Edward de Bono’s laughably twee “Six Thinking Hats” is like a kindergarten playtime for supposedly serious adults. Its supposed methodology is that using different approaches to problems allows us to solve them better, which, supposedly, we do by putting on different coloured hats. Unfortunately, the hats are not, apparently, conical and pointy.
Albanese government MP Andrew Leigh seems to have got the strategy somewhat mixed up. Mostly, one suspects, because all of his hats are red, and he puts each one on in turn, according to whatever his boss tells him to.
Twenty years ago, as a professor of economics at the Australian National University, Leigh had some very candid ideas about mass immigration, ‘diversity’ and ‘social cohesion’.
In particular, he explained how diversity tends to reduce both trust in a society and solidarity, in the form of support for welfare spending and other forms of income redistribution.
On trust, Leigh’s research closely echoed that of US academic Robert Putnam, who famously found that diversity reduces trust because people ‘hunker down’ to avoid those who are different. Leigh found that Australian survey data also showed a negative correlation between trust and ethnic diversity […]
Leigh was not just theorising at the macro level. He was aware of real-world, ground-level evidence about how diversity imposes costs on communities.
Leigh essentially echoed the arguments of historian Geoffrey Blainey, who in the 1980s pointed out that bringing in large numbers of Asian migrants into a mostly-British Australia, at a time of high unemployment, was a recipe for social friction.
But where Blainey was cast into the outer darkness, in one of the first eruptions of that now-grimly familiar phenomenon, the cancel mob, Leigh was rewarded with a golden ticket to getting his arse on the velvet for the Labor Party. Just so long as he sticks to party lines.
Leigh is a Labor true believer, through and through. He joined the ALP in 1991. He clearly shares the ALP’s self-conception as a movement motivated by a strong sense of solidarity and a firm commitment to public services and welfare spending.
Leigh is also a strong advocate for high levels of immigration. In an X post this week, he spoke of how ‘migrants build our homes, power our economy, and strengthen our communities’. He believes Australia’s immigration system is working well.
Even in the ’90s, Leigh was simultaneously warning of social friction from mass immigration and stumping for mass immigration. He reconciled that spectacular cognitive dissonance with a Pollyanna optimism about “building local trust in immigrant communities”, so that, magically, divisions would “over time” become “less salient”.
We saw how well that worked out at Bondi.
Still, being a leftist means never having to say you’re sorry, or admit that you were wrong. So, where in the ’90s he blamed any inconvenient migrant-induced friction on the big, bad, bogey of the day, Pauline Hanson, now he’s got an even bigger, badder, bogey to dutifully deflect blame on to: social media.
We’re seeing polarisation right across the spectrum. But we do know that the angertainment model is a model which favours right-wing angry populists. We see that in terms of the leading influences on a range of these platforms. We see it in terms of individual posts. This is a platform which has been very good for the Andrew Tates of this world […] a diet of toxic filth […]
It is eroding some of the bedrock of Australian society and that’s where the Digital Duty of Care comes from.
So, not, apparently, from the hordes of Muslim immigrants whose first response to the worst massacre of Jews since WWII was spontaneous celebration, who stormed what was intended to be a vigil for the innocent Jewish slain, chanting ‘Gas the Jews’. Nor is it the fault of the hooting, howling conga-line of leftist antisemites who’ve led the years of open hate, culminating in Australia’s worst terror attack – the massacre of 15 Jewish Australians at the hands of a Muslim visa overstayer and his son.
Nope, none of that has anything to do with it. It’s all Andrew Tate’s fault, apparently.
Back in 2006, Leigh was also adamant that policymakers should ‘maintain the current high levels of immigration’. Having explained in detail how diversity reduces trust and lowers support for welfare spending, Leigh basically shrugged his shoulders and concluded that Australia needs ‘more of the same’.
And how’s that worked out for us?
Coincidentally, the Scanlon Foundation’s annual Mapping Social Cohesion Survey was initiated shortly after Leigh’s article was published. Over the two decades since, it has recorded a steady decline in measures of pride in the Australian way of life and the sense of belonging in Australia.
Who do you think had the better measure of the effects of mass immigration in Australia? The high school-educated chip shop owner? Or the rusted-on Labor barnacle with a PhD from Harvard?
