Culture Matters

Today's comment picks up on a theme I raised regularly when I was a politician.

Culture matters.

When I used to say that, the ignorant would usually counter with, "What is Australian culture anyway?"

Australian culture can be defined just like all others:

The way of life, especially the general customs and beliefs, of a particular group of people at a particular time.

It's the amalgam of societal expectations that determine how we co-exist. When that expectation is no longer a shared belief, society starts to break down.

Once lost, the 'culture' can never truly be retrieved. It is replaced by a different culture.

That can be healthy for a nation, but it can also be very damaging.

And that's the risky social experiment that has been happening in Australia for decades now.

The essential charms of Australian culture that made us such a wonderful nation have been under assault through policies that are doing us continual damage.

First among them is mass migration.

Not only do we have too many migrants coming to this country, we simply aren't choosing our migrants wisely.

Then, when they come here, we no longer expect them to assimilate and integrate into Australian life, values and culture.

Instead, our politicians proclaim we are a multicultural society, claiming diversity is a strength.

In doing so, these political multiculturalists are often forced to choose which cultural practices prevail over other ones. Invariably, they side with the new over the established for fear of being labelled racist, intolerant or worse.

The single exception is that they choose to celebrate the 'culture' of the first migrants despite there being very little to show for the tens of thousands of years of them living in this land.

Actually, most of the Indigenous cultural acts we are forced to endure today are relatively recent inventions, so perhaps the maxim of choosing new over old still holds.

In any event, the mass migration policy has delivered worse outcomes for our country. We have more people on welfare, more ethnic enclaves and a deepening divide in our society.

We see it manifest in race or religious-based preferments and the obvious pick-and-choose policing of what laws to uphold and against whom.

There was another warning about the dangers over the weekend when a bunch of Islamic nutters were mourning the loss of the leader of terror group Hezbollah.