The great membership institutions of Australian life – the churches, the unions, the parties, the married family – are dying of the same disease.
Each was built on default membership: you were born Anglican or Catholic, unionised on your first morning at the plant, Labor or Liberal by inheritance, married with children by tradition. When the world that assigned these defaults died, the institutions built on them began falling apart too. The individual ties which remain tend to be with organisations that have learned to charge for belonging instead of assuming it.
There is one institution kept its default: the nation.
You are born into it. It is difficult to lapse your citizenship by forgetting to renew it. It survives your indifference, your emigration, even your contempt. Long after ancestors, the village, the parish, the shop floor, or the branch stopped assigning you an identity at birth, the passport still does.
Even the workplace – one of the last holdouts of group identity, a congregation with required attendance – half-dissolved into a combination of laptop and mobile phone after 2020. The nation is the last default – the final surviving store of unchosen belonging in a society that has converted every other membership into a subscription.
Once you see this, the politics of the past decade stops looking entirely mysterious. Insurgent movements across the West have reached for the flag not because their voters became more populist or nationalist – an argument which, in the process, excuses the establishment of any responsibility – but because the nation is the only institution left that has any inherited loyalty.
Patriotism is the residual stock of unchosen belonging. All those who circle it – the politicians who drape themselves in it, the ones proposing to conscript for it, the leaders who argue they, despite the weight of evidence, are talking Australia up – have sensed the same thing: there is one default asset left in the electorate.
And, in this era, the question for the established parties is: Do citizens value it – enough that parties can appeal to it – or does patriotism, too, like other institutions need to be refounded.
A daily plebiscite
Ernest Renan told a Sorbonne audience in 1882 that a nation is ‘a daily plebiscite’ – a thing that exists because its members keep choosing it. For more than a century, the line read more as poetry than as reality. Nobody was choosing anything; you were born into the nation, wars renewed the vows on your behalf, and the plebiscite ran unopposed.
The walkout era, what we are experiencing today, makes Renan literal again. When every other membership has become voluntary, the habit of choice is spreading to the one membership that was never in question. People now interrogate the nation as they did the family model, the church, the established parties, union membership, indeed any organisation wanting their loyalty: What is this, what does it ask, what is in it for me?
Australia is unusual in helping us reach an answer: the country has one of the largest ratios of voluntary converts on Earth. Over half the population, a majority, is first or second generation; a ratio at the highest level among the world’s large nations. Many of the current first generation came through a costly turnstile – one involving points, years, fees, and a test which a third of applicants fail – and finished their journey at a ceremony in a town hall, making a pledge.
If we consider the ceremony, it is a liturgy performed, a doctrine recited, a vow taken, a final price paid. It is the one place in Australian life where the nation does behave like a strict church. The converts did not inherit their membership. They suffered for it – and the oldest finding in the sociology of religion is that converts out-observe the cradle-born.
How converts vote
That suggests a testable claim, so I tested it. The results were more instructive than a simple confirmation would have been.
I looked, seat by seat, at the 2023 referendum – a national vote on a question the professional class framed as a test of progressive conscience. I ran every division’s ‘No’ vote against its census profile through my engine. The first result is the confound that the commentariat never quite gets past: taken raw, migrant seats voted ‘Yes’, as migrants live in cities and cities are full of graduates, and education is the monster in this data – the ‘symbolic’ degree share, on its own, explains most of the seat-level variation.
But control for education and the sign flips: at any given degree share, the more overseas-born a seat, the higher its ‘No’ vote. And the seats that voted ‘No’ furthest above their education profile are a rollcall of the points-tested middle-class belt: electorates like Mitchell, Bennelong, Bradfield, Tangney, Menzies, Parramatta. Seventy per cent of adults hold degrees in Bradfield, while nearly half the seat is overseas-born. The seat produced a ‘No’ vote twelve points more than its education would have predicted.
So far, so confirming. Then I ran the falsifier I had pre-registered – decompose that overseas share by country of birth – and the signal is not generic. It is carried overwhelmingly by the Chinese-born, with a weak echo in the Indian-born. Nothing at all in the rest. The English-born and the pooled remainder of overseas-born contributed nothing to the ‘No’ vote once the factor of education was controlled.
A second, sharper test made it worse for my thesis, with predictions committed before running: if this is about purchased membership, then the Filipino-born share (a high-naturalising group that came through the standard turnstile) should carry more signal than the New Zealand-born share (who mostly use the special-category visa). The results came back statistically identical. The price-based voting pattern my argument suggested does not appear at seat level.
Instead, what the data contain at the seat level is a strong, robust, but specifically Chinese-Australian ‘No’ signature – the most striking single fact in the referendum’s demographics, and one that both the ‘migrant communities are progressive’ and ‘the ‘No’ was a bush revolt’ stories miss.
The leading suspect is the community’s tilt toward business ownership over salaried careers. Chinese-born workers run incorporated businesses at nearly twice the native-born rate, and employ staff at more than the average level. In contrast, for example, Indian-born workers pursue ownership less than the native level. It is equity versus payroll; a divide potentially as significant as mortgage versus rent – the strongest axis in my model.
I analysed further – down to the individual level, using the national election study, whose many respondents include birthplace, age, education, and answers relevant to the questions my argument turns on. The results again forced greater precision about what is, in fact, happening.
First, on the referendum: overseas-born respondents voted ‘No’ at essentially the native rate – there was no generalisable convert effect on the Voice, confirming that the seat signature was one community’s response to one question.
But a more discriminating test threw up a key insight – as always, with my model’s prediction committed ahead of time. On the question of volume (should the immigration intake be reduced?), overseas-born voters were notably less restrictionist than native voters at the same level of education: they support the programme that admitted them.
However, on the question of cost (should boats carrying asylum seekers be turned back?), the sign flipped: overseas-born voters were more restrictionist than comparable native voters. The small respondent group born in North-East-Asia were, directionally, most opposed of all. They support the intake volume, but defend the turnstile cost.
My pricing thesis forecast precisely this asymmetry – unpriced entry offends the purchaser far more than volume does – and the assimilation tale, which assumes migrants stand to the left of native voters regardless of the specific point at issue, does not bear out. This conclusion is not a one-survey artifact: the 2025 and 2022 election studies both show the same asymmetry.
‘Big Australia, hard border’ is often described as a compromise: between a small enlightened pro-migration elite and a larger restrictionist public. The data say something more interesting – it is the migrant’s own position, held more cleanly by them than by anyone else in the country. The convert effect is real, and it lives where the theory says it might – at the turnstile, not in every race-adjacent question an official class cares to put.
The situation, then, is not a puzzle. People who paid full price for their national membership are disproportionately offended by exactly two things: (1) any write-downs of their new status, and (2) unpriced entry – ‘we worked for our stake’ is not xenophobia, it is a shareholder complaint.
An official class stating that the nation is shameful is telling passport holders, like a company CFO announcing a massive write-down to the market, that his or her asset is now impaired. Migrant communities are heterogeneous, and much of this belt still votes Labor on class. And yet – while they are not anti-immigrant; they are very much interested in the value of their passport.
Removing the turnstile
Set Australia against Britain and the pricing lens explains what a simple argument on volume never could. Australia runs, on a percentage base, one of the largest immigration schemes in the world and sustains, by international standards, a strangely durable consensus for it. Britain runs a not entirely different scheme – and is being torn apart.
The difference is not how many enter. It is whether membership was actively priced.
Australian geography plus Australian policy has kept our turnstile intact: almost everyone here has come through it. Nearly the entire congregation here is either cradle or convert. The government in Britain stopped protecting its entryway as something vital. There have been three decades of free movement and then the small boats. 5.7 million people now hold settlement-scheme status while naturalisations run at a small fraction of that stock. There is a massive backlog. Even at the end, the ceremony is thin.
Worse, Britain has priced the wrong gate: entry tends to be ‘free’, while the citizenship itself costs more than £1,800 plus almost 60 per cent for each child under 18 – the exact inverse of Australia’s structure, which prices the border heavily and keeps the ceremony to several hundred dollars, children under 16 included at no extra charge.
Britain’s approach – free to enter, expensive to belong – is precisely backwards, and it has manufactured a third category of resident that the framework suggests may be corrosive to the value of everyone’s holdings: the resident who neither inherited nor worked for their status.
Overwhelming tides into this third category pressure the sense of worth which many, both cradle and convert alike, see in their citizenship. It is not the fault of those entering – simply their arrival proves belonging can be had without birth or price. It is like getting a job, but without the degree or interview. It is like being given a nice house in a good suburb without the inheritance or savings.
Britain’s membership politics is bitter because the asset, citizenship, is losing its distinction. Why hold shares in a company if the market price is heading down and the executives have no interest in supporting it? Australia’s is calmer because the scrip has remained scarce. That contrast also answers the best-known pessimist finding in the field – Putnam’s ‘hunkering down’, the claim that diversity itself erodes trust; a claim which has been contested ever since.
Britain hunkered; Australia, running one of the highest foreign-born shares in the developed world, did not. Immigration volume does not necessarily erode trust. However, unpriced diversity seems to. The church can be large, provided there is a turnstile and a recognised process – which is exactly Benedict Anderson’s point. The nation – as our last remaining default community but an imagined one – is, by definition, bounded. No nation can be all of mankind; otherwise its conceptual point is meaningless.
America has spent the past 18 months running an experiment – the impact of a leader with the right diagnosis and perhaps the wrong instruments. Trump correctly identified one of the most unpriced memberships in the Western world: citizenship by accident of birthplace and randomness of lottery – 20 million entries for 50,000 green-card prizes, essentially free to enter.
Each time, as a solution, Trump has reached for a decree instead of a legislated process. His initial move by executive order was struck down six-to-three at the end of June, the Chief Justice harking back to the rights of Englishmen.
The raffle was panic-frozen after a shooting: an executive pause, litigable and revocable by the next signature, stranding a 130,000 people in the status-limbo that devalues everyone’s membership. Nearly seven months on, the machinery runs – applications lodged, interviews held – but not one visa has been issued. When the lottery reopens, entrants could pay a fee for the first time in 30 years: one dollar.
Even Trump’s introduction of one genuine price – a hundred thousand dollars on the skilled-worker visa – is done via proclamation, and a federal court struck it down in June on precisely the framework’s grounds: a price is a tax, and taxes belong to the legislature. It survives, for now, but only on appeal. And the skilled visa is itself allocated in a second raffle; he priced the ticket without fixing the draw.
Recently Trump signed two more decrees in answer to the Court judgment – one expanding the categories excluded from birthright citizenship, the other declaring birth tourism a fraud upon the system. ‘They’re buying their way in,’ he said. He is right – which is why the remedy should be a statute and a turnstile, not another signature. Famously, this was the criticism levied against Obama: everything an executive order. In contrast, Australia repriced its gate back in 1986 via ordinary legislation, and nobody recalls. That is what the right way looks like – boring.
The prescription is not mysterious, and it would lift Trump’s vote. First, raise the price of entry by statute, ranked not raffled; he endorsed the model back in 2017. Second, maximise the ceremony; point his unmatched liturgical talent at the deed instead of against it, linking events to the President as the one who sanctions – not unlike his great series, The Apprentice; make converts a key element in the show.
Raising the turnstile will get backing from existing converts; amping the ceremony will get backing from new converts. Trump’s support from both groups could be strengthened.
Third, and hardest for anyone: what is said must be what occurs. Britain is the warning – Johnson promised an Australian-style points system and delivered the largest uncontrolled inflow in British history. It is the gap, not the number, which destroys trust.
Of course, even descriptions of the best model can be misleading: on the Australian government’s own data, only 35–45 per cent of the country’s skilled intake are, in fact, skills-tested – the remaining 55–65 per cent can be the family of skilled migrants. Complicating the situation, skilled migrants amount to just 2 per cent of total foreign individuals legally residing here. Almost 98 per cent are either non-permanent residents or not skilled.
Hanson has picked up on this: the pricing and the gap. She argued most recently that the idea of skilled entry as an accurate or complete description of the system was ‘an absolute scam’. ‘We don’t need,’ she continued, ‘more Uber drivers, nail technicians, dog walkers.’
If the immigration debate is framed this way, she may well outmanoeuvre the big parties in her desired electorate – and the government can feel it: the immigration minister put off a set-piece speech to finalise a crackdown on visa ‘gaming’.
The re-pricing temptation
Which brings us to another proposal that has circulated on the right in diverse countries over the past few years: national service.
The instinct behind this idea appears, on this column’s own terms, correct – it looks at the last default and proposes to give it what the dying institutions lacked: practice and a price. Its admirers look at Nordic countries, or Israel, and see the proof: expensively priced citizenship, serious belonging.
But run it through the machinery and the idea breaks down in three places. First, the strict-church mechanism runs on ‘chosen’ cost. The Mormon missionary’s two years signal commitment precisely because he could have stayed home; the conscript’s year would signal only that the law applies to him.
Second, the reading is, at least for countries like Israel or Finland, backwards. The meaning justifies the cost in Israel, not the reverse. Israelis serve inside a mission which is existential; remove the mission and compulsory service would be more like the late Soviet army – vast, priced, and utterly unbinding. Sunak’s national-service announcement fell flat for this reason: practice that is detached from doctrine, cost detached from meaning, is simply another tax, but paid in months of life and personal risk.
Third – and this is the tell – observe who proposes it. Parties that ask just five dollars and nothing else of their own members propose to demand a year from everyone else’s children. External imposition by unreformed institutions is the inquisition pattern in civic dress. Parties should reform their own seminary before conscripting the laity.
However, a version which might work is already sitting in plain sight, and it is voluntary to its bones: the ADFA exchange, widened. Salary and a funded degree – in engineering, IT, medicine, intelligence; the more practical options at university – in return for years of service owed after graduation, not before; both sides priced, nobody conscripted. Similar mechanisms can provide opportunities for trades or nursing.
If we run the ledger, there are several useful results. The scheme would retire individual debt for education with service instead of principal and interest. It tilts national formation back toward practical education rather than symbolic. It matures citizens the way only demanding institutions ever have. It is a means to put the university student and the apprentice closer together, each depending on the other by name within the same section – rebuilding, on purpose, the cross-class contact that society and the economy have gradually dissolved. Plus, the scheme would strengthen Australia’s defence force, which has tended to miss recruiting targets year after year.
In other words, this single programme may help solve multiple policy challenges ‘simply’ by pointing education and defence budgets in directions that significantly overlap. The breadth of the potential impact is not a designer’s boast; it helps confirm the diagnosis.
The various problems enumerated just now are not unconnected: they reflect a mispricing that has only increased over time in our society. Australia has – almost – stopped demanding anything special from its citizens and, it appears, stopped providing them with anything valuable or durable in return.
Before we reject the idea out-of-hand as the hare-brained scheme of a late-night novice scribbler, it is useful to note several fundamental points about the concept’s realism, its practicality.
First there is a critical design discipline: the scheme is about being paid to undergo formation for which demand exists in society – in voluntary exchange for personal service. Any belonging that does arrive is a by-product. Imposing conscription or advertising patriotism is precisely the package that Sunak proposed and erred in doing so.
Second, a simple test sorts a true reform from the typical grab-bag of brainstormed thought bubbles. A policy grab-bag is assembled from selling points – a promise for each target audience, bolted on like accessories. Remove any one of them and the contraption has to be redesigned to cover the hole.
A true reform is more like a medicine. Leave a benefit off the label and the omission changes nothing about what the medicine is, what it does, or why we take it: the symptoms it ends, it ends anyway.
And the medicine here is a single corrected price. Every club charges its members something and offers them in return something special. Right now Australia asks university-leavers for nothing but loads them with years of debt. The return is labelled opportunity.
The scheme in this article repairs both sides of that deal: a real ask, years of service, for a real gain, a salary on top of a funded trade or practical degree. If we run a pen through the label and cut out the second-order, or follow-on, benefits such as patriotism, nothing changes. The deal stays the same because it solves a fundamental issue that is undermining the health of society.
And the contrast – between one lever and many follow-on benefits – is how we know we have found a major joint in the policy structure, and not another campaign gadget.
Third, the demand signal, which is necessary for the idea to take off, is already visible in two places. The ADF’s gap-year programme is routinely oversubscribed even if the open-ended career offer goes begging. Meanwhile, the United States has seen Army recruiting leap 38 per cent from its 2022 low, and every service meet its 2026 recruiting target by July – even as America’s President has led the country to become more confrontational and increase the risk of battle exposure.
Fourth, parts of the machinery do exist – school cadets, university regiments, the Defence Force Academy, the ADF gap year itself; the scheme does not need wholesale inventing, just developing, connecting, and pricing.
Fifth, the concept does not need a uniform for it to work. There can be a civilian manifestation. This could be, for example, through volunteer emergency services or through placement in understaffed health services or through teaching in school classrooms. These options could be priced in extra years, so that it remains a conviction choice rather than a soft under-priced loophole.
The last time the West ran some kind of exchange like this, at scale, it was called the GI Bill, and it manufactured the most civic generation in modern history: the very cohort whose passing Putnam mourned.
Europe is about to face this challenge my article is discussing on a continental scale, because Trump has withdrawn the last default for international life: America’s defence umbrella, yet another institution that had seen a falling price for membership, encouraging lacklustre support. Trump can see the problem of ‘no pain, no gain’ even if European complaints suggest leaders there do not always understand that the pernicious illness Trump seeks to remedy is the same one undermining all their institutions.
At some point in history, revisionists will highlight what a pivotal era we are experiencing: how, on the right, only America’s GOP survived this age of disruption – thanks to Trump’s hostile takeover – and how America, before anyone else even saw the common disease, sought to reintroduce an effective remedy: giving back to institutions both significance and membership value.
Forced to re-price their own defence, European states are once again tackling the idea of conscription – Lithuania led the way back, Latvia restored an eleven-month draft, Croatia voted its own back after seventeen years, Denmark extended service to eleven months and included women. Germany is edging toward a new scheme.
My framework predicts results will split cleanly along one line. Frontline states have the logic if not always the budget: Russia and history give them an existential mission. Finland, which never dropped conscription at all, consistently tops Europe’s surveyed willingness to fight for one’s country. In contrast, the hinterland has the budget but not always the rationale.
Berlin might rearm – but a Germany which cannot say what Germany is will discover that cost without doctrine breeds resentment rather than renewal. It is easy to forecast that Helsinki, Warsaw, Tallinn, or Riga will diverge from Berlin, let alone Madrid.
Conscription would be a huge mistake in this country. Compulsory service is not the great bonding instrument of Australian history – it is the great schismatic one. Any proposal would carry a historical landmine for politics.
The conscription fights of 1916 and 1917 split the Labor Party four decades before the Split everyone remembers, and along the same seam: the Irish-Catholic working class against its own leadership. Similar groupings have ruptured three times – 1916, 1955, and the walkout now underway. The trigger was someone trying to legislate belonging or thinking. A chosen cost is what bonds; imposed cost is what splits.
The nation’s most honest liturgy remains the dawn service on Anzac Day – and note how it behaves: its crowds surged for the centenary, thinned after, and are reported at records again, waxing and waning with the meaning proposed, which is exactly how a voluntary congregation behaves and exactly how a conscripted one doesn’t. Its members choose to be there at four in the morning.
A glance at the Western world’s more creedal nations adds perspective to our situation. These nations have a set of canonical events. July the Fourth and July the Fourteenth are doctrinal feasts. They celebrate the founding argument, while the fireworks provide aesthetics – the stained glass. And events compound the belief. The Civil War did not just add many dead; it revised and annotated the creed.
Gettysburg used two hundred and seventy-two words to re-cash ‘all men are created equal’ through blood. Every war since, each critical moment, has been folded back into the national ceremony in the same, accretive manner. For America, wars amend and enhance the belief.
Britain is different: it has no founding argument and not even a national day – a customary nation needs no founding, because its legitimacy is that nobody can remember acquiring it. However, it has the Cenotaph first assembled in 1919 and the poppy, a practice instituted from 1921.
Australia is different again. We have both a founding event and a commemoration, yet the two don’t meet. Our political founding has no creedal roots – the more so because Federation’s date lies occluded under New Year’s Day. Nobody has stood at dawn for the Constitution; few know the national anthem. Instead we have a liturgy that commemorates a serious defeat overseas fourteen years after founding. Anzac Day is a vigil, not a parade: there is the dawn, silence, the Last Post, not one word of creed anyone must recite. As much as Anzac revives, we see that Australia Day fractures.
A creed, like that found in America, is created and shaped; a liturgy, like that in Australia, can only be served. This explains why wars tend to reinforce creed in America, but only lengthen the honour roll in Australia. And it explains why the Trump option will not translate easily here. A politician will shape the creed – from Washington to Lincoln and on to Trump – but they find it harder to manipulate historical experience.
Benedict Anderson opened the modern study of nationalism with precisely this observation – that no emblem of national culture is more arresting than a cenotaph, the tomb kept deliberately empty so that imagining can fill it. Creedal nations celebrate what they decide; customary nations mourn what they endured.
Four sellers, one product
The figures circling the last default – Hanson, Trump, Meloni, Farage – hold one instrument in common, and it is the one the incumbents dropped: doctrine. Each can finish succinctly and concretely the sentence ‘this nation is…’ It is the test of meaningful institutions, of belonging somewhere – versus institutions that can be anything anywhere. In a market where no other political party will even embrace the challenge, that alone explains the surge in polls away from the establishment.
However, if we compare the four leaders they do separate, and the separation is a prediction.
Hanson and Farage are one-instrument institutions: doctrine without formation – full pews, no clergy – which is why both have presided over serial vehicle deaths whenever succession or candidate quality has been tested. Trump adds a second instrument, a liturgy – Trump’s rallies and events are, whatever else they may be, practice – but he has built no seminary behind him, and he prices dissent at infinity. This will, probably, spell organisational trouble longer-term.
Meloni is the outlier because she came up through an order: a youth-section formation begun in her teens, decades of cadre work before office – formation plus doctrine – and she is, not coincidentally, the one governing with apparent durability. If I rank these four leaders using the instruments in my model, I can convert the so-called ‘populist’ vibe sweeping the West into a set of falsifiable claims about which insurgencies might outlive their founders.
What strengthens
So, within the constraints of a free society, and leaving aside the one instrument that never worked – forced belonging, whether by inquisition or by conscription – what would make the Australian nation stronger as an institution? Let’s review the toolkit in order.
Doctrine. Australia does have a creed: one administered – about democratic beliefs, liberties, the rule of law – at every citizenship event but abandoned elsewhere. The only Australians who have ever recited the doctrine are the converts. The one time a newspaper tested it on passers-by at Central Station in Sydney, nobody could recite the pledge and most would have failed the citizenship test outright – which is the sorry state of most clubs these days.
The task is not necessarily to adopt the insurgents’ answer to ‘Australia is…’ It is to stop leaving the sentence on the table for whomever will finish it.
Formation. The nation’s clergy include its storytellers, its teachers, its officers – and that pipeline struggles to have an impact. In the last national assessment, the share of Year 10 students proficient in civics fell to 28 per cent – the lowest since testing began two decades ago. Between thirty and forty-five per cent of respondents under-30 tell the Lowy Institute they don’t believe democracy is the best form of government – or can’t say for sure. In some years, the ratio has spiked over fifty per cent.
The untapped clerical order is the convert congregation itself: more than half the existing church chose to walk through Australia’s door in the last two generations; and they can say why. No large-sized nation ever had more natural evangelists, or used them less.
Practice. Multiply the liturgies that already work: the dawn service, the fire brigade in summer, the ceremony in the town hall. Notice what they share – voluntary, costly, and therefore binding. The compulsory alternative has been run twice in this country, and both times it rent along similar seams.
Inquisition. Shrink it. Though history notes that both wings of politics have run one, the cases which reach the news these days run conspicuously along just one side. A nation confident of its doctrine can afford its heretics; only a doctrineless institution needs blasphemy laws.
And the price. Keep the turnstile. It is the reason Australia has a convert congregation instead of a membership crisis. However, we should extend the pricing inward – widen the gap in meaning between residency and citizenship, so that the passport which new entrants receive on successfully completing the process of naturalisation stays valuable – and, if anything, increases in worth.
How this fails
Two rounds of tests have already run inside this piece and I have reported both bites. The seat-level convert data decomposed into a community-specific signal, while its purchase control (the Philippines vs New Zealand) failed. Subsequent modelling at the individual-level identified a key point – migrants support the intake, but defend the turnstile – visible in both the 2025 and 2022 election studies. Meanwhile, the Voice referendum offered little that could be usefully generalised on attitudes to immigration.
What remains falsifiable going forward: if the 2028 election study fails to replicate the boats-intake asymmetry among the overseas-born, or the 2022-to-2025 movement of the foreign-born toward the turnstile reverses while immigrant intake stays high, then the convert effect was a coincidence of two surveys.
If the North-East-Asian-born pattern disappears at a larger sample size, the strictest-turnstile reading goes with it. If Europe’s hinterland conscripts successfully without doctrine – if Berlin gets Finnish-level numbers or Finnish-like attitudes toward military service – then the meaning-validates-cost claim is wrong. If a priced, voluntary service-for-degree exchange is ever really fielded here and the young decline it, the chosen-cost claim fails at home.
If Hanson’s vehicle survives its founder without ever building a clergy, formation matters less than I have argued. And if Britain restores a hard entryway without any recovery in the perceived value of political membership, or Australia keeps its turnstile and develops British-grade enthusiasm among the voting public anyway, the pricing frame itself is in trouble.
The American prescription carries its own stake: if a statutory, ranked, priced turnstile is ever legislated and support for the President among naturalised voters falls anyway – or if the decree-and-freeze method lifts it – the convert-pricing claim is wrong. I will report the results either way.
The nation is the last institution Australians are born into. In this era, many struggle as a result to assess its merit. However, more than one half of the present membership voluntary chose to join. The people who paid full price are already telling us – at ceremonies, in test rooms, and possibly in referendums – what they believe is Australia’s unique value.
A self-respecting nation with agency is not founded either on the inquisition or on conscription. It is founded on behaving like an institution which has enough value that people are willing, even desirous, to be in its company whatever the cost. If I were to paraphrase L’Oreal’s groundbreaking ad of the 1970s – indeed with similar motives – Australia should be in a position to declare, ‘Because we’re worth it.’
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