The Multicultural Con

Australia has spent the past week arguing about one word: “monoculture”.

Pauline Hanson said Australia should be a “monoculture”, not a multicultural society, and suddenly half the country’s public figures had something to say. Anthony Albanese had a swing. Angus Taylor chimed in. Former Governor-General Sir Peter Cosgrove weighed in. The media did what the media does, which is just to simply say that what Pauline Hanson said is wrong and pretend the argument begins and ends there. It does not.

The real question is not whether people like the word “monoculture”. The real question is whether Australia is still allowed to believe in one people, in one nation, under one flag.

That used to be normal. It was not a scandal. It was not a dog whistle. It was the basic idea of a country. People came here from all over the world, but they came to Australia. Not to an international airport lounge with suburbs attached. Not to a patchwork of separate communities, each flying its own flag, speaking past each other, and lobbying the government as permanent identity blocs.

And while everyone is now arguing about “monoculture”, hardly anyone wants to ask the more important question.

What exactly is multiculturalism?

When did Australians have a serious national debate about making multiculturalism an inherent value of Australian society? Not immigration. Not racial equality. Not whether people from different backgrounds can live here and get along. Those are different questions.

Multiculturalism is something else, at least in the hands of the government.

Most Australians, I suspect, understand multiculturalism in a pretty relaxed way. They think it means people from different backgrounds living peacefully in the same country. They think of the Chinese restaurant down the road, the Italian club, Greek neighbours, Indian doctors, Filipino nurses, Vietnamese bakeries, Lebanese families, and the odd cultural festival where everyone eats too much and goes home happy.

That is harmless enough. In fact, most people barely think about it. They just get on with life.

But that is not what Canberra means.

In 2024, the Australian Government received a report called Towards Fairness: A multicultural Australia for all. It is worth reading, not because it is pleasant, but because it tells you what the people who run this stuff actually believe.

This is not a report about neighbours getting along. It is not a report about basic decency. It is not even really about migrants becoming Australians while keeping some private customs and traditions.

It is a blueprint for rebuilding the country around diversity bureaucracy.

The report calls for a “multi-decade multicultural framework” and a “once-in-a-generation reform agenda”. That language alone should make people sit up. This is not a small adjustment to grants or community programs. It is a plan for long-term institutional change.

It wants a bipartisan national commitment to multiculturalism. It wants a Multicultural Australia Commission. It wants a dedicated Department of Multicultural Affairs, Immigration and Citizenship. It wants a Multicultural Ministerial Forum, a Multicultural Community Advisory Council, culturally responsive services in health, disability, education, aged care and housing, cultural capability across the public service, a new grants system, a national language policy, a refreshed citizenship process, a more diverse media sector, and investment in arts and sport to drive social change.

That is not “live and let live”. That is a whole-of-government apparatus to change the nation.

It is one thing for Australians of different backgrounds to live side by side, work hard, raise families, cheer for the same cricket team, complain about the same power bills and queue at the same Bunnings sausage sizzle. It is quite another thing for the government to reorganise public life around identity, language, ethnicity, grievance, representation and state-funded advocacy.

The public is sold one version of multiculturalism. Canberra is building another. The public version is simple: different people can live together peacefully. The Canberra version is far more aggressive: Australia must be institutionally reshaped around diversity, equity, anti-racism, multilingualism, cultural recognition and identity politics. Those two things are not the same.

One of the most revealing lines in the report says that “Australia’s identity as a nation-state is inherently multicultural”. Not that Australia has become home to people from many backgrounds. Not that immigration has changed modern Australia. The claim is much bigger than that. It says multiculturalism is built into the very nature of Australia as a country.

That is quite a rewrite.

Australia did not appear from nowhere as a blank multicultural canvas. It inherited British institutions, parliamentary democracy, the common law, the English language, Christian moral assumptions, self-government, mateship, sacrifice and the fair go. These things shaped the country. They gave us our legal system, our public habits, our civic language and our sense of order. You can like that inheritance or resent it, but you cannot pretend it did not exist.

Yet the report talks about “Anglo dominance”. It says legal and political structures enabled that dominance while reducing the significance of other cultures. This is the kind of phrase that sounds normal in a university seminar and completely mad at the kitchen table.

Most Australians do not think of the English language, the Westminster system or the common law as sinister instruments of “Anglo dominance”. They think of them as the foundations of the country they live in. They may not use those exact words, but they know the feeling. There is a reason people move here. There is a reason they chose Australia over places where law, order and freedom are far less secure.

This is where the fight over “monoculture” becomes dishonest. When ordinary people hear “one culture”, they do not think everyone must eat the same food, worship in the same church, have the same surname, or trace their family back to the First Fleet. They think we should have one civic culture. One national loyalty. One law. One common language. One flag. One basic idea of what it means to be Australian. That's not an extremist idea. That's the concept of nationhood.

The 2024 report sees it differently. It is uneasy with older ideas of shared values and integration. It criticises the shift toward “shared Australian values” and suggests this pushed policy toward assimilationist attitudes. It even treats the term “social cohesion” as problematic. That should tell people something.

To most Australians, shared values are not suspicious. Social cohesion is not a dirty phrase. Integration is not some dark project. It is how a country avoids splitting into parallel societies. It is how people from many places become one people. Without that, multiculturalism does not give you harmony. It gives you managed separation.

The citizenship recommendation of the report is one of the clearest examples. The report recommends reviewing the citizenship test, including considering whether it should be offered in languages other than English. That is extraordinary. English is not a race. It is not an ethnicity. It is the common language of Australian civic life.

A country with people from many backgrounds needs one shared language more than ever. English is how we work together, argue together, vote together, serve together and build a life together. It is how a new arrival from Vietnam can talk to a neighbour from Greece, a nurse from the Philippines, a tradie from Mackay and a police officer in Melbourne.

If the citizenship test itself can be moved away from English, then multiculturalism is no longer about becoming Australian. It becomes a policy of permanent linguistic separation.

Reasonable people understand the need for translation in hospitals, courts, emergencies and early settlement. No one seriously wants an elderly migrant left stranded at a medical appointment because they cannot explain what is wrong. That is not the issue.

The issue is whether government support is temporary help in Australian life, or a permanent system built around keeping people linguistically separate. The report leans toward the second. It calls for a revitalised national language policy, stronger interpreting and translating services, fully funded translation capacity and greater investment in language accreditation.

Again, this is not the food festival version of multiculturalism. This is a standing bureaucracy.

And then there is the money.

The report calls for improved multicultural grants and co-designed funding frameworks across federal, state, territory and local governments, along with community sectors. In plain English, more taxpayer money for multicultural organisations, advisory bodies, consultants, training schemes, cultural programs and advocacy networks.

For the average taxpayer, multiculturalism means getting along with the family next door. For Canberra, it means another industry.

The media and arts recommendations are just as revealing. The report calls for an independent and diverse multicultural media sector and investment in community organisations and cultural programs to “drive social change” through arts and sport.

That phrase, “drive social change”, matters. This is not a neutral cultural celebration. It is not just letting people enjoy their heritage. It is using media, art and sport to change public attitudes. Anyone who has watched a football code, a government ad campaign or a taxpayer-funded arts project in recent years knows exactly how this works. The public pays. The message is delivered. The ordinary person is told to clap along.

Then multiculturalism gets fused with every other fashionable cause in the bureaucracy. The report calls for an “intersectional, gender-equality lens” to be applied to multicultural policy and services. It has a section on “Empowering multicultural LGBTIQ+ voices”. It argues that discriminatory attitudes and practices inside multicultural and faith communities must be addressed.

This is where it becomes almost absurd. The same people who tell Australians to respect every culture reserve the right to march into migrant and faith communities and correct them when their religious or moral views clash with progressive gender ideology.

So are cultures to be respected, or re-educated? The answer is obvious. Under official multiculturalism, cultures are welcomed only if they fit inside the approved progressive framework. Traditional Australian identity can be attacked as “Anglo dominance”. Conservative migrant and faith communities can be told their views on sexuality and gender need correcting. The activists always end up on top. It is diversity under management and inclusion, with a Marxist rulebook.

One of the more politically explosive parts of the report links rhetoric about protecting “jobs for Australians” to far-right xenophobia. That is an astonishing thing to do. Wanting Australian workers to have secure jobs is not extremism. It is a normal working-class instinct. It is the sort of thing Labor once claimed to care about, before it became more interested in pleasing activists, big business and the permanent political class. Jobs for Australians should not be a controversial phrase in Australia.

But this is the pattern. Concerns about jobs, borders, stability, cultural identity and national loyalty are treated as suspicious. Not answered. Not respected. Suspicious.

And that is why the debate is so dishonest. Australians are told multiculturalism is just kindness. Then, when they raise concerns about mass migration, housing pressure, language separation, ethnic enclaves, foreign flags, imported conflicts or whether new arrivals owe loyalty to Australia first, they are treated as though they have said something shameful. They have not. They are asking the basic questions every country has the right to ask.

Who are we? What holds us together? How many people can we absorb? What duties come with citizenship? What culture are newcomers joining? What happens when imported customs clash with Australian law? Why should taxpayers fund permanent ethnic advocacy networks? Why is one flag suddenly too much to ask?

These are normal questions. They only sound dangerous to people who do not want them answered.

That is why this argument over “monoculture” has been useful. It has exposed the panic. The people who insist multiculturalism is beyond debate are desperate to stop Australians reading the fine print. They want the public to keep thinking about dumplings, dancing and neighbourhood harmony, while the bureaucracy gets on with building something much bigger.

Most Australians are not cruel. They are not hostile to migrants. They are not interested in racial purity or any of the hysterical rubbish thrown at them whenever this issue comes up. They are happy to live beside people from different backgrounds, provided everyone is expected to join the same country. That is the key point.

Migrants becoming Australians is one thing. Australia becoming a loose collection of competing identities is another. Racial equality is one thing. Racial bureaucracy is another. Private cultural freedom is one thing. Taxpayer-funded identity politics is another. And a fair go for every citizen is one thing. A permanent grievance industry is another thing altogether.

A country cannot survive without a common culture. That does not mean everyone must be identical. It means everyone must belong to something bigger than ancestry, language group, tribe, sect or identity label.

One people. One nation. One flag. That should not be hard to say.

“In the real world, equal respect for all cultures doesn't translate into a rich mosaic of colorful and proud peoples interacting peacefully while maintaining a delightful diversity of food and craftwork. It translates into closed pockets of oppression, ignorance, and abuse.”
– Ayaan Hirsi Ali