Anthony Albanese is not the first prime minister to fail to deliver promises made in the exhilaration of an election night. Yet seldom has a prime minister dashed hopes as cruelly as this one in the space of just 18 months.
Albanese promised to lead us to “that common ground where together we can plant our dreams … to unite around our shared love of this country, our shared faith in Australia’s future”.
Today, our country is more divided, less proud, more pessimistic and more tribal than at any time since reliable records of the national mood began.
The Scanlon Foundation’s 17th annual Social Cohesion survey, published last week, showed our sense of common purpose has reached its lowest ebb. The proportion of people who feel a strong sense of belonging in Australia has declined from 77 per cent in 2007 to just 48 per cent.
In 2007, 58 per cent of Australians felt great pride in the Australian way of life and culture. This year, it is 33 per cent. The proportion of people who strongly agree that “in the modern world, maintaining the Australian way of life and culture is important” declined from 65 per cent in 2007 to 40 per cent this year.
The great re-tribalisation of society, as Victor Hanson-Davis has described it, has been accelerating for a decade and a half. The short march of identity politics through our universities began in earnest in the last decade and has infected almost every cultural institution and much of corporate Australia.
This relentless, insidious, tiresome barrage of guilt and moral self-loathing has inevitably eaten away at our national self-confidence. Placing group identity above our shared identity as Australian citizens has weakened the threads in the social fabric. The insidious philosophy of postmodernism, with its rejection of universal truth and sceptical attitude to progress, has weakened our common values
The destructive narrative we have come to call woke (for want of a better name) has become the guiding moral philosophy of the intelligentsia. Its influence accelerated during the Covid-19 pandemic, as German-American political scientist Yascha Mounk explains in an important new book, The Identity Trap. Its ideas became more extreme and dominant, enforcing a more aggressive form of cancel culture.
Our first post-Covid prime minister needed the intellectual clarity and confidence to stop the drift towards separatism and reassert the universal values. We needed a prime minister committed to integration and the integrity of citizens as individuals, not categories.
Instead, we elected Albanese, a leader with fungible values and tribal instincts who represents one of the most woke electorates in the country. In an era when we needed institutional stability, he pledged to push through two major changes to the Constitution in quick succession.
The voice referendum, he promised at the 2022 Garma Festival, would be a “unifying moment”. Instead, as the Scanlon survey reveals, it was deeply divisive.
“Support for the voice has been highly polarised on political and demographic lines,” the survey finds. “The hardening of positions in the debate and the growing division is also highlighted by the doubling in the proportion of people who strongly disagreed with the voice (from 10 per cent in July 2022 to 20 per cent in July 2023).”
The voice was a step towards disintegration, introducing a competing form of political representation for one minority Australian group. It perpetuated historical grievances and exhumed the national sovereignty debate we believed had been buried more than 30 years ago with the High Court’s judgment in the Mabo case.
When Albanese told us voting yes to the voice would “make us feel better about who we are as a nation”, which part of the Uluru Statement did he have in mind?
Was it the claim that Aboriginal children have been “alienated from their families at unprecedented rates” or that we live in a nation that allowed “our youth to languish in detention in obscene numbers”?
Were we to seek pride in denying Aboriginal people “a fair and truthful relationship with the people of Australia”? Or is the aim to besmirch the good name of our ancestors, to attribute malign intent to their attempts to give Aboriginal Australians equal rights and obligations as citizens?
Last week, the Prime Minster reasserted his claim to be the voice of unity, a leader dedicated to bringing communities together.
“I make no apologies for standing up against anti-Semitism,” he said, “but I also have a track record of standing up for the rights of and justice for Palestinian people.”
Albanese’s reluctance to utter the word anti-Semitism without including Islamophobia in the same breath is a particularly obnoxious form of moral equivalence that fails to recognise the gravity of what has been happening on our streets.
On October 7, some 1200 Israelis, mostly unarmed civilians, were slaughtered in one of the greatest massacres in recent history. Yet, quick as a flash, Palestine supporters took to the streets in a violent and threatening manner, accusing Israel of being the real aggressor.
Police warned Jews to stay off the streets for their own safety. Ten days ago, another threatening crowd prevented Jews in Caulfield from attending synagogue. Convoys of cars and motorbikes brandishing Palestinian flags and yelling threatening and abusive slogans have been driving through suburban streets in eastern Sydney and other areas with large Jewish populations.
There have been no reports of anti-Islamic demonstrations in Auburn or Broadmeadows. No Australian Muslims are too frightened to attend prayers at the Coburg or Lakemba mosques. There have been no Zionist hoons forming cavalcades to terrorise Muslims peacefully going about their daily lives.
With our 31st prime minister out of the country performing his duty as a citizen of the world at the weekend, it fell to our 25th prime minister to remind us what it means to be a citizen of Australia.
“I am ashamed at what your community has been subjected to over the past few weeks,” John Howard told the congregation of Central Synagogue in Bondi. “The great majority of your fellow Australians … are as appalled as you are at these manifestations of bigotry. They believe in the unity of this country, and they believe in the contribution that the Jewish people have made, not only to Australia but to mankind through all the ages.”
If the Prime Minister is to recover from the great misadventure in identity politics the voice referendum became, he should learn from Howard.
He must remind new migrants of the unwritten rule that obliges every migrant to leave historical grievances behind. We must abandon the chicken-livered language of diversity and remind ourselves of our greater loyalty to Australia and its people, whose democratic beliefs we share, whose rights and liberties we respect, and whose laws we will uphold and obey.
Nick Cater is senior fellow at the Menzies Research Centre
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