I’m driving to Denpasar airport in Bali (or rather being driven, I am still learning to drive) and it’s a nightmare. I see three near-collisions. Yet no one is honking their horn. There are hundreds of cars and motorbikes jammed into a terrible road yet the streets are actually kind of quiet.

“Where’s all the road rage?” I ask my driver.

“What’s road rage?” he asks.



Ha ha ha, what’s road rage.



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I give him the sanitised version. “It’s this thing we have in Australia, where if you cut someone off, or don’t let them into traffic or don’t see them, or are driving too slowly – they will let you know by screaming at you, swearing at you, honking their horn, chasing you, trying to scare you, run you down, or kill you.”



“Er no, people might get annoyed by other drivers but they are silent about it.”



I decide not tell him about the time a former colleague of mine was bashed and got his legs broken in Sydney after he had berated a driver who almost ran over him at a pedestrian crossing.



Yet road rage is a symptom of something bigger, a national malignancy. It’s anger. When an outsider thinks of Australia, anger hardly springs to mind as a national characteristic. Aren’t we meant to be laid-back? Easygoing? Sand between our toes and all that? Lately I’m not too sure.



At the airport the queues for immigration are long. The couple behind me, Australians, are agitated and irritated. Aged maybe in their 60s, they are swearing, jostling, anxious and pissed off. They curse the other queues that are moving faster, and the Indonesians that are checking passports too slowly. The husband is angry at the wife because she chose this SLOW QUEUE. Are they going to miss their flight? No. We’re all on the same Melbourne-bound flight that leaves in a couple of hours. Chill, dudes.

In all this road rage, seething anger at queues, fury at someone in your space, there's an enormous sense of entitlement

On the Jetstar flight back to Melbourne, almost every seat is taken. There’s a family sitting in an exit row near the toilets, a row up from me, and about an hour into the flight a verbal stoush erupts. The woman sitting down tells a man standing near her seat, but also near the toilet, that he is in her space.

“I’m stretching my legs, I’m waiting for the toilet,” he says.

She arks up – irritated, defensive: “No you’re not. You’re in my space.”

It goes on for a while like this – does he have the right to be standing there?

Family members around her join in and tell the standing man to back off. He’s not budging an inch, he has the “right” to stand where he wants, he says. He calls the group “arrogant wankers”.

A man, also in the exit row, gets involved – maybe he’s the woman’s husband. He says in a calm, clear voice. “When we land and get off the plane, you better run as fast as you can, because I’m going to find you and bash you.”

The man uses the toilet and then presumably goes back to his seat. I spend the rest of the flight shocked. Since when do you bash people for standing in your space? And was it even their space?

There is in all this – road rage, seething anger at queues, fury at someone in your space – an enormous sense of entitlement. It’s an entitlement that says: my comfort, ease, convenience, point of view and beliefs are more important than yours.



This entitlement is the opposite of civility. It poisons our interactions – whether it is with the person next to us on the plane, or someone we disagree with on social media.



This mindset and the anger with which we enforce our so-called needs is fixed and ungenerous and backs others into a defensive position. This is how fights break out. All this anger and entitlement is a wretched state of affairs if you want to have a proper, robust debate and not get smashed up for it. Somewhere along the line we stopped playing the ball and started playing the man.

Columnists such as Mark Latham have made a second career out of their anger but the left and the right are just as bad as each other. I don’t care much for the writing of Daisy Cousens yet seeing a mob on Twitter go her one night because she wrote a bad column about Bill Leak felt kind of bestial and unseemly.

But it was a light touch compared with the anger directed at Yassmin Abdel-Magied for a pretty innocuous Facebook post about Anzac Day this week.

This was not just individuals angry at an individual they disagreed with – but a corporation (News Corp) and institutions using their full might to unleash anger at a person who they have deemed in some way needs to be put back in her box.

This is anger as both a warning and a punishment – and crosses over, of course, into bullying.



One of the traditions I like most about the law is that in court between opposing barristers, basic civilities are agreed upon. Each addresses the other as “my learned friend” and various modes of communication and conventions have evolved so that opposing counsel fight the case, not their opponents.



Nothing gets solved otherwise.

Yet anger has been so seeded into Australia’s discourse, into our very identity – the default mode used by politicians, the media and citizens – that we accept it as just a thing that happens now, and we pick a side (and get angry, very angry at the other side).



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Why are Australians so angry? We’re one of the richest nations on Earth, with one of the highest standards of living. We live in a free and democratic society where political views can be expressed without fear of being jailed or gagged. It is far from perfect – particularly if you are Indigenous. But it’s a marvellous place for the vast majority of the population; we are so lucky to be here.

Maybe that’s the problem. I wonder if we are the spoilt children of the planet – the only ones to escape a major recession, swept along by this long boom – and therefore we haven’t had the pain or hardship to show us a bit of forbearance and gratitude?



In the meantime what to do with anger? Suppress it. Or turn it into a joke. Or just chill out and think of something else. Count to 20. Accept that the queue is not going to move any faster even if you swear at your spouse. Feel a sense of sadness but just shrug if someone doesn’t let your car into their lane. Come to terms with the fact that on a plane, your sense of personal space is going to be compromised. Accept that in a democracy people are going to say things – about feminism, about Anzac Day, about One Nation, whatever – that you’re going to disagree with. Argue the point with them. Do it gracefully, passionately and with intelligence.

You might just change their mind.