Well, hasn’t this been an interesting year?
I don’t think I’d even know where to begin with a proper recap of all the madness that has appeared on the Australian political scene in the last twelve months. And really, why would I need to? We’ve all lived through it. Most of us have no desire to relive it. And if we do, well, there are many excellent blogs that can help you with that (did you know that Andrew P. Street now has a blog on Patreon? It’s pretty fantastic, and this post here seems like a good place to start, though he’s pretty reliably witty and interesting at all times.).
So I’m not going to do that.
Instead, I want to write about something that has raised its head in a variety of ways this year, and has, I think, almost been a defining theme of politics in this country. It’s a question which has been around for a while, and which seems to be being asked a lot at present – or perhaps it would be truer to say that it is a question that is continually being answered, with great forcefulness, even when nobody is asking it. And it’s a question which I think is going to be part of the political discourse for a good long while yet.
That question is, of course, what it means to be Australian.
