“Progressive patriotism” — is it an idea whose time has come?

Fresh from a commanding victory at the federal election, Anthony Albanese began to bundle his campaign policy offerings together in a new package — not just to give these political commitments a kind of internal coherence, but also to stake out what could be distinctive about his premiership as a whole.

The term he reached for to sum it all up is “progressive patriotism”. In a conversation with David Crowe for the Nine papers, the Prime Minister explained what he means:

“We spoke about doing things the Australian way, not looking towards any other method or ideology from overseas. At a time where there’s conflict in the world, where people are often divided on the basis of race or religion, here in Australia, we can be a microcosm for the world.

That says that we’re enriched by our diversity, that we have respect for people of different faith, that we try to bring people together, that we don’t bring turmoil overseas and play out that conflict here, either, and that’s really important.

This is a project, if you like, that’s not just about strengthening Australia, but also being a symbol for the globe in how humanity can move forward.”

Hearing a Labor leader talk in terms of “patriotism” should not be terribly strange to our ears. Bob Hawke did it in his own vernacular, and Paul Keating was able to combine a certain confidence over Australia’s place in the region with an irrepressible economic self-assurance that was his trademark style — a national confidence, moreover, that needn’t be undermined by a frank acknowledgement of what “we” Australians had done to the First Peoples of this land.

But left-leaning patriotism can lay claim to a longer, more noble lineage. It was, after all, the British Labour government of Prime Minister Clement Atlee (1945–1951) and his Minister for Health, Aneurin Bevan, that established the NHS and embarked on an unprecedented public housing program — a welfare state borne along by the winds of post-war patriotic sentiment.

For his part, Albanese seems to be invoking a notion of patriotism largely devoid of ideology and exceptionalism, and that is grounded in an enlarged idea of welfarism and social provision. It is a promising and undeniably noble sentiment. But in times like ours, can “patriotism” really shed its exclusivist undertones?

Can patriotism be reoriented as a horizontal attachment to our fellow citizens through the shared principles that govern our common life — or must it always involve a form of vertical loyalty, a civic religion that binds some of us together insofar as we swear fealty to a necessarily exclusionary ideal?