The politics of responsibility

![CDATA[‘Responsibility’ is a ubiquitous theme in contemporary Australia. It is writ large in institutional politics and social policies that aim to engineer and reward personal responsibility. This is particularly evident of course in the field of social welfare where the principles of mutual obligation scaffold government policy (Centrelink 2002; McClure 2000). Much emphasis is placed on the responsibilities of individuals for themselves, to themselves, to others and to the government. Accompanying this is increasing interest in corporate responsibility and corporate citizenship (Cronin 2001). Responsibility – especially getting the right mix of the governmental, the corporate and the personal – shapes mainstream political discourse. To some extent, discourses about responsibility and ‘the right mix’ offer a mode of distinguishing the political parties and framing political choices. Alongside the domains of the institutional and governmental, and sometimes in response to them, the politics of responsibility has taken rather different forms most especially in the calls to non-Indigenous Australians to take responsibility for the past treatment and present positioning of Indigenous people in the political community and national imaginary. Here the emphasis is on a richly conceived collective responsibility that defies conventional interpretations of responsibility as individualised accountability for actions personally undertaken or neglected. The recent debates on Australia’s approach to asylum seekers and refugees has also appealed to Australians’ sense of themselves as participants in a political collectivity Penny Rossiter: The Politics of Responsibility with responsibilities that are both more than and less than those captured within the ambit of citizenship and the nation state. In addition to the material prepared by campaigning and policy groups that seek policy changes on reconciliation, state responses to refugees and broad social justice issues, a philosophically shaped literature has developed. Within this, theorists such as Moira Gatens, Genevieve Lloyd, Rosalyn Diprose and Linnell Secomb have extended insights from philosophers including Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Luc Nancy to analyse Australian conditions and the possible meanings and ethics of responsibility (Gatens and Lloyd 1999; Diprose and Secomb in Healy et al eds 2003). Both the campaigning and the philosophical writings argue for the embrace of collective responsibility but they also question what that means. Not only is the meaning of responsibility carefully examined, but frequently so too is the meaning and nature of the “subject” of responsibility: who is the ‘I’ or ‘we’ that might take responsibility? Responsibility is simultaneously pursued and problematised. However, it is noteworthy that the insights from this literature are not taken up in the governmental and policy focussed discussions of responsibility and the latter is the weaker for it. This paper is part of a larger project that brings these two literatures into conversation with each other in a critical examination of the character and ramifications of politicised responsibility in Australia today. Here the specific focus is the argument that Australian society is increasingly fragmented, civility and mutuality are moribund and, that ‘all-round’ intensification of responsibility is an essential requirement in redressing this situation, for generating civic renewal and the creation of a society that can thrive in the uncertain conditions of the 21st century.]]