David Penberthy: Why do we keep welcoming those who hate our guts?
An insistence that migrants embrace Australian values is not racist, particularly not when we have seen two of the great success stories of multiculturalism, killed by two of its greatest failures.
THERE is one burning question many Australians want someone in authority to answer, and answer urgently.
Why do we keep extending the hand of friendship to people who hate our guts?
The problem we have as a country is there are too many people in authority who not only fail to answer that question, but don’t even want the question asked, as they squeamishly tip-toe around the reality of the challenges we face.
Whenever Australia has suffered a domestic terrorist attack — and there have now been several — you hear voices decrying the violence as a failure of multiculturalism.
It is more nuanced than that. Two of the most appalling of these incidents involved perpetrators who represented everything that is wrong about multiculturalism, their victims epitomising everything that is great about it.
Multiculturalism has been an overwhelming positive for this country. It has made us culturally richer and economically stronger. Sisto Malaspina was a classic example — a successful businessman who brought the conviviality, warmth and cultural class of his ancestral home to his adopted one, helping to transform Melbourne into our most sophisticated and European-style town.
Curtis Cheng, gunned down on the streets of Parramatta, Sydney, a family man with that prodigious Asian work ethic and thirst for learning, working diligently as an accountant for the NSW Police when he, too, lost his life to an Islamic terrorist.
Two of the great success stories of multiculturalism, killed by two of its greatest failures. Two men who shared with us with the best of their ancestry, killed by two others who afflicted us with the worst from theirs.
Ban Muslim migration is the populist hard-line refrain. How, and why? What point would it serve given that so many Muslims already live here anyway?
What would it achieve given that many of these attacks, such as the thwarted Christmas terror plot in Melbourne, were carried out by second-generation Arabic men, all of them born in Victoria? How do you “ban” people who were born here? And in what manner could it be construed as fair, given almost every Australian Muslim goes quietly about their lives?
I have three good friends who are Muslims, two of them in business who have created a lot of jobs and reinvested money in our community, the third a noted domestic violence campaigner who has just entered public life as a thank you to his adopted homeland. We are the richer for their presence here, and these people, like almost all of their number, don’t deserve the generalisations they often cop.
Especially when, as ASIO tells us, many of the tips it gets about the radicals come from good-minded Muslims informing on those who have strayed into extremism.
If we are going to make our society safer, the conversation needs to focus not on fruitless and flawed generalisations, but the key question of values.
To this end, we have done a really poor job as a nation in affirming the values that underpin our citizenship, both for new Australians and those of us already here. It’s not that we have devalued our citizenship, we have never really valued it all.
We need to establish and enunciate our bedrock values to include respect for the rule of law, tolerance of other religions, equal rights for women and homosexuals, freedom of speech. These are of course the very things that radical Islam abhors. The rules here should be clear. If you can’t abide by these values, Australia isn’t the place for you.
The Left of Australian politics has by and large been completely pathetic in resisting any attempt to elevate these values and impress them upon those who have been lucky enough to be accepted as migrants or born into migrant families.
In these PC times, it is almost considered a form of white supremacy to take any pride in such things, or to extol as them as not just desirable, but morally superior.
Further, we have also seen the Left resist attempts to make it easier for the Government to deport known radicals (such as Man Haron Monis) back to their country of origin.
We have seen calls for English language testing, or minimum language requirements, denounced as a racist attack on non-Anglo Australians, rather than a sensible recognition that proficiency in the national language is the entry point to social inclusion.
Every year in Australia our schools hold a thing Harmony Day. Its supporters would say it's a harmless celebration of multiculturalism. I’d describe it as vacuous nonsense, in that it has at its centre the relativist, Hooray-for-Everything assertion that we should simply love everyone regardless of what they stand for.
Better to hold an annual Values day where we actually talk about what it should mean to be an Australian. It’s the same idiotically polite brand of cultural generosity that saw the former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull hosting that post-Ramadan reception at The Lodge, where it emerged the guest list included several Imams who were on the record as saying homosexuality should be punishable by death.
It’s the same pollyanna, PC nonsense that has seen Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews in a state of denial about African gang violence, as youths run wild with machetes on the streets.
Be it swifter deportations, tougher language requirements, or the incorporation of liberal values into a mandatory citizenship test and pledge, the Australian Senate has shown itself to be captive of that exceedingly naive and uncritical brand of multiculturalism which deems it impolite to point out that some people are medieval monsters who have no place here.
It has got to the point where I’d argue anyone who has been demonstrably supporting ISIS should simply be locked up for the rest of their life. It is called treason.
And if any of the lefties want to quibble about that, they can argue publicly why they’re going into bat for those who hate women, gay people, non-Muslims, and would kill the true heroes of multiculturalism peacefully living their lives on Australia’s streets.