"Visiting the Margins: Revenge, Transgression or Incorporation -- An Australian engagement with theories of identity"

This article was initially inspired by the dilemmas that arise when, as an Australian political theorist, I attempt to apply selected North American or British theories of identity to Australian examples. Those theories can be both surprisingly applicable and frustratingly inappropriate. Yet, Australian examples provide a fascinating case study, and an interesting test case, because of Australia’s complex and contradictory locations. Australia is a (maybe) post-colonial settler society engaging, however unsuccessfully, with the legacy of invasion and consequent issues of reconciliation with Aboriginal peoples. Australia is also an extremely multicultural society, transformed by mass post-war immigration and attempting -to come to terms with the legacy of Anglo-Celtic dominance and a White Australia policy. We are a traditionally vulnerable economy internationally, one which was originally shaped by British colonialism and which never quite developed manufacturing industry sufficiently to be properly called post-industrial, yet we are trying to survive deindustrialization and globalization. Australian society challenges European and North American timelines and periodizations. Terms such as “North” or “South,” commonly used to describe the contradictions between “developed” and “developing” nations, are also singularly perplexing from an Australian geographical perspective. Australia is a society that predominantly saw itself as British and European, situated in the Southern hemisphere immediately adjacent to an economic revolution in Asia that is challenging traditional white economic dominance. At the same time, successful legal challenges by Aboriginal people are undermining settler certainties of Australian land ownership. We are a society where social movements based around gender, race, ethnicity and sexuality had, until recently at least, achieved unusual success in changing social values and in influencing the policies of state and federal governments.¹ For all these reasons, issues of identity are both particularly pressing and problematic in Australia. They are also issues which Australian governments have been forced to confront quite explicitly in debates over national identity. Consequently, Australia is a particularly interesting spatial point from which to engage with North American and British theories of identity. This article will give a brief background account of Australian government interventions in the politics of identity before proceeding to analyze the implications of the Australian experience for general theories of identity.

Australia’s current federal Liberal government won office in March 1996 after thirteen years of Labor rule. The Liberal Party is Australia’s equivalent of the Republicans or the British Conservatives. John Howard, the Liberal Party Prime Minister, came into office stressing the huge uncertainty many Australians were feeling in the light of economic changes associated with globalization and rapid technological change.² It is worth noting that this sense of uncertainty itself only makes sense from the point of view of prior privilege. As Doreen Massey has pointed out in her analysis of globalization, feelings of uncertainty, disorientation, of boundaries being penetrated and of a lack of control, of ten associated with the postmodern condition, in fact only make sense from the point of view of privileged sections of the population within the first world. They have been felt by the colonized for centuries, as they have been felt in somewhat different form, by marginalized groups in so-called first world countries, e.g. women.³ As we shall see, the Howard Liberal government and the Keating Labor government have responded to the challenges facing Australian society in different ways. The Howard government has attempted to restore existing privilege and subordinate marginalized identities and the Keating government responded by attempting to develop an inclusive conception of Australian identity that could incorporate marginalized identities. Both of these projects have been ones that, in different ways, privileged economic conceptions of national and personal identity.

The Keating Labor Government (1991–6), and its Labor predecessor, the Hawke Government (1983–91) were both determined to open Australia up to external economic competition in a period of globalization. Consequently, they introduced policies which deregulated the economy, drastically reduced protection, cut real wages, cut the welfare state and privatized or corporatized significant elements of the public sector. In this respect, they are undoubtedly the most right-wing post-war Australian Labor Government. On the...