It may be that the carbon tax is the final chapter in the strange death of Labor Australia.
From Richard Flanagan
Among many other reforms, Australians pioneered the secret ballot and universal suffrage.
For much of the latter part of the 20th century, Australia seemed to be opening up to something large and good. It believed itself a generous country, the land of the 'fair go.'
In the late 19th century, the theory that the Aborigines were an inferior race that was doomed to die out became accepted as fact.
In 1995, the Paul Keating Labor government commissioned an inquiry into the forcible removal of Aboriginal children.
John Howard, willing to apologise to home owners for rising interest rates, would not say sorry to Aborigines. He refused to condone what he referred to as 'a black armband version' of history, preferring a jingoistic nationalism.
I have met Aborigines younger than me who used to hide every time anyone official came round their camp for fear of being taken away.
I was born too late and missed the dream of empire. Its shadow, the Commonwealth, coincides with my life but rarely connected with it.
What supposedly bound that Commonwealth together was a mysterious shared identity - Britishness.
Through my youth, there was imposed on us a culture relentlessly English. English books were all you could buy; English television filled our screens, and in consequence, England seemed to matter in a way that our world didn't.
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