THE EVAPORATION OF AUSTRALIA.

NEITHER A RETURN TO PAST LIES NOR A THEME-PARK NATIONALISM ...

The evaporation of Australia is continuing apace, and it may soon become impossible to invoke that name without some sort of post-modern smirk, something which has become apparent since Peter Allen's `I Still Call Australia Home' became a de facto national anthem sometime in the eighties. Globalisation has been embraced with a death-hug intensity by the three major parties, and under successive Labor and Coalition Governments, virtually since Gough Whitlam began modernising the Australian economy in 1972 by getting rid of the clothing and footwear industries, the complex agricultural and manufacturing economy which had emerged from the Second World War has been stripped down, sold off and rationalised to the point that if we were cut off from our major markets we'd all have to go barefoot because we don't know how to make shoes anymore. But of course, as its cheer squad and international events keep underscoring, the spread of free trade guarantees an era of global peace, so nobody need worry about that.

The penetration of the Australian economy by foreign business, and the active encouragement of foreigners to take over perfectly serviceable national companies -- despite the recent invocation of the `national interest' -- has now reduced the search for Australian-made products to the kind of quaintly ridiculous activity Pauline Hanson voters might engage in. It's a sign of the times that the old-fashioned patriotism Hanson and her followers embrace is regarded with such hilarity by the political and intellectual elites. For them, there is nothing valuable about being Australian; it means being small, narrow-minded, parochial, poor, lazy, stupid and unprofessional. The political elite of the country now has nothing but contempt for the majority who have been left behind in the rush for global gold. When they do think about them, like when election time is coming round, it is with a sense of bewilderment that people can't see just how good everything is.

That is to say, the political hegemony enjoyed by the power brokers for the last fifty years is now coming apart at the seams as the country splits into the ones who can't get away and the ones who are already going, and the Australia this latter group and its artists used to speak of to get us all fired up and ready to die defending it has ceased to matter or even exist.

It no longer matters that the products we consume are Australian made or Australian owned; it no longer matters, or shouldn't matter, we're told, where the salmon came from, who made the sports shoes and under what circumstances, or where the news we're consuming was cooked up. It doesn't matter that our sports have been corporatised, our jails and electricity supplies handed over to foreign multinationals, or that our children's only sense of history comes from the cartoons. What matters is the efficient running of the international market; that is the only thing that counts, and if you're buying a car because it's Australian-made, not only are you stupid, but in the new shape of the world, you're actually unpatriotic to boot.

So it should be no surprise to find these same forces reducing our national culture to incomprehensible gibberish. If buying Australia is now inconsequential, or worse, and we have all become outsourced sub-contractors of international conglomerates whose products are household names in every country in the world, then seeing, hearing or thinking about Australia makes as much sense as worrying about life on Mars. It doesn't matter that you're Australian, what matters is that you've got a job with Sony or GE or Nokia -- someone with a future -- and while corporate businessmen might weep crocodile tears about the country turning into a branch-office economy unless we lower taxes and hammer the unions even more, these same businessmen are happy to see the Gold Coast turned into an American back-lot, and the local music scene trashed by the elimination of local content rules. Indeed the extent to which Australian culture is turning into a mere echo of the international culture being flogged by the Time-Warner-Microsoft-Mega-Mouth is truly frightening, and like Bill Gates says, it hasn't even started.

The ambition to explain ourselves to ourselves has long since been abandoned by theatre's Artistic Directors in favour of good corporate goals outlined in mission statements and accessible on snappy web-sites. Entertainment is the name of the game and box office takings the sole criteria of success. Only joking. Box-office takings have got nothing to do with it because the whole thing's subsidised and corporate logoed anyhow. What really counts is that whatever happens onstage doesn't actually offend anybody. The Artistic Directors have learnt to apply the same rules of taste that helped create MacDonald's hamburgers, and what we've wound up with is a fast-food theatre for people who don't give a toss anyhow.

Art is what Sotheby's sells and spiritual values are what you go to India for. Cliche has been given intellectual respectability by French philosophers who think no-one else has got anything left to say, and the audience has lost such a massive amount of what used to be straightforward historical and political self-knowledge that even satire is hard to do. Watching Survivor is easier.

There is no doubt that a monumental collapse of artistic skill is occurring, just as there is no doubt that a migration overseas not only of the sciences, but also of the arts is taking place. It's one of the country's best kept secrets. Because the publicists running the place know you only want to hear the good news.

The institutions and practices that have characterised and sustained the nation for a hundred years have been corrupted to the point that they can no longer be relied upon to deliver even a civil engineer you can trust. But that doesn't matter, because all the major engineering works are done by overseas firms anyhow, and if water starts leaking into the tunnel there's always some public servant to blame.

And the odd thing is, we all know that. None of what I've said is new or even controversial. It's the stuff of daily news headlines. The Murray-Darling system is collapsing, inland water will be undrinkable within thirty years and native species are disappearing on a daily basis and at a terrifying rate. Any minute now, we know some publicly funded economist will pronounce us all surplus to the economy's needs, and issue us with our eviction orders. We know that, we feel it, the depth of anger and cynicism is so palpable that a party with no policies, no program and no answers can rise from the dead and give the big fellas the scare of their lives. The situation in Australia now is so diabolical that Australians will vote for anyone other than the incumbents. And why not? They're the ones who got us here.

We are clearly approaching a watershed, and the choices are becoming increasingly stark. The environmental catastrophe is upon us, and everyone knows it. We also know that the political process has now become so gummed up by the fixers and the rorters and the industry lobbyists that it can't even reform itself, let alone fix the nation. Almost exclusively the domain of big and increasingly international business, the political game has essentially become a snatch and grab exercise with all the major parties captives of the merchant banks and financial whizzkids making a killing by creaming the rest of us. This situation is unsustainable, and something has got to give. The Hansonites offer the solution of returning to a past that was a lie even while it was being lived. That Australia, like it's cousin, John Howard's Australia, never existed except as an advertising jingle, and it will never be revived except as a kind of theme-park nationalism with its painfully gauche symbolism wrapped around its turgidly corrupt shoulders. That Australia is dead, and good riddance. It is the task of the new writers and artists to come up with a genuine account of an Australia we can all live in, in a global village that is not being run by Bill Gates, but one where poverty, ignorance and disease are diminishing rather than growing, and where people are living rather than struggling not to die. That is the future we need to choose, and that is the task we artists must engage in, and that can only take place in the context of the new political movements we can now see developing before our eyes.

Stephen Sewell is one of Australia's leading playwrights.