It’s time to reassert values that invigorate Australia

We used to get regular headland speeches from leaders offering an invigorating vision of a future within our grasp. Now, too often, we have the politics of the social media bunker and combat with hashtag slogans. This is one reason Tuesday’s speech by News Corp co-chairman Lachlan Murdoch has been so widely welcomed at a time of timid and tentative leadership. Launching the Centre for the Australian Way of Life, Mr Murdoch set out the values that make this country distinctive and warned of the increasingly borderless threat to what unites us with common destiny. His speech is a challenge not only to the political class but also to sense-making institutions such as higher education and the media.

Unity is not uniformity, but we can recognise the threads of identity that run through our history, give the present its stability and shape, while gesturing at the future that we can secure with optimism and determination. It’s fashionable in some circles to deny there is any Australian character, but it is no less real just because it is open to influence as well as confident in its own living tradition. The fact Australian identity is misrepresented and attacked is itself a reminder of what needs to be defended. As Mr Murdoch said, “our national identity and culture are weathering constant attempts to recast Australia as something it isn’t. To listen to our national broadcaster or much of the media elite is to hear about a uniquely racist, selfish, slavish and monochromatic country”.

Like any nation settled during the age of European empires, Australia has a history shot through with dispossession as well as development, with both injustice and bold social advances. We have to be able to look unflinchingly at our past and learn from it. But there is a relatively recent and highly politicised movement that seeks nothing less than to delegitimise Australia at its very foundation. This is not a scholarly project or a good-faith attempt to foster pragmatic reform. As a warning, Mr Murdoch cited the ahistorical radicalism of the 1619 Project run by The New York Times that sought to make slavery the founding principle of the American republic, which, for all its faults, remains an international symbol of freedom. Activists in Australia, with noisy support from countercultural allies in the media, shamelessly adopted the slogans and beliefs of the 1619 Project as if we, too, had an industrial-scale system of slavery.

This looks like a form of progressive imperialism oblivious to local history and the nuances of national character. It arrives instantly, thanks to social media, and is enforced by the sanctimonious language police of the big tech platforms. It favours a new privileged elite that lives in a cyber bubble of groupthink. A new and dysfunctional mode of communication and interpersonal relations has developed with an unforgiving harshness that would never be tolerated offline in a real-life community of people who must get along and accommodate each other. If unchallenged, this will be fatal to the ingrained fairness of the Australian character. “We have a visceral sense of what we call a ‘fair go’,” Mr Murdoch said. “This is our own idea, an antipodean concept, a deeply rooted understanding that whatever our circumstances, we deserve the same opportun­ities, the same respect, the same fair go. It is why we welcome immigrants, embrace aspiration and scoff at class-based deference.”

The symbolic rage of the new class of self-styled social justice warriors distracts us from real human misery and inequality of opportunity crying out for public policy that works. Refusing to engage with the dissenting views that can clarify the true nature of the problems facing us as a society, the woke Brahmins declare words of disagreement to be “literal violence”. There is great irony in this because trending hashtags, like ideas, can have real-world consequences. The Black Lives Matter demand to “defund the police” led to spikes in homicide in major US cities, owing to the demoralisation of law enforcement. In the same way, the up-ending of Australia’s foundation in the name of Indigenous justice would be bad news for everyone, especially the most disadvantaged. It would be directly counter to the positive and egalitarian spirit of the country, as seen in the 1967 referendum to empower commonwealth intervention on behalf of Indigenous people. Bring on more practical reform, by all means, but remember that symbolic revolution can inflict real damage.

In our schools and universities, there is too much “black armband” history taught. Quite apart from this being a distortion of reality, it is deeply worrying at a time when Australia’s strategic outlook has so rapidly deteriorated. As Mr Murdoch asks, “How can we expect people to defend the values, interests and sovereignty of this nation if we teach our children only our faults and none of our virtues?”. Globalised progressivism cripples the search for truth and unity by reducing them to the competing narratives of oppressor and victim groups. This is corrosive of individualism, not just the irreverent strain within the Australian character but also responsibility for one’s actions and the belief that each and every person can contribute to a better future. She won’t be right unless we make it right.