The great political -isms from Europe and the US, like capitalism, socialism and communism, have never really…

The great political -isms from Europe and the US, like capitalism, socialism and communism, have never really explained Australian life. What is distinct about Australia, and most of it is unspoken and unseen, is that it defines itself not so much by geography or class…/1 https://t.co/tSiWENNnem

…or ideology, but my something more simple and practical. It defines itself by community. A much more complex and sophisticated idea than we think. Many countries have little or even no real experience of community life. No community sport, for example, something we assume…/2

…is how everybody lives. The core of Australian life has always been the practical negotiation of achieving collective aims, together. Putting out fires, helping with floods, building parks and other community resources, surf lifesaving, ALL voting for who is to represent us. /3

An election in Australia is a community event, with its sausages and its election night count. Not ‘compulsory voting’, that’s the language of Europe and the US. It’s a community activity, for Australians government isn’t some other as it increasingly is for those overseas. /4

We see government as just a bigger community group, like a big RFS crew. None of the Big Brother rhetoric, we know government is just people like us, doing stuff that we as a community want done. Australia needs to bottle and market how it thinks about community, because it…/5

…could save the world. The politics and wars of territory and identity overseas always lead to rivers of blood, throughout history. Australia is a ruthlessly pragmatic country, because it replaced territory and identity, with community. It didn’t even realise it was doing it. /6

My theory is this way of thinking about collective life emerged from the basic fact we were dumped here, as a penal colony, on the other side of the world, at a time when a distance like that meant we may as well have been relocated to another planet. That isolation drove…/7

…a practical focus on how to get by. Without cooperation, we were dead. Unlike the ideologies and territorial claims that drove nationhood in the rest of the world, Australia is maybe the only nation ever formed by the necessity of working together, to survive. That’s where…/8

…our unspoken idea of community came from. I would also wager that we picked up a similar communitarian focus from the indigenous Australians we encountered, who by all accounts have a very similar way of approaching life. There’s a long story still to be told I think about…/9

…how much of what we call the ‘aussie’ way of life is actually a hybrid of ourselves and indigenous Australians. But that’s a vast topic. Having just finished another national election, this essence of our lives, the community, hit me again. You can’t unsee it. /end