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Addressing the CEW Bean Foundation yesterday, Governor-General Sam Mostyn made a plea for a return to civility, saying she had received feedback from numerous Australians who “wish for us to return to habits of disagreeing well, respecting and listening to those whose views we may not always agree with, particularly those who we’ve never met and can attack from afar”.
“It’s an old-fashioned concept, perhaps, but reflective of our modern demands and needs of the Australian community,” Mostyn added.
Old fashioned is right. When exactly was this golden era of civility and restraint?
2020s?
It’s certainly no time in the past eight years. Indeed, a search for the phrase “return to civility” in the news archives of Factiva returns more than half its hits in the years since 2016. And the calls weren’t limited to the US or Australia — pundits and politicians were dreaming of a more civil time in spots as diverse as Indonesia, Ireland and Zambia.
2010s?
So maybe prior to 2016 gave us a civil debate? Alas, Australia certainly wasn’t doing so — in 2012, one public figure was moved to call for “a return to civility in political debate”.
“I sometimes regret the deeply personal tone that creeps into some of our political debate,” he said. That was then-opposition leader Tony Abbott, who was in the process of explaining why he wasn’t going to boycott Alan Jones’ radio show after Jones had been recorded saying then-PM Julia Gillard’s father had “died of shame”. Earlier that year, noted unifier Piers Akerman lamented “the disappearance of the basic civility which existed in Australian politics nearly half a century ago at both state and federal levels”.
On-again off-again PM Kevin Rudd, whose manners with his colleagues were legendary, made several calls for civility to return over the years. In 2016, in 2012, and even in 2008, when the cricket was getting heated over claims of racial slurs during the Australia-India Test series.
2000s?
In 2008, newly elected president Barack Obama was still claiming “We need a return to responsibility and a return to civility”. Which must have been an ongoing disappointment to US voters who, we were assured by Democrat Nancy Pelosi in 2006, had “spoken out for a return to civility to the Capitol in Washington and how Congress conducts its work”.
Things were not better here. “We are a less polite country now than we used to be,” then Australian PM John Howard told Southern Cross radio in 2004. “We do need more civility and more civility leads to a greater enjoyment of life.”
Earlier, over in the UK, the Yorkshire Post noted in 2000 that “Like Lady Thatcher, [Tony] Blair wants a return to civility and public manners”, which must have meant so much to the people of Iraq.
1990s?
Perhaps pre-9/11 we were all able to get along a little better? Afraid not.
In a widely quoted address to a symposium on declining moral standards in 1998, Queensland Children’s Court president Fred McGuire called for a “moral renaissance” and a return to “civility to combat the increase in juvenile crime”.
Two years earlier, newly elected PM John Howard (not knowing he was in for eight years of miserable failure) argued that “Australians deserve and are now getting the restoration of civility in public life.
Where there are genuine differences of view, they need to be debated directly and
robustly, but not in a personally abusive way.”
1970s?
It must be way, way back. Because it certainly wasn’t any time in the past 50 years, if then US president Richard Nixon is to be believed (and sure, why not?). As far back as 1970, Nixon was making “a strong appeal today for the restoration of civility and an end to violence and intolerance in American society“.
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