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00:00For the best part of 20 years, my career took me overseas.
00:23I was always homesick and it was places like this that played in my imagination.
00:29The joy of returning sparked unexpected questions and conversations.
00:36My nostalgic view of Australia was challenged by the place I returned to.
00:42I realised that my idea of Australia was perhaps a bit out of date.
00:47In a rapidly changing world, I wonder, is it time that we all began to reimagine what is the idea of Australia?
00:59My idea of Australia is a place of unimaginable deep time.
01:05When I close my eyes and think of Australia, I see my dad in his shorts mowing the grass.
01:10The surf lifesaver, the footballer, crocodile dandy.
01:14Meat pies, Vegemite, big sky, big red dirt roads through the desert.
01:19I smell gum leaves, smoking ceremonies.
01:23Coriander and garlic simmering in olive oil.
01:26It smells like a Bunnings barbecue.
01:28A sausage sizzle.
01:30This is like a country, there's no question about it.
01:32I mean, if you're born in Australia, you've won the lottery.
01:35The place works.
01:36A diverse, bubbling, subversive culture.
01:39What an extraordinary, polyglot place it is.
01:43It is astonishing.
01:44Celebration of the nation.
01:46Celebration of the nation.
01:48Celebration of the nation.
01:50But the idea of who we are as a nation is still a work in progress.
01:56It sparks debate and conflicting views.
01:59If you just tell that happy story, you're really engaging just in propaganda.
02:04Fair go, egalitarianism, greatest multicultural country on earth.
02:08Like, that's a great package.
02:10It's just that it's not real.
02:11This nation has committed a crime against Indigenous people while claiming some grand successful multiculturalism.
02:20There is something great and awful about Australia.
02:24In the tale of Australia, characters and plot lines have been discarded.
02:29Rule number one of the colony is to pretend there was no past.
02:33We talk a lot about less we forget in Australia, but we are a nation that's very good at forgetting.
02:38The interesting thing here is, where were the women?
02:41You won't read about them in the history books because essentially men wrote the histories.
02:45We hide from our history because it is so dark and so unnerving.
02:52By delving into our past, we can find clues to our present and our future.
02:58If you don't know the past, you can't go forward.
03:00The idea of Australia, for me, it's in ashes.
03:04Like the story goes, the phoenix will rise from the ashes.
03:09But I don't doubt the power, energy, creativity of the Australian people.
03:14If we stop being divided, we can actually focus on just how incredible the opportunities we have here in Australia are.
03:23I think at its best, Australia is genuinely full of potential.
03:28It's a great democratic country committed to enterprise, aspiration and egalitarianism.
03:35A nation which delivers to future generations the opportunity to have an even better life.
03:41A story yet to be completed and is one of the most extraordinary, most adventurous in a way.
03:47And so out of this great southern land of dreams and descent, of achievements and missed opportunities,
03:53what is the new story that we want to tell about this ancient continent?
03:58Like any story, the idea of Australia is an imagined one.
04:16The story we've chosen to tell ourselves.
04:20It is of course in iconic books, films and television that our identity is explored and shaped.
04:29But what's the reality of who we are?
04:32Where does the myth end and the truth begin?
04:35Nations don't just fall from the sky.
04:39The creation of people's imagining, of their agency, their political activism.
04:44The idea of Australia has always been contested.
04:49Myths are really important to creating nations.
04:52Everybody in a nation, like hundreds of thousands or millions of people,
04:56will never meet each other and never see each other face to face.
04:59And so to create that commonality and unity, myths and legends and films are really, really important.
05:11I'm not a bushranger.
05:12My kids aren't bushrangers.
05:13So what is it that attracts us to the idea of, say, Ned Kelly thumbing his nose up at authority?
05:19Some are about control.
05:21Some are about comfort, social cohesion and the idea of an Australian identity.
05:27We are building a great industrial civilisation on this primary basis
05:31and developing a new race, a new force in the culture of mind and body.
05:36The way that I think about myths is like bedtime stories.
05:40When we put our kids to bed at night, we hold them tight.
05:43We hold them close.
05:44We make them feel safe and secure and like they belong.
05:48We talk about mateship.
05:49We talk about having a figure.
05:51We talk about equality.
05:52We talk about equity.
05:53No Australian child will be living in poverty.
06:01The myth-making about brave pioneers, the little black princess myth.
06:08Jedi, I want to marry you.
06:11I want to build a little house for you and me.
06:13They're all concoctions of people clinging to the hope that their origins here as settlers have some honour.
06:22The pioneers have struggled and fought and worked to make it.
06:27Free, tolerant, raw.
06:30Any disturbing of those underlying stories, many of which are untruths, forces, you know, an extreme reaction.
06:45When you dare stand up against the people!
06:49And this is where social historians aren't very popular.
06:52Because they're always telling people things they don't want to know.
07:00There's perhaps one myth that defines Australia's self-proclaimed identity above all others.
07:07Fair Go, the great new program that you've been waiting for.
07:10A program in which it's a knockout competition.
07:12I remember hearing that Australia was the place of a fair go, and I thought that was a great aspiration for a society to have.
07:20The principle of a fair go all round will apply.
07:23The Australian public are always prepared to give the leader a fair go.
07:28Equality and the fair go.
07:31I believe in a fair go for those who have a go.
07:34A fair dinkum people whose diligent hard work has built a fair dinkum land.
07:39The fair go actually comes with the sort of people who came to build Australia.
07:45The ordinary emigrants and the convicts who were rehabilitated.
07:52They laboured hard and wanted a fair go at work and in politics.
07:59But the term was first coined around 1860 on the sports field, where it lives on to this day.
08:05Sport is one of the things that unites people here.
08:10That's one place where I really felt I fit in and I belonged.
08:15It suddenly didn't matter where I was from at all.
08:19It doesn't matter who you are or where you're from.
08:23You can be the equal or better of your competitor on the sporting field.
08:27We're in the middle of a great movement that when sports bring women in and treat us equally.
08:37We have a resurgence of interest in going to sport.
08:41And that says something about our great sporting nature.
08:44As it should though about everything else we do.
08:47Who deserves a fair go appears to still be subjective today.
08:50It's not a notion that seeks to lift up anybody who's been left behind.
08:55We actually celebrate a culture of plunder, of finders keepers.
09:01So it's a notion of the fair go that's very much about the individual more or less winning the lottery.
09:08Women have not had a fair go and still don't get a fair go in this country.
09:11We still have a gender pay gap.
09:12It certainly wasn't on offer to those who had been living here for millennia when the British claimed the land.
09:20That fair go really never applied to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
09:26It's something I think we tell ourselves, but Australia is very good at marginalising people as well.
09:33Mabo.
09:35What about it?
09:36That's your classic case of big business trying to take land and they couldn't.
09:43The Mabo decision pertains to the specific issue of native land title and terra nullius.
09:50Yeah.
09:52Terra nullius is Latin shorthand for a doctrine that was propagated back in the 1800s for British colonisation.
10:01Terra nullius doesn't mean simply empty land.
10:03It means an ungoverned land.
10:06In the face of menacing savages, the white men advance up the shore of the new land.
10:11You know what? In the long run, I reckon we'd be better off with a more restrictive immigration policy.
10:16According to the British, the Aboriginal peoples of Australia were savages and therefore could not be treated with in the same way that they might treat with an Indian Raja, for instance.
10:29The British had claimed that the Aborigines did not actually own their land.
10:36They weren't really settled on the land.
10:39They simply wandered across it.
10:41And they also don't exercise any form of dominion or sovereignty over it.
10:46They don't have laws and customs which we can recognise.
10:48Now that was the original sin from which all else followed.
11:01The reality was a land inhabited for at least 65,000 years.
11:06And a population in 1788 of hundreds of thousands of First Nations people with complex economic, political and social systems.
11:17Governor Phillip arrives and says, well, there are a lot more indigenous people than we expected.
11:23And they don't look very disorganised.
11:25They look pretty organised in their anger about us.
11:28Are you feeling defeated?
11:30No, no, not at all.
11:33This country was discovered, explored and settled by Aboriginal people.
11:39It's the lie of Terra Nullius that's underpinned everything in the Australian nation.
11:45And that lie continues to haunt us.
11:50This convenient fiction of an empty, ungoverned land has had a catastrophic impact for centuries.
12:01The man who applied Terra Nullius in law for the first time was the aptly named Chief Justice, Baron Field.
12:10He was an Englishman who in 1822 helped put up the first plaque to commemorate the landing of Captain Cook at Botany Bay.
12:21By the late 18-teens, the colony was growing quite rapidly.
12:24More free settlers coming in and the kind of basic unresolved questions of what law really applies here became more and more critical.
12:34So a guy called Baron Field, which literally means untended, unloved land, comes up with the idea of Terra Nullius.
12:43It's so foundational to the nation that we've become in all kinds of ways.
12:47For Field, who, you know, first applied this idea in Australia, he wasn't really concerned about its effects on Aboriginal people.
12:55He saw it as a way of resolving this legal issue between groups of settlers.
13:00That by treating Aboriginal people as if they don't exist in the eyes of the law, effectively, ultimately, they just won't exist at all.
13:09And that's what Field thought.
13:11It was a kind of a Darwinian idea almost, wasn't it?
13:14He makes it quite clear that Aboriginal people weren't fading away of their own accord, that there was hostility and effectively war, and that he expected them to lose.
13:26So he's almost imagining in 50 years they really won't be here, so we may as well say they're not here now.
13:31Now, this Baron Field, he fancies himself not only as a legal scholar, but he's a wordsmith, he's a poet.
13:37He is the first person to rhyme the word Australia, and he famously rhymes it with failure.
13:42How did he feel that Australia was a failure?
13:47It's a penal colony. He's there as a judge, the whole place is full of convicts, the governor's corrupt, you know, everyone's drunk all the time.
13:55How can this ever become a normal community, a normal society?
13:59A civilised society.
14:00A functional society did emerge within a few decades, but that must have been unimaginable for those sent from the other side of the world.
14:14For them, life was hard, unknowingly part of a grand imperial plan.
14:19Convict transportation needs to be understood as one of the great forced migrations of unfree labour in world history, complementary and continuous with the slave trade to the Americas from Africa.
14:33But this is the dispossessed people of Great Britain and Ireland.
14:39But what genius the Empire has, we will put them to work to dispossess another group of people and as an exploited, unfree workforce, build the infrastructure, the involuntary agents of colonisation.
14:54The motivating ambition of Empire was to claim and exploit this distant land.
15:01It paved the way for another of our beloved myths, the heroic and pioneering Aussie Bushmen.
15:08There's this narrative in Australia about the early settler going out into the bush and exploring.
15:15Poison at the front, hit him!
15:18And conquering and, you know, bringing the sheep with him and all of that, you know, that's true, that happened, right?
15:26But then they had to fight for the land because there were already people there.
15:31And so that story about that heroic, white, iconic person is also drenched in blood.
15:41And we just gloss over that.
15:44In the hands of some writers like Banjo Patterson, absolutely romanticised.
15:50In reality, they're homeless, itinerant workers who didn't have the money to get married.
15:57And what Australians are looking for, I think, is something unique that they can use to mould their character.
16:04And they see that figure as extolling a kind of dry humour, stoic qualities, grin and bear it.
16:13That is a new kind of person bred in the frontier, bred in the colonies.
16:16And so they wanted to celebrate people who struggled against distance and drought and fire and flood.
16:26And so it's not surprising in a way that they were taken to be seen as emblematic.
16:32A celebrated figure of masculinity is, of course, the mythical Aussie Bushranger.
16:41But even that story isn't always as it seems.
16:45Some, like Ned Kelly, became icons.
16:49But others who challenged the stereotypes, well, they just disappeared.
16:53So, Captain Moonlight, such a big name.
16:58He's probably one of the most fascinating characters in Australian history that most people have never heard about.
17:03All around the country and indeed all around the world.
17:05I mean, the Moonlight story was being carried in the pages of the New York newspapers and back in London as well.
17:11Ended up robbing a bank at Mount Edgerton, just outside Ballarat.
17:15And was later convicted of that and spent 10 years in Pentridge.
17:18But it was there that he met the greatest lover of his life, James Nesbitt.
17:23And they became incredibly close.
17:25And once his moonlight was released, he ended up forming a bit of a, I guess you'd call it a posse.
17:30It's sounding very dog day afternoon right now.
17:32Oh, it's incredible.
17:33It's a really black kind of noir kind of setting.
17:37These five guys walk from Melbourne up to the Murray River, get to Gundagai and to a station called Wanta Badgerie.
17:44They're starving. The manager of Wanta Badgerie turns them away.
17:49And over the next two or three days, they take guns, they take food and up to 40 hostages.
17:55And it all ends in this bloody showdown with the troopers until James Nesbitt is shot.
18:00And the police find Moonlight lying at the base of his hut, cradling his great friend in his arms and kissing him passionately all over his face, sobbing.
18:15They staged a trial in Sydney and he was sentenced to hang.
18:20There were thousands of people ringing the streets, climbing trees, trying to peer in over the walls.
18:26Tell me about the night before.
18:29For hours, he's been scribbling away at his desk with a fountain pen, writing letters to family, to friends, saying goodbye.
18:36He writes to Jim Nesbitt's mother and it's a very, very touching letter.
18:41He says, my dearest Mrs. Nesbitt, to the mother of Jim, his grave will be my resting place and I trust I may be worthy to be with him.
18:50He wanted to be buried with James Nesbitt and the authorities went no.
18:53To think that he was facing execution, he was only a few hours away and he knows that he's about to die.
19:03And he went to the gallows and was hanged with a lock of James Nesbitt's hair in a ring around his finger.
19:09It wasn't until this cache of letters were discovered after his execution and they were seized by the governor of the prison and they were never sent.
19:18And they languished in this box until these researchers came across it almost a century later.
19:25He talked about his soaring heart every time he looked at Nesbitt, how he was the great lover of his life.
19:31Do you think he's been written out of our history because of his sexuality?
19:35Without a doubt. So they just sort of pushed him to one side.
19:39Why do you think this bush ranger legend has endured for us, the mythology? Why is that lived in our imagination?
19:46We like to imagine that we're a little bit different than what we really are.
19:57Anti-authority mavericks or sticklers for the rules.
20:01I wonder what's closer to the truth of our Australian identity.
20:05By the middle of the 19th century, the popular imagination was captured by a very different kind of radical.
20:14People with big dreams and high ideals.
20:17In the 1850s, many settler colonists determined that they were creating a new world.
20:25Manhood suffrage meant that men were politically empowered, all men, against rank and status, against other hierarchies.
20:35So many Australians have no idea about these advanced progressive reforms in opposition to the British Empire and that we exported to the world.
20:48In the 19th century, democracy took root in this country as fast as any other nation on earth.
20:55From the early days, there was this deep and profound sense, we want to make a better Britain in this country.
21:02And to a large extent, that's what happened.
21:04It's voting day.
21:06What's voting day?
21:07We have to pick one of these people to be the boss.
21:10Oh, okay.
21:11Oh, don't pick that one, I don't like your smile.
21:13Pick her, she's got earrings.
21:14Australia is a democratic innovator, preferential voting, proportional representation, compulsory voting.
21:23Australia was the first country in the world to allow women to actually stand for Parliament.
21:28And beyond these egalitarian aspirations, the idea of Australia as a cultural melting pot was emerging.
21:35Chinese Australian merchants and other educated Chinese Australians in Melbourne argued that Australia should become a cosmopolitan country.
21:44That was the word they used.
21:46It anticipated what we later came to call multiculturalism.
21:50A brave new world of progressive social, economic and political reform.
21:57But not everybody agreed.
22:00The utopian new nation was gripped by fear.
22:05Would some be more equal than others?
22:14What do you think of the white Australia policy?
22:16White Australia policy?
22:17Well, I think it's all right.
22:19You want a drum, go back in that tree in the jungle where you came from.
22:21Well, I think it's good that we can keep out the coloured races.
22:24What a great promo that is for King Kong.
22:26Get Adam's goods down front, do you reckon?
22:27We should keep our country as white as possible.
22:29It is an open manifestation of racial discrimination.
22:33Keep them out, we don't want them.
22:36All this is banking up against Australia, against the white race.
22:40So the white Australia policy is announced in 1901 as part of the creation of the nation.
22:46It was an outward looking policy stating that Australia was to be a white man's country.
22:52And it was particularly addressed to their fear of the power of China.
22:57They thought they were going to be swamped by Chinese and they're going to take over.
23:03So anti-Chinese campaigns flourish over several decades.
23:07Tensions between our two nations escalate dramatically.
23:11Australian government wants an inquiry.
23:13Our sovereignty will be paramount.
23:20And so on the 7th of August 1901, the first national parliament of the newly minted nation meet to debate the Immigration Restriction Act, which will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.
23:38So sitting right here by the dispatch box is the Prime Minister Edmund Barton.
23:42Opposite him, Labour leader Chris Watson warns of racial contamination.
23:47There's also his irascible colleague, the firebrand Billy Hughes, who declares,
23:51we object to these people on the basis of their vice and their immorality.
23:57After fierce debate, finally the bill is passed enthusiastically.
24:01It's one of Australia's great sliding door moments.
24:07The White Australia policy is enshrined and will remain for more than 70 years.
24:14The White Australia policy was directed to the world.
24:18The legislation comprised the Immigration Restriction Act and the Pacific Laborers Deportation Act is also passed in 1901.
24:27Each of the different colonies had regulated who could come in and out.
24:31And so there were differences.
24:33And in Queensland, there was a need for labour.
24:36And so the South Sea Islanders were brought into Australia even during a restrictive period of time.
24:43But how they were brought here is one of the many dark chapters in Australia's story.
24:48So blackbirding refers to the trafficking of some 60-odd thousand Melanesian men stolen from their island states.
24:58They were tricked, coerced off those beaches, brought to New South Wales, but also Bundaberg in particular.
25:07From the 1860s, tens of thousands of South Sea Islanders were put to work in the sugarcane plantations.
25:15And so it's memories of the brutal trade live on to this day.
25:20My grandfather came from the Solomon Islands when he was snatched off the banks of Langalunga Lagoon.
25:26How old was he?
25:27He was 14.
25:28And he was fishing for his tribe.
25:29He was a young boy, initiated to go and hunt sharks.
25:33A lot of it hasn't been told.
25:36But myself as an elder, I walk and live and I carry that mantle of a rich tapestry over my shoulders.
25:43There is an issue, Rachel, that we need to address.
25:46And that is that the Australian South Sea Islander history has to be told in its full light for what it is.
25:55Why can't the Australian government do that?
25:58Why can't they have the intestinal fortitude to say there's going to be a few flies around this thing when we rip the bandaid off the history of Australia?
26:08How we brought them slaves here from Melanesia?
26:11How can we fix that?
26:13One man willing to rip that bandaid off is Brian Cortis.
26:24His grandfather bought the family property from a man who made his fortune from indentured workers.
26:31It's a history that's been covered and buried for a long, long time.
26:36Robert Townes saw in January 1863 that Abraham Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation,
26:43which meant slavery was going to be abolished in the US,
26:46which then meant that the sugar industry was not going to flourish but decline in America.
26:51And with the support of the colonial government in Queensland,
26:55he helped to establish a sugar industry in our state.
26:59So he was future-proofing it?
27:01He was, definitely.
27:03Now the other tragic thing is that 62,000 were brought to Queensland,
27:08and of the 62,000, 16,000 died here.
27:12Now that's a mortality rate of 25%.
27:15So in a way their lives were perhaps even more precarious than a bought and sold human.
27:22If an American bought a slave for $2,000 at auction,
27:25he would look after that person because it was their property in their mind.
27:30Whereas here, they only cost the price of the shipping over and a few pounds.
27:36That's why so many died.
27:38And yet that has never come out.
27:40Well, it's kind of shocking because I think most Australians,
27:45I mean we know about the convict labour,
27:47but I think we don't think we had slavery.
28:00This history is coming out of the shadows.
28:03In Bundaberg, unnamed graves symbolically commemorate the thousands of islanders who died.
28:10Brian Cortis remembered his grandfather saying that people had perished working on the farm,
28:16their bodies left to rot.
28:19So he set out to find and honour them.
28:22I felt I had an obligation to bring some dignity and respect to the people that are buried here.
28:27Rachel, they died a long way from home.
28:30We don't know who they were.
28:32And many of them were brought out against their will.
28:36How have your fellow farmers felt about you turning the lights on on this story?
28:43It's history.
28:44And you can't have a vision collectively for this great country unless you know where we come from.
28:50Well, it's a mind-blowing history.
28:53Really, you've exploded this little mind of mine.
28:59In 1906, the High Court confirmed the commitment to a white nation
29:04and upheld the forced removal of around 7,000 South Sea Islanders on the grounds of race.
29:13Ever since, that same institution has determined whether or not governments
29:19can deport people.
29:21I mean, we've got to keep in mind that Australian governments
29:24right up until the 1970s are preoccupied with race
29:28and they often understand race in terms of colour but not always.
29:31It's about social engineering and it's about the preservation of a British and white way of life.
29:38Ships are bringing migrants and new settlers vital to the future security, growth and development of this nation.
29:44Since federation migration has played a really important role in every element of Australia,
29:49where the migrants come from, how we choose which migrants to bring into Australia
29:55and indeed how we treat them when we get here, that's been a moving feast over a long period of time.
30:01Professor Michael Wesley is Deputy Vice Chancellor at Melbourne University,
30:10but he may never have lived or worked in this country.
30:13The White Australia policy denied his entire family entry until the early 1970s.
30:20My mother was a bit of a rebel. She was expected to leave school at year 10,
30:25return back to the farm and she said,
30:27I'm going to head off to India to be a missionary nurse.
30:31And she was actually posted to the small town Asamgo that my father was born and grew up in.
30:37He was one of the pioneers of a specifically Asian form of Christian art,
30:43really quite famous around the world.
30:46A mixed race marriage in the mid 1960s was utterly alien to both my mother's family and to my father's family.
30:55My mother was an Australian citizen.
30:57She had two children who had been born in India but were half Australian.
31:02And the intention was very much to move to Australia,
31:06but they found that they were making no progress whatsoever.
31:09Suddenly once the Whitlam government had formally abolished the White Australia policy in 1973,
31:17things moved very quickly.
31:18And that's the year we came to Australia.
31:21It was a very difficult environment for a young half Indian kid to come into
31:28and for my parents to integrate into.
31:31Our family history has been in some way intertwined with the end of the White Australia policy.
31:38It makes it very personal for me and it's meant that in my academic career I've returned repeatedly
31:45to how Australia has navigated the cultural differences between itself and its Asian neighbours.
31:53The flow of people into our country from all corners of the globe over the last 200 years
31:59has meant that change is our only constant.
32:03The very idea of Australia is shaped and evolves with the stories and the experiences of those who come here.
32:12That idea of Australia offering a good life or a decent life has been so important right through its migration history.
32:21For almost 200 years, newcomers have been migrating to Australia.
32:26I felt that I landed on the moon or something.
32:30I wish to know where I am now. King's bloody cross! Thank you, but I wish to go to the Hampton Court Hotel and I'm not deaf in my ears.
32:39The difference between us and Europe is that we desperately wanted people and so it's worked incredibly well.
32:47We are now an extraordinary multicultural society.
32:50Australia I grew up in was 95% British.
32:53These people have come in search of a new future in a country of opportunity.
32:58As an Australian citizen.
32:59As an Australian citizen.
33:00As an Australian citizen.
33:02Eventually, the policy of assimilation, of forgetting and fitting in, gives way to multiculturalism and celebrating difference.
33:12Not everyone welcomes it.
33:14Abolishing the policy of multiculturalism will save billions of dollars.
33:19I had someone recently comment on social media that we should go back to our own countries but leave our hummus.
33:25I was like, you don't get our hummus if you don't want us, we're the ones that bring the hummus.
33:31Our multicultural communities feel as though their social licence or their passport can be withdrawn.
33:38Whereas mine can't.
33:42Australians now come from almost every country in the world.
33:47But the precariousness of the migrant experience continues.
33:52When we got married, the government in Sudan changed and it became a dictatorship.
33:58It wasn't the place that we wanted our children to grow up.
34:01And my husband decided that Australia is the place to be.
34:05And for some reason he said he was impressed by the Australians.
34:09He said they were fair dinkum.
34:11They're salt of the earth.
34:13And so for him these were the characteristics of the place that he wants to live in.
34:18And he wants his children to grow up in.
34:21So coming in 92, if I can just jump forward, September 11 happens.
34:27For Muslim people September 11 is a turning point.
34:32It was that important and that significant in our lives.
34:37We became potential terrorists.
34:41But your daughter Yasmin became Queensland Australian of the Year in 2015.
34:46And then she posts about Anzac Day relating it to the plight of refugees.
34:51That post, up for an hour or so, went viral, sparking a furor.
34:58The backlash coming out of that was out of all proportions.
35:03She's obviously pretty un-Australian and she's entitled to make a fool of herself.
35:07She's become totally infatuated with her own sense of importance.
35:10Like the number of death threats that I've gotten.
35:13And she is absolutely without credibility.
35:15I did not know how to handle the full force of the mainstream press.
35:21It was done with good intentions.
35:24To draw attention in Australia as a land of the fair go to groups of people that are incarcerated.
35:34And to say that the values of the Anzac, you know, are about freedom, opportunity.
35:42And so if we believe in those values, then what about the people that we have incarcerated?
35:48So the right talks about cancel culture, but the right cancelled your daughter.
35:53That was probably the first example of cancel culture in our communities.
35:58It sent a very strong message to young people in the community that if you speak,
36:03if you put your head above the parapet, this is...
36:06It could go very, very, very bad.
36:09And it made a lot of people question their Australian identity, their sense of belonging and so on.
36:15Well, they were really told that your place here is very fragile.
36:18It's very conditional.
36:20She would be walking down the street and somebody would come and say to her,
36:23you should be killed.
36:26So she ended up leaving the country and she's still not back.
36:31And I hope that we will be able to have more conversations, deeper conversations about Australia,
36:39about the position of different groups of people.
36:42So do you feel Australian?
36:44I feel Australian, but my own sense of Australian.
36:47Not the standard Australian that everybody thinks about.
36:51But do they?
36:52Do we all just carry our own Australian-ness?
36:56My Australian-ness is one that is multicultural.
37:01Yeah, that's fine.
37:02It's one that enjoys having barbecues.
37:06Oh, that's a big tick.
37:08Yeah, ticks.
37:09Does not enjoy rugby.
37:11Same.
37:12We are so the same Australian.
37:14So Australian.
37:16You're more Australian than me.
37:18It seems what it is to be Australian is still contested.
37:22A multicultural nation, but a work in progress, continuing to evolve.
37:28I kind of think about my dad and all the racism that he's experienced.
37:32He's just encountered so many setbacks along the way because of his thick accent and because of his dark skin.
37:41We're just like you.
37:42We have to prove that we're just like you.
37:44Like, it's not enough that you just look at me and say, you see another human being.
37:49We've never seen this before.
37:52You can call me this, but my name is Mohammed.
37:55Mohammed.
37:56Australia is Held Out is this great success story of multiculturalism.
37:59But when we look at representation, look at our parliament, look at our judiciary, look at our legal profession, the world in which I operate, it is not representative of the society that we are.
38:09I grew up in Australia.
38:11I learned to speak Hindi in Australia.
38:13I learned classical Indian dance in Australia.
38:15I developed the aspiration and self-belief that I could be an actress in India, in Australia.
38:20So I think there's something really positive to be said for how multicultural communities can flourish.
38:27I think in multiculturalism that we're as good as anybody.
38:35I've been around the world and I haven't seen it better.
38:38I find myself saying to an Indian cab driver or an African in a store, thank you for coming.
38:44And now these people make Australia what it is.
38:47And I really truly still believe that you could become the global exemplar.
38:53I don't think Australia should give up on that aspiration.
38:56So if I'm trying to describe multiculturalism for Australia, I think of it less of a word.
39:00I think of it as a spirit of who we are.
39:03That's the beating heart of this nation.
39:05So we are successful to a certain degree, but not without the fight, not without the struggle.
39:12So people in positions of power that have been handed the baton for generations upon generations
39:19still have that even subconscious schooling and education.
39:24It's like trauma sits in the DNA.
39:27So does privilege.
39:30But despite these entrenched inequalities, for many Australians, there's another well-worn myth
39:37that they hold dear.
39:39No wonder they call this the lucky country.
39:42Come and say good day.
39:44For generations, Australia's unofficial tagline has been the lucky country.
40:01But just how deserving of that name is it?
40:05The received wisdom has been that Australia is a lucky country, a society where people have
40:11been able or should have been able to have a fair go.
40:14Now it's a country of 12 million.
40:16Some are just learning their first words of English.
40:19Australians are lucky for so many reasons.
40:21We're amongst the richest people in the world.
40:24We have a huge land mass.
40:26We have enormous natural resources.
40:28While Australia has been a lucky country for some groups, that luck has depended upon the
40:34deprivation and the disadvantage of other groups.
40:38The lucky country thesis has taken such deep hold that it's ended up actually being self-belittling
40:45and not sufficiently and accurately describing what Australia became.
40:51A lucky country may be a myth, but like most myths, it contains a kernel of truth.
40:59Australians are indeed good at making their own luck, finding innovative solutions to vexing problems.
41:06Governor Macquarie did this in 1812 when the colony was running out of cash.
41:13So tell me about the coin shortage in the early 1800s and why that was a problem.
41:18Remember Australia was a penal colony.
41:21There weren't any currencies except for those that the merchant ships used to bring in,
41:26from Spain or England or even Dutch currency.
41:30And it was something that Governor Macquarie was very mindful of and was trying to solve.
41:37The British government came up with this sort of fallback plan to send out some Spanish dollars.
41:43And they sent out £10,000 in Spanish dollars and sort of said,
41:48well here you go, make do, make do with this.
41:51Alright, 10,000 Spanish coins arrived, but that wasn't enough.
41:55Yeah, he thought, this is not going to cut it.
41:57What can we do?
41:58And thought, well what if we punch a hole in this coin?
42:03And that will essentially give us two currencies.
42:06So, in a sense, you had the holy dollar, which was five shillings, and that was the outer bit.
42:15And the hole punched bit was called the dump.
42:18And that was 15 pence.
42:20And when you sort of added it together, you got a value that was 25% more than the dollar.
42:26So, in a sense, it kind of worked for everyone because it was worth more
42:31and you solved a problem of not having enough coinage in the colony.
42:36So, what parallels can we draw between what Governor Macquarie did back in the 1800s
42:41and what Macquarie Bank is doing today?
42:43He sort of would come up with these solutions that got the outcome that he wanted for the state,
42:49but also created a commercial outcome.
42:52Finding the loopholes?
42:53Yeah, finding the loopholes.
42:55Like the holy dollar?
42:56Yeah, make money and solve the problem.
43:01The trailblazing Australian Investment Bank is inspired by Governor Macquarie's pragmatic genius
43:08and adopted his holy dollar as its logo.
43:12It's known as the Millionaire's Factory and came into its own in the 1980s
43:17when the Australian economy was in desperate need of modernisation.
43:22We are God!
43:24We are God!
43:25We are God!
43:26We are God!
43:27By the early 1980s, Australia had been wracked by a series of recessions.
43:31It started in the mid-1970s and there was one recession after another.
43:35I mean, there was a new economic orthodoxy around.
43:39By the time the Hawke government comes in in 1983, the Australian economy was very rigid and sclerotic
43:46and we were going down the tube.
43:52Bob Hawke was the last Prime Minister to sit at this desk in an old Parliament House
43:56where he led his Labor government.
43:58He was elected with a mandate for economic reform.
44:01You dirty!
44:02In the early days of the Hawke-Keating governments, there was very much an attempt to offset the market economy
44:09with social safeguards.
44:11It was made politically achievable by Mr Hawke's consensus approach.
44:15Labor balanced the idea of free market economics on the one hand
44:20and a fair go for the Aussie battler on the other.
44:23What Hawke and Keating introduced was what they called neoliberalism with a human face,
44:28which reintroduced free healthcare in Australia in return for unions agreeing to temper, to moderate wage demands.
44:38This was the decisive government that transformed the Australian economy,
44:43that opened up the economy to market forces, to deregulation, getting rid of protection,
44:49introducing free trade, delivering a budget surplus.
44:53But the Hawke-Keating philosophy was always growth with equity.
44:59That was their great achievement.
45:01When your phones started ringing in dealing rooms this morning, trading was frenetic.
45:06Economic growth and protection for the less well-off followed
45:09and Australia was the envy of the world.
45:12The model is later copied by Britain and America, who call it the Third Way.
45:18The Third Way was simply what we'd been doing in Australia for some time.
45:22Australia's policy development processes were identified as the best.
45:26This was the gold standard.
45:28When that period of government ended and John Howard was elected,
45:31the framework of the market economy had completely taken root.
45:34And so the privatisations continued at an extraordinary clip.
45:38We have been elected with a mandate, a very powerful mandate.
45:43So one of the consequences is the sort of marketisation of schools, universities, everything you can think of.
45:52He wasn't the first government to decide that the private sector must be better at running things than the public sector.
45:58We now know that to be nonsense.
46:00We economic reformers were on a journey.
46:03We knew where the journey started, but we really didn't know where it should end.
46:06By the year 2000, I would like to see an Australian nation that feels comfortable and relaxed about their history, about the present.
46:14And I'd also like to see them comfortable and relaxed about the future.
46:18Under John Howard, the labour market in Australia changed radically in ways that didn't make life very relaxed or very comfortable for those at the bottom.
46:27What Howard was very clever at doing was shifting the discourse from one of national aspiration back to a very individual aspiration.
46:39Yeah, no, it's kind of dangerous out there.
46:42There's Iraq.
46:44There's 9-11.
46:46It's okay.
46:48You can just stay here and comfortably enjoy your home and your investment property and your beach house and your jet ski and your private school education.
46:58And that's aspirational enough for you.
47:01I want to be effluent, Mum.
47:03Effluent.
47:04I mean, look at everything you've got.
47:05You've got a Hyundai to Hightail at Round In, a half share in a home unit, a DVD player, a mobile.
47:11I mean, what else is there?
47:12It's not enough.
47:13I deserve more.
47:15He encapsulated what he called the Howard Battlers.
47:19The fact that he won four elections suggests that he got that pretty right.
47:24You know, I was his treasury secretary through until 2007.
47:29And from my perspective, we could have done more in terms of restructuring the taxation system and also investing in long lived social and economic infrastructure.
47:39We probably won't get that opportunity again in my lifetime.
47:43And I think there are a lot of people who would look back on that period now and say, that's a bit of a missed opportunity.
47:53Whatever the contest over ideas, there's no doubt about the increasing economic inequality in Australia.
48:00Perhaps we've forgotten that the fair go is meant to hold out its hand to the underdog.
48:06What's happened over the past 20 years, essentially since Howard, there's no doubt at all that inequality in this country has become much more of an issue.
48:17We have a very significant percentage of 20 to 35 year olds cannot afford to buy their first house.
48:25People who once would have been able to fall back on public housing can no longer get public housing.
48:31The taxation system that we have these days is placing an increase in burden on the shoulders of young working Australians.
48:40And less and less is being asked of those who do not need to work because of their wealth or because of their age.
48:48And that has to be fixed.
48:50And in a country as rich as Australia, how is it that we're not paying women equally?
48:54How is it that there are three quarters of a million children living in poverty?
49:00Australia's richest 20% are now at least 90 times better off than the bottom 20%.
49:06In one of the wealthiest nations on earth, the gap is widening in many ways.
49:11Australia should be, as a nation, about community.
49:15Whether it's a village, a town, a city, social cohesion, fundamental.
49:20We talk about fairness, fundamental.
49:23The poverty that exists, the homelessness that exists, the educational inequalities that exist, are so often overlooked.
49:35Because of the myth of Australia being an egalitarian society.
49:40There's enough to house the people.
49:43There's enough to feed the people.
49:45There's enough to educate the people.
49:47You know, this is a rich country.
49:49Perhaps if our priorities shifted, the land of the Fargo really is a destination we could reach.
49:56So how might we get there?
49:59As the rich become richer and the poor become poorer, the aspirational idea of the fair go seems more of a myth than ever.
50:14To understand how we got here and where we might head next, perhaps it's worth looking to our colonial past.
50:23No matter who we are in this country, we're all the inheritors of the legal force, the genocides, the massacres, the control of prisoners.
50:32The origins of modern Australia is still very, very difficult.
50:37The ships brought convicts and they brought the savagery of the British.
50:43To some, this same cruelty still reverberates in our justice system.
50:48There's a lot of Aboriginal people and a lot of poor people in Australian jails.
50:53Who are the people most incarcerated in Australia?
50:57Well, it's obviously Aboriginal people at rates that exceed some recorded world records in some parts of the country.
51:07Five Aboriginal people in the last four weeks!
51:11Four weeks!
51:12Almost 100% of the children in juvenile detention in the Northern Territory are Aboriginal.
51:20It's always time to fail!
51:22It's always time to fail!
51:25I think it's because it's black kids that a majority of Australia can, you know, can ignore what is going on
51:31and not feel some sort of link to those children or those families that are suffering.
51:37And the suffering and inequality goes beyond the incarceration of our First Nations peoples.
51:44So often the most vulnerable in society targeted and punished.
51:49From refugees...
51:50Iranian refugee Behrouz Bouchani has been detained in Manus Island for four years.
51:55To women...
51:56There is a serious problem in Australia around violence against women.
52:00To a government policy that stole from the poor...
52:04Robo-debt illegally pursued welfare recipients.
52:07And people killed themselves.
52:09Boy, there's a lot of punishers and straighteners in Australia who love to punch down, who love to blame the victim.
52:15Worried about unemployment? Don't blame the unemployed.
52:18Worried about poverty? Don't blame the poor people.
52:22But if we could take the mythical ideal of a fair go and see it played out as a reality, what might that look like?
52:30Compassion is much cheaper than cruelty.
52:33There's high returns from investing in compassion.
52:36I mean, when you think back to the origins of white settlement, it was as a penal colony.
52:41They were designed on the principle that people would be able to rehabilitate themselves and create new productive lives.
52:48Adopting that idea now could help us create a fairer, more just Australia.
52:54I'm an optimist about Australia and our capacity to introduce changes, changes to economic and social policy, to redeem the concept of the fair go.
53:06I have hope, but we need to reach out to each other, to understand each other, to break through polarisation and resist those tactics of divide and conquer.
53:15And that's how we're going to get a better and more fairer Australia.
53:19The fair go should be about what is available to future generations.
53:24And if we started thinking about it in those terms, about the future rather than the present, then I think we could achieve something, something quite amazing.
53:34And to create this fairer place, perhaps we must first look back to move forward.
53:41Having DNA that's in this country for thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of years, Australia's just only a recent thing.
53:52So, it's a new idea and it's still in progress.
53:57I think that we all have a role to look after this beautiful land and waters that we call and share as our home, that we now know as Australia.
54:08Let's do it together. Let's make it better.
54:11It's within our grasp to do so.
54:14Next time, the story of the contest to create a nation.
54:20The idea of Federation started when Henry Parks accepted a dare from the English governor.
54:25So, to get Federation was quite a coup.
54:27Of rebellion and defiance.
54:30It's not what we think is the foundation of our culture as these radical, progressive women.
54:34And the legacy of war.
54:36The idea that any wartime feat forges a nation leaves me distinctly uncomfortable.
54:42We should also acknowledge the people who fought in the Australian wars.
54:47What does the making of our nation tell us about the idea of Australia?
54:55This is an excellent work in the future.
54:57We should also relax a few decades ago.
55:00Two times the nation's fonction of the group during the year.
55:02This is a good idea of our national relationship.
55:03The country has changed, and the country has changed, and pertenected business of the country.
55:05This is a good idea of our nation.
55:08This is a great idea of our nation's legacy.
55:10It is about the national relations of the country.
55:13This is an ongoing relationship with ourè¡—.
55:15The nation's its great, and the world is a great.
55:17The nation's great idea for us is a great idea of the nature of nature and its nature.
55:20Transcription by CastingWords
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