Barring jihadis Australia is doing fine as a multicultural society

IT pays to choose one’s words carefully on the topic of multiculturalism since the penalty for giving offence is high.

So let’s just say that the evolution of Australian jihadis — migrants or their offspring who have decided they want to kill us — suggests the multicultural voyage has hit a rocky spot.

It’s a pity because in almost every other respect multiculturalism has been brilliant. We’re getting on splendidly, thank you. Australians, as Donald Horne predicted in 1964, are more capable of adopting a live-and-let-live attitude than some gave them credit for.

Yet the intercultural tension between Islam and mainstream Australian values should not be ignored, least of all by institutions such as, say, the Ethnic Communities’ Council of NSW, which receives about $1 million a year in grants to help maintain the social fabric.

So how are the rainbow nation warriors at the ECC occupying their time? Well, they’ve got the Asian Dry Cleaner Electricity Saving Project to run for a start. They are employing “bilingual environmental educators” to lecture Vietnamese and Chinese business owners on the frugal use of energy.

The harassment of a cohort of migrants who understand the principles of efficient business management better than most does not stop there. There’s the Saving Water in Asian Restaurants program, which, as the name suggests, offers “multilingual information on actions that can be taken to reduce water use in kitchens”.

It is tempting to think that meddling institutions such as the ECC (and there are many of them) have outlived their purpose, if indeed they ever had one. Melodious cross-cultural social and economic interaction — a phenomenon we used to call integration — occurs millions of times a day, including at dry cleaning shops, without the assistance of the harmony industry.

The multicultural institutions have decided that integration is not their thing. They have chosen to specialise in diversity, social justice and the assertion of rights. Each is a laudable activity in itself, but in isolation, without a corresponding observance of civic duty, they promote a dangerously lopsided attitude to life. They lead, in fact, to the opposite of integration, which is segregation.

While the multicultural institutions busy themselves at the margins, the maintenance of social cohesion has been outsourced to ASIO, a body to which we owe a debt of gratitude judging from the informative National Press Club speech last week delivered by ASIO’s retiring head David Irvine.

The nature of Irvine’s job means he can never be confident he is on top of it. Irvine’s enduring fear, he told the press club, is the lone wolf radicalised on the internet.

Nevertheless, the identification of 100 or more potential terrorists in our midst is a remarkable accomplishment.

When you’ve spent the morning listening in on jihadi chitter-chatter, the questions at a press club luncheon must sound relatively harmless. Even so, one sensed an inaudible splutter from Irvine when one young journalist piped up at the far end of the table.

“The talk of Team Australia,” a reporter ventured, “was that divisive by Tony Abbott?”

Irvine paused for a moment and looked at his inquisitor sternly. “I don’t think it was,” he replied.

The concept of national identity seems to have been lost somewhere along the way when a member of the fourth estate imagines that to be a reasonable question.

It wasn’t as if Abbott had said Team Manly Sea Eagles or Team Sancta Mater Ecclesia. Team Australia is surely the one we all support. It is an expression of common purpose, comradeship and national pride.

Given the official indifference to the promotion of integration, it is a testimony to the common decency of Australians that non-discriminatory migration has worked as well it has. If we were allowed to indulge in a little patriotic delight, we might even boast about it. Pedants may have a problem with the word multiculturalism but in practice it is working more smoothly than many imagined.

Disturbingly, however, talk of restricted immigration is back. Like many active debates, it is not one that can be conducted on the ABC. In clubs, workplaces, commercial talkback radio, however, even — heaven forbid — at some middle-class dinner parties, the notion of placing restrictions on migration is gaining ground.

Australians agreed by consent some time ago that a racially discriminatory immigration policy was morally indefensible. The content of a person’s character cannot be judged by their religion any more than it can by the colour of their skin. Yet there is a widespread sentiment that Islam, or to be precise the ideology of Islamism, stretches the multicultural project too far.

“We’ve had the Catholics, the Protestants, they’ve all come here,” Alan Jones told his listeners on 2GB last week, “but suddenly here is a set of immigrants that hate us.”

It is a reasonable point. No doubt Jones will be accused of stirring up trouble but, as is almost always the case, he is merely reflecting the sentiments of his audience, which is large.

“What are we supposed to do about it?” Jones asked. “I’m getting a lot of text messages and emails saying discriminatory immigration policy.”

We may disagree with Jones, but he is at least confronting the issue, unlike his mealy-mouthed counterparts who consider the matter too inflammatory to discuss.

Even the government’s anti-terrorism laws are now being described as divisive by the bien-pensant. Goodness knows why. The infiltration of a doctrine of hate and savagery is as much a threat to Australia’s 500,000 Muslims as it is to everyone else.

We are in this fight together, united in the defence of the common Australian values that reward production rather than predation. By a stroke of good fortune, Australia inherited the idea of liberty and the rule of law from its British settlers. These are civil rather than ethnic principles, however, and Australians are only too happy to share them.