I
recall when reading the Mark Lopez book The Origins of Multiculturalism
in Australia, 1945 to 1975 when it was first publish back in
2000 how it firmed up my suspicions and thinking on this toxic policy
and where we were headed. To many of us this was all so obvious and
predictable. Even the clinical but clunky, bureaucratic name itself
had something of the feel of a laboratory, rat treadmill experiment
about it.
It was always
just the disguised, skirted scaffolding erected around the
superstructure of the nation to bring about the ultimate demolition of
Australian identity, culture and society and I’m amazed that more people
couldn’t see past the rich, vibrant, colourful fabric of
multiculturalism, beyond the dance, the dress, the cuisine and now the
bollards. That’s right the bollards. They too are part of the legacy of
unbridled, turbocharged multiculturalism.
The following is and extract from Janet Albrechtsen’s column in The Weekend Australian.
“…Where does this
end? The truth is no one knows, but a few things are clear. First, too
many people have turned away from liberal ideas that sought to unite us
regardless of colour, religion, gender and other markers that divide
people. And second, multiculturalism hasn’t worked out as planned. The
word used as a feel-good descriptor of a happy and cohesive Australia
hasn’t been the unifying policy that politicians, activists and
bureaucrats promised more than 40 years ago. Instead, it’s clear
multiculturalism is the misguided parent policy of the new politics of
division.
That’s no great
surprise because multiculturalism was never a mainstream unifying
policy. It was pushed upon us by a small group of activists on the
fringe of politics in the 1970s.
As sociologist
Katharine Betts has written, multiculturalism was the hobby horse of a
group of Anglo-Australian lobbyists and “most of them could and did meet
in one room”. Recruited to the cause, Malcolm Fraser included
multiculturalism in the Coalition’s 1974 platform and it became
official government policy the following year.
Worse was to come
when this ill-conceived policy spawned more virulently divisive fads
and movements premised on separating people. Victimhood feelings and the
right not to be offended by words became the new measure of a
recalibrated set of so-called human rights. Sure enough, bureaucracies
such as the Australian Human Rights Commission became pedlars of
censorship rather than defenders of free speech.
The postmodern
world has become so censorious of free speech that academics who veer
from some orthodoxy about race or gender politics are hounded off
university campuses. It’s another strike against the liberal project.
Brick by brick,
these illiberal movements — from the bastardisation of human rights to
victimhood politics and postmodernism — have been built on foundations
laid by multiculturalism.
A few years ago, a
former boss of Britain’s Equality and Human Rights Commission, Trevor
Phillips, said the West was “sleepwalking to segregation”. In his final
book, Who Are We?, Samuel Huntingdon wrote that multiculturalism was
“basically an anti-Western ideology”.
Blind to the
warnings, we continue to move away from a social contract that once
bound people together by expecting majority tolerance, minority loyalty
and vigilance in both directions. A decade of weak political leadership
in this country has only emboldened the cultural dietitians, as former
prime minister John Howard once called them….”