Recalling Canberra’s Brexit-like day of shame

So many of us, Australians now, have UK roots (so for example, of the 26 per cent of today’s Australians born overseas, almost 15 per cent of us were born in England, that demi-paradise, that precious stone set in a silver sea) that it is no wonder that we have a political/emotional interest in what the UK does.

Even so, the strength of my reaction to the 2016 Brexit result, the great pang of horror and sadness, quite ambushed me. I had thought most traces of my Englishness, of my fondness for that foggy little world, had evaporated in the 50 years since I had been enticed to this sunlit dominion. The xenophobic, ignorant, grumpy, foreigner-mistrusting pro-Brexit vote of a slim majority of the people of my England came as a revelatory shock. The England one thought one knew had turned out to be something else.

Britons horrified by the 2016 Brexit result have included the philosopher Professor A.C. Grayling. His robust, rabble-rousing agitations for a second referendum continue to be stimulating in the extreme.

For example, his insistence that the 2016 referendum was only an “advisory” referendum that parliament had no reason to mindlessly accept as some sacred “will of the people” reminds us of the ACT’s own Day of Shame on November 25, 1978.

On that day, voting in what was known to be only an advisory plebiscite, a misguided majority of Canberrans, 63.75 per cent of them, voted to reject the federal government’s generous, enlightened offer of democracy, of ACT self-government.

A bewildered world of democracy-starved peoples looked on in amazement as churlish Canberrans voted not to embrace the happy responsibility of democracy but to continue the tyranny of one capricious despot, a Minister for the Capital Territory.

Dismayed and heartbroken (and belonging with the mature, progressive 30 per cent of Canberrans who had voted for self-government) I would have gone looking for grief counselling had there been such a thing in those days.

But, thankfully, federal governments eventually chose to defy Canberrans’ ugly, childish side. Like a wise parent insisting a surly child eat his greens and keep up her piano lessons and have his essential vaccinations, the government herded us, whingeing, into self-government with the 1988 Australian Capital Territory (Self-Government) Act.

Alas, though, the blush of shame is still not banished from the ACT’s cheek. Canberra’s GMs (Grey Miserabilists) still write deluded letters to the editor insisting that the years before self-government were Canberra’s Golden Age and that since the infliction of self-government on us the grass in our parks is never mowed, graffiti vandals have run amok and the Milky Way has lost its sparkling lustre.

The crusading Grayling is very, very good on the subject of why there must, he says, be a second referendum, a People’s Vote, to avert a Brexit that will be an economic and social catastrophe for Britain and the British. His speeches and writings bristle with facts and, as well, with his heartfelt uses of the word “shameful” to describe Brexit’s champions, their slimy motives and grimy tactics.

You can find him at his recent persuasive best in his online New European piece, Now we know the facts we must get a People’s Vote. As well as his attractive case for enabling people to think again and vote again on important matters in the light of what they’ve since learned (for how often, elsewhere in life, we are glad, now that we are more grown up, of a second go at something) there is his persuasive bewilderment at why Britons would ever shun Europe.

A transplanted Briton and still culturally a European, I read Grayling’s sentiments aloud to Oprah, for they capture my feelings exactly. “It [the EU] has succeeded in creating a continent of peace and progress, forward-looking and optimistic. The UK has been part of creating it … it is an extraordinary fact that 28 governments have over time made Europe a rich and secure shared place. It is remarkable and praiseworthy. The best things about the culture, music, art, science, travel, cuisines, languages, landscapes and histories of our Europe are a marvel, and in the last five centuries they have transformed the world. This is our shared legacy. We British are part of it, and should remain so.”