Blindly round the flag we go — Australia’s will to forgive and forget
It is quite an Australian thing for a political leader to gain popularity following a national crisis, no matter which side of politics they stand on, and no matter how well they’ve guided the nation through the crisis. The average Australian is quick to say that the Prime Minister has done the best they could ‘considering the circumstances’. Well, maybe they have done the best they personally could have done, but what a lot of people don’t consider is whether someone else could have navigated the crisis better than the Prime Minister in charge at the time.
In political science this is called the “rally-round-the-flag” phenomenon and has been referred to as an artificially inflated level of belief in one’s country and leaders. It is artificially inflated by the effect the crisis has on the populace — amongst the fear and the uncertainty critique of the government falls away, and many people who were against the government for other reasons shift their support behind the party in power to support the common cause.
It is because of this failure of the public to enquire into whether things could have been done better under someone else, and a failure to enquire into the ‘what could have been’ and instead focusing on the ‘what is’, that fairly average politicians are put on pedestals and are given inflated score cards despite their objective shortfalls in leadership during these crises.
As long as they don’t make any serious public relations or policy blunders, it is not uncommon for a leader who has presided over a national crisis like a war or a pandemic to find themselves re-elected because of an almost willful ignorance by many in the populace who accept what is as all that could have been and who are not fussed with wanting to review their leaders’ performance.
One of the greatest Australian political curses is that our country always seems to come out of a crisis without too many scratches, with our nation still together and with it our sense of nationalism still vastly intact. Whether it’s to do with us being an island, protected by the seas that surround us, or whether it’s because we are geographically far away from the action, safe from the horrors of wars and famines and safe from the epicentre of a pandemic — on the whole we have been lucky in many of the crises that have gripped the world and decimated the economies and social fabrics of other countries. Because of this we are not overly skeptical of our leaders, we do not put them under scrutiny to the levels that leaders in other less-lucky countries around the world are subjected to. Put simply, we have (on the whole) not lost, and so we have not learnt.
We are a forgiving country too. Forgiving the faults of our leaders and not expecting them to be able to give anything more than the average man is something that Australians do best. This narrow-mindedness on the Australian public’s behalf was laid bare by Donald Horne in his 1964 critique of Australian parochialism, The Lucky Country, and can be seen in the popularity figures being published today. Australia’s current Prime Minister — the man who infamously decided to holiday in Hawaii whilst the country he led burned (just a few months ago) — is now topping the chart of world leaders seeing a gain in their personal ratings due to the Covid-19 crisis. Although the massive rebound can primarily be attributed to the fact that his popularity fell so far during the 2019–2020 bushfire crisis which was undeniably a disaster public relations event for Scott Morrison and the Liberal Party.
It seems unfair though, that the average management of one event has wiped out nearly all voter memory of another more local and more visceral crisis in Australia, particularly when much of the pain and hurt from the bushfire crisis still persists and is yet to be properly addressed. We still have not had an independent inquiry into the Prime Minister’s and Australian Government’s handling of that crisis and the longer the Covid-19 crisis plays out the more unlikely it will be that we will get one.
If there is one thing that the Australian public needs to learn from these events it is that we cannot forget. We need to examine the actions of our political leaders and the parties that they lead as they guide us through these crises. We need to see if their actions were justifiable, and we need to hold them to account where their actions were left wanting or where their actions actually harmed Australia’s and Australians’ interests. If we do not, they will be re-elected despite their inadequacies and without us knowing the fact that we may have gotten a better deal if we’d backed someone else. In short, if we forget, if we do not hold them to account, they will never learn, and neither will we.
