‘March for Australia’ haters can’t face honest debate on multiculturalism
However, Sunday’s March for Australia was different. To take part was to admit guilt by association with the neo-Nazi nutbags said to be behind it. “This brand of far-right activism grounded in racism and ethnocentrism has no place in modern Australia,” Multicultural Affairs Minister Anne Aly said last week.
Character assassination has been multiculturalism’s modus operandi for decades. Geoffrey Blainey’s timely warnings in 1984 about emphasising separateness and the dangers of breaking Australia’s historical thread with British tradition were greeted with threats of violence, prompting the police to request the removal of his name and address from the public telephone book. John Stone’s criticism of immigration policy in the 1980s attracted a similarly indignant response.
Doubtless some who joined the chorus of condemnation four decades ago might now regret it. Refusing Blainey and Stone’s invitation to debate was an opportunity we should’ve taken, for the mistakes of the past four decades cannot be easily undone. Yet we can – and must – engage in an open debate about the size and composition of our immigration.
Dispassionate discussion won’t be easy, for this is not primarily a dispute over policy. It is what Thomas Sowell describes as a clash of visions, a profound disagreement between people with different assumptions about how the world works.
On one side is the view that cultural discrimination is not only permissible but necessary to maintain social cohesion. It’s coupled with the belief that our cultural traditions are worth upholding, not least because they work. Australia’s attractiveness as a destination is strong evidence of our cultural advantage. This year, immigration officials are expected to register more arrivals than departures, consistent with the trend that began in 1788.
Running counter to this constrained vision is the unbounded vision of the elite, people who think in abstract rather than concrete terms. In this vision, Australia’s traditional culture is disparaged using various combinations of words such as white, xenophobic, colonial, repressive, exclusionary, hegemonic, paternalist, and so on.
The vision of the anointed, as Sowell calls it, is more than a moral framing of the world; it is a vision of how they see themselves, as people with greater moral sensitivity and clarity than the rest of us. Anne Aly’s account of her own “lived experience” – a child of Egyptian parents who arrived in Australia at the age of two on an assisted migrant program, excelled at university, and became a successful politician – is not a tribute to the openness of Australian culture, but a personal triumph over adversity.
Aly told the 2023 Multicultural Youth Conference she wanted “a different migrant story”, one in which “young ethnically diverse people have a sense of place and belonging”. Aly urges us to “recognise the diversity of young people, the diversity of their aspirations, the diversity of their needs, and, importantly, the diversity of their lived experiences”.
Aly goes on to speak at greater length about diversity, but fails to explain herself any more clearly, other than to imply that there is something disreputable in the current Australian culture.
The shapelessness of the multicultural vision makes it difficult to refute. It also makes it dangerous, as arguing that diversity is a good thing, in and of itself, removes the guardrails between cultures that are compatible with ours and those that are deeply antagonistic.
It’s this confusion that has landed the progressive left in the awkward position of having to defend the misogynistic, homophobic, xenophobic and exclusionary culture that prevails in parts of the Middle East and North Africa.
Once diversity becomes an intrinsic good, it is hard to make a moral distinction between a culture in which the religion of Islam is a matter of personal piety and one in which it is expressly militant, where religion legitimises armed struggle.
The incorporation of the Palestinian cause into the progressive vision of a fairer world presents the biggest threat to the Australian multicultural project since it grabbed hold of the political imagination in the late 1970s. Many of us who were philosophically uncomfortable with the word itself were prepared to believe multiculturalism, as practised in Australia, was relatively benign. Few Australians were uncomfortable with the live-and-let-live attitude that prevailed, provided loyalty to Australia came first. Yet the rise of the Palestinian cause presents a nastier form of multiculturalism, one that makes no distinction between the civilisation we inherited and the barbarism of Hamas or Iran.
Somehow, in this minefield of debate, we must move this discussion away from the high-minded, unworldly plain occupied by the anointed and back into the concrete world of trade-offs. We should at least be able to have a reasonable discussion about numbers, recognising the imperative of reducing immigration quotas to the 60-year post-war average of around 90,000 migrants a year. The pressure on housing, infrastructure and the social fabric caused by annual intakes of half a million or more are unbearable.
We should restore the integrity of our skills-based migration scheme, recognising the importance of offshore processing. Opportunities to upgrade from temporary visas to permanent residency while remaining in Australia should be exceptional.
We must confront the diversity fetish and recognise that some cultures are more conducive to flourishing than others. Whether we are citizens by birth or because of a conscious decision, Australians overwhelmingly believe our culture is a particularly good one and want to keep it that way.
Rather than impugn the motives of those who marched, the political class should ask searching questions about why ordinary people with families and busy lives feel compelled to march at all. Surely the purpose of parliament and courts is to mediate civic disputes and allow the rest of us to do other things.
The mobilisation of ordinary Australians in recent years on causes ranging from oppressive pandemic restrictions to immigration and the rollout of industrial renewables is a measure of institutional weakness for which the elite must be held responsible.
Just because a convicted terrorist was photographed waving a black Islamist flag on the Harbour Bridge doesn’t turn everyone who marches for Palestine into a jihadist. That would be as ridiculous as suggesting Bob Carr is a paid-up member of the Axis of Evil because he decides to join Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un in the VIP enclosure of a Chinese military parade.