Performing Reconcilliation

Performance matters, particularly in politics. There can be little guessing whom Mr. Baillieu is currently trying to impress. He is playing the big man in that fine traditional role: beating up the little and the powerless.

The latest string of announcements has populist conservative written all over it. First threatening to override the council to block an injecting room and now opting out of recognising the indigenous owners of this land.

Interestingly both of these examples play first and foremost to the idiot electorate. Both are mindless and counterproductive moves. However, they stand to enhance Baillieu’s standing with people who like power and like to see it performed.

We should consider his performance, newcomer that he is, against one of the world’s greatest political stayers, our queen and sovereign: Regina Elizabeth II, currently in the republic of Ireland on the first British sovereign visit since independence.

Ireland was Britain’s first colonial project. Addressing hundreds of years of oppression the Queen has managed the encounter well. In many ways rather than some grand notion such as reconciliation I feel we should direct our efforts towards better encounters. It is in this sense she has addressed the history of British oppression and Irish counter violence with sophistication, and with restraint.

It is restraint that strikes me as being fundamental to the power and the believability of the Queen’s performance. While the visit would never have been seen as anything short as symbolic of the British position on Ireland and the Troubles, it could have been played any which way.

She could have made a stilted march through Ireland as empty gesture, or conjured profuse and over-emotional nightmare where the signs and symbols of suffering could be totally appropriated for the establishment’s own use. Instead a fragile balance has been struck between recognition and remembrance, and a conviction that those practices are in the past and a different future beckons.

This political performance would be well studied in Australia. It is increasingly evident that the political stars are aligning against the marginalised in this country. Bereft of ideas and pandering to the imagined moronic mass, politicians of all stripes and at all levels are looking for easy targets: welfare recipients, asylum seekers, injecting rooms, and of course overly PC reconciliation.

While I don’t have a problem with Baillieu’s assertion that there is no need for a mandatory welcome to country or recognition of traditional owners, this move could have been announced with a strong commitment to maintain the gesture despite its now non-mandatory status.

Failing to do so sent a clear signal about how the conservative government views such issues. Moreover, it is stunning that in a state with so many obvious problems that this is an issue with which the government chooses to gain some media limelight. It is deeply troubling that so recently in office, this government is already conceding that it has no idea.

the Colonial