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Mark Latham - What is Right?

In this extract from'The Enabling State', the Labor back-bencher examines the moral foundatios of government.

	Mark Latham

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Two years ago, in one of the reception halls of Parliament House, the Deputy Prime Minister, John Anderson, gave a speech which I believe typifies what has gone wrong with the moral foundations of government. Addressing a youth leadership forum, he talked of his belief in "our shared humanity". Yet in defining the things which glue society together - the values and obligations held in common between people - he said that these must come from a higher existence, Almighty God. I was left wondering: how can we have a shared humanity, but not a shared morality, in the relationship between people?

By its nature, morality is a learned practice. It is a social practice, formed in the experience and bonds between people. It is much more than a question of faith, handed down to people in the form of religious doctrine. A shared morality cannot be directed, coerced or manufactured. It is not something to be dispensed from a higher existence; it is in the existence between people.

Anderson, of course, is not alone in this misunderstanding of morality. The Federal Parliament is full of those who want to dispense morality on behalf of society. It is full of authoritarian Christians and statists who, despite political differences, share a common methodology in public life. They want government to make the moral rules of society, rather than devolving this process to the informal rules of civil society. They are the great centralisers of our time. Their unity ticket can be seen on issues as diverse as the Federal Parliament's 1996 euthanasia debate and the making of the 1999 constitutional preamble. They believe that public morality comes more from the citizen-to-state relationship that the relationship between people. The lack the language and purpose of social capital and social relationships. This approach, however, is out of step with the public mood. It is an inappropriate response to the demands of our post-traditional society.

We live in an era of moral confusion. On each of the major public issues now facing society - globalisation, economic restructuring, the loss of social connectedness, family breakdown, street crime and youth alienation - people are looking for a new understanding of their relationship and obligations to each other. This is the moral dilemma of our time: if traditional institutions and social connections are in decline, what form of moral obligation might take their place?

Unhappily, these answers cannot be found in the old ideologies of Left and Right. Social democrats hope to use state power as a way of defining the rules and functions of society. Social conservatives hope to impose their own morality - in practice, the church's morality - on the rest of society. Neither Left nor Right recognises that people need to participate in making their own morals rules. Each positions the public as clients to the power of state intervention. The rule making of civil society is replaced by the law making of government.

Too much state power means too much reliance of government. The old ideologies tend to treat people as rule followers, rather than rule makers. If this influence becomes dominant, people can easily fall out of the habit of determining their obligations to, and trust in, each other. This is when social norms and cohesiveness start to break down. This appears to be the unhappy state f Western society at the beginning of the 21st century. The relationship between states, markets and society has become imbalanced.

While global economic markets have been able to generate huge amounts of wealth and technological progress, societies everywhere appear to be fragmenting. Law-and-order concerns, gated housing estates and the loss of public spaces point to a breakdown in social cohesiveness. While government has triumphed over the last century - with improvements to the education, transportation, housing and health care of its population - society has lost much of its civility and morality. From the loss of public faith in democratic governance to the rancour of what remains as public discourse, civic life is in retreat.

These changes have brought to society a new paradox. While in recent decades people have come to enjoy unprecedented freedoms - liberty and opportunity of globalised markets and communications - they have also experienced a decline in the social connectedness upon which these freedoms inevitably rely. The extend of social change has magnified the level of social stress and anxiety. In the words of the US sociologist, Alan Wolfe:

Modern people need to care about the fates of strangers, yet do not even know how to treat their loved ones. Moral rules seem to evaporate the more they are needed. The paradox of modernity is that the more people depend on one another owing to an ever-widening circle of obligations, the fewer are agreed-upon guidelines for organising moral rules that can account for those obligations.

A terrible irony now confounds our polity. At a time when people need to be closer to each other, so as to cope with the challenges of globalisation and the Information Age, social trust and morality appear to be in retreat. The demands of modern citizenship require an upsizing of society. Civil society needs to rediscover the habits of rule making. It needs to find a way of reconciling individual freedoms with social obligations. This does not mean winding back new technologies. Nor does it mean engaging in old ideological struggles. Answers are not likely to be found either in the state interventions of the Left, in the social conservatism of the Right or, for that matter, in free-market economics.

Rather, a different set of issues present themselves. In an age of mass information and global markets, what type of social governance is best suited to rebuilding social trust and morality? What role might the reform of public policy plan in this process? And, finally, what form of citizenship is now needed to enhance the cohesiveness of society? I offer two answers, both drawn from the ethos of the enabling state.

A Civic Conversation

The first step is to use politics as a way of strengthening the civic voice and moral dialogue in society. More than ever, during this period of moral confusion and transition, the rulemaking functions of civil society are critical. As Wolfe puts it:

Rather than implying a longing for a moral order of the past, civil society ought instead to serve as a metaphor for all those episodes and encounters that [provide] the foundation for thinking through, in connection with others, the rules by which [we] will be governed. Families, communities, friendship networks, voluntary organisations, and social movements are to be valued not because they create havens in an otherwise heartless world, but because it can only be within the intimate realm, surrounded by those we know and for whom we care, that we learn the art of understanding the moral positions of others.

This shared understanding is an essential part of modern citizenship. It helps people to cross social and geographic boundaries in their relations with each other. Just as the institutions of government need to change, so too do the processes of politics. Public policy needs to emerge from what amounts to a civic conversation: political leaders engaging the public in a dialogue about moral values. This is an important way of helping people copy with the bewildering pace of social change.

Governments need to do more than just stand and deliver their views to a waiting public. They need to position civil society as an agent of moral dialogue, encouraging people to reassess and redefine their obligations to each other. They need to open up the public issues and dialogue through which people can rediscover the habits of rule making. This reflects what is known as a communitarian approach to politics. It attempts to disperse a political power and thereby correct the shortcomings of modern democracy.

As with most parts of the state, political decision making has become highly centralised. Democracy was founded on the idea that everyone should have a say in the decisions of government impacting on their lives. But the sheer size of the modern state has forced government to replace direct democracy with representations from sectional interest groups. Community consultation has thinned out to the interaction between government and these national peak bodies. This has led to widespread public dissatisfaction with the concentration of political power. Communitarian politics aims to broaden the span 0of public consultation. It tries to create the time and space required for civic engagement. It advocates an extensive dialogue about the moral dilemmas facing civil society. These include questions of national identity, community values, family life and personal responsibility. To give just one instance of this approach: the framing of a constitutional preamble in Australia should have been opened up to a process of public dialogue. Given the scale of social change in recent decades, many Australians are rethinking the issue of national identity. They are looking for a clearer sense of what it now means to be an Australian.

These issues can only be sorted out satisfactorily by an exchange of views between Australians themselves. The last thing the nation needed was for its Prime Minister to pre-empt such a debate by writing his own preamble. The Federal Government should have sponsored a national dialogue about the modern meaning of Australian identity. It should have given every Australian a chance to have a say. Every classroom should have been asked to debate the values important to your Australians. Every newspaper should have been asked to invite submissions from its readers. Every local government area should have been asked to conduct public forums and opinion surveys. Every household and library connected to the Internet should have been asked to join the debate online. Only when the people have had their say can the nation have confidence in a new preamble.

During a time of constant change and confusion, governments need to do more than frame laws and make decisions. They need to get a public involved in the great moral questions of our time: how do we answer the new challenges of citizenship, identity and shared morality? Government should protect the freedom of its citizens to engage in such processes, not monopolise the process itself. The aim is not to abolish state power, but to prevent its encroachment upon those matters which are best left to civil society. This is one of the moral foundations of good governance.

Multiple-identity Citizenship

Another essential step is to broaden our understanding of citizenship beyond both the boundaries of the nation state and the reach of single-identity politics. The political system needs to develop a concept of citizenship suited to a post-traditional society. This is what I call multiple-identity citizenship.

Questions of identity are at the heart of a good society because, at the end of the day, they raise the most basic issue of all about society: who are we? Not who am I as an individual, but who are we - together - as a society? This is why the concept of citizenship must be as inclusive as possible. It must be a big tent within which the various identities of modern society can co-exist, rather than compete against each other. This co-existence is essential to the reordering of public morality

Unfortunately for much of human history, citizenship has been a small tent. In pre-capitalist society, identities were framed around the city state and the tribalism of religious groups. With the rise of nationalism in the 18th century, citizenship repositioned itself around the identity of the nation state. In the 19th century, as the Industrial Revolution transformed society, identities were increasingly moulded in the workplace: the awesome struggle between capital and workers, between capitalism and socialism.

History, of course, points to the folly of these narrow identities. The great disasters of mankind - feudal wars, religious wars, empire wars and ultimately, the Cold War - had their origins in the small tents of citizenship. Only I recent time have people had to think about their identities and loyalties in a complex and challenging way. For most of history these were predetermined by the simplicity of single-identity politics. Anything which could not be squeezed into the small tent was aggressively rejected.

Thankfully, globalisation is now challenging these tribal boundares and points of conflict. The increased flow of people, information, culture and economic exchange across the globe is demanding new types of governance and citizenship. It is forcing society to find a bigger tent. As the end of the Cold War showed, national governments are finding it harder to suppress information and political freedoms. As the success of the European Union is showing, nations are having to cooperate internationally to regulate economic activity.

So, too, citizenship is having to move from a single-identity framework to multiple identities. It is no longer possible to simplify identities and keep cultural groups apart. Globalism, multiculturalism, feminism and the struggle for human rights - these are modern inventions which have broadened the span of life's loyalties.

Citizenship now requires consideration of a wide range of geographic allegiances and personal characteristics. These include everything from local, regional, national and international loyalties to career, ethnic, gender and cultural identities. This is driving the complexity of modern politics. It demands a new way of thinking about citizenship and the cohesiveness of society. The many identities of modern citizenship need to find room to breathe and coexist. They need a big tent within which people commonly cross social boundaries and lead a life of many loyalties.

I offer an example of what this might mean in practice. Some time ago a close friend asked me to rank my personal loyalties: as a resident of the Campbelltown community in south-west Sydney; as an Australian national; as someone committed to the ideals of good international citizenship; as a Federal politician; as an Anglo-Aussie male. This is a useful exercise to consider. My conclusion was that I didn't need to give these identities an order of importance. There is no reason why they cannot coexist. They need not fall into cross-purposes and conflict.

Not surprisingly, this kind of citizenship requires a different kind of governance. The task for policy makers is to allow multiple identities to live together easily within individuals as well as between them. Governments need to find ways of lifting people beyond their tribal differences. We need to become a society of boundary-crossers - moving easily across a full range of geographic and personal identities.

Unfortunately I the habits of modern democracy this is not a straightforward task. There is no shortage of political causes and activists wanting to reduce public life to a struggle between single identities. This is a problem across the political spectrum. One the extreme right, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party wants to return Australia to the cultural habits of sameness - narrowing our national identity to the monoculture of White Australia.

On the industrial left, there remains a tribal commitment to economic nationalism - a belief that Australia needs to erect barriers to international economic cooperation. These protectionist policies are often expressed in the name of cultural integrity - a belief in the capacity of governments to identify the unique features of Australian culture and then quarantine them from the many cultures of globalisation. This is one of the burning paradoxes of left-wing politics: its willingness to use the open flow of migration as a tool for multiculturalism in Australia, but not the open flow of entertainment and the arts.

The Left has also promoted the single-identity politics of personal characteristics, such as ethnicity, sexuality and gender. These issues have taken up much of the space and effort it once devoted to class struggle. It has turned itself into a 'rainbow coalition'. It is not that feminists, environmentalists and the ethnic lobby are poorly motivated. The problem lies in the size of their tent.

Feminists identify primarily with the gender politics of affirmative action, while most people - male and female - want a society based on merit and equal opportunity. Greens identify primarily with the environment, while most people want this concern balanced against the need for economic development. The ethnic lobby identifies primarily with non-English-speaking cultures, while most people want all communities to be respected and assisted.

Indeed, few people live their lives through a single identity alone. The diversity of society is in its people, as well as between social groups. Life's circumstances arise from a rich combination of identities, loyalties and socio-economic conditions. None of these factors is homogenous, either within groups or within geographical boundaries.

Seeing like a Citizen

These factors show why state power is a poor way of handling the diversity of civil society. As the Yale academic, James Scott, points out in his wonderful book, Seeing Like a State, the methods of modern government rely on homogeneity and standardisation. He writes:

The utopian, immanent and continually frustrated goal of the modern state is to reduce the chaotic, disorderly, constantly changing social reality beneath it to something more closely resembling the administrative grid of its observations.

In short, the things for which the state cannot plan are the things it cannot handle. This is an enduring flaw in the Left's approach to identity politics.

The state's standard method in this areas has been to divide society into a number of crude categories and groups - gender groups, ethnic groups and so on. It identifies and funds each group on the false assumption of homogenous needs and interests within the group. This is another paradox: how the state tries to manage society's diversity by denying the diversity and multiple identities of its citizens. This can be seen in the folly of reverse discrimination programs.

The difficulty with affirmative action and quotas is the way in which they automatically give one group an advantage at another's expense. This is not because the state's selected beneficiaries are necessarily more deserving or needy, but because they carry a certain characteristic in common (such as gender or race). Other citizens miss out through no fault of their own. No fair-minded person would want society to operate this way. They would want the state to recognise diversity within groups as well as between them. They would want governments to focus on socio-economic need, not a loose assumption that people sharing certain characteristic also share the same type of life - in all its diverse circumstances and identities.

This task, however, is beyond the sophistication of government. The modern citizen has many inter-related identities, yet the modern state can only manage one at a time, and even then only in a crude way. It sees the world in terms of standardisation, not diversity. Thus, from a social justice perspective, single-identity politics reflects a failing of reform technique. It expects from the state outcomes which the methods of government are poorly equipped to deliver. Indeed, the harder the state tries to manage society's diversity, the less successful it is likely to be. This is the ultimate paradox of the Left: when more becomes less.

Whenever governments intervene to nominate and promote a particular identity, other identities are automatically downgraded. This is contrary to the goals of inclusive citizenship. Nobody wants to be left out of the citizenship tent, especially when public resources are involved. This type of exclusion inevitably leads to political resentment and envy. This is what the Americans earlier in the 1990s described as the phenomenon of "angry white males". In Australia it explains the major cause of the Keating Government's defeat in 1996. Labor was punished by "downwards envy" - a feeling in the electorate that we were addressing social issues more through identity politics than socio-economic need.

Exclusion is not a good way of building trust and the habits of boundary-crossing in society. As Richard Sennett writes:

Social inclusion is not a subject reformers think through well. We tend to assume that if we diminish racial discrimination class inequality or sexual prejudice, a more cohesive society will inevitably result. But inclusion has its own logic. Inclusion, be it in a small-scale project or in a nation, requires mutual recognition; people must signal that they are aware of each other in common enterprises.

Multiple-identity citizenship can only succeed through the politics of inclusion. This is what the communitarian leader, Amitai Etzioni, has described as "a community of communities" - a society which recognises diversity while also fostering the bonds of moral obligation. It uses the mutual trust and mutual recognition of civil society as a way of helping identities and interests to coexist. This approach is based on three reform strategies:

� The first is to 'see like a citizen'. Policy makers need to recognise the limits of state power. They need to understand the rich diversity of identities and loyalties in civil society. They need to see the world through the eyes of multiple-identity citizens. It is not sufficient to write human rights into the laws of the state without also considering the means by which they might be respected and practised in the everyday laws of civil society. The most enduring and powerful rights are those embedded in public morality. These foundations lie in the relationship between people, no less than the relationship between citizens and government. Policy makers need to develop the habits of a civic conversation to close the gap between the shared experiences of civil society and the wishes of the state.

� The second strategy is to focus on the right kind of inputs to civil society, instead of trying to control its outcomes. Government needs to help people to reconcile conflicts within their multiple identities. The raw materials for this task are clear: mutual trust and social capital; the power of lifelong learning; the devolution of social policy; plus strong laws against negative discrimination. This is the role of government as an enabler, as a negotiator of differences, rather than as a social engineer.

� Finally, the state needs to maximise the competence of its citizens. Multiple-identity citizenship requires a high level of excellence in public life: a strong devotion to civic engagement, enlightenment and ethical ideals. This points to the need for improved public investments and outcomes in education. In the global village, people are being called on to tryst and understand the position of strangers. This process requires a particular way of looking at the world. It requires they type of enlightenment and self-knowledge associated with education: people understanding themselves, the broader society in which they live, plus the needs and interests of others. In short, a capable society is a learning society.

Conclusion

The moral foundations of governance lie in a new politics which:

� Recognises the role of civil society in creating trust and moral obligation

� Follows the communitarian practice of engaging the public in a civic conversation

� Builds a new citizenship, based on the big tent of multiple identities

� Above all else, trusts its people.

Without trust there can be no shared morality or, for that matter, shared humanity. It is not morality that people hand down from a higher existence. It is authority. This is because they do not trust the people they purport to represent. As one of the bishops covering my electorate wrote to me: 'The basic difficulty [with the idea of social capital] is the assumption that people can be trusted.'

The enabling state is about the politics of trust. This is why it tries to disperse power, rather than concentrate it. It is not afraid to trust civil society. The new politics demands the dispersal of power and the sharing of morality. It is our highest hope, not only for a just society but - in the best and proper meaning of the phrase - a shared humanity.

� This chapter is based on a paper originally delivered at the Australian Association for Professional and Applied Ethics Conference, Old Parliament House, Canberra, 1 October 1999.

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»	Spotlight on HIH�s WorkCover Link
»	Construction Industry Faces Safety Crisis
»	Statewide Strike Off But Della on Notice
»	David and Goliath Battle at IBM
»	Natasha�s Democrats Face Senate IR Test
»	Howard Abandons Working Families
»	City Councils Recognise Birth � Now for the Bush
»	BHP Forced to Back Off Kembla AWAs
»	Impulse Bores Workers Into Submission
»	Coach Drivers Win Permanency
»	Boss Pockets Compo Payment
»	Union Wins Battle in AWA War
»	Publicans Want to Reduce Bar Pay
»	Abbott Agrees to Ban Asbestos
»	Union Acts to Save Leichhardt Refuge
»	Trade Union Choir Turns Ten
»	Activists' Notebook

»	The Soapbox
»	The Locker Room
»	Trades Hall
»	Tool Shed

»	Thanks from Indonesia
»	Hester Spot On
»	Fuelling Voter Anger
»	May Day - The Debate Continues
»	Not a Chaser Fan

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