You don't need to be rich or a plutocrat's pet to run for office here. So although Australians have their doctrinal and moral disputes, they don't swing fiercely between extremes of private indulgence and public penance. We are realists, not idealists. The truth is that Australians tend to be natural pagans. As the writer David Malouf points out, we don't even think of ourselves as hedonists because that would be too self-conscious.
Australian culture is for the most part deeply democratic, and joyously so as well.
It is the result of a bloodless and slow-developing social revolution conducted over 40 years as a small society grew larger and immeasurably more complex, shook off its sense of derivative Englishness and its fear of American domination and learned to trust its own talents. But a reasonable equipoise, a relaxed uprightness of cultural carriage, is with us only some of the time. Jingoism still disfigures the lowbrow end of our journalism. We no longer feel we have to explain ourselves to anyone but ourselves. But on some levels it is, alas, true.