It’s time for some home truths this Australia Day
This Australia Day, our resolution should be to keep Australia Australian
If New Year’s Day is a time for personal resolutions, Australia Day should be the time for national ones. If it wasn’t obvious before the Bondi massacre, it certainly should be now. As a nation, we have let ourselves down. That two people, resident here for over 20 years, could feel justified in slaughtering 15 innocent people in the name of Islam should shake to the core any complacency that we are “the most successful multicultural nation on earth”.
Yes, Australia remains as free, fair and prosperous as any comparable country. Yes, it remains the case that to have the right to live in Australia is to have won the lottery of life. Yet we are changing fast and not always for the better. It should have been clear on the night an angry mob screamed “F—k the Jews” on the Sydney Opera House forecourt that something was seriously wrong. It should have not taken the subsequent widespread vandalism, the fire bombings of synagogues, and the routine mass protests demanding “death to the IDF” and “globalise the intifada” – let alone the worst terrorist attack in our history – to alert us to declining respect for Australian values.
If this is successful multiculturalism, what would failure look like?
Long before the doctrine of multiculturalism was imported from Canada, Australian Jews were the exemplars of how to reconcile maintenance of a distinct identity with wholehearted commitment to Australia. Only on a superficial level, was the post-October 7 explosion of anti-Semitic rage directed against Israel and against Jews. At a deeper level, it’s been a rejection of the fairness and decency that has always characterised Australia at its best, and to which Jews have made such an extraordinary contribution. Partly, it’s a vicious form of identity politics in which Jews are always to blame; and partly, it’s the advent into this country of people who, in the Prime Minister’s words, have not “left their hatreds in the customs hall”. As yesterday’s “invasion day” protest will doubtless show, there’s now a toxic alliance between the anti-Israel activists and the anti-Australian ones.
Multiculturalism was originally pitched as a way of making migrants from diverse backgrounds feel welcome but has become a mechanism for changing our country by stealth. At its best, multiculturalism has meant reassuring new migrants that they could become Australian in their own way and at their own pace. In its more strident forms, institutionalised through though a plethora of grants to ethnic community groups, as Geoffrey Blainey foresaw, it’s fostered a “nation of tribes”; or as Noel Pearson has just described it, “plural mono-culturalism”.
The vast majority of migrants don’t come to Australia to change us, but to join us. It’s hardly a favour to them, therefore, to change the country they’ve joined to make it more resemble the countries they’ve left. Unsurprisingly, the chief advocates of multiculturalism, other than activists on government grants, have rarely been the most recent migrants themselves, who have invariably been keen to become Australian as quickly as possible. Multiculturalism’s champions have mostly been left-wing academics with a grudge against our supposedly sterile Anglo-Celtic core culture and our supposedly oppressive Judaeo-Christian ethos.
The problem is not that we are in fact multi-ethnic, because that’s been the case since the beginning of modern Australia. The problem is the ideology of multiculturalism that so emphasises difference that there’s nothing left to bind Australians together other than carrying the same passport and vacuous slogans such as “our strength is our diversity”.
