Andrew Bolt: Our sense of unity lost to the new tribes dividing us
THE tidal wave of immigrants to our country is fragmenting the national identity as the Australian community splits into tribes with little in common, writes Andrew Bolt.
Andrew Bolt
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THERE is no “us” any more, as a tidal wave of immigrants sweeps away what’s left of our national identity. Another 240,000 foreigners joined us last year alone, not just crowding our cities but changing our culture.
For instance, in 1996, there were 119,000 Chinese-born people living here. Now, there are 526,000.
In 1996, there were 80,000 Indian-born people living here. Now, there are 469,000.
Once we might have assumed that such migrants — just like my own parents — would assimilate into the wider “us”.
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We’d still be able to recognise Australia and talk about what “we” wanted and believed.
But something has changed and no longer can we assume Australians share anything but territory.
Immigration is becoming colonisation, turning this country from a home into a hotel.
We are clustering into tribes that live apart from each other and often do not even speak the same language in the street.
Check the new Chinese suburbs such as Melbourne’s Box Hill, where a third of residents speak a Chinese language.
Chinese is now spoken by 40 per cent of residents there and Chinese signs dominate in the shopping streets.
In Melbourne’s Clayton and Sydney’s Campsie, three-quarters of residents speak a language other than English at home and a third speak Chinese.
It’s not just the Chinese who tend to live with their ethnic tribe in the same suburbs, speaking the same language, following the same faith.
In Sydney’s Lakemba, nearly two-thirds of all residents are Muslim and nearly 70 per cent were born overseas.
In Melbourne’s Springvale, one in four residents speaks Vietnamese at home. Another 10 per cent come from China or Cambodia.
In Sydney’s Fairfield, one in four residents were born in Vietnam, Cambodia or China.
In Sydney’s Five Dock, long after the heyday of immigration from Europe, one in seven residents still speaks Italian at home.
In Melbourne’s North Caulfield, 41 per cent of residents are Jews, including hundreds who have lately fled South Africa. Dandenong now has an official Little Indian Cultural Precinct, with 33 Indian businesses.
Such colonising will increasingly be our future as we gain a critical mass of born-overseas migrants.
Like tends to attract like and these new colonies can then more easily keep their cultures thanks to satellite TV, the internet, and cheap travel.
This would already be a huge challenge to our sense of a common identity — an “us” to which we owe our loyalty and mutual support.
But this massive immigration challenge has been dumped on us exactly when we’re at our weakest.
We have for decades had activists, academics and politicians push multiculturalism — a policy to emphasise what divides us rather than celebrate what unites.
That has been made even worse by the new identity politics, and our sense of an “us” is now being shattered, deliberately.
What do we today share as Australians when we don’t even have a national day or flag we can agree on any more?
Even our national broadcaster, the ABC, has agitated against keeping January 26 as Australia Day, and several Melbourne councils now refuse to celebrate it, claiming it’s divisive.
Over most government buildings, at least three flags are now flown — including ones for the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander “nations” — while many activists and republicans deride the Australian flag as racist and colonial.
The Western civilisation that gave this nation its character — and especially its democratic institutions — is damned as oppressive and racist even by our universities, with the academics’ union attacking “the alleged superiority of Western culture and civilisation”.
Meanwhile, Christianity is losing its hold as the country’s faith and is followed now by just over half the population.
Even the law no longer binds Australians into an “us”.
Instead, we have Aboriginal-only courts, and politicians of the Left now want to create an Aboriginal-only advisory council.
Meanwhile, Muslim extremists refuse to stand for our judges, claiming their religion is higher than Australia’s law.
As I say, there is no “us” anymore.
No flag, faith, national day, law or civilisation can be said to represent us all now.
Nor does even our army. We have so little in common today that more Muslim Australians have joined the Islamic State than serve with the Australian Defence Force that fought it.
And so we fragment, more every year.
These are just trends for now, but we should resist this colonising of Australia while there is still an “us” who can.
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