There is a world of difference between treating everybody equally and making everybody equal. The first limits the power of the people who write the rules. The second gives them a reason to keep rewriting the rules until the results suit them. That’s how the fair go has been turned inside out.
The Australian fair go grew out of a rejection of the English class system. Back there, a surname, an accent or the right family connection could determine your place before you’d done a day’s work. Here, the bloke with a title could walk into the pub, but he’d still have to shout his round. You were entitled to the same respect and the same chance as anybody else. What you made of that chance was up to you.
Bob Hawke captured it in 1988: ‘In Australia there is no hierarchy of descent: there must be no privilege of origin.’ Nobody should start above you because of his birth. Equally, nobody should be able to put a ceiling over your head because you started below him. That was the bargain: no inherited rank, no official permission required to have a go.
It’s even in our national anthem: ‘wealth for toil’. That isn’t a guarantee that everybody who works hard will get rich. Luck exists, as do bad decisions and genuine setbacks. But the words capture an Australian expectation that effort should be allowed to pay off. Wealth for toil, not guilt for toil.
The victim-obsessed modern left has made itself at home in the bureaucracy and corporate Australia, bringing its noxious brand of grievance politics into institutions with real power over our lives. From there, it has redefined the fair go while keeping the name. A fair go now gets talked about as if it means equal outcomes. They call the replacement ‘equity’. If one person has more than another, the result itself is treated as proof of injustice. We no longer have to establish who rigged the rules, who got the favour or who was denied a chance. Somebody did better, so somebody else must have been wronged.
Once you accept that logic, every difference becomes an excuse for another tax, restriction or law. Government stops protecting a fair chance and takes responsibility for engineering the finish. People will never make identical choices or take identical risks, so the job can never be done. There will always be another gap to close and another official claiming the authority to close it. The fair go used to be a brake on power. They’ve turned it into an accelerator.
I’m not saying every tax is unjust or every rich person earned his money honestly. If someone got a government contract through his mates, call it out. If a child leaves school unable to read properly, that’s a failure we should fix. If a stupid rule shuts a newcomer out of an industry, scrap it. Those are identifiable wrongs. Taking a whack at anyone who succeeds is easier than fixing them, but it won’t give the next person a fairer chance.
The other half of this hijacking is tall poppy syndrome. I’ve called it Australia’s one great cultural flaw because we have always been too quick to cut down achievers. There was a decent instinct buried in it: take the piss out of a pompous man who thinks his money or position makes him better than the rest of us. The modern left has taken that instinct and removed the requirement that he be pompous. It used to mean, ‘Don’t act better than us.’ Now it means, ‘Don’t do better than us.’
Think of the person who risks his savings to start a business. For years he works weekends, wonders whether he’ll make payroll and wears the consequences if it fails. If it finally works, he employs people and earns a decent living. Then he’s told the outcome is evidence of privilege, that he owes more, and that he ought to feel guilty for having got ahead. You don’t build a culture of people willing to take chances by treating the reward as a moral failing.
Ironically, the two ideas feed each other. Equity supplies a respectable reason to punish success; tall poppy syndrome supplies the appetite for it. Together they make it possible to call envy justice and coercion a fair go. Meanwhile, the people who write the rules acquire more power, and the person having a go is expected to thank them for it.
We didn’t reject the English lord so that a new class could decide how successful the rest of us are allowed to be. Treat people equally. Pull down the barriers that protect the well-connected. Help people back on their feet when they fall. Then leave them free to work, risk, fail, try again and, yes, get rich if they can. The fair go was our ladder out of the class system. The left sawed off the rungs and called it equality.
