You can’t win the culture war pretending it doesn’t exist

WITH Tim Soutphommasane’s term as race discrimination commissioner coming to an end, the government has the opprtunity to right the wrongs, writes Miranda Devine.

RACE Discrimination Commissioner Tim Soutphommasane’s term expires in August and the Turnbull government cannot afford to miss this opportunity to stake out its ground in the culture wars.

Conservatives are sick of Coalition governments which appease the Left, curl into a ball and try not to cause outrage while Labor-Green governments remake the culture in their own image.

The country always takes two steps to the Left with a Labor government, and not much better than one step to the Right or even staying in place with the Coalition, which puts us on a very bad trajectory indeed.

The result is that the cultural Left has encroached on every aspect of our lives, from the relentless push to change Australia Day to the gender-neutral birth certificates proposed by the Queensland government. From corporations paralysed by “diversity and inclusion”, to Christians hounded out of the public square. From the promotion of Islam in school religion classes to the feminist-themed, virtue-signalling Commonwealth Games closing ceremony which emptied the stadium in record time.

The Left’s “long march” through the institutions that Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci once dreamt of has been a raging success.

The term of Dr Tim Soutphommasane, Australian Race Discrimination Commissioner, ends in September. (Pic: supplied)

Every time a Labor-Greens government is voted in, it wastes no time appointing fellow travellers and cleaning out anyone associated with the old regime. The bureaucracies become further embedded with leftists committed to cultural change.

But when Coalition governments arrive they don’t do much more than benignly preside over the status quo, even when run by avowed conservatives. John Howard pushed back on the black armband view of history but even after 11 years in office, he only managed to slow the leftward drift. Even then, at the end, he embraced climate voodoo.

Tony Abbott barely had time to make a difference, though stopping the boats and killing off the carbon tax were a promising start. Even then, his government introduced Safe Schools and appointed Natasha Stott Despoja to a pointless new position of Ambassador for Women and Girls.

Every Liberal state education minister knows, for instance, that it’s not worth challenging the leftist orthodoxy in the department or in the teacher unions because their careers won’t survive. The last minister who tried, Terry Metherell in the Greiner government, found that out the hard way. NSW banned Safe Schools but the education establishment still found ways of slipping gender ideology into schools.

The bureaucracies just operate a little more covertly under a Coalition government.

So government gets bigger and more intrusive, the ABC continues unimpeded, destructive quangos such as the Human Rights Commission proliferate and the cancer of identity politics takes hold. Little by little, our remarkable nation is transformed, and the seeds of division take root. The self-reliance and entrepreneurial spirit of Australians is sapped and the bonds of mateship are eroded.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

The only way to arrest this dispiriting drift to the left is for Coalition governments to stop pretending there are no culture wars and get into the trenches and fight.

With a one-seat majority, a prime minister with fashionably progressive views and an election in the next year, we can’t expect bold actions by the Turnbull government that was beyond the Howard and Abbott governments. Like, closing down the HRC.

But Malcolm Turnbull cannot afford to keep making mistakes like he did at the ABC when he appointed as chairman a man who is such a leftie he said he couldn’t see any bias.

The symbolic value cannot be over-estimated of replacing Soutphommasane with a Commissioner who doesn’t want to use race to divide us.

That’s all this pesky 36-year-old French-born son of Laotian refugees has done since he was appointed to a five-year term by Kevin Rudd in 2013, a month before the Abbott government was elected. Despite the fact Australia gave Soutphommasane’s family a home, a free education at Hursltone Agricultural High, the University of Sydney, and a Commonwealth scholarship to Oxford University, he preaches that this is a racist country.

Should the Coalition continue the position, Warren Mundine could be a future Race Discrimination Commissioner. (Pic: Damian Shaw)

Despite the fact this is the most successful immigrant country in the world, which has mostly harmoniously absorbed as many as 200,000 new people each year from around the world, Soutphommasane tells us that culture is toxic.

The former freelance journalist has bought the identity politics agenda, hook line and sinker. He saw the great honours bestowed on him such as membership of the board of the National Australia Day Council and the $340,000 gig at the Australian Human Rights Commission as proof, not that this was a country which offered equality of opportunity to all comers, regardless of the colour of their skin. No, he saw it as more evidence of anti-white racism which needed to be set straight with social engineering.

He will never be forgiven for soliciting racial complaints against a cartoon by the late and much missed Bill Leak, whose persecution under Section 18C of the racial discrimination act only really ended with his untimely death last year of a heart attack at 61.

Soutphommasane’s latest obsession is to impose ethnic diversity quotas on corporate Australia. He declared last year that there were too many white people running Australian companies.

In his five years he has just libelled Australia, creates race-based social divisions and helped fuel a backlash against immigration.

So it’s not good enough for the government to appoint, as is mooted, an innocuous replacement who just avoids the headlines. Restitution is needed. If we must have a Racial Commissioner then let it be a clear-eyed patriot who loves this country.

Warren Mundine is the best person for the job. Well respected, brimming with common sense and optimism, he has proven track record as a businessman, and as an Aboriginal and political leader. He would unite us around what’s best about Australia.