Dear Simon,
Thank you for inviting me to your King’s Birthday BBQ! As Donald Horne’s key message of The Lucky Country, “Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second-rate people who share its luck.” We, as an Australian Monarchist and an Australian Republican, would not put ourselves in that boat of the 1965 public discourse. Like many Australians, we assume that we have escaped of the past. Oh, that it was so.
There is progress in that Australian modernity, of which Horne played a significant role in the narrative development, has both Australian good versions. Monarchism and Republicanism has escaped, at least, the worst of other worldly forms: the worst of British smugness and American arrogance in political form. The educated Australians can civically discuss the spiral history of Anglo-American-Australasian ideals and nonsense, without the horrible Australian derivativeness, colonial-mindedness, and cultural cringe (Cropp 2023: 224). Unfortunately, the vast majority of Australians are extremely uneducated when it comes to history, sociology, philosophy, and education. Australian universities had killed intellectual history courses and squeezed out the researchers from the system (a general statement, and thus a general truth).
It is for this reason Horne, in the late 1970s, argued for the future in the elite model. A re-constitution for Australia, democratically elected, small directive, governance (232). I myself prefer, from the same era, the New Left’s horizontal, participatory structure; (232) that is the historical background to my Level Playing Field Thesis. As my colleague, Dr Neil Peach, argues: Participation is the key for politics to work in favour of the goals of humanity. We must participate in the Humanist Project with the most inclusiveness to our understanding of humanity and persons.
Thus there is a general and a particular narrative here: global political systems and Australian aspirations for a better life. Working the two together, requires education, the education of intellectual histories and cognition sociology lost to, and from, the universities. It is the story of Donald Horne’s republican battle in the light of “The Dismissal”; to use a double meaning that includes the anti-epistemological political response, and as told in Ryan Cropp’s chapter, “Shock Therapy” (212-233). My argument is that the spiral of Australian history has returned, in new form, back to that moment. At the end of the chapter, Cropp stated, “The System that had produced the prosperity of the post-war years now appeared to have broken down.” (232) We are now in the parallel moment, as the end of the Neo-Liberal Economy. Whether Harris’ ‘Opportunity Economy‘ will emerge and what come from it, I dare not say.
However, what needs to happen, irrespective of the calculating mindset of the economically obsessed, is a re-constitution of Australian politics. Would it not be creative, innovative, and intellectually harmonious if Australia could take particular features of the two global models, to create a new Australian political landscape, one that was inclusive of both educational elitism — meaning that unless you are educated on the educated themed topics, your comments is “talking out of your ass”, and democratic level playing field model — meaning a severe backlash against political corruption at all levels of governance. Yes, like the Cromwellian Commonwealth, it IS (and was) a negative spiral, as a republican model, but the spiral history appears to me necessarily overreactive: the challenge and response thesis on steroids. The War in Gaza and Lebanon, a case in hand; which by the way, is no justification for the war as a sound argument — we also make choices not to be captive to historicism while declaring its truth.
The idiot academics will dismiss my argument as Dr Frankenstein creating the multi-part monster. But through many better epistemic arguments, they are the losers as grossly poor thinkers; Horne’s now luckless second-rate people. Knowledge is finally comprehensive.
I look forward to your monarchial BBQ, and your good counsel.
Kind regards,
the “Cromwellian Roundhead”
Neville Buch
Historian,
Professional Historians Australia (Queensland).
Australian and New Zealand History of Education Society (ANZHES).
President, Sea of Faith in Australia Inc. (SoFiA)
Convenor, Sociology of Education Thematic Group, The Australian Sociological Association (TASA).
President, Southern Brisbane Suburban Forum (SBSF).
Director, Brisbane Southside History Network (BSHN).
MPHA (Qld), Ph.D. (History) UQ., Grad. Dip. Arts (Philosophy) Melb., Grad. Dip. (Education) UQ.
Call: 0416 046 429
ABN: 86703686642
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Neville Buch
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