The lost generation

 

our national narrative once inspired generations of Australians and gave them hope for the future. but that has changed, with young people today increasingly pessimistic despite growing up in the most technologically advanced and prosperous society in human history. by alexander downer.

First published in the Australian Financial Review.

Just imagine parents sitting around the dinner table telling their children their family is a disgrace, they despise their grandparents, that their forebears were cruel and indolent.

Imagine how the children would grow up. Would they be imbued with a sense of optimism, hope and enthusiasm? Or would they be despondent, pessimistic and fearful of the future? I think you know the answer.

Yet that is what we’ve started to do as a country. Once, we were immensely proud of our achievements, of building a successful economy from scratch, setting up stable, lasting democratic institutions without revolutions or civil war. We lauded the courage and success of our servicemen and women in war, and we honoured our great scientists, artists and doctors.

This national narrative inspired generations of Australians. It gave us confidence that in the future we could do still better. It inspired hope.

The narrative has changed. We are told to be ashamed of our past. Our story, we are now told, is a story of invasion, cultural genocide, exploitation and environmental vandalism. Indigenous Australians lived a life of perfect social harmony, responsible environmental management and were free of human frailty. And then along came the settlers from Europe with their dystopian culture and moral nihilism. We must repent for their sins and be ashamed of our country.

Not many would be familiar with the 17th and 18th century origins of this idea, often attributed to Rousseau. We’ve recently imported this old and tragic narrative from North America, of course. Over the past few years, this worldview has spread like that other toxic import, Paterson’s Curse. And as with Paterson’s Curse, attempts to control it are at best challenging and have the potential to be futile. The purveyors of a dark and tragic Australia are winning.

This matters, especially to young people. They’re brought up in the most prosperous, technologically advanced, healthy and long-living society in the history of the human race.

But how do the feel? They’re depressed, negative and pessimistic. They think the future will be worse than the past. An alarming number even subscribe to the old “end of the world is nigh” trope. Mental health has become a major problem and youth suicide rates have risen.

What is more, so indoctrinated are the Millennials and the Gen Zs that many want to restructure our economic structures radically and fundamentally change our institutions. Yet it is those very economic structures and political institutions which have given them so much.

Political commentators ponder why so few people aged under 30 vote for the Liberal Party? Why would they, if they’re told through their school years the whole country is a failure, a tragic mistake, a model of misogynistic exploitation, a racist legacy of colonialism etc. No wonder they like the iconoclastic, neo-Marxist Greens!

When I was briefly the leader of the Liberal Party, I described myself as a progressive conservative. By that I meant I believed we should savour what we’ve achieved, protect our institutions which have worked well, but change what isn’t working well. So I am conservative to the extent that I’m very cautious about changing what works. But I’m progressive in the sense that I’m not reactionary: sometimes change is needed, such as the economic changes through the 1980s to the mid-2000s.

The problem is, young people in particular are increasingly persuaded that our past is so bad almost nothing is worth preserving. We need radical change, a bloodless revolution!

Yet progressive conservatism has been the basic building material of modern Australia. We have been conservative enough to be sceptical of idealistic ideologies, and we have been cynical about passing political fashions. We have in the main mocked virtue signalling as nauseating, holier-than-thou hypocrites, and we have always been cautious of zealots who have some newfangled idea about changing our system of governance. But when needs must, we’ve changed things.

Two recent events have made me dwell on where we are going. A couple of weeks ago I was giving a lecture to 80 Argentine politicians and business people. In 1900, Argentina and Australia were among the three or four richest countries on earth. Today, Australia still is one of the very richest, but Argentina is about the 70th richest. Why?

You guessed it. They played constitutional roulette, gave public money to every seemingly worthy cause regardless of the cost, abandoned free trade, nationalised key sectors of the economy and gave the unions as much power as they wanted. This was the Peronist revolution, and they now can’t seem to escape its woeful clutches.

Then on Saturday, I watched the new King’s coronation. It was a glittering ceremony combining traditions which go back a thousand years with the technical and indeed social advantages of modernity. And Australians were prominently present as they should have been. Our society has partly evolved from that institution, but we now interpret it by vesting the powers of the Crown in the institution of governor-general.

Our evolutionary approach has been far more successful than those who in their enthusiasm to embrace some ephemeral fashion decide to make radical and irreversible changes. The Argentines did that.

So, where will Australia go? Either someone will pop up and get our country back onto its well-worn path, or we will make radical change which, by the way, will in time invite a radical backlash. That’s starting to happen in America. There was the aggressive progressivism of the Obama years which led to the madness of Donald Trump, which in turn led to the backlash which gave America a president who seems unsure of the day of the week. And what next? The country is now bitterly divided.

But back to where I began. If we can’t be grateful for the huge achievements of our forebears and recognise, flawed as they sometimes were, that on balance they created the world’s most successful country, then Australia too will embrace ill-considered radical change. But to avoid that will require great leadership.

I know what you’re thinking. It couldn’t happen here. Well, it’s happened in much of the world, and it could happen here if we keep teaching the next generation of voters we are nothing more than the shameful inheritors of an immoral and woeful state who need to change everything to atone for the crimes of our forebears.

Alexander Downer was Australia’s longest serving foreign minister and former Federal Leader of the Liberal Party.

 
CultureSusan Nguyen