Trump and Vance start multiculturalism conversation Australia needs to have

House prices, rental prices, falling living standards, childcare centres and synagogues getting firebombed and so much else connects in some way to record breaking migration numbers.

Australians weary of their government’s inability to dial down migration numbers must be looking on with envy at the USA.

Let’s tick off a few of the new Trump 2.0 administration’s recent achievements on the border front, shall we?

This past weekend, after turning back a couple of planeloads of Colombians being repatriated from the US where they had been picked up living illegally, Colombia’s president backtracked in the face of trade sanctions and sent his own plane to fetch them.

US border tsar Tom Homan vowed to move forward on deportations “without apologies”, even going out on televised raids including one which picked up a sex predator from Thailand.

And on Sunday, Vice President JD Vance had a sit down interview with CBS television anchor Margaret Brennan, who came prepared with a series of gotcha questions designed to embarrass the new administration.

US Vice President JD Vance steps off Air Force Two. Picture: AFP

Vance parried Brennan’s central committee talking points and, after a back and forth over whether a particular Afghan national later accused of planning a terrorist attack in Oklahoma was properly vetted, dropped a crystal clear nugget of common sense.

Brennan, thinking she had the VP cornered, said that “it wasn’t clear if (the terrorist) was radicalised when he got here or while he was living here,” as if that made a difference.

Vance’s reply? “I don’t really care, Margaret.”

US Marines install concertina wire along the southern border with Mexico near San Ysidro, California, on January 25, 2025.

“I don’t want that person in my country, and I think most Americans agree with me.”

Simple, direct, and as he suggested, probably in line with the thinking of pretty much everybody.

Yet compare Vance’s approach with that of the Australian political class.

Here, migration seems like the issue that ties everything together but no one wants to talk too much about.

House prices, rental prices, falling living standards, childcare centres and synagogues getting firebombed, university life, and so much else connects in some way to Australia’s defiantly record breaking migration numbers.

Yet despite all this the discussion around migration tends to silo around security (are they terrorists?) or economics (what does this mean for housing or unis or skills?).

Debate flared up over Labor’s granting of 3,000 visas to Gazans last year amid obvious questions about how many of them might support Hamas.

It flares again whenever the per capita GDP numbers land.

Crowds at an Invasion Day rally on January 26, 2025 in Melbourne. Picture: Getty Images

But Vance’s point suggests that there is something deeper to this debate that we are missing.

Are we a nation that is bound together by ties of common culture and language, or are we just a place to come and hang your hat and hopefully make a few bucks, perhaps in a suburb where most of your neighbours also come from where you came from?

Or, to turn Vance around, who do we want here, and why?

Post-World War II, there was certainly the sense that Australia was a frontier nation for migrants to come and seek their fortune, but the idea was to in the process become Australian as well.

Yet decades of official multiculturalism, ethnic spoils politics, and cultural institutions like schools and broadcasters pushing the worst takes on Australian history have taken their toll.

Thus we now have not only the annual anti-Australia Day push (which polls suggest is being increasingly rejected) but also rhetoric about Australia’s illegitimacy as a “settler colonial” state and signs at weekend demonstrations reading “Death to Australia” and “Watch Out Whites”.

Members of the local Jewish community in Maroubra arrive with their children at the childcare centre which was firebombed in an anti-Semitic attack.

Peter Dutton will naturally campaign on migration from a security perspective, where the ex-Queensland cop and immigration minister has obvious advantages over Labor.

But he also has a chance to also re-evaluate our stale Whitlam-era multiculturalism at a time when 30 per cent of us were born overseas and the question of what holds us together has never been more pressing.

While this conversation is urgently needed, it is also politically advantageous as here Labor is at a distinct disadvantage.

Since October 7 the party has pivoted hard against Israel and, at least federally, been atrociously weak on anti-Semitism, leaving Labor well out of the mainstream and unable to talk about things like national unity.

Last year’s Scanlon Social Cohesion survey found our social cohesion at a record low and support for migration slumping, yet in practical terms all Labor is offering is more of what got us here.

John Howard said we could decide who came here, and Tony Abbott stopped the boats, much to the horror of the left.

Peter Dutton’s challenge will be, through the coming campaign and in government if he wins, to take this a step further, figuring out a way to reconnect all of us who are already here while making sure we get the mix right in the future.

Originally published as Trump and Vance start multiculturalism conversation Australia needs to have