Australians mostly have little to worry about. So why do we succumb to fear?

The Guardian

22-02-2025

A miasma of fear is sweeping over the land and, as we jump at the shadows in the mist, it is sending us all a bit mad.
Think for starters of Creative Australia's decision to withdraw Khaled Sabsabi as Australia's representative at the 2025 Venice Biennale, the painful details of the ABC-Lattouf case, the failure to staunch the appeal of violent extremism, the rise of antisemitism and Islamophobia, the paid removal of stateless refugees, locking up children as if they were adults, introducing mandatory sentencing, cancelling truth-telling and treaty processes.
The foundations of Australia's much vaunted, if lazily maintained, pluralist and inclusive values are being eroded by the poison in the air. Courage is evaporating. People wonder who to trust and what to believe.
Watching the destruction being wrought in the United States, many ponder whether Australia's institutions and norms would be robust enough to survive a similar onslaught.
They probably are. But few would have predicted how quickly the American system and its international commitments and standing could be eroded.
Ever since federation, fear has been used as a political tool, always poised and ready to be pulled out at any moment. The official view then, according to historian John Hirst, was that Australia was 'not the federation of fear, but the wise solemn rational federation of a free people … only possible through the advance of intelligence and the development of a higher system of morality than the world ever saw before'.
Yet at the same time, fear was being invoked towards South Sea Islanders, Chinese and Aboriginal people, and by 1902 their exclusion from the political system became law.
Fear has deep roots in a society that has fewer reasons to be fearful than almost any other, even if it is not as fair as we'd like to believe. Australia generally works, it is rich, the people are educated, it has no land borders, its democracy is intact, tolerance has long been considered a virtue.
But still we are encouraged to be fearful – of others, of abandonment, of what the future may hold.
When trying to make sense of why fear works so powerfully in Australian public life, the old frames of analysis that focus on polling, party politics, economics, demographics, history and even language, help but fall short. There is a need, as Dr Julie Macken writes in her forthcoming book, Australia's Schism in the Soul, to add the tools of psychoanalysis.
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'The psyche of the nation is revealed by its collective action and inaction,' she writes.
'Pretending not to know, ignoring the past and encouraging ignorance, can temporarily bury fear. But pretending not to know can make us sick, when it leads to cruelty towards refugees, First Nations people, the poor, what we pretend not to know can actually kill.
'Australia is a fragile, divided, anxious nation. We vote for policies that destroy the sacred core of people, of children, simply to assuage and manage our own fear. We are unable to accept the reality of Australia's colonial violence and we all continue to pay a dangerously high price for this delusion. As for any person caught in a life of lies and delusions, our world has managed through self-fulfilling prophecy to become an unsafe place to be.'
In recent years, the pong of fear has been building since a 'motley group' of opponents to an Indigenous voice to parliament gathered in Melbourne in late August 2022 with what they considered to be the unlikely mission: to break the consensus supporting meaningful recognition of the First Peoples. Five months after they released the genies of fear and envy online the consensus broke.
Their slogan 'If you don't know vote no' was as political scientist Allan Patience wrote: 'one of the most ignorant, ethically despicable, and anti-democratic moments in the history of federal politics in Australia … How can anyone respect people who have chosen indifference over concern, hostility over love, exclusion over inclusion, cruelty over compassion?'
As always, those who resort to fear-based politics tested how much they could get away with by first targeting the First Peoples, those Noel Pearson powerfully described as 'much unloved'. Then it moves to other groups who become the focus of fear fuelled rhetoric.
What we need is leadership that soothes, comforts and inspires, that helps us deal with grief and shame, rather than denies the complexity of our past. Too often our leaders lash out, or smother important questions in economic jargon and empty talk about the cost of living.
As seems to be common throughout the world now but has not until recently been a feature of contemporary Australian politics, fear-based blame has become a headline grabbing tool, the leader of a major party, opposition leader Peter Dutton, who might yet be prime minister, has stoked division between the diverse communities that make up the nation. By blaming and setting up straw men, it encourages those who feel neglected by mainstream Australia to lash out.
It's a Sunday, so excuse the sermon, but we can do much better. It's time to grow up, face our demons and create an inclusive, robust future.
Julianne Schultz is the author of The Idea of Australia