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Howard, hegemony and values: the left and the problem of mateship: Nick Dyrenfurth argues that the left needs to reclaim mateship from the right.

Article Excerpt
John Howard's appropriations of ideals such as 'mateship' and the 'fair go' are pertinent examples of the intersection of symbolic and material politics, one the Left must seriously (re)contemplate in the struggle against contemporary hegemony. Looking at the historical peculiarities of the Australian political landscape through a consideration of the language used by the current Prime Minister might help clear away the ideological undergrowth.

Howard has recast shibboleths of Australian collectivism, presenting them as historically and presently individualist, acquisitive and naturally supportive of capitalist--and implicitly ruling class--canons. As Judith Brett rightly suggests in her Australian Liberals and the Moral Middle Class, Howard's opponents have been 'misled' by his self-description as a social conservative, neglecting his takeover of Australian radical nationalism. His often clumsy narrative of Australian mateship, egalitarianism and nationalism, rooted as it is in his distorted imagining of Australia's Gallipoli experience, immediately comes to mind.

The problem with Brett's account is that she stops there, neglecting to critique the very real ideological purpose and effect. Concomitant with this takeover, values hitherto understood as asocial or unhealthy are now regarded as common sense. Howard has metaphorically hijacked the discourses of collectivism and egalitarianism, colonising and inverting such belief systems with a perverse and ironic ethic of 'practical mateship'. The effect of this has been to empty the very meaning of the central symbols and rhetoric of traditional political discourse. Appeals to egalitarianism are a good example. Merely proclaiming or extolling egalitarianism's prominence in Australian history is enough to place it centrally in Howard's hegemonic idiom: 'the concept of mateship runs deeply through the Australian character'. It is perhaps Labor's greatest shame that over the past nine years it has allowed Howard to do so virtually unchallenged.

'Battler' is another. Howard's early seizure of the 'battler' was central to the symbolic colonisation...

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