This is an increasingly interesting question given the experience of the past two years.
We have been divided by state, city vs country and vaccinated vs unvaccinated.
Borders, which were simply lines on a map for administrative and tax purposes, became hard barriers you couldn’t cross.
More so, people in different states began to act differently towards each other.
A good example of this was the reaction of many Victorians when NSW, who smugly claimed the gold standard for COVID-19 pandemic management, encountered an outbreak that surpassed Victoria’s.
The isolationist approach of some states seemed to me an extension of parochial protectionism under the guise of public health.
It does accord though with a measure of national character I heard discussed on National Public Radio last week. Freakonomics Radio was discussing the pros and cons of America’s extreme individualism.
One guest was Gert Jan Hofstede, professor of artificial sociality at Wageningen University in the Netherlands.
He is the man behind the Culture Compass, which consists of six dimensions of culture society needs to come to terms with in order to organise itself.
Australia, like the United States, sits high on the scale of 0-100 for individualism.
Individualism does not mean egoism. It means that individual choices and decisions are expected. Collectivism does not mean closeness. It means that one "knows one's place" in life, which is determined socially.
Australia, with a score of 90 on this dimension, is a highly Individualist culture.
Hofstede’s country comparison says this translates into a loosely knit society in which the expectation is that people look after themselves and their immediate families.
In the business world, employees are expected to be self-reliant and display initiative. Also, within the exchange-based world of work, hiring and promotion decisions are based on merit or evidence of what one has done or can do.
Applying this assessment to the pandemic is interesting and points to self-reliance rather than parochialism or antipathy driving the state responses.
The pandemic has not been a high point for the federation or nationalism. It has highlighted the fragmentation of our country and our politics.
Increasingly everyone is in the same boat when it comes to the pandemic, and perhaps the upcoming Federal Election will serve to help us refocus on who we want to be, and what we want to achieve as Australia.
Darren Linton is chief correspondent at McPherson Media Group.
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