‘Australia has less social cohesion, resilience and common purpose than I can recall in my lifetime’
We’ve lost cohesion and character as protesters intimidate fellow citizens and government fuels division.
Casting my mind over 2025 for my final column of the year, there is an overwhelming sense that the nation has changed or that differences long in the making have started to become more perceptible. Australia has less social cohesion, resilience and common purpose than I can recall in my lifetime.
Citizens have paraded behind posters of terrorist leaders to intimidate fellow citizens. Jewish people have repeatedly faced public death threats and their communities have been attacked and vandalised, a synagogue and childcare centre firebombed.
Climate zealots have blocked cars, trains and ships, preventing their fellow citizens from going about their lawful business. Activists routinely and selfishly place their obsessions above the interests of law-abiding compatriots – and too often authorities protect the rights of protesters over those of others exercising their day-to-day freedoms.
Our governments and authorities deliberately fuel alarmism over global warming and mislead the population about our national energy self-harm. Regional communities are divided into the haves and have-nots as renewable energy and transmission projects cut through their landscapes.
More than half of all voters now rely on government for most of their income. A report by the Centre for Independent Studies calculated those directly employed by government, getting most of their income from welfare benefits or working in jobs reliant on government funding top 50 per cent of the adult population – consider what that means for the economy, politics and individual initiative.
Large numbers of people look to government to solve any manner of ills. Media exacerbates these expectations and politicians oblige with ever more intrusions.
The National Disability Insurance Scheme has blown out to become a $50bn a year behemoth, where taxpayers’ money is rorted by service providers who drain the market economy of workers and productivity.
The parties of government are receiving fewer votes than ever and the parties of protest are winning an increasing share.
Our national flag is shunned by many, and when it is flown it is usually accompanied by not one but two Indigenous flags. Welcomes to country are overdone and often sound anything but welcoming, morphing into grievance and admonishment.
What has happened to a frontier nation once ingrained with self-reliance and adaptability? What have we done to an economy once endowed with plentiful, cheap energy?
Where is our common purpose and cohesion? What do we rally around? And what do we share (apart from a government debt that has reached $1 trillion)?
Most of this has unfolded on a continuum, and some government overreach was exacerbated during the Covid-19 pandemic. Social divisions and protest movements have been animated by the war in Gaza and inflamed by social media.
We are living in a rapidly changing world and it is inevitable that Australia will change too. But a wise nation would look to retain strong qualities that have held it in good stead, while nourishing clear values and shared ambitions.
When tens of thousands of people marched across Sydney Harbour Bridge in August it was celebrated by many politicians and much of the media as a mainstream movement for the Palestinian people and peace. No doubt there were well-intentioned people who joined in, probably misinformed by social media, the ABC and others.
The protest was organised by the radical Palestine Action Group, which has close links with operatives in Socialist Alternative and Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir (which is banned in many countries, including in the Muslim world). It was a march of hatred, not peace.
Protesters displayed terrorist banners and a poster of the supreme leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei, a sponsor of global terrorism against Israelis and a country that has launched drones and fired missiles in pursuit of its stated aim of wiping Israel off the map. Iran was behind the arson attack on Melbourne’s Adass Israel Synagogue last year.
Marchers also chanted slogans about the elimination of Israel (“From the river to the sea”) and the killing of Israeli soldiers (“death to the IDF”). Among the pro-Palestinian crowd was Sheik Ibrahim Dadoun who fronted a cheering crowd at Sydney’s Lakemba on October 8, 2023, expressing elation, happiness and pride at the October 7 atrocities.
At the bridge protest Dadoun said he was “marching for humanity”. Sure.
This was an ominous episode for this country; it amounted to an Islamist-dominated threat against Israel, its supporters and Australians who are Jewish. It came almost two years after the Lakemba celebration of October 2023 and the Sydney Opera House protest and threats against Jews the following night – there have been almost weekly anti-Israel street marches in Sydney and Melbourne since.
Pro-Palestinian groups also made intimidating sorties into suburbs with high Jewish populations. The bridge march was the culmination of this ugliness, yet it was embraced by Hamas’s useful idiots in our political and media class.
Based partly on the strength of the Harbour Bridge turnout and cynical electoral concerns (Muslim voters outnumber Jews 10 to one), Anthony Albanese formally recognised the non-existent state of Palestine the following month at the UN. A steadfast supporter of Israel since its modern reincarnation in 1948, Australia under Albanese abandoned a mate, the only pluralist democracy in the Middle East, a country under attack on all fronts. It is impossible to watch all this unfold and fail to realise that something fundamental has changed in our country.
From the Prime Minister down, our governments and authorities have failed the Jewish population and Israel while bending to the wishes of hardline Islamist groups whose fundamentalist views are anathema to our central values of democracy, tolerance and pluralism. Rather than take lessons from what has been unfolding in Europe and Britain, our government has taken itself to the top of the list of countries welcoming refugees from the terrorist badlands of Gaza. Security checks for about 3000 visas could have been only cursory.
With a population topping 500,000 people, the city of Newcastle in NSW is the seventh largest in the nation and has a proud history. Its economic fortunes have always been linked to the coal industry and it remains the world’s largest coal exporting port. Last month climate activists including Greens leader Larissa Waters kayaked and swam in the channel in a deliberate and successful attempt to disrupt shipping, just as they have previously blocked rail lines and loading operations.
Apart from interrupting coal exports the protesters dissuaded a cruise liner scheduled to bring 1000 tourists into the city. The arrogance and selfishness of these protesters is astonishing. To indulge their activism, they choose to prevent fellow citizens from working or plying extra trade in their small businesses – hardly a fair go.
We have seen years of moral vanity from the left, imposing their will and ducking intelligent debate on the basis that alternative views are morally bankrupt – it is all about white hats denouncing black hats. This has mutated into a moral narcissism, where the left is so infatuated with its own virtue that it has only visceral hatred for those who disagree with it.
This has poisoned discussions about Indigenous affairs so that the Indigenous voice proposal, designed to bring the country together, only deepened a chasm. There is a post-referendum harshness now, where activists make wild demands and opponents pretend rejection of the voice means there is no ground to give and no problem to fix – the mainstream consensus around practical reconciliation has been trashed.
We are on a dismal trajectory. Just five years ago, soon before he died, the great British-born Jewish philosopher Jonathan Sacks was prescient in his brilliant book Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times.
“If we focus on the ‘I’ and lose the ‘We’, if we act on self-interest without a commitment to the common good, if we focus on self-esteem and lose our care for others, we will lose much else,” Sacks wrote. “Nations will cease to have societies and instead have identity groups. We will lose our feeling of collective responsibility and find in its place a culture of competitive victimhood. In an age of unprecedented possibilities, people will feel vulnerable and alone.”
His diagnosis is global but applies here. Do you see vulnerability and competition for victimhood in Australia? Do you see a greater focus on identity groups rather than common values and goals?
Sachs was on to something. His prescription is to shift away from the transactional to the meaningful, from the individual to the communal. “A contract is a transaction. A covenant is a relationship.”
There is merit in this. But to my mind, knowledge is also key.
In so many of our volatile disputes, such as the Middle East, climate change, energy policy and even economics, ignorance and misinformation abound. New generations are informed by social media, which means they know little except their own prejudices, reaffirmed by algorithms feeding them what a computer thinks they want to hear. It is a digital inversion of our intellectual evolution, where the contest of ideas, scientific scepticism and consideration of alternatives have driven us forward.
Let us make a covenant for 2026 – in the new year and beyond we must fight strongly against this collective dumbing down. Thank you for reading, and thinking, and I wish you a peaceful Christmas. Rest up for the struggle ahead.
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We are losing parts of our national character and this is weakening our nation. While this may be an inevitable and unsurprising consequence of globalisation, the digital media age, record immigration and multiculturalism, it is still troubling to witness, and we have the option of resisting.