A bit of a drag: what Eurovision tells us about the federal budget

Although the lead-up to the Commonwealth budget dominated much political and public discussion in Australia over the past few weeks, the unlikely site of Eurovision has contributed significantly to shifts in gender politics, representations of sexuality and new frameworks for thinking about performance.

These are all elements of contemporary everyday life that, when thought about as political, will have far further-reaching effects than in both Australia and globally than the national budget.

The Eurovision Song Contest, which has a substantial following in Australia often culminating in the weekend-long Eurovision party. Thinking about Eurovision can help us to understand the political, cultural and social climate in which the new Budget has been produced and the debates that have, and will, happen around it.

There are many similarities between the theatrics of parliamentary and partisan politics in Australia and the theatrics of Eurovision, including the fact that both submerge ideological stances beneath the dress-up of pleasantry and entertainment or tag-line and slogan.

Where Eurovision songs, song choices, lyrics, costuming and humour disguise old rivalries or new manoeuvres (such as Russia's intentions over Ukraine), Treasurer Joe Hockey's eloquent speech that all Australians must share in budget pain and step up to personal responsibility disguises the further entrenchment of inequalities his budget produces.

Where the Eurovision audience in Copenhagen made clear their views on Russia's intentions in Ukraine by booing and hissing the beautiful performance by the Tolmachevy Sisters, the Australian Commonwealth Budget will be booed and protested in a performance of dissent for which the government is pre-prepared and expects as a built-in response to its more unpalatable fiscal plans.

Important here is not that politics involves an element of theatrical performance, but that all theatrical performance is-to varying degrees-political. Unlike many other years, the 2014 Eurovision Song Contest and its winning performance were acts of politics that demonstrate recent, important shifts in how we behave and relate to one another.

The Bearded Winner

The real political change that has been occurring over recent years and that is so strongly signified by Eurovision centres on the politics of gender and the practices of normativity. Eurovision 2014 was won by Austrian with the entry by Conchita Wurst, a drag performer whose appearance was staged as a glamorous woman with a beard, a classic beauty with a man's power-ballad voice. Effectively, a complexification of gender categories and norms.

Twenty-five year-old Thomas Neuwirth performs Conchita as a character with a specific persona, preferring the pronoun 'she' when representing herself in drag (although not necessarily in everyday life as a man).

Conchita is not transgender, in the sense of a person who identifies and lives as a gender category not of one's birth and which may be pre-, post- or non-operative in terms of sex re-assignment surgery. Indeed, there is significant variance in how transgender persons live their gendered lives, the issues, forms and language of transgender are complex. For example, the important work of Norrie-May Welby who in April 2014, after a four-year legal battle, had the High Court of Australia rule that the NSW Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages must, according to her wishes, record her gender as non-specific. An important political shift that helps us overcome the tyranny of a very narrow and very strict two-gender system - a gender system in which not everyone fits, and yet in which most people at some stage in their life are regimented, pressured and coerced to perform. Norrie-May's legal win, and the public discussions, theorisations, discourse and politics that make this win possible, usefully points out the extent to which a two-gender system is a myth, and that human beings are far more complex.

Eurovision is a wholly different environment from parliament and the courts - it is a site of entertainment, but in a politicised form. In Copenhagen this week, Conchita had a similar win (a highly political one) from a different perspective.

Conchita's performance did not just challenge norms, but the politics of norms. There is nothing radically new or startling in drag performance. In a world two decades since the film Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) and the positioning of Sydney's Mardi Gras as a central economic, investor and tourist attraction, the very ideas of a play with gender do little to challenge gender norms today. Rather, the challenge to norms can be seen in the context of Conchita's performance not in 'imitating' cross-gender, but in pointing clearly to that imitation by presenting herself as a woman with a beard.

It is also a subversion made in juxtaposition to the lyrics of her winning song, Rise Like a Phoenix.

Peering from the mirror
No, that isn't me
Stranger getting nearer
Who can this person be?

The person referred to in the lyrics is not Conchita herself but, when heard in the context of the performance as 'bearded lady' is gendered humanity itself. The lyrics point to the future of a humanity that cannot recognise itself within the out-dated norms of a two-gender system. It is a post-gendered humanity that will "Rise like a phoenix, out of the ashes" in such a way that the broad, complex, varied and diverse ways of living, being and performing gender are recognised as legitimate, real, and always acceptable. Beyond categories, human beings in their complexity always resist and exceed categorisation.

The political future that Conchita's performance calls for, and sign-posts as being culturally 'in demand', is a future of embracing and accepting diversity, whether that be around gender, sexuality or difference.

The Politics of Categories versus the Politics of Diversity

In contrast to the demand for diversity that underlies the Eurovision performance, the Australian Commonwealth Treasurer's performance (for being a Treasurer is very surely a kind of drag performance, perhaps involving props such as a cigarette-holder like Audrey Hepburn drag, or even a manly and somewhat disdainful cigar) on Budget night signals a resistance to the politics of diversity.

In the new budget, to be a person is to be assigned a category still. The implications are complex, but most people within the budget are deemed to fall into the categories of low, middle or high income earners. In claiming to spread the budgetary pain, Mr Hockey signals that it will affect all categories, but what remains submerged is not only that it will cause far greater hardship for the lowest earners, but it will actively prevent them from moving from one category of income earning to a higher one. Categories remain the same, and yet the Treasurer's catch-cry concept of opportunity is inequitably distributed across these categories.

The principal of equitable redistribution, a primary role of taxation, is of course to eradicate categories of earning or at least to remove the disparities in opportunity such categories entails.

Within media commentary, one is somewhat differently assigned to the categories of budget winners (medical research, small/medium business owners, school chaplains and, interestingly, ballerinas) or losers (the sick, university students, public servants, pensioners, the young unemployed and Indigenous persons). Barely a glance is needed at these examples to see that the winners are, in general, the already-secure (usually) and the losers are, in general, the most vulnerable in Australian society.

Without wanting to suggest that Europe is necessarily acting in an ethical, considered or politically-progressive way, it is notable that on Sunday night millions celebrated the post-category discourse of Conchita's win for the vulnerable group of those who do not fit narrow gender norms (a win for all gendered persons), while 48 hours later in Australia we bemoan the loss for the vulnerable in a budget that, economically, will fix the status quo.

A Song's Coda: When Diversity Fails or the Australian Love of Norms

An unfortunate element of The Eurovision 2014 broadcast for Australians-perhaps important to reflect on in terms of Australia's culture of categorisation and disparity-was the unexpected failure of SBS commentators to embrace all forms of diversity with respect.

Commentary by SBS' Julia Zemiro and Sam Pang, despite their barracking for Conchita's win, grated with audiences across the three nights. The pair have been Eurovision co-commentators for SBS each year since 2009. Aside from baffling encouragements from Ms Zemiro to the audience to "Drink! Drink! Drink! Drink!" much of the commentary involved mocking performers, participants and commentators from other countries.

The clothing of commentators from across Europe was particularly targeted by them during the vote-counting, with a litany of either raves or disapproval, as if there is to be only one style, one fashion and two categories-the fashionable and the hideous. This, ostensibly, ignores the diverse and complex ways in which fashion and taste develop in different countries, at different times and in different ways.

The other targets were the categories of the elderly and the young. During the second semi-final aired on Saturday 9 May, an interval act starred ordinary members of the public invited to stage to dance. This included Kit, an eighty-six year-old woman from Denmark who gave a lively dance performance but was mocked by Sam Pang: "Tell you what, Kit'd be having a good time if she knew where she was," implying senility and non-belonging at Eurovision.

This is not so different from Prime Minister Tony Abbott dismissing the legitimacy of a budget response from Australian pensions.

Younger performers were also targets in Eurovision commentary, particularly Finland's entry performed by alternative rock band Softengine, comprised of boys aged seventeen to nineteen years. Pang repeatedly referred to them mockingly as children and as kids, in a way which ignores the talent and hard work they brought to the competition.

Not unlike the dismissing the struggle of young persons of about the same age seeking jobs in a particularly difficult labour market, now forced to do so under Youth Allowance rather than the more adult NewStart.

Perhaps it is notable that, at a time when Australia's budget negatively affects many young adults and the elderly, Australia's Eurovision commentators likewise categorise and exclude those groups.

Australia was represented in Eurovision commentary by brutish, mean-spirited, disdainful and disrespectful observations, which might easily be mistaken for the inane murmurings of two drunks at a pub. Indeed it is remarkable that while they gave great support for Conchita's win, they were unable to embrace the diversity in the spirit of Eurovision and instead represented Australia as a country and a culture that categorises injuriously (the senile elderly, the childish youth, the unfashionable) and embraces, looks after and respects only the mythical, narrow middle-ground category norm.

Much like the budget.