Insecure much? Why we should shrug off playful Canberra-bashing

A long-time student of this highly unusual city and of its unusually sensitive citizens, I knew exactly how Canberrans would overreact to Queensland premier Steven Miles' banal but playful criticisms of Canberra. I have seen this phenomenon again and again.

Sure enough, prominent and rank and file Canberrans have been quick to shrill angry responses, often far angrier and name-callingly spiteful than the premier's opening gambit.

When you look at the footage of Miles making his remarks, there is a kind of playfulness in the manner of the man who, with his lefty working-class and trade union background and his strong environmental convictions, is bound to be a decent fellow.

But Canberrans have been agitated and ropeable.

The Canberra Times, as always when these sorts of things come up, has taken it all far too seriously. And in Gerontistan (my amusing name for this newspaper's letters-to-the-editor page, for it is only ever people in their 80s and beyond who write letters to newspapers) the anti-Miles fury has boiled with the vengeance of Hell.

Of course grown-up citizens of mature, broad-shouldered cities don't even notice, or just give what I will call a metroshrug of those broad shoulders when their city is niggled at by an outsider.

But insecure Canberrans lack the kind of metro-self-esteem one finds and feels in more poised and confident cities.

Why is it so?

Canberra's extreme youthfulness (federal parliament opened here in 1927) has something to do with this. The city is pubescent still and puberty is a challenging time in the life of a city just as it is (your columnist is shuddering to recall it!) in the life of a person.

Canberra the city does not feel established. There is a nervy impermanence about Canberra and the life lived here that is never felt in mature-age cities where visible evidence of antiquity (olde man-made structures, say) somehow soothingly reassures that here is an enduring city where just as there have been a million yesterdays there will be a million tomorrows.

Then there is something else (on top of the powerful metropubescence just pointed to), something unique-to-Canberra going on in Canberra's case when these extreme reactions are sparked.

It has to do with the flawed sorts of people who are attracted to Canberra as a place to live, to its first-world Barbieworld artificiality, to the shelter it gives from the real world.

We (for I am in some ways one of these freaks I am describing) have a most peculiar, uneasy relationship with this non-city. We know in our hearts that if we were better, more adventurous people we would be living in real cities that challenge and stimulate and even dismay us (New Yorkers famously love and hate their thrilling but confronting city).

And so we find criticisms of the soft, plush, undemanding, under-stimulating city we've chosen to loll our lives away in really rather triggering. We are defensive because the person who chooses to live in Canberra has something to defend.

Horror!

Opening last Sunday's paper edition of The Canberra Times a truly shocking page three picture leapt out at me. There had been not so much as a trigger warning of it on the newspaper's front page.

The photograph, of all 25 Canberra Liberals' candidates for October's ACT election gathered together in one spot in a Canberra park, gave my inner-Socialist a nasty turn.

There is an indefinable something about Liberals (deriving from their disappointing preference for political and social conservatism when there is so much about our society that needs red-hot radical reform) that shivers a sensitive, thinking man's socialist timbers.

In the accompanying news story, Liberals leader Elizabeth Lee rejoiced over her team's attractive "diversity".

Hmmm. Just as there is a sort of diversity in bat species (and, eerily, the number of bat species in the ACT and its region is almost exactly the same as the number of Canberra Liberals candidates in the photograph) a bat is a bat is a bat and all bats share an essential essence unique to bats.

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All Liberals, in my experience, share some of the cold, shifty vampire-bat DNA of the party's John Howards, Tony Abbotts and Scott Morrisons.

But perhaps another, kinder way of thinking of the 25 candidates (kinder because it gives them more credit for diversity than my unkind bat analogy allows) is to imagine them as Pond Life in a pond.

"While ponds may appear serene on the surface," the Australian Wildlife Education (AWE) website enthuses in its Life In A Pond "they are bustling hubs of activity for countless organisms."

"Tiny water fleas dart through the water, algae blooms create floating gardens, and microscopic bacteria play crucial roles in nutrient cycling. Frogs, turtles, insects, and countless other creatures find shelter, nourishment, and a breeding ground in this miniature world."

Yes, that's all true, but the pond of Australian political conservatism is still only that brackish "miniature world" (AWE's words) when what the increasingly capitalistic and inequality-pocked ACT and Australia needs are great big, humane, generous-spirited ideas and reforms.

These are seldom dreamt of in a Liberal's philosophy.