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Let us now praise (less) famous men …

By Helen Pringle - posted Friday, 20 October 2006


Karl Marx famously characterised the executive of the modern state as “a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie”.

Take away the pejorative connotations of the word bourgeoisie, and a great many people now seem to agree with Marx that the central task of government is managing the economy, where successful management depends on the protection of private commercial interests.

As Alan Bond, in his heyday, replied when criticised for his contacts with government leaders: “As far as I’m concerned they are businessmen like myself. I see them as managing directors of Australia Incorporated.”

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However, governments also perform tasks apart from economic management. Governments also instruct their citizens in what to praise and what to blame, or in Platonic terms, governments instruct citizens in how to exercise their judgment. Governments do this through the laws they make.

They also do this through bestowing honours and awards to recognise meritorious actions and those who perform them. Such honours pay homage to those who have themselves honoured the world by their character and their conduct, and who have graced it with their deeds. This homage is not paid in monetary or material benefits, but takes the form of recognition by one’s fellows. Hence the bestowal of honours also serves to recall a community to a sense of its common values.

Bestowing honour in this manner is an appropriate way to praise (and in some cases, to mourn) not people of fame or notoriety, but those quieter but dutiful spirits whose righteous deeds should also not be forgotten.

At the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, in 1993, the then Prime Minister P.J.Keating honoured the “free and independent spirits” who gave us a lesson in true nobility and grandeur by teaching us “to endure hardship, to show courage, to be bold as well as resilient, to believe in ourselves, to stick together”.

The creation of a distinctively Australian honours system in the 1980s was also animated by this sense of our democratic and egalitarian traditions, whose values are, as the former Governor-General Sir William Deane noted, “courage, and endurance, and duty, and love of country, and mateship, and good humour and the survival of a sense of self-worth and decency in the face of dreadful odds”. The bestowal of honours reminds us to watch over and attend to those values, as well as the men and women who embody them.

These values are by their very nature not narrowly national, but have an openness to the world. To be a good Australian in the sense of Deane’s speech is necessarily to be at the same time a good citizen of the world.

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Similarly, the philosopher Will Kymlicka, in an exploration of the meaning of being Canadian, has argued that one of the foremost aspects of Canadian identity is a generous cosmopolitanism. By this Kymlicka means that the people who live in that area of the world think that they are being good Canadians by living up to cosmopolitan obligations, for example, by giving aid or supporting the international human rights order.

And conversely, says Kymlicka, indifference to the obligations one has as a citizen of the world is seen as in some sense “un-Canadian” (to use that rather unfortunate term).

Kymlicka’s view is that Canadians for the most part are not people who place their global obligations above their national obligations; rather, he points out that an important part of their understanding of themselves as Canadians involves their sense of themselves as having these cosmopolitan obligations.

In all the noisy carry-on over Australian values, and what it means to be an Australian, perhaps it is worthwhile to cultivate a similar sense: that being a good Australian necessarily involves a generous recognition of duties that go beyond our borders. To love one’s country is to love its openness to others. And perhaps it is worthwhile to carry over this wider sense of being Australian when we honour distinguished actions and character of those within our borders.

Australian governments honour citizens during their life. They also honour citizens on their death, for example, by the offer of a state funeral. There are certain persons who are automatically offered a state funeral, by virtue of the public position they held in their lifetime.

For instance, the New South Wales government stipulates that present or former premiers, state governors and so on are automatically offered a state funeral. Governments also offer state funerals to “distinguished” citizens. Examples of state funerals for such distinguished citizens are the funerals of Henry Lawson in 1922, Dame Mary Gilmore in 1962, Dr Victor Chang in 1992, and Alec Campbell, the last Gallipoli veteran, in 2002.

However, the criteria for “distinguished” seem to have been relaxed even within the last ten years, such that a state funeral may now be offered in all seriousness to a spruiker who made a practice of commodifying his own children. The criteria for state funerals stipulate “distinguished” citizens, not those who are “famous” or “notorious”. And I would argue that this sense of distinction as an Australian embodies a more generous sense of obligation and duty.

I am thinking of someone like Peter Norman. There could be few finer images of courage and duty and love of country than Norman’s quietly standing without flinching beside John Carlos and Tommy Smith at the Mexico Olympics, with the badge of the Olympic Project for Human Rights on his chest. Time was when sportsmen were honoured for being “best and fairest”. Peter Norman was both.

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About the Author

Helen Pringle is in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of New South Wales. Her research has been widely recognised by awards from Princeton University, the Fulbright Foundation, the Australian Federation of University Women, and the Universities of Adelaide, Wollongong and NSW. Her main fields of expertise are human rights, ethics in public life, and political theory.

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