The old trope about Australia being a horribly racist country prior to the arrival of multiculturalism in the 1960s and 70s is starting to lose its potency, especially when you compare it to current times.
However uncomfortable it was for migrants in Australia back in those awful days, at least they weren’t being hunted down and shot while enjoying a barbecue at the beach, as 15 Jews were by two residents from a rival cross-town ethnic enclave last month.
This is what the advocates of the multicultural dream never factor into their sales pitch. Sure, Australia now has a wider range of culinary options since we stopped laughing at the pungent smells emanating from Italian and Greek migrants’ school lunchboxes and started dining at their restaurants instead. But the rest of the multicultural panacea to Australia’s original racist sin has turned out to be far worse, and far more lethal, than monocultural Australia ever was.
Set aside the increasing number of immigrants arming themselves to the teeth and shooting people for racial or religious reasons on Australian streets and beaches in recent years, which is on track to reach the same terrifying heights that Europe is already at very soon. There are other negative consequences of all this incoherent immigration that are not quite as lethal but, being ubiquitous, are just as lamentable.
It turns out that the pseudo-intellectual nonsense about white racism that is created in industrial quantities in our universities is so shallow and pliable that even a migrant whose main skill in life is wielding a cricket bat can turn it into an argument that the media, ever the multicultural bridesmaid, will report with astonishing levels of credulity.
Usman Khawaja’s retirement from Test cricket this week featured a final spray agains the country that took him in as a 5-year-old migrant and provided him with the opportunity to play his chosen sport at the highest, most rewarding level. Not only did Australia give him that, but our cricket authorities also permitted him to remove a sponsor’s logo from his team uniform because it upset his religious sensibilities. And the team even adapted the way it celebrates wins to make him feel included.
Had his parents stayed in their native Pakistan, his options in life would have been not much higher than flogging unhygienic servings of Peshawari pulao on the street or teaching young kids about the evils of Christianity in a madras.
In return for rescuing him from the limited opportunities and general misery of Pakistan, he called us a bunch of racist bastards. Ungracious? Yes. Illogical? Absolutely. But you won’t read that in the mainstream press. The iron law of reporting in the age of multiculturalism is that a person with minority status who whinges sells more newspapers than an Australian who doesn’t.
The cumulative effect of all this self-flagellation must be traumatic enough for the hacks acting as stenographers for the perpetually offended, but the effect on the culture at large is not exactly edifying either.
We pay a Race Discrimination Commissioner, Giridharan Sivaraman, $385k a year to tell us how racist we are. And when he’s not berating us, elected “representatives” are. Pakistani-born Greens politician Mehreen Faruqi last month told the Senate that her voice was being shut down, even as she was speaking, and that the parliament “drips in racism”, which compels her to repeatedly warn us all about where the “normalisation and legitimisation of racism” leads.
We don’t need reminding, sweetie.
We can see it in the Jewish funerals and locked children’s playground adjacent to the Bondi Pavilion since a couple of your co-religionists decided there was something more worthwhile to do at the beach than surfing and hanging out with friends. Racism is normal and legitimate in the countries that are now the primary source of migrants for Australia. If you think Australia is racist now, Mehreen, wait till the place is overrun by your compatriots.
On top of that, as relentless patriotic crusader Drew Pavlou is about to reveal, immigrants are scamming our welfare systems to the tune of, wait for it, tens of billions of dollars. It’s almost as if they see us as gullible fools just waiting to be taken advantage of.
One of the most effective propaganda campaigns in Australian history is the distortion and vilification of the White Australia Policy. For most of Australia’s early years, the policy made undeniable sense. To build a functioning, cohesive nation, the government needed to focus on creating a populace in which a certain level of trust and harmony could be assumed. In a colony founded by the British, this meant allowing in mostly Anglo-Saxon people combined with, later, some Chinese and Europeans.
Since the emergence of postwar liberalism in the latter half of the 20th century, however, the White Australia Policy has become about as toxic as a Covid vaccine in hospital ward for myocarditis patients. Successive governments, starting with Whitlam’s Racial Discrimination Act in 1975, have legislated it out of existence. The postwar consensus throughout liberal democracies is that previously white, prosperous nations have an obligation to accept large cohorts of migrants from poorer countries. If they don’t they risk becoming too patriotic and will start World War III.
But would they? A nation that is culturally coherent might develop ambitions to extend its borders, as Germany and Japan once did and China and Russia routinely still do, but this is both rare and manageable. An aggressive nation can be contained.
But a country that is not cohesive? Well, it won’t try to invade its neighbours, that’s for sure. But neither will it thrive. Nor can it survive in the long run. The social, political and economic collapse of Europe, which can be attributed to unprecedented levels of unassimilated immigrants, is proof.
This is the price Australians are paying for falling for the lie that the White Australian Policy was racist. It wasn’t. It was what enabled this country to evolve from a penal colony to a prosperous nation. If anything, its only fault was its name. Self-loathing leftists would never have been able to vilify it so thoroughly if it had been called the Culturally Homogenous Australia Policy instead.
Australia isn’t a racist nation. By most standards, we are extraordinarily welcoming. Too welcoming, in fact. There is nothing wrong with a nation being discerning about what kind of people it lets in as migrants, and what kind of people it kicks out when their exotic recipes turn out to be not worth the accompanying trouble.
