interpretation, and administrative practice. Whilst many have alluded to the

speeches and texts of leaders, in my mind insufficient attention has been

placed on the role of political language. My argument aims not only to show

how Australian citizenship has been developed but also argues that public

political language (with a firm connection to social reality) has, in the absence

of legal and official definition and explication, vastly shaped our past and

present imaginings of the citizen.

An Australian Citizenship

The nature of citizenship . . . is a question which is often disputed: there is no

general agreement on a single definition. (Aristotle, fourth century BC, The Politics

of Aristotle)

Aristotle’s quandary is apparently no closer to resolution. Australian citizenship hasbeen incrementally defined and contested throughout the twentieth century. It wouldbe mistaken to suggest that it was ‘created’ either at a moment, such as federation, orappropriately defined when the legal concept was enacted on 1 January 1948. Thereis no one document or classic text from which we can draw its essence. The Consti-tution is all but silent on the matter.1 What should be the primary legislation, now

Australian Journal of Political Science,Vol. 40, No. 1, March, pp. 87–109

Nick Dyrenfurth is a PhD candidate and teaches in the School of Historical Studies at Monash Univer-sity, Clayton. His particular interests are in Australian political and cultural history, political languageand ideologies. His PhD, entitled ‘Inventing Tradition: The Languages of Australian Labor, 1890–1920’, is a study of the Australian Labor tradition and its formation in language.1 As Irving (1997, 156) has shown, section 117 formerly ‘contained the word “citizen” andbehind. . .[subjects’] bland final wording lies a long and tortured debate over the use of the term’.This is despite the efforts of delegates such as Andrew Inglis Clark at the 1891 Sydney ConstitutionalConvention and John Quick at the 1898 Australasian Federal Convention Debates. The term subject wasdeemed to be less problematic as it avoided co-definition and distinction of subject and citizen. Theword citizen appears only once in the Constitution, oddly enough in section 44, referring to a‘citizen of a foreign power’. This previously unobtrusive reference had ramifications nearly a centurylater with the disqualification from membership of parliament of ‘British’ citizen and One NationSenator-elect Heather Hill.

ISSN 1036-1146 print; ISSN 1363-030X online/05/010087-23 # 2005 Australasian Political Studies Association

DOI: 10.1080/10361140500049313

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titled the Australian Citizenship Act 1948, ‘offers a definition of citizenship strippedbare’ (Rubinstein 2002, 11): what Jack Lang tellingly described in 1948 as ‘nothingbut the title’ (Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates (House of Representatives), 23November 1948, 3301). It tells us how an individual might become a citizen, or losethat citizenship, but not what that citizenship entails.2 That being the case, citizenshipin Australia, within the confines of the twentieth century, has been an (at timesuneasy) admixture of ideals and practice—a device of inclusion and (infamous)exclusion. To that extent one must agree with Chesterman and Galligan’s (1999, 1)confident assertion that ‘citizenship is at the heart of Australian politics’. Paradoxi-cally, the authors contend that citizenship has also been a ‘little written’ subject untilrecent times.3 The ‘citizen’ is a complex category: an ‘essentially contested subject’(Vandenberg 2000, 1). It is both a legal and political appellation defining formalrelations between individuals and the state. It also connotes social and economicmembership and participation speaking for a more substantive citizenship—theperformance and acting out of abstract rights and less often responsibilities. In Aus-tralia, it has often been infused with varying degrees of nationality and morality, withcivic citizenship positioned as a desirable activity.Looking towards legal judgments like that of activist judge H.B. Higgins in the

1907 Harvester Case, social policy instruments as varied as the White Australiapolicy and assorted social security acts, the jigsaw becomes a little more complete.Citizenship thus becomes, in theory, practice and historiography, a descriptor andmeasurement of social, legal and political rights and standards (although not quitein the fashion that T.H. Marshall (Marshall 1950) had previously envisaged). Afuller account of citizenship must also emphasise the highly symbolic, often rheto-rical and iconographical tools that have defined, and been defined themselves by,the public discourse.4 The study of language and rhetoric practised by Australian pol-itical leaders within the somewhat disparate fields of history, biography and politicalscience has been a source of considerable recent interest, though somewhat lacking inconceptual coherency and rigour. Judith Brett’s (1993) psychoanalytical biographyRobert Menzies’ Forgotten People and to a lesser extent her more recent effortAustralian Liberals and the Moral Middle Class (2003) are stand-out examples ofan approach which successfully crosses these boundaries. James Curran’s recentThe Power of Speech: Australian Prime Ministers Defining the National Imagepresents an argument over why and how Australian have approached and soughtto define national identity. It is a timely and important addition to the field. In hisview, language or ‘rhetoric’ is neither ‘inconsequential’, ‘superficial’, nor inherently‘manipulative’. Curran rightly sees political language (through its concomitant prac-tical and theoretical import) as filling a void, albeit with historical context and

2 The Preamble to the Act (inserted in 1993 with no legal consequence attached) tells us ‘Australian citi-zenship represents formal membership of the community . . . a common bond, involving reciprocalrights and obligations, uniting all Australians, while respecting their diversity; and persons grantedAustralian citizenship enjoy these rights and undertake to accept these obligations by pledgingloyalty to Australia and its people, and by sharing their democratic beliefs, and by respecting theirrights and liberties, and by upholding and obeying the laws of Australia’ (Rubinstein 2002, 12).3 This is much harder to contend today, though popular confusion and conflation with aspects of race andnationality still abound.4 The term discourse in this sense is used as the general form of public political debate but recognisingthat discourse can be considered a ‘structural idiom used by social groups to acquire knowledge andpower simultaneously’ (Davidson and Spegele 1991, vii).

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contingency, which metaphorically represents the ontological crises of race andnation.5 In a sense the importance of language is possibly over-drawn as a resultof the lack of attention accorded to the formative role of ideology and class interests.As Stuart Hall (1993, 82) reminds us, drawing upon Geetz, there exists a ‘mediatoryrole played by rhetoric and symbolization in the elaboration of ideologicalformations . . .’Despite these recent studies, the two potentially mutually advantageous fields of

citizenship theory and language analysis have not, in my opinion, been linkedclosely enough. For in the absence of adequate constitutional or statutory explication,the notion of a language of Australian citizenship is both theoretically and practicallysuggestive. Political leaders, though consciously and unconsciously steeped innotions of race and nation, class and ideology, have projected individual and collec-tive imaginings of an ideal citizenship through their public political language. Anapproach foregrounded in political language does not necessarily argue that othertexts and constitutional devices cannot be read as language but argues that politicaldiscourse is a language and a continuing tradition of considerable importance—as amediating and explanatory social phenomena. Hall (1993, 80) explains how domi-nant ideological systems structure the legitimacy of values and discourses withinan overarching ‘public language’: ‘dominant value systems represent themselvesas the natural mental environment and horizon of the whole society . . .’. Hall(1993, 85) argues that there exists ‘the historical interests and experiences of domi-nant groups and classes which lie embedded within the environment of a publiclanguage, and which are drawn on . . . in specific settings of dominance’. In Hall’s(1993, 87) fluid and historically contingent framework of rhetoric and symbolisation‘. . . the dominant and subordinate forms of ideological consciousness present in asociety at a specific historical moment . . .’ what Hall (1993, 87) eloquently desig-nates as ‘maps of meaning’—within which certain groups’ and classes’ claims andarguments are legitimised whilst others are deemed and marginalised as ‘deviant’.Building upon Carol Johnson’s (1992, 56) argument that ‘Australian politicaldiscourse reveals strong consensual elements in which the shared norms andvalues of liberal ideology still play a central role’, how Australians have imaginedand argued ‘the citizen’ has arguably framed the boundaries of citizenship as weknow them.Nineteenth-century Australians, despite their status as British subjects, spoke of

themselves and others as citizens: bearing rights and entitlements, forming voluntaryassociations, contributing to civic society and owing responsibilities. In the absenceof formal definition or decisive documentation, and in the presence of a de factoadministrative Australian citizenship (Dutton 2002, 16), the language of citizenshiphas been crucial in defining what it has meant to be an Australian citizen. My empha-sis is upon the language employed by political leaders and their parties (typicallyPrime Ministers)—those whom Walter and MacLeod (2002, 8) term the ‘ideologymakers’—and whom I have closely examined in another forum (Dyrenfurth 2003).Their language is important for two reasons. They are representative and implicitlyaccepting of the dominant ideological and institutional superstructure. And,secondly, political language is the key exemplar of how the disparate elements ofthe Australian polity mediated their sense of national community. Yet (political)

5 Though ‘crises’ and ‘reaction’ are somewhat helpful terms, the destruction of both the reality and onto-logical security of monoculturalism, was, in a sense, ‘demanded’ by the post-war immigrant groups.

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language is not the exclusive form of citizenship discourse. So whilst acknowledgingthe influence of the culturalist approach to history, as Beilharz (1994, 17–18)suggests:

This is not to suggest that language governs social life, but that its significance in

the process of legitimising different projects is rather greater than may hitherto

have been imagined, language thus needs to be recognised, but also to be put

into perspective . . . [by not] privileging text over content or context, words

above history, noise over action and conversation, images over suffering. Yet

language does matter, and values and ideas do form and structure the scope of

social action.

It is at the level of national politics that most of the reforms and debates over theAustralian citizen have taken place: ‘citizen-building is a prerequisite for nation-building’ (Uhr 2002, 267). Citizenship has been intimately linked to the rise of themodern nation-state—at the moment those now famous ‘strangers’ were imaginingthemselves in abstract community (Anderson 1991) so too did individuals andthe institutions of state begin to conceptualise a developing relationship to eachother. If Australia was ‘born-modern’, it was also born ‘abstract’—whereby languageaided in the collective and individual imaginings of nation and state. Uhr (2002, 261)has noted ‘the place of political rhetoric in establishing and transforming Australianinstitutions . . . [though] analysts . . . have paid little scholarly attention to the roleof rhetoric’. In Uhr’s view (2002, 263), ‘prime ministers . . . shape the civicoutlook by clarifying the rights and responsibilities of citizenship . . . appeal[ing]to citizen-building to justify many of their deepest claims to leadership’. Whilstcare must be taken not to stretch the analysis, it is apparent that political partiesand their leaders have shaped much of what we know to be citizenship. In thissense, Curran (2004) is an important but partial addition. I shall now outline mytheory of the importance and theoretical utility of language and speculate withregard to some of the reasons and consequences of such a tendency. I shall touchupon some examples, and conclude by noting the relevance of such case studies tomy concept of a language of citizenship and dominant modes therein.

Imagining the Citizen

The citizen, to be sure, is potentially, a symbol: a dutiful voter, a courageous

soldier, a productive worker. (Alejandro 1993)

According to Irving (2000, 10), Australian citizenship has developed as a socialconstruction rather than a formal political or legal category: a ‘. . . concern with citi-zenship as a particular type of community, imbued with a particular character, hasbeen consistent in Australian history, and the advent of citizenship law has hadlittle impact upon it’.6 The citizen ‘would be a type of person found within the

6According to Irving, the use of the term ‘citizen’ has three main strands before 1949. In the 1890s theterm was associated with a type of person, not simply voters. Whilst women would not achieve suffrageat a national level until 1902, they claimed their voting rights as citizens. Being a citizen entailedvirtuous qualities such as ‘commitment, belonging and contribution’. Secondly, a citizen was anexpressly white subject, though there were exceptions such as Chinese-born Quong Tart, who fittedthe third citizen type, being ‘law-abiding and respectable’, which might also be read as a cue forboth subservience and passivity.

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legal category of British subject, but having extra characteristics or qualifications’:thus ‘the political rights we most readily associate now with citizenship were inthis rhetoric not what defined a citizen but what followed from being a citizen’(Irving 2000, 157–8). This elemental confusion was confirmed by the somewhatstrangely titled act of 1948, which said nothing at all about what being an Australiancitizen entailed. In reality, the act was about ‘the need to administer an [ever more]diversifying population during a period of mass immigration: it was about whoshould belong, and not what their entitlements should be’ (Walter and MacLeod2002, 7).For most Australians, citizenship is not an ‘emotive’ concept, ‘it describes a dry

and formal category, redolent of earnest but long forgotten civics classes’ (Salvaris2000, 78). The 2001 federation ‘celebrations’, which should have witnessed aconsidered evaluation of citizenship, focused almost entirely upon political partiesand leaders. The 1999 republican debates were focused upon technical models ofpolity rather than a simultaneous and logical discussion of citizenship rights. Citizen-ship as portrayed by ‘inclusive naturalisation’ ceremonies is a privilege bestowed,but not actively experienced. The formal study of Australian citizenship has untilquite recently been an under-theorised and concomitantly underdeveloped concept,akin to the practice itself.During the past decade, citizenship literature has flourished, and it could no longer

be referred to as neglected. At the same time, state-sponsored activity and enquiryintensified.7 Both sides of mainstream politics have lamented the reduced statusand understanding of civics in Australia. As traditional class-based models of analy-sis also declined, many theorists interested in reducing disadvantage and inequality‘rediscovered’ (Brett 2001, 424)8 citizenship as the tool by which to ‘bring thestate back in’.9 Citizenship has been conceptualised as a generalist theory, but alsoas the thematic perspex through which revisionist accounts have been framed. Ana-lyses of race, class and gender have re-interpreted citizenship—given the experienceof the White Australia policy, the status of Indigenous peoples, and the residualist,gendered nature of the welfare state—as an exclusionary and defective device:

Our [Australian] political and social histories have been written around the

struggles to extend or transform the rights of citizens and non-citizens, and revisio-

nist energies are continuously directed at the re-interpretation of those social move-

ments. (Thomas 1993, 383)

The idea of citizenship as legal status—beginning with the consolidating nation-state—has dominated public and academic discourses at the beginning and end ofthe twentieth century. Such a legalistic interpretation has come under increasing chal-lenge from what Rubinstein (1995) terms the ‘substantive’ or ‘normative’ conceptualunderstanding, yet all conceptions are ultimately linked to the state as the conferrer ofcitizenship and related rights. At the same time, the arena of citizenship has oftenrepresented an uneasy fusion of discourses, so the literature is diverse and at timesunrelated—leading to what Michael Dodson (1996) terms the ‘clouded meaning of

7 For instance, see the reports by the Joint Standing Committee on Migration, Australians All: Enhan-cing Australian Citizenship, Parliament, Australia, 1994; Senate Legal and Constitutional ReferencesCommittee, National Well-being: A System of National Citizenship Indicators and Benchmarks, Parlia-ment, Australia, 1996; and Civics and Citizenship Education: Report by the Civics Expert Group (1994).8 Brett (2001) suggests that Marshall actually marks the ‘revival of progressive interest in citizenship’.9 See, for instance, Cass and Smyth (1998) and Capling, Considine and Crozier (1998).

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citizenship’. Language, in terms of a loosely defined language study, rather than aFoucauldian discourse analysis, is an approach which brings together the realms ofthe legal, constitutional and more practically attuned substantive citizenship—giving shape to the whole. Academic confusion is grounded in popular mystification.As Brett (2001, 423) remarked:

Describing their membership of the Australian political community, few contem-

porary Australians will reach for the concept of citizenship and are far more

likely to identify themselves simply as Australians.

Attempting to assuage such puzzlement, Chesterman and Galligan (1999, 4) havedocumented both the legal and more substantive dimensions of citizenship in Austra-lia, accurately describing it as ‘institutionally diffuse’, developed incrementally:

Australian citizenship has been defined and developed through legislation, admin-

istrative practice and public policy by both Commonwealth and State governments

in key political, civil, social and economic areas . . . There was no historical

moment or place of articulation, nor is there a core definition of citizenship or state-

ment of citizens’ rights.

However, Chesterman and Galligan’s understanding of citizenship’s constitutionaltreatment, in which they argue that ‘the creation of an Australian citizenship was oneof the great purposes of and achievements of federation’ (1999, 1) seems to contra-dict the implied argument of the text—that one must ‘pursue the substantivecomplexities’ (1999, 4). Moreover, their claim that the Constitution and its concomi-tant federal compact has a ‘primary purpose . . . too enhance and serve democraticcitizenship’ (1999, 1) is dubious given that document’s well-renowned minimalismand focus upon the separation of powers rather than rights possessed by individualsor groups. The authors are on far more solid ground when they suggest that ‘there ismuch more to citizenship than legal status and negative rights . . . The substantivepart of citizenship thus entails membership of the person in the political communityand the social and economic ability of that person to function reasonably well’ (1999,8–9). Such a view stems from the well-known and arguably most significant contri-bution in the area, British sociologist T.H. Marshall’s classic study Citizenship andSocial Class. Marshall argued that citizenship (entailing full membership of thecommunity) had developed over the past three centuries since the Enlightenmentperiod, consisting of the attainment of civic rights by the end of the eighteenthcentury, political rights during the course of the nineteenth century, and finally(and most importantly) social and economic rights through the twentieth century.Despite its well-documented flaws and limited applicability (such as the some-what passive and statist stages of rights and entitlements, problematic applicationto women, and British centricity), it remains a significant and enduring point ofreference.Current theorists, working across diverse disciplines, have attempted to build

upon such a conception. Australian endeavours did not occur in a vacuum, andformed part of a concerted (worldwide) effort to re-think the boundaries of citizen-ship, much of which was triggered by the decline of traditional Left critiques andmethodologies since the end of the Cold War. From an Australian perspective,Hudson and Kane’s Rethinking Australian Citizenship (2000) covers some ofthe key debates and trends. Turner (1993) has summarised ‘citizenship as theory’categorising typical definitions of the citizen, whilst Kymlicka and Norman’s 1994

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article ‘Return of the Citizen’ focuses the debate at an international (and highlytheoretical) level. Kymlicka and Norman argue for a cautious approach towards atheory of citizenship because such a ‘theory’ is virtually limitless: ‘almost everyproblem in political philosophy involves relations among citizens or between citizensand the state’ (1994, 353),10 whilst advocating a post-Marshallian outlook thatrequires a ‘greater emphasis upon responsibilities and virtues’.However, to portray citizenship as a solely Left concern would be misleading. In

fact, much of the recent literature emerged in reaction to the ‘New Right vision ofcitizenship’,11 which some discerned ‘not as an alternative account of citizenshipbut as an assault on the very principle of citizenship’ (Kymlicka and Norman1994, 357). Somewhat strangely, in Australia at least, the Right—that at timesuneasy coalition of liberals and conservatives—has traditionally monopolised theterm ‘citizen’. When referring to Australian society and its values, conservativeshave often utilised the rhetoric of citizenship to insist upon duties and communityservice (Hudson 2000, 5).12 Notions of civic virtue have characterised much ofwhat we know as Australian social liberalism. In more recent times, so-called‘Third Way’ theorists within the ALP such as new leader Mark Latham (see, forinstance, Botsman and Latham 2001) have utilised citizenship rhetoric in a similarsense but tenuously maintained that rights must precede responsibilities.In terms of citizenship historiography, Rubinstein has outlined the legal and

substantive threads to Australian citizenship. She notes that ‘citizenship in Australiais not a constitutional concept’ (Rubinstein 1995, 505). One must look towardsdisparate pieces of legislation and separate pronouncements by the High Court todiscover the legal consequences of citizenship (Rubinstein 1995, 517). Rubinsteinalso makes the interesting point that ‘the Court hasn’t shaped citizenship but thelitigants before it have’. In summary, Rubinstein (1999) links the ‘clouded’meaning of citizenship to an argument for a bill of rights or ‘stronger constitutionalstatement’.Davidson’s critical From Subject to Citizen (Davidson 1997) outlines the broad

historical transformation of Australian citizenship whilst also highlighting what heperceives as its ongoing flaws, chiefly ‘legalism’, a reliance upon a common lawenunciation of rights and the historical primacy of ‘race’ bound up in the confusionof nationality and citizenship. Davidson’s work is instructive in identifying the short-falls of such a citizenship. Whilst keenly aware of the importance of public discourse,it does not fully explore how important that language has been in such a ‘legalistic’formation. Similarly, Dutton’s recent One of Us distinguishes ‘between an Australiancitizenry, a distinct population characterized in certain ways with precise legaldefinition, and an Australian citizenship: the quality of belonging to that citizenry’(2002, 2). Dutton, like much of the field, focuses upon the salience of race and

10 Like others, Kymlicka and Norman (1994, 313) note the conflation of citizenship as legal status and‘citizenship as desirable activity’ where the ‘quality of one’s citizenship is a function of one’s partici-pation in that community’. See also Kymlicka’s Multicultural Citizenship (1995, 193) in which heargues for an overlapping ‘identity’-based citizenship or group (minority) rights which he considers‘consistent with liberal principles of individual freedom and social justice’.11 In short, the New Right critique mounted a sustained criticism on the field of ‘social rights’, bemoan-ing a culture of dependence and passivity and arguing that welfare payments should be linked to obli-gation (such as ‘work for the dole’).12 See Brett (2001). The recent proclamations of Tony Abbott and Peter Costello—calling for a renewedsense of ‘voluntarism’—reflect an ongoing concern with this civic form.

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nationalism to both state and citizenry, also noting the importance of allegiance andpolitical obligation to such understandings.13

Even more recently, Walter and MacLeod’s The Citizens’ Bargain has lookedagain at the documentary sources, aiming ‘to capture the historical conversation’(2002, 1) and ‘document the voices of those whose arguments about citizenshipshaped the ways in which the civic realm would be understood’ (2002, 14). I sharetheir methodological focus—one which places language alongside statute and otherdevices—and agree that any approach must be ‘indicative’ rather than ‘thorough’,yet their interpretation of citizenship as a ‘political bargain between the individualand the state enacted through (and safeguarded by) our institutions’ (2002, 1) is deba-table. Our institutions have surely done this, but arguably ‘bargain’ is too static andpassive a description. Pressure groups and organised classes have ‘demanded’ moreflexible and expanded institutional arrangements.Whilst not downplaying the significance of race, my focus is more upon the

substantive nature of citizenship. Substantive citizenship, or what Davidson (1997,143) terms ‘best practice’ can be defined as:

the primary right of a citizen is a vote of equal value . . . that vote cannot exist as anautonomous individual contribution to a consensual notion of public good unless

two conditions are met. There must be the right to life, to freedom of movement,

to conscience, speech and organisation. There must also be freedom from economic

and social deprivation for each individual. Without all of these the vote would be an

empty exercise.

It is not unexpected to find a neglect or indeed dismissal of language. Indeed,studies of legal and institutional forms deserve a central place in any understanding.However, traditional approaches largely ignore the role that language plays in thevery development and legitimation of such structures. My argument contends that,in the absence of a definitive statement or legislation, both the public understandingand practice of citizenship has been shaped by what I term the ‘language of citizen-ship’. Language has rushed in to fill the ‘vacuum’ (the unwritten substance) of citi-zenship. The politicians of the post-federation polity swiftly realised they had a roleto play, interpreted as a duty (or more so in Labor’s case, as a practical necessity), andboth mediated and illuminated the ideals of a national citizenship. I will attempt toidentify and analyse the interrelated concepts of language and iconography involvedin the formation of the idea of an Australian citizen—a process that continues to thisday. Language and rhetoric reveal important conceptions and ramifications aboutthe nature and quality of citizenship. Yet language, rhetoric and ideas do not existindependently of government policy and practice.We can identify several key themes within the language of citizenship. The notion

of an ‘independence ideal’ (Capling, Considine and Crozier 1998)—emphasisingeconomic and social self-reliance as virtuous or moral citizenship—has been parti-cularly salient and persistent. The strength of Capling et al’s argument, though Inote it is not a thoroughgoing theory of citizenship, revolves around an assumptionof a dynamic, as against static, political culture. ‘Independence’ had its genesis in the

13Dutton suggests that ‘racial exclusivity remained a sacrosanct principle of Australian citizenship andpublic policy until the 1970s’. As a result ‘the stranger was subject to a series of behavioural expec-tations and was constituted as an object of observation and governance by several agencies of thestate’ (Dutton 2002, 31).

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nineteenth-century moral economy of colonial liberalism and its dynamic relationswith the evolving labour movement and working class, but was transformed by theevolution of national and party politics. For the strengthening trade unions andthe emergent ‘populist’14 Labour Party, independence was simultaneously a roman-ticised sense of a pre-industrial (and British derived) past, but also contingent uponan idealistic view of the manly independence and dignity of skilled male workers,rather than more abstract notions of an industrialised proletariat. For colonial liberals,independence was the realisation of their idealised society of rational and cooperativeindividuals. It was also, as Brett (2003) points out in her revisionist account of theAustralian two-party system, indicative of liberals’ ideological and class-specificsense of masculine individual autonomy. Whilst contingent upon economic ideologyand historical context, one can see in the discourse utilised by current Prime MinisterJohn Howard (the most obvious example being ‘the battler’) and perhaps evenMark Latham’s ‘ladder of opportunity’ certain rhetorical parallels and continuities.Without withdrawing from my central argument, I acknowledge that citizenship aspolitical language is problematic within the Australian experience—citizenshiphas not been consciously discussed at a formal level.At this point it is important to discuss a crucial issue of terminology. Independence

is a potentially more useful term of understanding than utilitarianism, lacking theintellectual baggage, and tendency towards an essentialising caricature of humannature. The predominance or at least continued self-perpetuating references to asomewhat crude utilitarianism as underpinning Australian political culture, oftendefined as ‘modern liberty’ (Melleuish 2004), assumes an essential and entirelynatural set of institutions and cultures. More accurately it is the product of the specificand contingent nature of Australian political institutions and the ideological flavourimparted to them at their birth. Moreover, the utilitarian argument rests largely upona static assumption of the dominance of liberal ideas within the suggestive notion ofan Australia ‘born modern’. On the contrary, Australian anxieties and ambiguitiestowards modernity would seem to strike at the heart of this conception. Utilitarianismremains a helpful frame from which to address citizenship, yet it cannot be seenas some essentialising feature of national character, floating free of ideology andinstitutional and class structures. As Althusser and Balibar (1970, 142) criticallysuggest:

. . . ideology is both theoretically closed and politically supple and adaptable. It

bends to the interests of the times, but without apparent movement, being

content to reflect the historical changes which is its mission to assimilate and

master by some imperceptible modification of its internal relations . . . Ideologychanges therefore, but imperceptibly conserving its ideological form; it moves,

but with an immobile motion which maintains it where it is, in its place and its

ideological role.

One can accept such a critical sense of ideology without dismissing variousAustralian political ideologies by incorrectly assuming, as Irving (1994, 8) contends,that ‘ideology is not just a form of social control but that it is the form of socialcontrol, an all embracing hegemony that automatically produces subordination ingroups or classes outside the ruling class’.

14 See Markey (1988).

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The importance of national identity should also be acknowledged. The idea that anational identity or character has consciously and unconsciously constituted thesuperstructure and eventual dominance of Australian political economy is at oncemisleading yet vitally important. Rubinstein (1995, 503) has argued that the recentinterest in citizenship can be partially attributed to a ‘renewed interest in nationalidentity’. When political leaders have talked of citizenship, more often than notthey have been projecting their own idealised conception of national character ortype imbued with specific qualities and beliefs. A concern with citizenship alsocarries an important moral element. Whilst objecting to the static ‘settlementthesis’ (Kelly 1992) we can tentatively say that continuums exist within thecentral ideal of independence. I am not claiming that the essence of Australiancitizenship can be found in the proclamations of so-called great leaders (mainlymen) but am suggesting that political leaders as the expression of political parties,classes and interest groups have played an important role in constructing politicalideas such as citizenship. I shall elaborate the discussion of national identitybelow, but as Castles, Kalantzis and Morrisey (1992, 6) have noted, the complexrole of national leaders means:

Those who have the power to rule . . . a nation-state have the most influence in

defining the ‘national character’. The definition may embody abstract ideals . . . butit is linked just as much to the economic and political interests of the definers.

As much as language broadens (national) horizons and possibilities it also has thepower to limit and control collective actions in the so-called name of the nationalinterest. The abstract ideals imagined for the Australian citizen have differed forboth sides of mainstream politics, but have revolved around an adherence to thebelief in the desirability and possibility of social harmony (that being the contingentjunction of economic and political interests). Up until now I have attempted toshow how current understandings have shown citizenship to be a complex,‘clouded’ concept. At the same time I have indicated that the study of language,rhetoric and iconography has lacked conceptual apparatus. In the next section Ishall outline a more thoroughgoing theory and proposed utility of the language ofcitizenship.

The Language of Australian Citizenship

Political language is first and foremost public language, the chief means by which

an aspiring politician reaches out to potential supporters . . . using images and

arguments that are quickly recognisable to its audience . . . its purpose is to con-

vince particular groups in society to see, feel about and act in the political world

in certain ways, and to win support for the speaker as the representative of those

ways of seeing and feeling. (Brett 1993)

Since Federation the shape of citizenship in Australia has been highly flavoured by

the independence ideal. Reading the history of citizenship through this ideal can

assist in a better understanding of the social and institutional ambiguities and

contradictions that have bedevilled the enactment of the Australian ‘virtues’ of

equality and justice . . .(Capling, Considine and Crozier 1998)

Citizenship has captured the attention of public and academic discourses at each ofthe extremes of the past century. At both the turn of the century, as the newly

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federated Australian nation-state was consolidating towards the so-called‘settlement’15 (though as Melleuish (2004, 82–3) notes this was originally under-stood as a ‘social laboratory’ or the ‘ongoing task of nation-building’ and alsobeen positively described as an ‘Australian way’—‘a settlement’ possesses a some-what pejorative and deliberately static ring (Stokes 2004))16 and later during the1980s and early 1990s when that settlement was reconstructed, popular attentionfocused upon the narrowly legal.17 Paradoxically, this occurred whilst the frame-work of substantive citizenship was written and re-written—and is exacerbated bya lack of critical attention upon the ‘settlement’ decade, sandwiched as it isbetween the mythical events of the 1890s and the events of the Great War.Such a statement may appear highly contradictory given that citizenship as legalcategory did not exist prior to 1948, but in reality the ‘vanquished’ term citizen,as Irving (2000) has pointed out, has deep roots within both popular and officiallanguage, enjoying popular usage in the 1890s. The category of citizenship, sim-ultaneously expanding in the form of manhood suffrage and contracting in termsof coloured men and women, denoted (and continues to do so to an extent)a certain type of person. Citizenship has never simply connoted the right tovote, but entailed the requisite characteristics that enabled a person to ‘claim’citizenship.For instance, women suffragists spoke not of a desire to become citizens and

exercise voting rights, but presented themselves as existing citizens (bearing therequisite attributes entailing ‘commitment, belonging and contribution’) unableto exercise the rights accorded such status (Irving 2000, 10). The absence of adefinitive statement whether in the Constitution (given the framers’ reticence forincluding express statements of policy) or in disparate pieces of legislation, hasmeant that language provides important clues as to the shape and content ofcitizenship. This is what Davidson was hinting at in his critique of ‘legalism’:that peculiar reliance upon British and Australian common law traditions as a(continued) guarantor of rights. As Davidson (1997, 253) posits, Australian citi-zens are all ‘equal in political inequality’. The paradoxical effect of legalismmeant that:

While it has become more and more easy to acquire Australian nationality in

1948–83, there had been no corresponding improvement in the quality or range

of citizen rights . . . Until . . .Whitlam, there was even a regression in the rights a

citizen enjoyed. (Davidson 1997, 94)

Davidson’s ‘regression of rights’ is a specific reference to the Robert Menzies’-ledgovernment after 1949. Menzies was a firm believer in the ability of the common law

15 This is Paul Kelly’s expression describing the five pillars of ‘the Australian Settlement’: industrialarbitration, protection, state paternalism, white Australia and imperial benevolence. He builds a some-what monolithic conception of settlement upon which citizenship was built. As the authors of the‘Australian Way’ suggest the story is far more complex, though his ‘five pillars’ is rhetorically brilliant,but perhaps better at detailing the political events of the 1980s than public policy development. See Cassand Smyth (1998), Melleuish (2004) and the article and subsequent commentary in Stokes (2004).16 As Stokes suggests: ‘to the extent that we can speak of a “Settlement” in Australia, it was one reachedon a wider range of key conflicts or cleavages than those to which Kelly refers’ (Stokes 2004, 5–6).17 See the federation debates and enactment in the White Australia policy, whilst the issue of refugeesand ‘border protection’ bound up in larger impersonal globalising processes is perhaps the currentmanifestation of this tendency.

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to ‘protect’ (but not create new) rights.18 His government’s unsuccessful attempts toban the Australian Communist Party19 with its consequences for freedom of speechare evidence, according to Davidson, of legalism’s poor ability to protect rights.Indeed, the High Court’s invalidation of the Communist Party Dissolution Act1950 was based upon a technical reading of the Constitution’s defence powerrather than a firm commitment to inviolable citizens’ rights. Whilst avoiding thelogical extension of the argument towards a bill of rights, we can summarise ourunderstanding: citizenship has been incrementally and partially defined, a languageof citizenship has thus derived from, but then helped frame, this discursive super-structure, setting the acceptable limits of public policy and collective action.It is probably more appropriate to speak of a dominant language, as contestations

from Indigenous, ethnic and women’s groups have always been made. The dominantlanguage has been inclusive and necessarily exclusive, dominated by certain recurringthemes and framed by a distinctive, though historically and often ideologically con-tingent, Australian political culture. The most salient feature of this culture is whathas been termed the ‘independence ideal’. Such an ideal sees the concepts of equalityand justice, what we today seemore clearly as substantive citizenship, viewed throughthe attainment of individual economic ‘independence’. Overlaying such an ideal, thecitizen, as that ‘potential symbol’ (Alejandro 1993, 2), was infused with moral qua-lities—closely related to notions of economic independence, symbolised as acertain type: male, productively autonomous and imbued with selective class valuesand stereotypes, all the while conceived through a developing sense of national identity.‘Citizenship as independence’ has its origins in the nature of ‘developmentalism’

(Stokes 2004) within the unique white settler/capitalist society of the nineteenthcentury. This fluid notion of independence was formed in concert with a politicalculture that mythologised the ‘status of the white victim’ (Curthoys 1999)—whetherworker or small landholder—and his relation to land and self-sufficiency in settlercolonial society (see also Hirst 1988; Macintyre 1991). The key premise was anemphasis ‘on economic self-dependence as the foundation of citizenship’ (Birrell2001, 16). That notion was later complemented by the somewhat contradictoryprotectionist policies (in that the state would legislate independence) establishedduring the federation decade. Citizens’ rights tended to favour the industrial oroutwardly material over the social, installing the citizen-worker as the dominanticonographic image (Curtin 2000, 232–4). The independence of the individualmale citizen-worker would mean social and economic security for himself and hisdependants. Independence has typically been ascribed, somewhat pejoratively,as ‘utilitarianism’:20 the ‘model of human nature . . . whose guiding assumption isthat individuals seek to maximise pleasure and minimise pain’ (Melleuish 2004,79). As Melleuish (2004, 79) has noted, this narrow view essentialises materialismas an entirely natural and static characteristic, covering a diverse set of peoplesand social relations. Even for one loosely working from within the tradition of his-torical materialism, individuals, classes and nations are better seen as actors and

18Menzies’ well-renowned regard for the common law basis of rights was not unique to the conservativeside of politics; his counterpart Opposition Labor leader Dr Bert Evatt, whilst playing a pivotal role inthe United Nations, also tended towards this view.19 This issue is more problematic in that Menzies was initially opposed to the peacetime banning of theCommunist Party but pragmatically moved to the 1949 election with its prohibition as a key piece of hiscampaign.20 Its most cogent version is Collins (1985).

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acted-on by circumstances and forces, both contingent and historically specific.Moreover, independence is seen correctly in my view as ideological—both interms of its promulgation as non-ideological and as a liberal device of hegemony,though in a somewhat ironic perversion of the Marxist sense of false consciousness.A contingent though historically informed independence ideal seems to be far moresuggestive. Independence was constituted as moral and private autonomy from othersand the state, but was often publicly displayed, in contradiction, as material advance-ment, a partial denial of the abstracting forces of modernity and the obviousencroachment of the state. The developing ideal or alleged tradition was notwithout contradiction. As Hancock’s Australia (1930 [1961]) suggested, the notionof independence exposed the ambiguity presented within the average Australiancitizen. On the one hand, the ‘citizen-soldier’ (with a correlation to the then strength-ening 1890s ‘bush legend’) was lauded as possessing the commendable traits of indi-vidual initiative and crafty independence, sitting in perhaps irresolvable tensionwith the negative typography of the ‘citizen-voter’, apparently lacking initiativeand displaying excessive dependence upon the state. And, as Hancock (1930[1961], 69) wryly noted, wasn’t the soldier a voter as well?The independence ideal has been both informed and transformed by developments

in government policy and institutional arrangements. A brief historical sketch sees itsconsolidation in the post-federation decade—‘under the auspices of Deakin’s newprotectionism’—alongside the electoral franchise’s extension from all adult malesto adult females (Capling, Considine and Crozier 1998, 122). Around the sametime in 1907, the ‘Harvester judgment’, as espoused by H.B Higgins (and with aninitially ambivalent reaction from the labour movement) stressed both the importanceand requirement of independence for the white male ‘productive’ worker. This wouldbe achieved through the payment of ‘fair and reasonable wages’—a basic wage—disconnected from a direct relationship to the market (Capling, Considine andCrozier 1998, 122). This is what Castles (1985) would later famously describe asthe ‘wage-earner’s welfare state’.After the Great War, the concept was ‘infused with spiritualism’ in the icono-

graphy of the (ANZAC) citizen-soldier. However, the events of the 1930sDepression provided a major setback for the ideal (Capling, Considine andCrozier 1998, 123)—and the capitalist economic system as modified by the com-promises between a ‘socially harmonistic’ labourism and ‘humanising’ social lib-eralism—as the link of work to independence was almost terminally severed. Withthe Depression firmly in mind, national politicians, bureaucrats and key unionistsset about revitalising the ideal (a major rebuttal according to Maddox (1998) forthe idea of a monolithic settlement) in terms of post-war reconstruction.Both sides of politics spoke a language of economic independence—sharing

the common desire and commitment to full employment. For the ALP, its chieflabourist concerns were viewed largely through the prism of modernity (with itsemphasis upon planned national economic development and the rationalisedmarket) focusing upon the male industrial worker: ‘citizenship as labour force par-ticipation’ (Capling, Considine and Crozier 1998, 125). In 1943, Labor sympathi-ser C.E.W. Bean (1943, 21, 92), and very much within mainstream labourism,stated that egalitarian citizenship should entail:

a vision of industrial organisation, education and machinery so improved as to

allow eventually, not higher dividends and issues of bonus shares, but cheaper

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goods and higher wages and salaries and shorter working hours . . . We wish to

see foreign travel come within the life of every citizen, his wife and family,

even the poorest . . . We do not want a land in which the leaders of industry, art,

politics . . . will grow very rich.

This view of citizenship, relying upon a rationalised version of the market guided bythe state in conjunction with private enterprise, promised:

a social structure not pyramidal but cubic, each citizen standing straight, head high,

enjoying whatever external advantages are open to the highest and recognizing the

same responsibility as they.

Citizenship was more than anything else a state of mind, suffused in abstract valuesand ideals. Wartime ALP Prime Minister John Curtin and his Treasurer and post-warleader Ben Chifley both stressed the importance of work and duty to moral citizen-ship. Independence was central to the wage-earner’s sense of self-worth. In Chifley’swords, ‘Self-respect is born in people who have the opportunity to work and thatbenefits the community of which they are members.’The twentieth century and more clearly the post-war citizen took shape against an

environment in which ‘state practices were designed to meet the interests of the idealautonomous white man’ (Grimshaw et al. 1994, 3). This meant that Australia becamea specialist in ‘workers’ welfare’—with both major parties committed, at least untilthe 1970s, to full employment, stable economic growth, and a wages system builtaround compulsory arbitration and unemployment relief. The labour market wasseen as the primary mechanism of wealth redistribution (Capling, Considine andCrozier 1998, 124). The consequences were that broader rights of citizenship wereignored and welfare was targeted rather than universal (possibly encouragingelements of passivity).Post-war conservatives, known variously as the United Australia and the Liberal

Parties, were also haunted by memories of the Depression. Menzies’ vision ofpost-war liberalism connected with many labourists’ concerns, yet was couched invery different language. As Brett has noted, politicians and parties use politicallanguage to ‘convince particular groups in society to see, feel about and act in thepolitical world in certain ways, and to win support for the speaker as the represen-tative of those ways of seeing and feeling’ (Brett 1993, 25–6). Menzies aimed attransplanting the values of his own cherished middle-class—‘of self-help and self-improvement, of thrift and hard work, of orderliness and lawfulness’ into a nationalmodel of citizenship—‘home-centred independent individualism’ or ‘citizenship ashome ownership’ (Capling, Considine and Crozier 1998, 124–5). Whilst not definingthe citizen as such, Menzies (1943, 106–8) imagined the ideal male citizen-worker,‘Mr Jones’, as characterised by his and his families’ ‘values’:

John Jones has worked hard all his life. He has never enjoyed a large income, but on

his salary. . . . He and his wife have acquired a home. They have brought up a

family. They have undergone real sacrifices in order to give the best possible edu-

cation to that family. They have been good citizens, and have contributed a family

of good citizens to their country. . . . If we are to retain our virility, our pioneering

spirit . . . we must put a premium on saving and on independence; we must not

penalise them.

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Whilst labourism contingently embraced modernist development within its indus-trial citizenship, Menzies’ social liberalism/conservatism cast a more wary eye, per-ceiving ‘mass society as anonymous, depersonalised, a place of ruthless modernrationalisation’ (Capling, Considine and Crozier 1998, 124). The key difference,however, was to be found less in policy and substance than in language—thoughagain both emphasised work’s relation to independence. For Labor, work was anexpression of independence, but for Liberals it was a fundamental means of realisingindependent character. Both parties expressed a nation-building language, Labormore robustly, with a traditionally collective (trade union derived) inflection, thanMenzies: ‘Each had a lexicon which cast independence, work and state sponsorshipinto a distinctive constellation’ (Capling, Considine and Crozier 1998, 125). Theindependence ideal was re-worked in contradiction, incorporating newer elementsof Keynesian macroeconomics with older traditions of Australian statism (Capling,Considine and Crozier 1998, 124) or ‘developmentalism’.Despite ongoing debates amidst an ostensible bipartisanship, it is argued here

(and expanding upon Brett (2001)) that the conservative side of politics not onlypossessed the citizen but also effectively ‘captured’ the independence ideal of citi-zenship. This is to be expected, as independence was increasingly in ideologicalalignment with Australian liberalism, but it is also ironic, for the ideal originallycalled upon the notions of egalitarianism of the early radical nationalist school(Scalmer 1999, 9–13) but was increasingly imbued with a pragmatic conservatismafter the 1930s and the shock of the Depression. It was also Labor’s rhetoric ofpracticality, deriving from a mythology of the practical man and politician of the pre-vious century, which meant that Labor pragmatically chose not too employ thisabstract terminology (Scalmer 1997, 301–11).The citizen was transformed into a civic identity that, according to Liberals,

extended beyond the simplistic and fractious calling of class. It is no coincidencethat the independence ideal has been re-interpreted and re-asserted after times ofso-called national economic crisis or instability: the 1890s Depression, the 1930sDepression (albeit with a lag induced by another ‘crisis’, the Second World War),and the 1980s and 1990s economic restructuring. At each moment, the Australianmiddle class saw its existence as tentative, framed by threats, of which it was conti-nually reminded by like-minded politicians such as Menzies eager to occupy the roleof spokesperson. Just as the 1890s Depression forged a persistent national legend,that same economic calamity also helped consolidate an ideal of citizenship thatwould resonate and adapt contingently over the next century. However, the politicalRight appropriated much of the related populist citizenship rhetoric, despite Labor’snatural affinity for citizenship’s general ethos, with its relevance to the dominantsocial harmony tradition of historical labourism.21

The competing traditions of the Liberal Party, social conservatism and socialliberalism, have, in practice, most often appealed to and drawn upon a language ofcitizenship. Menzies’ re-born conservatives, seeking to build a new constituency,prioritised the middle-class ‘home’ (and family) and ‘work’ not as mere labour butas the realisation of middle-class values of thrift and accumulation. Menzies’ post-war social liberalism emphasised ‘independence out of adversity’ (Capling,

21 The labourist belief in social harmony essentially suggests that Labor can successfully manage thecapitalist economy for the benefit of the working class. Class conflict is not inevitable and can be ame-liorated through the economic and political actions of the ‘neutral’ state.

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Considine and Crozier 1998, 126). At its core was the aim of home ownership, whichstruck a chord not only with Menzies’ middle classes but also with the materialaspirations of working-class Australians. Suburban home ownership as independenceconnected with one of the more persistent themes of Australian history, the conflictover, and importance of, land (ownership) (Melleuish 1994, 155).22

At the same time, other new, sometimes contradictory, forces were transformingcitizenship. Consumerism and challenges to a monocultural Australia after large-scale post-war immigration were layering the citizen with new meanings. The elec-tion of the Whitlam ALP government in 1972 and the increasing desire for cultural(national) ‘independence’ re-positioned the citizen as cosmopolitan Australia(Capling, Considine and Crozier 1998, 127). In many respects the Fraser Liberalgovernment continued this trend, and in fact consolidated the policies of multicul-turalism and loosening ties from Britain. If we compress the years after Fraser, asboth major parties shared a common desire of neo-liberally minded economicreform, the independence ideal appeared radically reshaped, at least within the insti-tutional tools at hand. As the ALP’s commitment to full employment seeminglywaned, despite its continuing and at times celebratory desire and confidence tomanage the capitalist economy, independence became increasingly understoodthrough a new Australian identity.This liberal cosmopolitan position held by then Prime Minister Paul Keating

argued for a re-conception of national identity, ‘enmeshed’ in trading relationshipswith Asia, and the removal of explicit ties with Britain. For Keating (1996), citizen-ship was integrally bound up within his new story and the national identity he wasattempting to tell. The citizen was evidently faced with a choice:

We can enter the new century a unique country with a unique future. We can enter it

prosperous and dynamic: a diverse and tolerant society, trading actively in Asia and

the rest of the world; secure in our identity . . . If we hesitate; if we look back and

say: well, there is the past on the one hand, and on the other hand there is the future,

and the choice is not exclusive; let us ponder, let us form a committee, let us have a

convention, let us listen to what our rump has to say, let us drift—if we do that, we

will lose the chance. There really is no limit . . . So long as we move quickly.

The important notion in Keating’s language was speed. Australian citizens couldeither move quickly or risk ossifying. Keating’s ‘story’ of a socially harmonistic,collective capitalism—a rather debatable ‘modern Australian social democracy’enshrined a citizen in flux, speeding along the information superhighway towardsa modern free-trading and hopefully republican Australia, comfortable withinAsia. Against this rapid change, the election of the Howard government in 1996,by an electorate showing signs of reform fatigue, witnessed a renewed interpretationof citizenship as liberal independence. Howard railed against challenges to nationalidentity, making the implicit argument that the political culture of mainstreamAustralia was highly resilient and marked, according to Hage, by the existence ofa ‘social essence’ (Hage 2001, 27–31).23 This static view of culture and valuesinvoked older moral images, and made a clever, renewed call to independencethrough Howard’s so-called ‘battlers’. This political rhetoric was a complex

22Melleuish (1994, 155) characterises this as ‘domestic private freedom’, a ‘form of individual libertyemphasising escape from the pressures of the world rather than positive engagement with that world’.23 See also Markus (2001).

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construction not easily reducible to economically deterministic categories. Howard’smoral and pragmatic vision of citizenship was closely related to other (cultural)debates in contemporary Australian society, but invariably turned, as citizenshiplanguage often does, to the debates surrounding national identity.National identity has often provided the marker for past and future conceptions of

citizenship. One particular dimension of the seemingly endless ‘quest’ for an essen-tial and possibly futile Australian identity holds our attention in regards to thedominant independence ideal. The angst-ridden ‘national legend’, which Macintyre(1999, 130) describes as arising out of the class conflict of the 1890s, has indeed‘exercised a powerful hold on succeeding generations’. That powerful iconographyidealised both an ‘interior’ and a ‘national type’—‘With the nomad bushman wereassociated fierce independence, fortitude, irreverence for authority, egalitarianismand mateship—qualities that were no sooner punished in the bush unions than theywere claimed for the nation at large’ (Macintyre 1999, 131). Initially used by theLeft as emblematic of past and current struggles, the myth was subsequently utilisedacross the political spectrum. On the other hand, commentators from Hancock24 toCollins have ascribed the composition of citizenship as owing to a distinctive andessential national character steeped in notions of a pejorative utilitarianism. Thesettlement becomes the logical though perverted expression of national identity—lamented by Hancock but simultaneously mythologised by the radical nationalistwriters of the Old Left.25 As argued above, utilitarianism is only a partial explanatorytool. National identity was originally conceived and romantically iconised byLabourites and radicals as a tool with which to castigate the aspirant ruling class,and so-called middle-class fellow travellers (who would eventually disappoint thepreviously sympathetic labour movement). Yet we can see that it was consciouslyand unconsciously inverted against the working classes (and other constitutive iden-tities such as race and gender) by promulgating the populist myth of classlessnessagainst the glaring consequences of a delayed though cautious Australian modernity.This contradiction, redolent of what some title the ‘abstract egalitarianism of citizen-ship’,26 is summed up by Castles (1992, 9):

On the one hand it was an attempt to assert populist values against the ruling class

and the state. On the other, it was an officially propagated image, useful to conceal

the reality of a highly stratified, bureaucratised and increasingly urbanised society.

The legend grew in contradiction, given Howard’s recent, impassioned defence ofthese values and beliefs—such as the ‘fair go’ and ‘mateship’—against the Left’sso-called ‘elitist’ cultural attitudes.The most contradictory element to this national mythology was the way major

parties revered the inherent qualities of this legend even though that figure, the

24 Tim Rowse’s Australian Liberalism and National Character (1978), remains the most incisive cri-tique of the intellectual methodology and persistence of Hancock’s view.25 For example, Brian Fitzpatrick, The Australian People, 1788–1945, 2nd ed., Melbourne UniversityPress, Carlton, 1951; Robin Gollan, Radical and Working Class Politics: A Study of Eastern Australia,1850–1910, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1960; Russel Ward, The Australian Legend, OxfordUniversity Press, Melbourne, 1958. While Humphrey McQueen, A New Britannia: An Argument Con-cerning the Social Origins of Australian Radicalism and Nationalism, Penguin Books, Ringwood, 1970is the more well known, a more dexterous and important critique is Stuart Macintyre, ‘Radical Historyand Bourgeois Hegemony’, Intervention no. 2, 1972: 47–73.26 See Nairn (1980) and Anderson (1977).

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‘muscular/digger/lifesaver’ was originally constructed as working class, as a‘battler’. Without contradiction, however, was the maleness of this national type.Thornton argues that citizenship displays a partiality to benchmark men: white,Anglo-Celtic, able bodied, heterosexual and middle class (Thornton 2000, 48).Thornton’s class treatment is problematic if applied uncritically to the Australianexperience. The legend held up a form of benchmark male, though conservativessimultaneously admonished the material and collective ends that those actions(and languages) sought to achieve. Working-class men were a part of this benchmarkwhen imbued with a middle-class and liberal values system. This unrealised newworld dream extended post-federation, for as Stokes (1997, 10) asserts: ‘whereveridentity is given prominence there exists a continually unfolding politicalproject based upon unrealised ideals and aspirations’. Moreover, with reference tothe persistence of an independence ideal, and Howard’s ‘colonisation’ of the‘battler’:

political thought offers a reinterpretation of the past from the perspective of a

particular present, and articulates a vision of a future . . . That future, however,may be based upon visions of community life to be found in mythical or romantic

conceptions of the past . . . (Stokes 1997, 10–11)

As legal understandings of citizenship remind us, discourses of national identity inAustralia have been layered with the additional notion of British identity. Referencesto the British dimension have diminished through the century as the Empire fracturedand Britain sought refuge in the European Common Market. Until the Second WorldWar, the ‘Britishness’ of the Australian citizenry was a given, on both sides of poli-tics. This did not mean that British characteristics were not still idealised, but in factbecame more obscure, indirect and contradictory. The stressing of a common lawexplication of rights, a strong continuum between Menzies and Howard, is onesuch example. Despite this increasing irrelevance, their language focused around acommonly imagined set of mainstream values and beliefs. These beliefs were heldto be in a continuum derived from the strengths and traditions of British West-minsterism and common law adapted to contemporaneous Australian conditionsand values.While national identity and race were obvious markers, the construction of the

citizen as a moral being, imbued with particular values, ideology and characteristics,was also essential. This derived from independence, as the citizen who achieved, or atleast sought independent economic and social security at arm’s length from the state,was cast as virtuous. As Brett (2001, 424) has argued, ‘Service, duty and obligationwere . . . central to the meaning of citizenship in Australia for much of the twentiethcentury.’ This moral type was inevitably and intimately linked with ongoing liberaland conservative arguments positing the existence or desirability of a ‘classless’ or‘co-operative’ society. In 1909, Alfred Deakin claimed the desirability (and indeedpossibility) of the classless society, in terms of the working man’s sense ofallegiance:

the working man is not merely a working man, nor can all his interests be subsumed

(classed) under the term Labour. The working man is and knows himself to be, the

citizen of a great State.

In 1943, Menzies, positioning himself as the great defender of the ‘unorganised’middle classes, repudiated the ‘false class war’. Howard made similar ‘celebratory’

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claims throughout the 1990s.27 In this continuing paradigm, the citizen is divested ofall potentially antagonistic class characteristics—acquiring a homogenised nationalidentity centred upon working-class idealism, yet tempered with more traditionalProtestant and conservative middle-class ethics. Brett (2001, 424) has referred tothe term citizen’s ‘partisan’ dimension: citizenship was ‘embedded in non-labour’sclaim to political virtue, in contrast to its representation of the ALP, committed tothe self-interested pursuit of sectional claims regardless of the national interest’.The ALP and wider labour movement were apparently more interested in ‘thepeople’, in general a pragmatic and populist pre-text signifying ‘workers’.28

Whilst I agree with Brett’s central analysis, Labor—as evidenced throughlanguage—also sought to govern in the ‘national interest’, and used a form of popu-list and ‘practical’ citizenship language—what Johnson (1989) describes as its‘socially harmonistic’ beliefs—realised in the historically contingent labouristpolicies towards wealth creation, wages policy and the private sector. Indeed, extend-ing Scalmer (1997), Labor may actually have bequeathed non-labour with theabstract term, as it sat uneasily with Labor’s claims to a (language of) practicalpolitics. Here, work was central, both to individual citizens and cooperative nationbuilding. However, as Beilharz (1994, 39) reminds us, ‘the limits of labourism,generally speaking, is that its sense of politics or of citizenship has historicallybeen governed and circumscribed by economics’. Labourism conceived of theworking class in a homogenising, highly gendered, and exclusionary model. Brett(2001, 425–9), however, demonstrates that non-Labour repeatedly located citizen-ship in ‘moral qualities, political virtues and social skills’—emphasising passivity,loyalty, obedience to law and a vague sense of duty. Political rights were not whatdefined a citizen but what flowed from the behavioural characteristics of the‘good’ citizen: ‘Citizenship was not conceived of primarily as a status conferredby the state, but as an attribute carried by individuals to their relationship withthe state.’ The slippage, as Brett (2003) notes, between sectarian and racialistimages was one such consequence. Thus non-labour took possession of the moral,ideal citizen.The ways in which Menzies and Howard pitched their conception of citizenship

are remarkably similar. Both consciously aimed at the ‘middle classes’ as part of a‘language of grievance’ (Brett 1997, 13). Menzies’ ‘forgotten people’ andHoward’s ‘battlers’ imagined a widely defined and fluid middle class refractingboth leaders’ idealised citizenship.29 On both occasions, that rhetorical constituency,despite the way each leader staked out a role as ‘life or death’ defender, wasaddressed in name only momentarily. Menzies used the ‘forgotten people’ onlyonce in 1942 and Howard largely used the term ‘battler’ during 1995 and 1996,before slowly withdrawing its use and meaning. The political psychology is

27 See, for instance, John Howard’s ‘Federation Address: “The Australian Way”’, 28 January 1999,Brisbane, available at <http//www.pm.gov.au/news/speeches/1999/federationaddress2801.htm>.28 Indeed Brett (2001, 425) suggests that ‘Labor’s failure to exploit the radical potential in the term“citizen” is perhaps the obverse of non-labour’s loss of “worker” to Labor despite the centrality ofwork and the work ethic to its understanding of moral virtue.’29 Green (1997) suggests that rather than explaining the loss of the ALP’s traditional working-class basethe battler is actually the (loss of support of the) swinging voter. Whilst I agree that the battler is notexclusively working class, it is more accurately a fluid category, successfully applied and identifiedwith across class lines, because it centres upon values, attitudes and grievances rather than economiccircumstance.

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remarkably similar and equally successful. The liberal citizen was defined, anddrawn into battle with variously defined threats. For Menzies this largely entailed‘socialistic’ post-war ALP planning, which, via its legislation of an ‘Australiancitizenship’,30 challenged the British Empire and common subjecthood, and com-munism’s threat to a natural and stable liberal social order. Howard drew uponthis tradition, defining his citizen against the (ALP’s) elitist and cosmopolitanchallenge to constitutional monarchy and Australian political culture as defined bypolitical correctness and republicanism. Refugees became the physical embodimentof globalising threats to that political culture and the moral realm of citizenship(Dyrenfurth 2003). Each constituency was addressed as an ignored, aggrieved collec-tion of autonomous actors, yet the technique logically ceased when that leaderattained power: voters and citizens aren’t supposed to be ‘forgotten’ or ‘battling’once a leader has the power to act (Brett 1997, 13).I have presented an argument emphasising the importance of language as defining

the possibilities of thought and action, and addressing some of its most commonthemes. Language has helped shaped the contours of Australian citizenship wherethe definition and parameters of its substantive and legal forms have been unenun-ciated or poorly understood. A methodological approach through language presentsvaluable insights into our past and present understandings of citizenship. A singulardefinition has not and is unlikely to be found. The law is unlikely, given public apathyand conservative dislike for a bill of rights type document, to be the future source ofdefinition. In any case, the ‘limits of rights speak’ (Capling, Considine and Crozier1998, 152–3) cautions us against an uncritical adherence to abstract and universalis-tic formulations. Nevertheless while the ‘backbone’ of citizenship is indeed missing,citizenship rights have been the source of haphazard development through commonlaw interpretation, legislation and administrative practice, and the public discourse,contingently reacting to the interplay between political culture and economicideology.Political leaders, mainly men in the Australian experience, have used this language

to legitimise their own projects as part of a practical espousal of ideology. As a result,the citizen has tended towards a social construction, not detached from reality butimagined as a particular type imbued with certain values and characteristics. Overthe course of the last century the citizen was imagined and constructed as a (classless,cooperative or dutiful) citizen-worker, closely but somewhat contradictorily linked tothe ongoing existence of a powerful national mythology, which gave primacy to therole of white men in the story of nation building. The moral citizen, perhaps anongoing cue for passivity, was imagined within a language of masculine economicindependence, providing the framework for a bipartisan public policy approach.The independence ideal of citizenship has exercised a powerful and continuinghold flavoured by a bipartisan advocacy of social harmony, though very differentlyconceived and pursued by the two major parties.Just as citizenship has been rediscovered, so too has language. The power of

language within the Australian experience of nation building is slowly beingacknowledged. My argument is one such example. Political discourses are histori-cally contingent, consciously and unconsciously understanding the citizen’s histori-city, and are ideological in the sense that the citizen is imbued with a leader’sself-interpretation of tradition and ideology. For past and current Australian Liberals

30 This centred upon the Chifley government’s Nationality and Citizenship Act 1948.

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the autonomous citizen is often imagined as an inclusive figure—the gateway to andexpression of liberal and virtuous citizenship. Labor’s current citizen is a confusedidea—swaying between the older, romantic ideas of historical labourism and therights-based claims of the new social movements. Themes of exclusion continueto challenge the relevance of the citizen on both sides of politics. If new, meaningfullanguages of inclusion are not developed, the older notion of the egalitarian citizenwill increasingly ring hollow. An Australian citizenship based upon a language ofimagined threats and giving primacy to variously defined superior types will continueto encourage exclusionary and nostalgic discourses.

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