Multiculturalism and the Australian Constitution

The poet Shelley once said that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.* 1 He was right. Societies are shaped by images, metaphors and tropes word-pictures of what particular societies stand for, what principles are important, where the societies are heading. These images are often constitutive in the sense that they provide a unifying language of public action, shape individuals’ political engagement, privilege certain policy outcomes and sketch the limits of political disagreement. When we think of what our country stands for what its essential values are we generally think in terms of these tropes and metaphors. The metaphors change over time. Societies change and images change with them, often through vigorous contestation and debate, for there never is a single set of fully agreed values in any nation, even the most unified. The tropes and metaphors, even if shared, provide the terms in which disagreements, not merely agreements, can be expressed. Indeed, at its most far-reaching, political argument consists in the attempt to redefine the terms in which public issues are understood, proposing new metaphors or giving old conceptions new meanings. Political leaders are often effective precisely because of the forcefulness of their imagery the facility with which they translate complex ideas of nation and policy into simple phrases and striking images. This process of making and remaking the country through language is related to what we normally mean when we refer to constitutional reform, but we should not simply collapse the two. Written constitutions are poor instruments for defining a country. Countries are always richer and more varied than the bare terms inscribed in legal texts. They contain much more diversity and disagreement. They are more dynamic changing, creating and recreating themselves, struggling over what they take to be their essential principles, rediscovering rights and wrongs in their past, working to correct some mistakes, working to defend others, struggling to determine where the country has come from and where it should be heading.