Your child might die: the right to defy doctors orders
This is the first of a two-part debate by different members of the medical community on the topic of what is natural and what is reasonable when it comes to birth and a mother’s right to choose her delivery method.
Genevieve Tait worries that many mothers who insist on vaginal birth against medical advice are competing for a fraught badge of womanhood at the risk of their life and the life of their baby:
I recently spent some time working with an obstetrics team at a Melbourne hospital.
I just might have witnessed a new and unexpected Vagina Liberation movement – where women are so proud of their vagina’s capacity to deliver children that the organ has taken on an identity status all of its own.
I frequently saw women wax lyrical, and sometimes even territorial, about their vaginas and vaginal birth.
It would seem that vaginal birth has gone from a functional use of anatomy to a source of competitiveness and entitlement that can be life threatening for expecting mothers and their unborn babies. And birth has become some kind of holy experience, rather than the mechanism by which another life enters the world.
“Vaginal birth has gone from a functional use of anatomy to a source of competitiveness and entitlement that can be life threatening for expecting mothers and their unborn babies.”
I saw many expecting women assert their desire for vaginal birth, even when that birthing method posed particular risks for themselves and their baby. Some women refused to allow for any blood tests or examination in case the result triggered the doctor to recommend induction, early epidural, or C-section.
Every woman should have the right to make a choice about her birthing strategy and her body. This right is inalienable. But sometimes I worry that women get so concerned about how they are going to deliver the baby that they forget about the actual welfare of the baby.
I worry they forget that the obstetrician is trying to manage the health of two people, and so any recommendation coming from that doctor is intended to benefit two lives. Whether a baby first glimpses the light of day via the stomach, in a pair of forceps, or via the vagina, what matters is that the baby arrives alive and the mother stays alive.
If I had a dollar for every time I heard that “vaginal birth is the most natural thing you can do” I wouldn’t be suffering such crippling debt from my medical degree.
I hear it in the hospital, I hear it on the bus, I hear it from my clucky friends.
To me, this statement is absurd.
Vaginal birth is the best option for some mothers. If we were all to live only as nature intended it, we need only look as far as those less privileged parts of the world where medical intervention isn’t available – nature kills mothers and babies. If these women are so opposed to medical advice (a specialized body of knowledge that is naturally evolving over time), then when they next get pneumonia they should just cross their fingers and hope to get better, or press their palms together and pray.
The capacity of the female pelvis and vaginal canal to accommodate the passage of an enormous fetal head leaves only millimetres to spare – if you try to add 1cm of width by inserting a pair of forceps, you more often than not end up with a tear.
Attention base jumpers and other thrill seekers: try giving birth.
“Every woman is different – so it doesn’t follow that every birth should be the same.”
Every woman is different – so it doesn’t follow that every birth should be the same. And yet, somewhere along the line, these women seem to have internalised the pervasive and pernicious notion that without a vaginal birth they are less of a mother and less of a woman.
Where did they swallow this misinformation?
I point the finger in a few directions but I poke it at parenting blogs and forums. Not all of them. Some of them are great. But so many of them spew up little else than gossip mongering, anti-intellectual, fad-driven peer pressure for grownups.
And don’t get me started about the current trend for home births and all the YouTube videos they inspire. Here are women so desperate for low-intervention, non-clinical deliveries in settings where incense burning won’t set off the fire alarm, that they are willing to flout the fact that home birth doubles the neonatal death rate.[1]
Women are demanding natural births but often those women have bodies and health issues that are a long way from the idealised body type discussed in natural birth forums. Pregnant women today are often very physically different to the pregnant women of a few decades ago. Today’s expecting mothers are more likely to suffer from: high blood pressure, obesity, gestational diabetes resulting in very large babies, mental illness, drug addiction, age complications, and domestic violence. All of these factors complicate birth.
For a number of women I saw, their insistence on vaginal birth had very serious consequences that could have been avoided by way of an alternative birthing method.
I attended the prenatal visits of a severely obese forty-one year old woman who refused any prenatal care other than ultrasound as she clearly saw the obstetrician as some evil agent seeking to suck her baby out of her navel with a vacuum cleaner.
The obstetrician suffered this hostility with dignity and followed through with this worryingly well-rehearsed advice: it has been found that more than 50% of mothers who die giving birth are obese, and 30% of stillbirths or neonatal deaths were born to obese mothers[2]. She didn’t budge.
Another woman had been sent to the ICU after suffering eclampsia – she refused any tests that may have identified such a complication because she was adamantly opposed to undergoing C-section or induction.
Another woman’s baby suffered brain injury and renal failure due to the delivery delay attributed to her violent defense of her right to vaginal birth – despite her baby having a dangerously low heart rate in-utero.
These were not the only examples I encountered. And I worry this particular Melbourne hospital is not the only one where the Vaginal Liberation movement is gathering pace.
Ladies. Some of you will choose to push a baby out of it. Some of you will choose to smuggle cocaine in it. There’s no need to get lyrical about it. Good mothering in the lead up to and during the birthing process should be measured by the judiciousness of decision-making based on professional advice – not the diameter of your vagina.
This article is part of a debate on the right to defy doctor’s orders. Read the other side here.
Ethics in your inbox.
Get the latest inspiration, intelligence, events & more.
By signing up you agree to our privacy policy
BY The Ethics Centre
The Ethics Centre is a not-for-profit organisation developing innovative programs, services and experiences, designed to bring ethics to the centre of professional and personal life.
The Ethics of Online Dating
“Who here tonight has used online dating?” asked panel moderator Jackie Dent. Almost half the hands in the room, accurate for wider Australian demographics, shot up.
“Rather than the last resort, it’s become the logical first step. But it isn’t an even split between the sexes: it’s a buyer’s market for men”, said cyberhate researcher Emma Jane.
But even if half of us are doing it, most things digital tend to get tagged as ‘inauthentic’ and there’s still a stigma around online dating (less so with apps). So when it comes to creating a profile, what constitutes an ‘authentic’ representation of who we are? What we think is import to know about us is not always what other people think is important to know. Is it important to disclose the colour of your eyes? That you’re married? That you have HIV?
HIV activist Nic Holas generally recommends disclosing your HIV status up front so you don’t set yourself up for rejection, even though some people don’t want to disclose because it doesn’t give them a chance to fully explain their situation. “It’s only reasonable to disclose your status when sex is a sure thing”, said Holas. “In NSW, if you are HIV positive, you’re legally obliged to tell anyone who you intend to have sex with. But that’s not the case all over Australia.”
Does online dating make us racist?
The online space is a wonder world for niche interests and narrow preferences. If your thing is getting it on in a coffin, there’s “Vampire Passions” or if you just want to spoon-feed your lover quinoa salad, there’s “Gluten Free Singles”. But what if your thing is just ‘white guys’?
“No one would walk into a bar wearing a T-shirt that said ‘No Asians!’. But there’s no end to Grindr profiles with stupid lines like, ‘No rice, no spice, but black guys to the front of the line ;-)’”, said Holas.
“If you were approached in a bar by someone who is Asian, even if you don’t intend to sleep with him, there are plenty of ways to let him down without making explicit reference to his race – or for that matter, his height, weight, or HIV status.”
“You can’t feel empathy unless you’re in some way vulnerable. We’re still at an awkward early stage of a digital era that doesn’t really compensate for physical embodiment,”, added philosopher Matthew Beard. Which is kind of what Louis C.K. reckons when it comes to letting kids use text messaging: if you call someone fat but you’re not there to see how it hurts them, you don’t learn not to call people fat.
Which begs the question, is it fair to call it online dating when our ultimate judgments will always be made in person? Well, there are plenty of people using the likes of Tinder and Grindr to meet friends or just to chat. While there are sites like “Girlfriend Circles” that are designed especially for finding friends, the app market is still in waiting.
Can an algorithm know us better than we know ourselves?
But not everyone’s brutally honest about what they want. We might not want to admit to ourselves or to a computer that we have a racial preference, but the algorithm works it out pretty quickly. “After you’ve interacted with three people, that’s enough data for the algorithm to ignore what you said you want”, said algorithm scientist Luiz Pizzato.
“It’s like Clippy the paperclip popping up to say, ‘Hey, it looks like you’re being a bit racist. Let me help you with that”, added Beard. Only, everyone hated that overly enthusiastic paperclip so the algorithm uses stealth.
The most conventionally attractive people don’t necessarily get the most messages. “Most users assume that ridiculously good looking people will get flooded with messages, so they don’t message. Those people with looks that polarize, people who would get 10s and 3s in a hot or not challenge, are the ones who get the most messages”, said Pizzato.
Does online dating make us more likely to lie?
Both men and women add about five centimetres to their height and about 20% to their income when they fill out an online profile. And when you’re instant messaging on a device with a camera, quick verification snaps of “those extra inches in other departments”, added Holas, is standard practice for gay guys.
But not being 100 percent honest online isn’t an indictment of online daters’ morality, thinks Beard. “Online dating doesn’t inspire lying, it just exposes it. It holds a magnifying glass to the human experience of meeting people.” Who can honestly say they haven’t told a few lies or sweetened the truth on a first date?
Cheating
What do you do when you see a friend’s partner on a dating platform? And if you’re partnered, is talking to people online the same as flirting in a bar? “I think the best gauge of what counts as cheating is to ask yourself, ‘Am I comfortable telling my partner about this?’” said Holas.
While studies show that men are more likely to cheat in general, there isn’t much reliable research to conclude whether online platforms make cheating easier. “In any case”, said Jane, “something like five to 15 percent of children are not fathered by their biological father. So the idea that men are the only ones who cheat is clearly inaccurate.”
Scamming
The sharks are still lurking, but since the online waters have deepened and sites have more safety nets, they’re less of a threat. “Scammers often masquerade as religious people. They do this because they tend to then attract genuinely religious people who are often trusting and caring and then the scammer abuses that trust for money or a visa or whatever else,” said Pizzato.
What’s Next?
When there are too many online offerings, we tend to see a throwback. But it tends to be token, suggests Beard. “The resurgence of speed dating in hipster bars says more about their love of irony than anything else.” The shift to online dating is only going to gather pace as more and more services come onto the market.
What might those new services look like? “The gay community is always an early adopter market”, said Holas, “so you should expect to see heteros opening up to the idea of meeting new people in new ways soon enough.”
Ethics in your inbox.
Get the latest inspiration, intelligence, events & more.
By signing up you agree to our privacy policy
BY The Ethics Centre
The Ethics Centre is a not-for-profit organisation developing innovative programs, services and experiences, designed to bring ethics to the centre of professional and personal life.
The twin foundations of leadership
For all of the talk about the importance of leadership, relatively few resources are applied to its support and development. Rather, the bulk of investment flows into building and maintaining the infrastructure of management and control.
The scale of this investment in regulation and surveillance is easy to underestimate. For example, government regulation is just the tip of an iceberg of which private sector compliance programs make up the larger part. As such, some of the most prolific rule-makers in the land sit at the nation’s board tables. Fearful of their own liability and hungry for certainty, company directors feed (and are fed on by) a narrowly conceived culture of compliance.
Of equal concern is the way in which organisations are led to disguise their real preferences by applying comforting (but misleading) labels to their programs. The fact that a management program has the word ‘leadership’ in its title does not make it a leadership program. Yet programs of this kind abound. This observation is not meant to suggest that there is no longer a need for strong management programs. In fact, the opposite is true. However, if organisations are ever to realise their full potential, the technical competence of managers needs to be reinforced by the art of leadership.
That we do not do so, in any extensive or meaningful way, is due to a number of factors not least of which is, as noted above, the fear of personal liability amongst people in positions of power and authority. In some respects, their fear is well-founded. Society has recoiled against an earlier period in history when people running public and private sector organisations seemed to be beyond the reach of accountability, no matter how terrible the consequences of failures in governance. Unfortunately, society’s response has been largely uni-directional; placing the majority of its eggs in the ‘regulation and surveillance’ basket. This has stimulated a vicious cycle in which those subject to these controls have replicated the approach, across the system as a whole.
However, there are two deeper issues to consider. First, it may be that society has lost faith in the power of good leadership to shape events for the better. That is, rather than rely on the qualities of people, society has thought to ‘engineer out’ their frailties by creating a system that is finely regulated so as to prevent any person from choosing to do what is wrong. Rather, if all comply with the technical demands of the system, it is assumed, ‘bad things’ will not happen.
While this kind of thinking is understandable, borrowing as it does from utopian/dystopian fantasies (depending on your world view) of risk-free and perfect certainty, it stands in contrast to what we know of reality. Furthermore, the model of the ‘finely regulated system’ contains within it the seeds of its own failure. Rather than eliminating risk, such a system increases systemic risk (risk to the system as a whole) by reducing the capacity of any single actor to make good decisions when the system is sub-optimal in its performance.
The best analogy that I can think of for this risk is that of putting a person into a full-body plaster cast as a way of ensuring that they maintain a straight and steady posture. To the casual observer, this will seem to be a model of stability. However, unseen within the bounds of the cast, the person’s body will be changing; muscles wasting away to nothing for want of use and bones losing their load-bearing capacity. The more perfect the performance of the plaster cast, the more the degradation within. Should the plaster cast fail, the body within will be doomed to collapse. Of course, everyone knows that this true, even those who design, build and maintain the plaster cast. Their response is to patch, reinforce and refine the plaster cast.
However, there may be a second factor that limits our investment in leadership. Apart from not trusting the variable human dimension to leadership, it may also be that we no longer really understand what leadership involves and requires. It is this issue that will be addressed in the remainder of this article.
The most potent enemy of ethical leadership is unthinking custom and practice.
Defining leadership
There are many definitions of leadership from which to choose. The one that I find most compelling forms part of the doctrine of the Australian Defence Force. The ADF defines leadership as, “The exercise of influence in order to bring about the willing consent of others in the ethical pursuit of missions”.
I like this definition for a couple of reasons. First, there is an emphasis on influence and consent. There is nothing here about the exercise of power or insistence upon compliance. Second, it is striking that the military conceive of leadership as an ethical practice. That is, they do not aim to treat the ethical dimension as something that is to be ‘bolted on’ to leadership, as an ‘extra’ (optional or otherwise). Rather, ethics is an integral (and integrated) part of leadership. The reason for this is not hard to discern.
There is a telling maxim in military affairs, “no plan survives first contact with the enemy.” The profession of arms intersects with a world of rapid change, unpredictability, and lethal consequences. If you do not manage risk, then the consequences are not merely some dent to the ‘bottom line’ but quite possibly death or injury. Such hard facts concentrate the mind. The military have learned that this is why leadership, as defined above, really matters. When all of the carefully constructed systems and structures have broken down, the only thing that may stand between success and failure will be those human factors embedded in the quality of leadership.
Of course, it must be noted that the world of the military is one of extraordinary contexts and demands, in many a world apart from ordinary world of civilian life. Yet, for all of the very real differences, we should not ignore a core lesson. Investing in ethical leadership is the most effective way to manage risk.
But what does such leadership involve? What does it require of those who would lead? And are there any core lessons for leaders? In my opinion, good leadership is built on twin foundations: strategic vision and moral courage.
Strategic vision
There are three elements to strategic vision:
- The ability simultaneously to ‘see’ a situation at multiple levels. There is the ‘satellite’ level that reveals the larger picture within which specific issues are located. There is the ‘submarine’ level that reveals how specific issues are affected by ‘undercurrents’ that shape the operating environment. Finally, a leader with strategic vision sees things in the moment, being entirely ‘present’ to those dealing with specific issues or an evolving situation. As one might recognise, it takes a particular ‘presence of mind’ to operate simultaneously at all three levels. Yet this is something that good leaders can be trained to do.
- The ability to employ a kind of empathetic ‘moral imagination’ that places a leader in the shoes of key participants including, supporters, allies and foes. The capacity to ‘read oneself’ into a situation, to see events as others might see them and to understand the implications of these perspectives, is of considerable advantage to leaders. An important function of a leader is to bring such insight to bear on a situation as to enable and encourage others to proceed down paths that would otherwise remain obscured or closed to them.
- Being able to simultaneously ‘see’ a situation at multiple levels and employ ‘moral imagination’ gives rise to a third ability: the ability to perceive (or sometimes to create) ‘inflection points’. Inflection points are best understood as presenting opportunities to redefine the conditions under which success might be achieved. Those who perceive or create inflection points are not bound by a fixed description of a particular situation. Instead, they are more likely to see apparently fixed points as variables that can be reconfigured to provide new opportunities. Put simply, strategic vision allows leaders to see new possibilities not apparent to others.
Moral courage
The other foundation for leadership, moral courage, is made necessary by the fact that many individuals and organisations prefer the comfort of the familiar, even if ‘the familiar’ is outmoded and dangerous. Those who would lead must be prepared to challenge patterns of unthinking custom and practice that typically define the environment in which they work.
In most cases, if you ask people to explain their conduct, the typical response will be that “everybody does it this way” or that it is “just the way we do things around here”. That is, people will be either unwilling or unable to link what they do to a clearly articulated and understood framework of purpose, values and principles. Usually this tendency will be relatively harmless in its effects. However, in some cases, unthinking custom and practice will expose an organisation to risk if not ruin. And when all of the damage is done and people are asked to explain why they engaged in such ruinous conduct they will say, truthfully, that they did not see the risk at the time. Instead, what they saw will have been a world viewed through a limited lens, the lens of ‘the familiar’.
It is against this background that one of the defining roles of a leader is to engage in and foster acts of ‘constructive subversion’.
Constructive subversion undermines unthinking custom and practice by questioning the basis for perceiving the world through the eyes of ‘the familiar’. Such acts of subversion are not destructive because the task of a good leader is to help each organisation to become more like the thing it says that it wants to be. That is, leaders are not supposed to impose upon an organisation a personal or idiosyncratic view of what it should be. Instead, their task is to serve a defining purpose within a governance framework with core values and principles at its heart.
To do any of this, not least to question the often long-established precedents of unthinking custom and practice is to invite the disapproval of those with an investment in the status quo. Whatever the organisational structure, there is likely to be a majority who protect ‘the familiar’ and who will resist those who seek to probe and expose its limitations. That is why leaders need to draw so heavily on a reserve of moral courage.
This is not to suggest that people should be reckless in their style of leadership. Good leaders are not required to throw themselves onto the ‘funeral pyre of integrity’ whenever the opportunity arises. Effective leaders understand that there is more to be achieved than a few beautiful sparks arising from the embers of their career. While there will be times when a stand must be made as a matter of principle, leaders will draw on their capacity for strategic vision by sensing, by seeing how and when to prosecute a particular course of action. Thus moral courage, like all virtues, requires a leader to discern the ‘golden mean’ that exists between the twin poles of rash and foolhardy action and the procrastination of the coward.
Becoming a leader
Earlier, I proposed a distinction between the techniques of management and the art of leadership. I noted that both capacities are valuable–even essential–arenas for human development, but suggested that our society does a poor job of investing in leadership. Instead, we seem to be inclined to ‘re-label’ management programs with the word ‘leadership,’ and pretend that the issue is being addressed.
A sure sign of a mislabeled program will be that it is structured around exercises that take place within a formal learning environment. Having spent over two decades working with and developing leaders, I am convinced that the art of leadership only emerges as a result of experiential learning. Learning of this kind tests and refines a person’s leadership capacity within a crucible of ‘embodied experience.’ Understood in these terms, authentic leadership programs work over an extended period of time, exposing their participants to a range of experiences that challenge them physically, intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually. Ideally, participants meet each challenge and, in doing so, come to recognise their own latent capacity to lead when called upon to do so. The process of self-validation that comes about within a well-structured program is essential. A notional leader can have all of the technical skills in the world yet lack the self-belief necessary to risk taking up a leadership challenge.
This article is not the place to outline the kind of ‘curriculum’ that is better suited to the task of developing effective leaders. However there is nothing especially mysterious about the process. Indeed, the only real mystery in developing and implementing programs that build effective leaders is that so few organisations invest adequately in the task. Instead, most organisations adopt the comforting myth that leaders can be made ‘on the cheap’ and in a matter of weeks, largely spent within a training room.
Becoming a leader, regardless of one’s formal role in an organisation, requires time and practice, ideally accompanied by a small, supportive group of others making the same journey. Along the way, good leaders pick up some essential skills, including an ethical literacy that can be used to explain and inspire across varied audiences.
To conclude
The most potent enemy of ethical leadership is unthinking custom and practice. It is this that leads otherwise good persons to participate in or to tolerate evil deeds. Thus, an ethical leader will always seek to look beyond conventional morality in favour of the application of an ethical framework that is based on personal reflection and is authentically held as the basis for living a responsible life.
Ethical leaders are actively engaged in acts of ‘constructive subversion,’ subverting unthinking custom and practice in order to build organisations and communities that increasingly become more like the thing that they say they ought to be as flourishing human communities.
To lead in these terms is to court unpopularity, often from all quarters where the majority will prefer simple certainties and a quiet life based around comfortable habits. Thus the need for leaders to possess an unusually high degree of moral courage, as must be drawn on when even the leader may be plagued by genuine doubt about how best to proceed.
Under this model, the requirement for leaders is essentially personal in character:
- a well-formed (and informed) conscience
- a well-formed (and informed) intuition (there should be no tolerance of those who are too lazy or complacent to work towards the refinement of their intuition)
- the virtues of moral courage and humility
- respect for the intrinsic dignity of others
- a capacity for discernment (including strategic vision and empathy)
These are the attributes that inspire others to follow, willingly–even to a point of personal sacrifice. This is what lies at the heart of ethical leadership: the art of doing..
Ethics in your inbox.
Get the latest inspiration, intelligence, events & more.
By signing up you agree to our privacy policy
BY Simon Longstaff
After studying law in Sydney and teaching in Tasmania, Simon pursued postgraduate studies in philosophy as a Member of Magdalene College, Cambridge. In 1991, Simon commenced his work as the first Executive Director of The Ethics Centre. In 2013, he was made an officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for “distinguished service to the community through the promotion of ethical standards in governance and business, to improving corporate responsibility, and to philosophy.”
BY The Ethics Centre
The Ethics Centre is a not-for-profit organisation developing innovative programs, services and experiences, designed to bring ethics to the centre of professional and personal life.
The ANZAC day lie
A group of women in New Zealand, all in their 70s, dutifully get up early every morning in April. They have a cup of tea and bowl of cornflakes, feed the magpies in the backyard, and head out to the main street of their town.
They walk in small groups of two or three from business to business in their neatly pressed pants, politely speaking to shopkeepers and business owners about supporting their cause. They’re raising money for scholarships, to help young people attend university.
But these aren’t ordinary women. They’re refused and shouted at. Even the kindly old man at the butcher’s shop, who’s known them all their lives, won’t help them. Because they’re radicals. They’re threatening the system. They’re selling pretty little white poppies made out of fabric and green wire on ANZAC Day. Why?
For peace.
Take a three-hour flight across the Tasman Sea to Australia and we have the same problem. Any attempt to shift ANZAC Day to anything other than its carefully crafted script and dominant paradigm is seen as a threat.
Criticism of the manner of commemoration is deemed by some to be disrespectful, sacrilegious or, dare I say it, un-Australian. Those offended, however, often don’t see the criticism as separate to the individuals involved. They pair the two together despite their fundamental differences.
On this, Australian historian Mark McKenna is quoted as saying:
ANZAC has now become a dangerous tradition in which critical debate and political controversy are whitewashed. ANZAC engulfs dissent and division, burying any hint of disloyalty and deviance beneath the compulsion to be patriotic and stand by our troops.
Criticism of the manner of commemoration is deemed by some to be disrespectful, sacrilegious or, dare I say it, un-Australian.
What’s wrong with ANZAC?
“What’s wrong with ANZAC?” Marilyn Lake, the Australian historian, asks. “The militarisation of Australian history”.
The ANZAC myth is a calculated and deliberate distortion of Australian history to shape our collective historical memory, inform our schemas, and influence the way we look at the world.
The battle of Gallipoli is a tiny event in Australia’s history and in the war effort of WWI. Yet it’s promoted to be one of the most, if not the most, important day of the Australian calendar. It’s characterised as the birth of the Australian identity – as if to say that nothing at all happened in Australia until the ANZACs ran up that narrow beach to be pelted by bullets from Turkish soldiers who lined the sheer cliffs at Gallipoli.
Everything before 1915 is out. That’s Federation, the Eureka Stockade, a big chunk of the suffrage movement, and about 40,000 years of indigenous history. Lake says:
These commemorations have been taken over by delusions of national significance – that our values and national identity was born and shaped on ANZAC Day at Gallipoli – when in fact it is our civil and political history that has shaped our national democratic values.
Twenty years ago, most people expected ANZAC Day to disappear as the last diggers died, like other days of memorial. It probably would have – had it not been for former prime minister, John Howard. Howard, then newly elected, had always been interested in history and wanted to get away from the history wars that had dominated the 80s and early 90s.
To do this, he decided to open up a new front overseas. While he was not the first to start the process of the reinvention of ANZAC Day, he took on the issue as his own project, becoming its vanguard.
He undertook a deliberate process of re-education, led by the newly formed Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA), which was created in 1996, replacing the Repatriation Commission formed in 1917. The DVA had a much broader mandate than the Repatriation Commission, which had only commemorated people individually for giving their lives.
Since 1996, the DVA has worked on several key strategies:
- The identification of new national days of remembrance which mostly end up being new battles
- The refurbishment of war memorials and the building of new ones including war memorials for minority groups, long forgotten wars like the Boer War and the war effort of dogs and horses;
- Education about significant events and education in schools. Curriculum materials, prizes, videos and textbooks have been developed for this purpose.
- And community awareness campaigns that often focus on the collection of oral histories and medals for exhibition.
Peter Fitzsimons admits there was great renewed interest in ANZAC Day in the late 1990s. He is not convinced, however, that it was because of Howard and believes it is the quality of the story that has drawn people in.
Wearing his iconic red Che Guevara bandana standing in front of the crowd at the Opera House, FitzSimons solemnly declared that he is “Not a historian, … I speak from the heart and not from the head”. He spoke passionately about his connection to ANZAC:
On the ANZAC tradition, I was raised on it. My father was a soldier and my mother was an army physiotherapist.
He still makes it clear that although he came from a defence family, he was against the Iraq war and marched in the streets with the hundreds of thousands of other Australians.
Despite his opposition to the war, he is still determined to honour those who fell in Iraq through the vehicle of ANZAC – which he says has grown to encompass all veterans of all wars. After watching FitzSimons, it became clearer that he was using these individuals as a reason to justify the whole day. He did not separate them from the manner and system of commemoration which, arguably, provides a context for Howard more conducive to the politics surrounding the Iraq war.
The odd and distorted romanticism surrounding ANZAC Day and its attribution to the Australian identity may be because we don’t have an independence day. As Australia Day is becoming confused and recognised more and more as the day of British invasion, we go back to ANZAC Day. Even though it was the invasion of another sovereign territory, it escapes negative connotations.
For a day of military commemoration to be one of our most important national days, reveals the elevation of masculinity and militarism in Australian values and identity. All other groups – women, racial or religious minorities, Indigenous Australians – are excluded.
Attempts to include them in the day and the broader concept through the inclusion of other wars and conflicts are often redundant because of the ANZAC-centric focus, and constant remembrance of the mandated legend means Australians who meet the characteristics of the original ANZACs can be perceived as more Australian than others.
The Dardanelles campaign from the perspective of Keith Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch’s father and a war correspondent during WWI, was scathing. He wrote a damning letter to then Prime Minister Andrew Fisher while he visited the Gallipoli Peninsula, arguing that Australia was being used as a pawn, wasted and manipulated in the war efforts at the behest of the Allies. This dangerously contradicted the authorised propaganda coming out of the government.
Murdoch argued passionately that the ANZACs at Gallipoli had been victim to the poor strategic planning of the allied military leaders. This perspective received little genuine attention by the government of the day and has found itself lost beneath the concept of ANZAC. So too has the fact that ANZAC Day marks the date of the invasion of a sovereign territory, the Ottoman Empire.
FitzSimons, a passionate and engaged advocate of ANZAC and anti-Iraq War activist, remembers how shocked he was to learn this fact from a radio broadcast in 1999 while driving in his car.
The exclusion of these particular perspectives from our national ANZAC narrative is interesting when considering Australia’s role in more modern wars and our unrepresentative sense of importance in these foreign theatres. More importantly, it gives insight into our self-made narratives concerning the decisions to be involved in wars which disguise the power relationships between us and the US.
In a way, this reveals what is still deep in the psychology of Australians – the mindset of a colony. This relationship of empire and colony has shifted from the UK to US, particularly in wars since Vietnam up until now.
ANZAC reinforces our self-image as a greater power’s ally and aggrandises our need to unquestionably respond to their instructions and demands. Like in Gallipoli, we hope they will protect our national security, rather than looking inward and developing our own regionally based relationships and strategies.
Instead of recognising our role in conflict, which is often being the pawns of powerful empires, we ignore it and transform our participation into something much more palatable. Our national security policies over the years reflect this deep cultural understanding of our place in the world.
Hugh White from the Australian National University argued in The Monthly that, as we’ve continuously flitted between attempting to be self-sufficient and relying on the support of a great empire, we’ve ended up doing neither well. A colonial mindset means that while we’ve toyed with the idea of self-sufficiency, we can always be relied upon to look back up to the wisdom and strength of that great power.
The relentless commemoration, creation, and control of our collective historical memory has served to create a social backdrop where it’s easier to politically justify the wars our powerful friend wants to wage. Lake believes that the relentless and calculated commemoration of ANZAC has served to “naturalise and create a conducive environment for war”.
Although there are no parades of tanks down George Street on ANZAC Day or overt military breast-beating, the constant remembrance of war, alongside the controlled, unbalanced, and unrepresentative focus on our military history reinforces violence and military solutions as key options to resolve international conflict. We see the military as a feasible and successful mode of conflict resolution, but don’t look at the real cost of war.
Academic Tony Smith argues that:
[Our] reluctance to criticise the military has its origins in the notion that troops are risking their lives for us. A more realistic and non-militaristic view would acknowledge that while troops might well die for Australia, their primary role is to kill for Australia.
We are mindful that when we send Australian troops on overseas postings they could die for us but seem to ignore the reality that in order to do their jobs they must threaten to kill on our behalf, and sometimes do so.
This is the reality of war and its cost.
Criticising ANZAC is a serious thing. It isn’t just a criticism of the day and the commemoration. It’s a criticism about the exclusivity of the legend and what has been accepted to be Australia’s identity and birth as a nation. It’s a criticism of the folly of war and Australia’s role as a pawn in international conflict, a criticism of Australian defence policy, and a criticism of our relationship with the US.
Dissent from the mandated narrative is serious because it threatens power structures that stretch between the smallest of communities to the grandest of political theatres where geopolitical relations play out. These structures work to reinforce war and not peace, promote a white Australian identity rather than a multicultural one and fortify our inability to act in our best interests in foreign policy decisions.
This is what is wrong with ANZAC.
Ethics in your inbox.
Get the latest inspiration, intelligence, events & more.
By signing up you agree to our privacy policy
BY Belinda Lowe
Belinda Lowe currently works as a Field Organiser in the union movement. She has presented a dissertation at the Global Rethinking International Criminal Justice Research Initiative and has volunteered with a number of organisations including the Cancer Council, Amnesty International and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Lowe holds a BA in Communications and a Masters in Peace and Conflict Studies.
BY The Ethics Centre
The Ethics Centre is a not-for-profit organisation developing innovative programs, services and experiences, designed to bring ethics to the centre of professional and personal life.
Why have an age discrimination commissioner?
The Federal Attorney-General recently decided to amend the 2004 Age Discrimination Act to provide for a an Age Discrimination Commissioner in response to growing evidence of damaging discrimination on the basis of a person’s age.
This discrimination is all too widespread. It affects older people in the main, though people of any age, including young people, experience age discrimination at times.
We are increasingly aware that many able-bodied, keen and productive employees are forced out of the workforce in their early 50s, sometimes even before that, for no reason other than that the employer has bought into the idea, false as it is, that only younger people are dynamic, energetic and able to learn new ways of doing things.
This is age prejudice and it must be tackled.
Any form of prejudice in our society diminishes the person or the groups suffering from this discrimination and diminishes our society as a whole. At the Australian Human Rights Commission, our slogan is: ‘human rights—everyone, everywhere, every day’. We understand that a person’s human rights do not diminish because of their age, just as they should not be diminished because of their race, gender or in the case of a disability.
Australia has had laws against race, gender and disability discrimination for quite a long time. The Australian Human Rights Commission was established by law in 1986, to protect and advocate human rights and to work against illegal discrimination.
As our society and our law-makers came to understand the terrible damage done to individuals and to society by discrimination we have long been familiar with, they came to the recognition that there is another form of discrimination which potentially affects every single human being, and this is age discrimination.
When I think of the long journey we took in Australia to challenge and then to start to reduce discrimination on the basis of sex, I worry that it might take us another generation to get on top of age discrimination. But when I think this through, I come to the view that age discrimination is something we can challenge today and every day in many effective ways.
While it is always hard to get rid of deep-seated prejudices in society, we’ve all had a bit of experience in doing that and I hope we can learn from that experience and remove the burden of age discrimination quickly and completely.
At the Australian Human Rights Commission, my main tool in carrying out this work is the Age Discrimination Act 2004. Like other anti-discrimination laws, it makes illegal discrimination on the basis of age in fundamental areas including employment, finance, education, and goods and services.
The discrimination that is illegal and is causing great damage to individuals and to our economy is most strongly evident in employment.
The discrimination that is illegal and is causing great damage to individuals and to our economy is most strongly evident in employment. I have seen in my short period in this job a great deal of evidence that the mature age worker, and people from 45 are often categorised as mature age, is frequently subjected to workplace discrimination. This unfair treatment can lead to people in their early 50s finding themselves unemployed.
This can be a disaster. Because of age discrimination, people at that age have a very difficult time finding another job. They try hard, they submit many applications, but all too frequently they get knocked back without even an interview.
Of course at that age they are unlikely to have a lot of superannuation and they are not eligible for the age pension. They have to try to manage on the very low Newstart Allowance. Female employees can be in an even worse position because generally they have only small superannuation savings even if they are of an age that they can access their superannuation savings.
At the same time, employers throughout our economy, large and small businesses, are crying out for more skilled workers. Every day the media publishes stories about skills shortages holding back our economic growth.
Well, you might think the solution is obvious. It is in principle, quite obvious to me. Employers need to throw out their prejudices against mature age workers, look closely at the needs of their businesses, and the existing skills of their older workers, and see what steps they need to take to match the two.
In many cases, it will be simply a matter of providing their older workers with some training to upgrade their skills. In other cases, when they consult their employees, they may find that offering them more flexible hours, such as a shorter working week or a shorter working day, will ensure that the employees can keep their jobs and the businesses can continue to profit from their experience and loyalty.
The Hon. Susan Ryan AO was appointed Age Discrimination Commissioner on 30 July 2011. This is an extract from a speech she delivered to a Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission Forum on the Rights of Older People in Melbourne on 28 October 2011. You can read this speech in full at humanrights.gov.au
Ethics in your inbox.
Get the latest inspiration, intelligence, events & more.
By signing up you agree to our privacy policy
BY The Ethics Centre
The Ethics Centre is a not-for-profit organisation developing innovative programs, services and experiences, designed to bring ethics to the centre of professional and personal life.
Who’s your daddy?
“Discrepant paternity” – or what fathers’ rights discourses call paternity fraud – has become a rallying point for parts of the fathers’ rights movement. Though fathers’ rights groups have successfully engaged with the media and politicians to achieve desired changes to the family law system, what is novel is the use of paternity fraud discourse to achieve these ends.
Types of paternity fraud
Bureaucratic and fathers’ rights discourse use the term paternity fraud to refer to two distinct phenomena. The first is where non-biological fathers are assigned legal and fiscal obligations for children they have never parented and may not even have known existed. Men attempting to use DNA evidence of non-paternity to terminate such obligations are blocked by legal and/or bureaucratic obstacles.
The second referent for paternity fraud in fathers’ rights discourse is the discovery by a man in a married or de facto relationship, through deliberate or incidental genetic testing, that he is not the biological father of one or more of the children he is parenting.
In Australia, the case of Liam Magill is a classic case of what I will call ‘cuckold’ paternity fraud. Several years after separating from his wife Meredith, Magill subjected his three children to secretive DNA paternity testing that revealed that the two youngest were genetically unrelated to him. He successfully terminated child support payments for these children and, because he was in arrears for payments for all three children, was effectively offered a refund for previous amounts paid for the two when this debt was cancelled.
Despite this, Magill pursued a claim for compensation from his wife on the grounds of deceit. While a lower court awarded Magilla $70,000 for pain, suffering and economic loss, the Australian High Court eventually dismissed the case on the grounds that the tort of deceit was an inappropriate vehicle for remedying the wide variety of dissimulation that can occur in intimate relationships.
Motivations for testing
Father’s rights groups claim that between 10 percent and 30 percent of children are being parented by men who are unaware they are not the genetic father. These figures are used to support their contention that discrepant paternity is a widespread social problem in need of systemic address through changes to family law and policy.
Fathers’ rights discourse implies that men are the prime instigators of paternity tests in the face of duplicitous and resistant mothers. This depiction is particularly seen in the push by fathers’ rights groups for ‘motherless testing,’ or the testing of the child’s DNA without the mother’s consent.
In arguing in favour of the legality of this sort of testing, fathers’ rights advocates claim that any law requiring the consent of both parents would effectively deny fathers the ‘right to know’ because mothers with something to hide would always withhold consent for the child to be tested.
Fathers’ rights discourse articulates four ways in which paternity fraud cheats or defrauds men or children: first, by creating a relationship between a man and a non-biological child/ren; second, by stripping non-biological fathers of the resources they need to start another family in which they can create and raise biological progeny; third, by denying the biological father knowledge of his progeny and/or a chance to form a relationship with that progeny; and fourth, by denying children full and factual knowledge of their biological origins and the resulting opportunity to both form a relationship with their biological father and to gain knowledge of paternity genetics essential to their health.
The central claim of paternity fraud discourse is that a man’s relationship with a non-biological child does not constitute a real parent–child relationship, and that cuckold paternity fraud cheats or defrauds husbands of real fatherhood.
The causative agent in this fraud is the unfaithful wife who, through her sexual infidelity and subsequent failure to disclose it, causes the man to form a relationship with a biologically unrelated child that he wrongly believes – and has a right to expect – is his biological progeny. In its arguments in favour of compulsory DNA testing at birth, the group Men’s Confraternity reveals its understanding of authentic fatherhood as biological fatherhood:
“DNA testing should be a compulsory procedure at the birth of every child born to ensure that the correct father is registered. Paternity must be determined via DNA testing at birth because any man can be deceived into believing they are the father.” (Men’s Confraternity, 2006)
Citing figures impossible to confirm, the website Men’s Rights Online asserts that non-biological relationships between men and children provide no basis for legal paternity and its attendant fiscal obligations for children:
“The Court System … forc[es] males to continue paying child support for children that they are NOT the biological father of as DNA testing proves. It is also brought to the knowledge of the judges in the individual cases that DNA testing proves the male paying child support is NOT the biological father… A minimum of 1,600,000 (1.6 million) males are being forced to financially support children that they are NOT biologically related to.” (Men’s Rights Online, 2003–2006)
Implicit in much paternity fraud discourse are normative claims about the wrongs of female infidelity and subsequent duplicity with regard to it, and the potential reproductive consequences. Justice, the discourse suggests, requires men to be released from support obligations for children of the marriage not just because of the non-biological relationship between father and child, but because they have resulted from illegitimate female sexual and reproductive activity.
Paternity fraud discourse also asserts that, when biological paternity is wrongly ascribed to the social father, the biological father loses the opportunity to know he has a biological child and/or accept rights to and responsibilities for this child. The group Australian Paternity Fraud, for instance, claims that paternity fraud ‘victims’ include “the biological father that may not even know he is a father and who, when the deceit is uncovered, will suffer … mental … damage”.
Finally, it is asserted that paternity fraud denies children necessary knowledge of their biological origins, the chance to form a relationship with their biological father and the knowledge of paternal genetics necessary for optimal medical treatment.
At the heart of cuckold paternity fraud discourse is the claim that real fatherhood is biological fatherhood. However, neither this assertion nor assertions about the threat to children’s health posed by non-disclosure of paternal genetics stand up well to scrutiny.
Legal definitions of parenthood
DNA paternity testing is often credited with causing the paternity fraud phenomenon. When performed properly, DNA tests guarantee a 99.9% probability of paternity.
Legislators in both Australia and England see the commercial paternity testing industry as a means of reducing the cost to taxpayers of growing numbers of socially fatherless children. They understand that, while not all children have social fathers, they all have biological ones, and that the new testing technology could, for the first time in history, reliably identify these men.
Affordable and reliable genetic testing is available, and the legal and financial implications of test results for men, women and children are significant and profound.
Motivations to test
While research data are scant, those available suggest a variety of motivations for both men and women to undertake or consent to tests that lead to the discovery of discrepant paternity.
Counter to the picture offered by fathers’ rights discourse, such tests are not always undertaken by men in the face of the mother’s ignorance or resistance.
Discrepant paternity may be discovered via a genetic test taken for other reasons. For instance, genetic tests may be performed on the parents of a sick child to ascertain whether the illness is caused by a hereditary condition or to determine whether the parent is a tissue match for a sick child. Parents of children diagnosed with a hereditary condition may also undertake genetic tests to discover their carrier status and the risk of transmission to future children. Separated and divorced mothers may test their children in the hope that proof of the social father’s non-paternity will allow them to block their ex-husband’s access to children of the relationship.
It is perhaps worth noting that the potential for mothers to deploy DNA paternity testing technology against social fathers to deny them access to children they have parented within the marriage was an early concern expressed by academic lawyers about the widespread use of DNA testing technology and concomitant legal changes to definitions of paternity and paternal obligation. This worry – about the risk testing posed to the maintenance of men’s relationship with children – contrasts with what appears to be the main concern of contemporary academic lawyers: the claimed injustice of men’s inability to shrug off support obligations – and be compensated for past amounts paid – for genetically unrelated children.
Single and divorced mothers may wish to test, or be coerced into doing so by the state, in order to facilitate the identification and/or enforcement of paternal support obligations. In Australia, England and the United States, a failure to identify and, where necessary, prove the paternity of their child’s father may put all or part of the mother’s welfare benefits in jeopardy.
In Australia, it is estimated that around one third of tests are sought by mothers wanting or needing – through obligations related to their pension – to enforce child support obligations from biological fathers.
As well, men, or parties acting on their behalf, pursue tests. They do so, the evidence suggests, not to satisfy a disinterested pursuit of the truth – as father’s rights discourse often suggests – but in the hope of altering existing legal and fiscal obligations for children.
The link between men’s, their new wives’ or their parents’ decision to test and the desire to alter legal responsibilities for children in the wake of relationship breakdown is further supported by Australian data showing that at least some men who test know that the child of the marriage is or may be genetically unrelated to them.
Finally, men with little doubt about their biological paternity may test to humiliate estranged partners and/or delay paternity adjudication and the assignment of support obligations.
Harm to children
The fathers’ rights argument about a child’s right to know takes in both the idea that the creation of a parenting relationship between a father and a genetically unrelated child is wrong because it is not a ‘real’ parent–child relationship and the claim that children’s health and identity formation are harmed by ignorance of their biological father’s existence and paternal genetics.
Claims of a child’s right to know also encompass assertions about the harms to children’s health resulting from non-disclosure of paternity uncertainty or discrepancy.
The claim that only biological paternity is real paternity is asserted rather than argued in father’s rights discourse, and is contestable on moral, logical, evidence-based and consistency grounds. In particular, the lack of argument leaves many questionable assertions including, though not limited to: What makes biological parental relationships real or valid in a way non-biological ones are not? How can genetics be understood as critical to the creation of real parent–child relationships when parties to such relationships can die unaware that their social parent–child relationship was not accompanied by a genetic one? If non-genetically based relationships between men and children harm both, how can the deliberate creation of such relationships in some contexts, most notably where a couple is infertile, be justified?
The central role that fathers’ rights discourse gives to paternal genetics in the establishment of a child’s identity may also be questioned.
While reflective of dominant Western social understandings that biological or blood relationships form the basis of kinship, Ruth McNair argues that “non-biological parenting has existed for millennia as a successful and meaningful addition to or replacement for biological parenting” (McNair, 2004, p. 39).
While some evidence exists to support claims that children may be harmed by the failure to disclose the existence of non-genetic parental relationships, McNair has found that this harm appears largely attributable to secrecy about the existence of such relationships rather than to a decisive role of genetic knowledge in identity formation (McNair, 2004, pp. 39–45).
Indeed, McNair adds:
“… the profound role social parenting plays in children’s understanding of who they are may be why some adopted children choose not to pursue knowledge about their genetic parents and suffer no negative outcomes as a consequence.”
Of course, identity is hard to define and measure, but this does suggest that, while it may be preferable for parents to give their children a truthful account of their conception story, including information relevant to their genetic lineage, the failure to do so need not necessarily damage children’s identity formation or overall social and psychological wellbeing.
The failure of fathers’ rights discourse to problematise the potential harms to children resulting from men’s behaviour around cuckold paternity raises questions about the sincerity of such concerns.
For instance, the discourse is largely silent on the question of paternal motives for testing and silent about the harms caused by men who respond to test results disconfirming biological paternity by abandoning children they have parented from birth.
In contrast to the gendered and non-nuanced depictions of cuckold paternity offered by fathers’ rights groups, analysis and evidence suggest that discrepant paternity reflects the complex nature of sexual and intimate relationships at the end of the twentieth and start of the twenty-first centuries.
At the heart of cuckold paternity fraud discourse is the claim that real fatherhood is biological fatherhood. However, neither this assertion nor assertions about the threat to children’s health posed by non-disclosure of paternal genetics stand up well to scrutiny.
In contrast, feminists who value autonomy may share concerns raised in cuckold paternity fraud discourse about the harm suffered by men and children when informed consent is denied.
Defining fatherhood in social and intentional terms could end the nexus in law, social policy and the public imagination between biological fatherhood and fiscal obligations for children, undermine the ‘you play, you pay’ philosophy supported by biological definitions of fatherhood, and reduce demand for DNA paternity testing with their high costs to father–child relationships.
References
McNair, Ruth (2004), Outcomes for children born of ART in a diverse range of families (occasional paper), Victorian Law Reform Commission, Victoria, Australia.
See also Men’s Rights Online at www.mens-rights.net/law/paternityfraud.htm and Men’s Confraternity at www.mensconfraternity.org.au
Ethics in your inbox.
Get the latest inspiration, intelligence, events & more.
By signing up you agree to our privacy policy
BY Leslie Cannold
Dr Leslie Cannold is a bio-ethicist, researcher, writer, commentator and an Honorary Fellow at the School of Philosophy, Anthropology, & Social Inquiry at the University of Melbourne, and lecturer at the Centre for Gender and Medicine at Monash University.
BY The Ethics Centre
The Ethics Centre is a not-for-profit organisation developing innovative programs, services and experiences, designed to bring ethics to the centre of professional and personal life.
The problem with Australian identity
Any Australian who has lived abroad for a time would have been confronted with the need to answer questions about the kind of society that exists in the antipodes.
It is usually easy enough to trot out a few clichés about the wonderful land of Oz or alternatively, to dispel a few myths about stereotypical Australian behaviour. Either way, the images (and counter-images) converge on icons such as Bondi Beach, the Outback, the MCG, kangaroos and crocodiles, meat pies, militant trade unions, and so on.
However, now and again, one is confronted by a questioner who wants to probe a little deeper in order to uncover something of the identity of Australia and its people. There may have been a time when it was relatively easy to give the sort of answer that would have commanded the assent of the vast majority of Australians. The content of such a description is now beside the point. Of far more significance is the fact that the question of Australian identity has now become one of the central problems facing the nation. Economic problems may seem to be intractable but they are as nothing when compared to the deeper questions relating to who we are as Australians and where it is that we think we are heading.
The problem with defining Australian identity is that there are so many different sources contributing to the country’s social amalgam. This in itself does not cause an insuperable problem. It is possible for different understandings, representing different starting points, to be grafted onto a common stock of images and beliefs.
The evolution of the United States of America provides the classic example of a process in which immigrant communities have given allegiance to the ‘American Dream’ – that potent admixture of myth, legend and genuine achievement that has helped to shape the American psyche (especially as expressed abroad).
The situation in Australia is patently different. Perhaps this is because of the relatively ignoble cause of European settlement in this country. No tales of Pilgrim Fathers escaping from religious persecution for us. Instead there is the ball and chain and the ignominy of a convict settlement consciously designed to house what were considered to be the dregs of another society. Or perhaps the difference lies in the fact of the ease of our attaining self government and independence. Having been denied the pain of revolution we have also been denied part of the substrate of national identity that comes with the warm glow associated with having thrown off the yoke of what is seen, inevitably with the benefit of hindsight, as being an oppressive regime. Or perhaps the matter is more simply explained as an absence of time since settlement coupled with such rapid change that there has been no opportunity to generate an Australian identity that can be consciously articulated and shared by all.
A rigid sense of what it means to be Australian may be inimical to the development of a tolerant society.
All of this is speculation and the truth about the matter is probably a mixture of these factors as well as a good many more. What is more, it may not necessarily be a bad thing that there is no absolute sense of identity at work in Australia. For example, a rigid sense of what it means to be Australian may be inimical to the development of a tolerant society in which a lack of absolute privilege for any one point of view acts as a social lubricant.
One needs to remember that riots in countries such as the US may have something to do with the fact that so many people feel excluded from the American Dream. Such an exclusion can go beyond there being resentment at the lack of opportunity to a deeper complaint that the dream is, for such individuals, a completely remote and foreign ideal.
In a similar vein, it may be that a lack of national identity precludes Australians from adopting too chauvinist an attitude in their dealings with people from other countries and cultures. Whilst uncertainty can be unsettling for some, it may also be evidence of an openness to new ideas, experiences and relationships. Could our acknowledged success as a nation of immigrants have something to do with the fact that each new citizen has reason to feel that he or she can make a contribution to the nation by subtly affecting the way in which it sees itself?
Yet, despite all of this, one senses that there is a yearning for some peg on which Australians can hang their hats. So, where are we to look for clues to an identity that will carry Australia forward into the next century? And of equal importance, how are we to maintain some of the benefits that may have flowed from the current uncertain position?
Ethics in your inbox.
Get the latest inspiration, intelligence, events & more.
By signing up you agree to our privacy policy
BY Simon Longstaff
After studying law in Sydney and teaching in Tasmania, Simon pursued postgraduate studies in philosophy as a Member of Magdalene College, Cambridge. In 1991, Simon commenced his work as the first Executive Director of The Ethics Centre. In 2013, he was made an officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for “distinguished service to the community through the promotion of ethical standards in governance and business, to improving corporate responsibility, and to philosophy.”