There has been much talk recently about “Australian values”. The new citizenship test will require aspiring Australians to demonstrate they possess them, or can at least reproduce them under exam conditions. This raises the question of what these distinctly Australian values might be.
Politicians and commentators have made a variety of suggestions. Malcolm Turnbull proposes “respect, the rule of law, commitment to freedom, democracy”. Other contenders include mateship, tolerance, belief in reward for effort, a resilient can-do attitude, egalitarianism, larrikinism and the storied “fair go”. But are there any singularly Australian values at all? [...]
The most well developed understanding of cultural values can be found in the work of social psychologist Shalom Schwartz. Schwartz and a large ensemble of international collaborators have established that cultural values are best captured by seven distinct orientations. Each culture can be positioned somewhere along each dimension, from low to high, based on the degree to which its people endorse each set of values. [...]
So just how unique are Australian values overall? One way to answer that question is to add up how much Australia deviates from the international average over the seven dimensions. By this metric, Australia is the second least distinctive culture of all, beaten to the gold medal by Brazil.
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