Civic virtue or vice

As the sun rises on national Australia Day celebrations, it will hardly dispel the long shadow of intolerance cast by a spate of brazen attacks on Jewish places of worship and property — including a childcare centre in Sydney’s east. Hatred such as this, directed at members of one Australian community by members of other communities, threatens to tear at the heart of our secular liberal democracy. 

Many Australian Jews are now feeling fearful and distraught in their own country in the face of the most virulent expressions of antisemitism possibly ever witnessed in Australia. We are now confronted, as perhaps never before, by signs that a weakening commitment to the practice of core civic virtues — tolerance, mutual respect and trust, among others — is undermining the very idea of what it is to be an Australian citizen.  

A key element of citizenship is that members of a society recognise one another as free individuals worthy of equal concern and esteem. Citizens are not bound to one another by bonds of tribe or family, but by the consensual assumption of obligations owed to one another as sovereign individuals who are nonetheless strangers to one another. These obligations must be underpinned by the cultivation of civic virtue.  

But there is mounting evidence that civic virtue is decaying in Australia and that a crisis of citizenship is upon us. One contributing factor is the subversion of multiculturalism that was supposed to allow for the coexistence of different cultures provided there was an accompanying acceptance of the civic, social and legal commonalities that define Australia as a nation. But this acceptance is weakening as the infestation of identity politics in multiculturalism has instead enshrined a commitment to ‘diversity’. 

This repudiation of Australian culture has been exacerbated by the emergence of social enclaves intent on preserving cultures that are distinct from our national one. Enclaves are the antithesis of a cohesive and integrated society because they gradually erode capacity for toleration and compromise; which are essential if citizens are to see one another as equals rather than as members of discreet, parallel communities. 

This social change has been underway for well over a decade. The Scanlon Foundation’s Mapping Social Cohesion (MSC) report, published every year since 2007 and one of the most authoritative accounts of the social health of our society, has detected a long term decline in our “sense of pride and belonging” in Australia. Its most recent report recorded a significant drop from a score of 91 in 2007 to a low of 78 in 2023. 

We also have a diminishing commitment to “maintaining the Australian way of life and culture”. In 2007, the proportion of those so committed was 65 per cent but had fallen to just 40 per cent by 2023. These results all indicate the foundations of strong citizenship are being weakened.   

In order to attend to this weakening, we have to recognise that the problem now confronting us a crisis of civic virtue. Intolerance is on the rise, as is a marked contempt for those with whom we disagree. Such behaviours do little to reinforce the essential virtue of trust that underpins our capacity to cooperate with one another. A disposition to trust others always presupposes reciprocity. 

However, trust and cooperation do not just spring up; they depend on a bedrock of mutual regard people have for one another. These functional virtuous dispositions are critical both for strengthening social cohesion and for building a culturally and economically prosperous society. As development economists have often pointed out, poorer societies fail to become prosperous because levels of trust and cooperation are much lower. 

In Australia, we need to attend to this crisis of civic virtue and consider how best to address it. Australia Day, when many new Australians will take the pledge of commitment and become citizens, is a good opportunity to reflect more carefully on what it actually means to be an Australian citizen. Great emphasis is always placed on the rights and liberties that the individual, as a citizen, holds against another. But this is no longer enough. 

The bundle of rights that go with citizenship — such as freedom of speech, freedom of religion and freedom from arbitrary arrest — are of course fundamental rights that protect the dignity of the individual. However, when this classical liberal ideal is subverted by identity politics, it effectively creates a world of strangers who use their rights as a shield to protect them from the views of other individuals … or the state.   

In order to cultivate and promote civic virtues, greater emphasis needs to be placed on the idea of citizenship as being about practice as much as it is about status. This, in turn, gives rise to the framework of ‘duties’ that must be discharged if an individual is to be established as a citizen among other citizens. This communal conception of citizenship thereby confers a shared responsibility for the wellbeing of a given society.  

By adding the idea of practice to a conception of citizenship, greater emphasis is placed on cultivating civic virtue in what can be seen as a life-long process of educating the individual in the arts of citizenship. This is neither to coerce nor to compel the individual; for to do so would be most illiberal. After all, virtuous behaviour, such as truth-telling, is a desirable ideal rather than — except in certain circumstances — an enforceable obligation.  

But the state does have a role to play in cultivating and encouraging the practice of civic virtue among citizens. Schooling is an obvious example, whereby students can learn to cooperate with one another and the rest of society. These skills can be learned in school and developed in the home, the workplace and society at large as the child grows to adulthood. 

Virtuous behaviour can also expressed by effective political leadership, especially when elected representatives are confronted by destructive conduct in the wider community. For better or worse, the elected political leader has a principal role in shaping a national civic culture. When truth gives way to deceit, conviction to equivocation, or tolerance to insouciance, the bonds of citizenship are gradually weakened and the bedrock of social cohesion steadily eroded.  

Cultivation of good citizenship demands certain standards of behaviour from us all. Australia Day is a timely clarion call to attend to the crisis of civic virtue, stamp out antisemitism, identity politics and all other divisive campaigns, and to strengthen the bonds of trust and civility that should be the mark of our national character.  

Peter Kurti is Director of the Culture, Prosperity & Civil Society program at the Centre for Independent Studies, and Adjunct Associate Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame Australia