Lauren Southern is wrong about multiculturalism

LAUREN Southern has a right to her views, even the most objectionable ones. Just as I have the right to tell her she’s dead wrong about multiculturalism, writes Caroline Marcus.

HAS multiculturalism failed?

If you ask Lauren Southern — the gorgeous YouTuber variously demonised by critics as Milo Yiannopoulos in a skirt and some kind of alt-right she-devil — it undoubtedly has.

The 23-year-old is in Australia on a speaking tour with fellow vlogger Stefan Molyneux, their talks kicking off in Melbourne this Friday.

To give you an idea of her popularity, Southern boasts more than half a million subscribers on the video-sharing site, has 376,000 followers on Twitter and is charging Aussie fans $749 for the privilege of dinner with her and Molyneux while in town.

I’m glad she’s made it here at all.

In March, Southern was denied entry to the UK on the basis her presence would not be “conducive to the public good”.

A month earlier, she’d handed out flyers in Luton, northwest of London, that read “Allah is a gay god” and “Allah is trans”.

Then there was the time she was detained by the Italian Coast Guard for trying to obstruct NGO search-and-rescue boats helping shipwrecked asylum seekers in the Mediterranean.

There’s no doubt she trades in being provocative.

When she touched down in Brisbane last week, she was photographed wearing a T-shirt that read “It’s OK to be white”.

If you subscribe to the Australian values of democracy, hard work and a fair go, you’ll be right, mate. Daniel Ajak moved from South Sudan to Melbourne at the age of 13, and is now a defence lawyer at Papa Hughes Lawyers. (Pic: Ian Currie)

As a statement of fact, that should be relatively uncontroversial, but the reality is that the slogan was coined by internet trolls 4chan and has since then been hijacked by white nationalist groups.

Southern is Canadian, yet poses with guns and an American-flag bandana wrapped around her blonde head Peter FitzSimons-style which, if I were woke, I might point out could be viewed as cultural appropriation.

She is undeniably part of the new breed of outrage merchants, like Yiannopoulos, who have gained currency as political correctness tightens its chokehold on the Western world.

But an Australia that does not ban Islamists like Hizb ut-Tahrir — a group that advocates for the establishment of an Islamic caliphate, sharia law and is outlawed in several countries including in the Middle East — would have no grounds whatsoever for banning a speaker like Southern.

And so it was that after a minor but highly publicised setback in Southern and Molyneux not receiving their Electronic Travel Authority visas (which read more like another media gimmick), their work visas were approved by the Home Affairs Department last Tuesday.

Good.

I for one will be exercising my rights by going to hear what they have to say when they speak in Sydney in a couple of weeks’ time.

But at least on one count, Southern is very, very wrong.

Kids rehearse ahead of their performance at a multicultural festival at Sydney Olympic Sports Centre.

On a Sky News panel we were both on last Friday, she claimed multiculturalism had failed.

“What multiculturalism means is literally multiple cultures in one area. That doesn’t work,” Southern said.

“You cannot have multiple cultures working towards the same goal because they’re going to have different needs.”

Yet Australia is living proof this isn’t true. Certainly, there are examples of cultures that have not integrated as well and as quickly as we’d expect them to: the disproportionate number of South Sudanese migrants involved in Victorian crime and the overrepresentation of Islamic refugees and their children implicated in terror incidents among these.

But, overwhelmingly, the migrant nation of Australia is a shining beacon of how a melting pot of cultures can not only live together but thrive in one of the most harmonious and envied countries in the world.

Southern lumps “Western culture” together but fails to acknowledge that various Western cultures have their own unique cultural identities. Indeed, when Italians and Greeks first migrated here, they were ostracised and discriminated against as “wogs”.

Now, they’re unfailingly accepted as part of the cultural fabric.

Lauren Southern arrives Brisbane. (Pic: Twitter)

None of this is to say we shouldn’t be having a serious discussion about the rate of permanent migration to this country, or from where we should be taking migrants.

But those debates must begin from the starting point that our multicultural experiment has overwhelmingly been a raging success.

Without meaning to blow my own trumpet, on a personal level, my own “lived experience” (OK, I really do risk sounding very woke now) is a multicultural, migrant success story.

I migrated here as an 18-year-old Singaporean Jew of Romanian background (Singapore being another successful multicultural society, of course). My family was variously chased out of Eastern Europe by the Nazis, then the Russian communists.

I barely knew a soul when I first moved to Sydney, but put my head down and bum up, and today have a voice in Sydney’s biggest newspaper and on national television.

Whatever culture you are from or part of, as long as you subscribe to Australian values of democracy, hard work and a fair go for all, well, she’ll be right, mate.

But freedom of speech is essential to a democratic Australia and the beauty of that is Southern is free to disagree.

Caroline Marcus hosts Saturday Edition and Sunday Edition on Sky News.

@carolinemarcus

Originally published as Lauren Southern is wrong about multiculturalism