Sallust
The Daily Sceptic
Writing in the Australian, columnist Nick Cater says of the Bondi Beach massacre:
If December 14th, 2025, was not the day Australia changed forever, it was certainly the day we were forced to recognise the profound and possibly irreversible changes of the past 50 years. The failure at Bondi was not simply about security or lax regulation of guns, but about a deeper assumption that Australians are bound by a shared moral compact: that strangers can be trusted, that public spaces are safe, and that citizenship still means something more than just being here.
Back in the day, says, Cater, the onus was on immigrants to assimilate:
[Robert] Menzies declared in 1950 that “we should go to no end of trouble to make every migrant feel at home”. Yet the obligations were placed on migrants to assimilate as quickly and smoothly as possible. “New settlers coming here should not remain in separate groups or colonies but should be absorbed into Australian society and life,” Menzies said in a radio broadcast in 1953.
The obligation to assimilate was removed by Gough Whitlam in 1973 when he borrowed the intellectually malnourished policy of multiculturalism from Pierre Trudeau in Canada. It was a creature of its time, justified entirely by sentiment, not logic, or with any thought given to its second-order consequences. It asserted the cultural autonomy of ethnic minorities with little consideration of the cultural glue that held Canadians together.
One of multiculturalism’s cardinal errors – the prediction that the biggest threat to civic harmony would be racist resentment in the native population – was locked into legislation in the Racial Discrimination Act passed in the dying days of the Whitlam government.
After Bondi, nobody can doubt that the biggest threat to social cohesion is not native-born bigotry, but radical Islamism imported by first- or second-generation migrants.
The status of permanent residency must be abolished. The only permanent residents in Australia should be its citizens. Everyone else is here on probation, and those who break the law with anything much more serious than a parking fine should be asked to go home.
From this point on, we should declare that non-citizens do not have the right to political protest. Those who decline the opportunity to express their wishes peacefully through the ballot box abrogate the right to make their voices heard through a megaphone.
Sensitive souls who would label measures such as these as draconian should consider the cost of maintaining the status quo that has prevailed since the early 1970s.
The real point, he argues, is that allowing non-citizens unwarranted liberty is to restrict the freedom of Australian citizens:
The cost of granting extraordinary liberty to non-citizens is to constrain the freedom of Australians to go about their lawful business. After Bondi, we can expect more security checks, more invasive surveillance, longer forms, more demands for ID, more blocked-off roads, and a lower threshold of civic trust.
A healthy civic society depends on a baseline of moral trust: the everyday assumption that strangers are not trying to harm us, that public spaces are meant to be shared, and that social rules will be broadly respected. Without it, ordinary life becomes impossibly costly, emotionally, socially and economically.
Cater says that rebuilding civic trust:
will demand political leaders willing to admit that some assumptions were wrong, that obligations matter as much as rights, and that a nation cannot outsource its cohesion to slogans about diversity while neglecting the hard work of assimilation and allegiance.
Bondi should mark the end of our refusal to reckon with these truths. If it does not, we may discover that a nation that fails to defend its moral boundaries eventually loses the freedom it thought it was protecting.
Let’s not forget though how Australia is a country that honours state premiers for longest lockdowns, pushes for global censorship, and has even been accused of being a police state.
Nick Cater’s piece is worth reading in full [Ed. paywalled].
This article was originally published by the Daily Sceptic.
