Are we done with ‘Multiculturalism’, yet? Of course we are – the elite just won’t admit it.
No matter how many times they prod the festering corpse, we all know Multiculturalism is a dead ideology. It was dead on arrival, of course, but this year the smell just got too obvious to ignore.
Multiculturalism, with a capital-M, should not be confused with either the fact of a multi-ethnic nation, nor the benign, small-m, ‘food and dance’ multiculturalism.
Capital-M Multiculturalism, though, was a very different and malign beast.
“Liberalism is about the rights of the individual, multiculturalism about the rights of groups, and they are incompatible”
Jonathon Sacks
During the term of the Howard government, it became clear that many people immigrating to Australia either didn’t understand or didn’t share our values, more often the former. There was no simple solution to this issue, especially if the nation maintained a non-discriminatory immigration policy and accepted refugees from all parts of the world, based on the greatest needs.
Unfortunately, too many elites, especially when their livelihood depended on it, refused to concede the basic malignity of Multiculturalism. Worse, they steadfastly refused to admit the difference between multiculturalism and Multiculturalism. Former Howard government MP Petro Georgiou was one of them.
Petro contended that the immigrants who arrived in the 1950s and 1960s did not need a citizenship test or other measures such as English lessons to share our values. He would cite the example of his mother, who spoke little English.
What Georgiou refused to see was that those migrants, while they may not have spoken English, nonetheless shared a common culture. “They have different cuisines, languages and folk cultures, but they were from the same Western, Christian culture,” says former Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews.
“Now we have people from different cultures – from Africa, Asia, the Middle East and elsewhere.”
Even that didn’t necessarily make such immigrants incompatible with Australia’s Western culture. Asians, for instance, tend to have a strong family, education and work-oriented ethic that assimilated well into Australian society. Many African immigrants are Christians.
Other immigrants, though, bring a culture which is actively hostile to the West, whether secular or Christian.
Multiculturalism as an ideology was always built on weak foundations. At its core, multiculturalism is inconsistent with liberalism. It gained support, especially in the UK, as an antidote to racism. There were various events which exposed the shallowness of the concept in practice, the reaction to Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses being one of the most notable […]
As the late Professor John Hirst, who authored the Australian history section of the citizenship materials, observed twenty years ago, ‘As a serious historical or sociological analysis [multiculturalism] is nonsense. To found policy on it may be perilous.’ It denies the very notion of a host.
Instead, disastrously, Multiculturalism treats Australia as a cultural terra nullius: a culturally empty space that just happens to be trod on by mutually hostile tribes. Instead of the old agreement that Australians whose ancestors came from different countries were ‘Australian of such-and-such an ethnic background’, now the Multicult identify as ethnicities who merely happen to live in Australia. Rather than, say, ‘Chinese Australian’, they are ‘Australian Muslims’.
Even the very notion of liberalism is antithetical to Multiculturalism.
Twenty years ago, Jonathon Sacks observed that, ‘Liberalism is about the rights of the individual, multiculturalism about the rights of groups, and they are incompatible.’
Spectator Australia
Or, as Mark Steyn put it, of “Multicultural” Toronto: In 20 years, there will be either the gay condom booth, or the Muslim lady. They can’t have both.
Who wants to take bets on which?
